A formulation primarily used to pitch a show or to quickly sum up the impression a show gives by expressing it as the sum of two separate, unrelated shows. The most famous variation is ""Die Hard" on an X", where X is a different location, means of mass transportation, or IN SPACE!, and so on.
It's very common in music writing — both reviews and press releases usually describe an artist as "Artist X meets Artist Y". Similarly, a work of literature may be reviewed as being the fusion of the styles of two authors; a common variation is to say that a novel is "as if X had written Y".
Should more works/characters be added into the mix (e.g. X + Y + Z...) and it starts specifically using mathematical symbols to define the work/character as parts of others, it becomes Troperithmetic. When this happens with multiple real-life stories, see Patched Together from the Headlines.
This is the undoubted result of tropers liking their Juxtaposition Gags.
Compare Recycled IN SPACE!, Crossover, This Is Your Premise on Drugs. See also Dueling Works. Frequent enough with weapons to qualify for a separate trope: see Military Mashup Machine. It can also result in a type of Tropes That Will Never Happen. A Hypothetical Offspring Comparison can be considered a form of this.
Not to Be Confused with works that have X Meets Y in their title, which are covered by Versus Title.
See also Come for the X, Stay for the Y where you initially take time on a work for one reason or another, but then get something out of it you did not expect.
To get a few pitch ideas for free see our Pitch Generator
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