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.
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.
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.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Films — Animation
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Professional Wrestling
- Tabletop Games
- Theatre
- Video Games
- Web Animation
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
- Other Media
- Tropes
- Real Life