Demographic-Dissonant Crossover

"Are yah ready, kids?" "NO WAY, CAPTAIN!"

"Speaking of brands, how exactly is my brand going to mesh with a kids game? I'm Deadpool! I hack off limbs and blow people's brains out! I've been sodomized by Inara from Firefly. I drop more F-Bombs than a face-blind Tourette's patient yelling at his own reflection in the mirror."

— Deadpool, questioning how an adult character like him could work in Fortnite, Deadpool Tries Joining the MCU

When a franchise meant for an older demographic with copious amounts of swearing, erotica, violence and gore, and other such mature nastiness that isn't for children to witness crosses over with another franchise meant for a general audience with hardly any of those things, it results in the creation of a Demographic-Dissonant Crossover.

To avoid controversy from Moral Guardians, the adult-oriented property is often Bowdlerised, especially with characters from those properties becoming Badbutts. Though the reverse also tends to be true, where the child-oriented property is made Darker and Edgier or Ruder and Cruder to Avoid the Dreaded G Rating. However, this may result in fans of the edited property being alienated by the changes. This is a common issue with a Demographic-Dissonant Crossover, as often times fans of one property will be satisfied while fans of the other property will be angry. It can be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to please everyone. Some of the more contentious examples of Demographic-Dissonant Crossovers (among the fandom) have an Audience-Alienating Premise as a result.

This is quite common in Fan Works, as the world of fanfiction gives aspiring writers the ability to combine whatever franchises they are fans of without copyright or trademark concerns as long as the fanfiction creator doesn't profit from the fan works nor deprive the creators of the original works of revenue. Fan works, naturally, do not have to worry about adhering to network standards, and can make the child-oriented properties as "adult" as they wish to a certain degree, without attracting lawyers from the creators of the original properties, who may fear that the fan works could ruin the reputation if they become sufficiently popular and later implement a Fanwork Ban.

Official such crossovers happen occasionally, and they can work surprisingly well if the tonal dissonance is kept under control—for one famous example, The Punisher agreeing ahead of time not to kill anyone in Riverdale is what allows Archie Meets the Punisher to work as well as it does. If the crossover takes place in the show or series catering to the younger Demographic, expect The Theme Park Version or Lighter and Softer version of the character(s).

Note that if a work happens to be suitable for children but is targeted to an older demographic and has official crossovers with works not suitable for children, it does not count - as an example, the XCOM Squad from the M-rated XCOM: Enemy Unknown makes an appearance in the Brave New World expansion for Civilization V, which is rated E10+ but is squarely aimed at adult gamers on account of its complex strategic gameplay and mature presentation of world history. There's a reason why this trope isn't called "Age-Rating-Dissonant Crossover".

Demographic-Dissonant Crossovers are often a Gateway Series for the mature works that cross over into it.

A Sub-Trope of Weird Crossover. A Super-Trope to "Sesame Street" Cred, specifically in the cases creators of adult-oriented media make a cameo on a kids' show, and So My Kids Can Watch when those creators make a cameo on a kids' show to show to their own children. Compare and contrast the similarly named Demographically Inappropriate Humour, as well as Misaimed Merchandising and Story-Breaker Team-Up.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• This Kids' WB! promotion crosses over Pokémon: The Series with... 7th Heaven, which wasn't even on Kids WB.
• In the 90s Fox Kids held an event promoting the adult animated series King of the Hill, complete with animated crossover bumps featuring the King of the Hill cast interacting with characters from Fox Kids series. Here is a bump where Hank tries to sell propane to the Silver Surfer.
• A promotion for Life with Louie featured Louie Anderson waking up in a live-action rendition of the house of The Simpsons.
• This Target commercial promoting The Peanuts Movie has a cameo appearance by Stewie and Brian from Family Guy, a show with a much older target demographic than that of Peanuts.
• Paramount+'s "A Mountain of Entertainment" commercials feature a wide array of IPs the company owns, to the point where characters from Nick Jr. and Comedy Central shows will appear in the same commercial. Pluto TV, also owned by Paramount Global, does this as well.

Anime & Manga

• Lupin III is a series about a Gentleman Thief and targets older audiences more often than not. Case Closed is a series about a Kid Detective and targets preteens and teenagers. However, there have been two crossovers between both works.
• How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, a light-hearted comedy about high-school girls really into excercise, is set in the same universe as and features cameos of characters from Kengan Ashura, a very brutal fighting series with many mature and sexual themes. Kengan itself also had a non-canon crossover with Street Fighter, which never ventured in its depiction of fighting and violence anywhere close to the bloody and gory manner Kengan had.
• The adorable Rascal the Raccoon has had crossover merch with the dark and depressing Puella Magi Madoka Magica and had not one, but two crossover campaigns with the gritty and violent Attack on Titan.

