Mainly I suspect it's done as a lazy short-cut by writers who can't be bothered to put much thought into the setup for their crossover.

Very good point - the laziest one I ever read (pre-validation on INaP) was one which was almost pure dialogue, as in the entire script of the episode, with the only change being the last line when Xander looks up and he's whatever character the 'writer' wanted to input. If they'd then gone on and continued the story with the new character it could have worked, but they just ended it there.

What people forget is that the original challenge (I think) was for drabbles. At least, almost all of the early ones immediately after the challenge was issued were drabbles or short ficlets. Most of those were really cute and funny, sort of like bon-bons in joke form.

I'm not exactly sure what prompted the change over to what it is now.

Although, my favorite one still remains the Sledgehammer/BtVS cross d_tepes wrote and that was a series of vignettes. Oddly enough, it was also written looooooong after the YAHFs got out of control. (Here's the link.)

There was another one that got started, had two chapters posted, and was never finished by Shinwillow (I think). What made this one unusual was Xander dressed up as Hannibal Lechter for Halloween, however, the YAHF part was actually a few paragraph prologue. The rest of the fic took place after the event and showed how Xander was using Lechter's psychological genius while trying not to become a serial killer himself. It had the potential to be a real genre-buster, but Shinwillow (who's one of the worst people on the planet for WiPs) never followed up.

I think a lot of the problems with the Xander YAHFs is the current atmosphere over at the Wank-tastic-Xander-Centric-Het-Only-Yahell-Group. Just about every fic over there these days falls into one of three categories: Superpower!Xander, Crossover!Xander, and Stu!Xander. The YAHFs are the cheapest and easiest way to hit the trifecta.

This is very true - I for one love Jedi Harris, which came out of the same kind of thing - a prologue set at Halloween, which then turned into a proper crossover (disclaimer - I know hte fic's complete, but I haven't read it all yet so if it got bad then I apologise for mentioning it).

When it works, it can be good and cute, but it's so over-used now that it just makes me roll my eyes whenever I see the setting.

First of all, thanks for the pimpage.

Secondly, I've always had a mixed view about the Halloween fics, personally. So many of them are a special kind of terrible that I can't even put into words, and while it may have been somewhat humorous to see the drabbles at first, the constant one-upmanship of "My crossover is more obscure than your crossover!" soon killed the whole concept.

And yet I've written two fairly long Halloween Fics myself, and have been batting around the concept for a third for like two and a half years now.

I guess that's because I think the concept itself is very interesting, especially with the limiter (one that is often ignored, including by myself) that it's only memories that Xander, or anyone else, gets at the end of the story. The idea of keeping Xander as a purely normal human being but providing him with skills and knowledge is one that I think works very well with him as a character.

It's just that most fics don't do that. They almost always feature Xander being physically changed in some way, usually to Dragonball Z proportions where he's going to blow up the planet with his pinkie finger. Like I said, I've written two Halloween fics myself, and while one just had Xander gaining memories and skills, the other was a full physical transformation.

So you can see why I confuse myself a little bit, when the stuff that I don't like about most Halloween fics is also what I'm doing anyway. I guess what it really comes down to is that most Halloween fics suffer from the same problem most crossovers suffer from. They almost always serve to overshadow the Buffy side of the equation, or they so dramatically alter the reality of the fic that it's not worth reading. There's a fine line between changing a variable and watching events unfold, and making Xander into a Super Demon King who then single handedly defeat Acathla, the First Evil, and Jesus before bedding half the female cast.

For me, a good Halloween Fic has to be about how the characters that I know and love react to the consequences of how they dressed, and they have to still be recognizable as those characters. The basic reality fo the Buffyverse can't handle Super Sayajin Times Bazillion and still maintain a sense of drama or tension. Some things cross over well. Others? Not so much.

And in all honesty, these are my issues with (Xander) fanfiction in general. It's just that with the Halloween fics everything is so much more clear, and I think that's because writing a halloween fic hardly requires you to even come up with a story. Just rewrite the episode based off a transcript and re-write maybe six key scenes. Boom, instant Halloween fic. It's cookie-cutter fanfiction, really.

They can be good, but by thunder, it's quite the rarity when it occurs.

You just reminded me I need to open up that half written YAHF word file and finish my Quantum Leap crossover. :-)

Hee hee...

You know TTH has a little Halloween check box to tag all the YAHF stories and people have the option to filter them out.