Comic Books

• Transformers vs. The Terminator is just that. A crossover between the bombastic and lighthearted world of Transformers: Generation 1, and the violent and gory world of the Terminator.
• My Little Pony/Transformers: Friendship in Disguise! is a crossover between IDW's G1 Transformers comics (aimed at adult fans of the original G1 franchise) and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (aimed at pre-teen girls). Strangely, it works.
• The long-running high-school comedy series Archie Comics notoriously crossed over with Marvel's brutal vigilante The Punisher in 1994's Archie Meets the Punisher, well before Archie's later turn to routinely producing adult-oriented horror and soap opera titles. Archie characters have since crossed over with other IPs that clash with their family-friendly image such as Predator (in Archie vs. Predator and Archie vs. Predator II) and Sharknado.
• In 2019, DC Comics and Maurício de Sousa Produções published a crossover between their two most popular properties, the teen/adult-oriented Justice League of America and the kid-friendly Monica's Gang, respectively. While the writing and revised character designs specifically appealed to young children, the plots catered to older readers by being chock-full of references to DC's classic stories. Most noticeably, two of the child characters re-enact the famous opening of The Killing Joke, which is widely regarded as one of the company's most violent and disturbing novels.
• In 2016, DC created a crossover line with Hanna-Barbera called Hanna-Barbera Beyond, where adult (though not grown-up) versions of their famous kid-friendly shows were serialized between 2018 and 2019, but before that they made DC meets Hanna-Barbera, with one-shot crossovers that could be possible, like Space Ghost with Green Lantern, to utterly bizarre combinations, such as The Banana Splits and Suicide Squad.

Fan Works

• A Man of Iron is a Fusion Fic between the mostly PG-13 Marvel Universe, and the very adult A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones.
• Harry Potter and the Berserker is a crossover between two fantasy works: the family-friendly (though still dark at times) franchise Harry Potter and the very much not family-friendly manga Berserk.
• Mortal Kombat vs. The Owl House is what happens when you mash the ultraviolent and mature Mortal Kombat series with The Owl House, an animated kid-friendly show created by Disney.
• Being a show that is perfect for Fanfic Fuel, Total Drama is the subject of many crossover fics that involve properties well outside its pre-teen to teenage demographic; such as Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and BioShock for Go Tell Aunt Rhody and Total Drama Raptured, respectively.
• Equestria at War is a Game Mod for the war strategy game Hearts of Iron that fuses it with the colourful kids' show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• Fallout: Equestria is one of the best-known cases of this, being a Fusion Fic between the Fallout franchise and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• Neon Genesis EvangeléMon retells the story of the psychologically terrifying Neon Genesis Evangelion in the universe of the much more kid-friendly Pokémon franchise.
• Turnabout Storm features Phoenix Wright from the Ace Attorney series, which is aimed at teenagers and mature audiences in later installments, getting transported to Equestria, the setting of the very light, kid-friendly My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy/Devilman: crybaby is a crossover between the mildly naughty but family-friendly Ed, Edd n Eddy with the violent and often sexual DEVILMAN crybaby.
• Infinity Verse is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover encompassing many different properties, some of which are intended for kids such as SheZow and Star vs. the Forces of Evil. Others not so much, especially Black Lagoon and Elfen Lied.
• Christian Grey vs. Pepper Potts has characters from the Marvel Universe transplanted into the NSFW Fifty Shades of Grey.
• A Dark Knight for Equestria has the fluffy and family-friendly setting of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic visited by the Batman of the adult-oriented Batman: Arkham Series.
• Elfen Lied: Children of Destruction is a crossover between the shonen action series Dragon Ball Z and the very violent seinen show Elfen Lied.
• Fury and Flame has characters from the older kid/teen-oriented Avatar: The Last Airbender end up in the grim and adult world of A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones.
• The multiversal crossover plot of Infinity Crisis allows for works as diverse as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the novels of Roald Dahl to co-exist with the likes of American Horror Story and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
• Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights crosses over five series that run the gamut of the Magical Girl genre spectrum, from the pure and lighthearted innocence of Cardcaptor Sakura to the dark psychological drama and Cosmic Horror of Madoka Magica... and the dissonance is part of the point.
• The meta nature of The Story to End All Stories allows for characters as varied as Hannibal Lecter and the Power Rangers to make cameo appearances.
• Infinity Train: Blossomverse is a crossover between Pokémon: The Series and Infinity Train, which are both family-friendly works (albeit the latter tending to deal with heavier topics). However, all the stories have its characters encounter characters from more mature works like Hazbin Hotel during their journeys, visit train cars that are mirrors of locations like Silent Hill, and there are additional references and shout-outs to everything from Uzumaki to Fatal Frame.
• A Loud Among Demons is a crossover between the child-friendly The Loud House and the incredibly adult Helluva Boss. It's lampshaded when Loona from the latter series finds out that the worst thing Lincoln from the former show ever did above ground was breaking his dad's trophy.
• Tokimeki PokéLive! and TwinBee is a crossover between the all-ages Pokémon franchise with a focus on the games, the lighthearted Seinen Love Live! franchise (Even though LL! has a Periphery Demographic of young girls in East Asian countries, particularly Japan.), the Dating Sim series Tokimeki Memorial and the Twinbee series of Cute 'em Ups. But it also has a dose of grittiness added in the form of characters using swear words (especially Mia Taylor), various apocalypses mentioned throughout the series (even if most of them can be prevented at least), Special Stories going for a more psychological feel, and a more mature feel overall thanks to topics like adoption and climate change being mentioned, which are otherwise absent in most official entries of the franchises involved in the crossover. In addition, there are also Shout-Outs to franchises aimed at adults like Rambo, Terminator, Mortal Kombat, The Simpsons, Family Guy and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure splattered throughout the fanfic series, which contrast the ones towards family-friendly franchises such as The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros. and Ruby-Spears Mega Man.
• One particularly common crossover in fan works is crossing over the lighthearted and family-friendly My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series with the silly, yet still M-rated and bloody First-Person Shooter Team Fortress 2. There are countless fanfics, fan art, and MLP:FiM inspired maps and Game Mods for TF2.
• Rick and The Loud House combines characters and plotlines from the raunchy and heavily nihilistic Rick and Morty with the lighthearted and slapstick-heavy The Loud House.
• The Silver Raven is this due to being a Fusion Fic between The Owl House and Devil May Cry series. The former is a series that, despite being a Horror Comedy, is still very much intended for younger audiences. The Devil May Cry series, meanwhile, is aimed at older audiences and has far more visceral action, language, and blood.
• Dueling Trigger Finger is a Fusion Fic between the shonen franchise Yu-Gi-Oh! and the much more mature Danganronpa series. While the former does occasionally dabble in darker and more mature themes, it never did to the extent the latter does on a regular basis.
• Paradoxus crossovers World of Warcraft and Winx Club. The former is an MMORPG targeted at males between the ages of 18 and 28. Meanwhile, the latter is a Western Magical Girl cartoon aimed at females ranging from 4 to 14 years old.
• God of War - Not All Gods crosses the gory, older audience-aimed God of War (PS4) with Nintendo's more kid-friendly Kid Icarus: Uprising.
• While both Ladybug and Madoka are Magical Girl shows, they are very different examples of the genre. Ladybug is a very upbeat, cheerful show that mixes magical girls and superheroes with a very goofy world seemingly filled with anything, while Madoka is the Trope Codifier for the Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction genre that stays grounded in a specific dark aesthetic. In Kwami Magi Homura Magica, Homura is often baffled by elements of Miraculous Ladybug when she has to deal with them and the Miraculous cast finds the Madoka elements to be rather disturbing.
• Suicidal Overconfidence is a crossover between the lighthearted Central Park and the much darker Marvel Universe.
• Smash Remix, a Game Mod for Super Smash Bros. 64, adds several more characters on top of the original game's 12-character roster. While most of the new additions hail from games rated E and rated T, among them is Conker, specifically based off of his appearance in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a game that is known for being very vulgar and inappropriate for children, though the content included isn't particularly vulgar. Also included is content from Perfect Dark (the dataDyne Central stage), GoldenEye 007 (the Golden Gun), and Doom 64 (the Spawned Fear stage), all three being gritty FPS games.
• The Baleful Bureau: While both A Series of Unfortunate Events and Control have horror elements, the former is a Horror Comedy Conspiracy Literature series aimed at kids and younger teens while the latter is a New Weird with elements of cosmic horror aimed at adults.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Batman Movie (which is aimed towards families) contains references to all different Batman media, where it's all implied to happen in the same universe, from the Darker and Edgier Dark Knight Trilogy and DC Extended Universe to the campy Adam West TV series. But where the film plays this the most straight is when the prisoners from the Phantom Zone are revealed to be famous antagonists from many well-known works of fiction. Most of the works represented are at least appropriate for children, such as The Wizard of Oz, King Kong, and Harry Potter. One notable exception, however, is the presence of Agent Smith and his clones from the R-rated The Matrix movies, as well as the shark from Jaws, though he is used as the punchline for a joke.

Films — Live-Action

• Space Jam: A New Legacy, a movie about the family-friendly Looney Tunes, features cameo appearances by characters from multiple adult-oriented works, such as A Clockwork Orange, Game of Thrones, Mad Max, The Matrix, It, Rick and Morty, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and most confounding of all, The Devils, a X-rated and highly controversial film that Warner Bros. hasn’t given a release on video in the US, and whenever it has been released on international home video such as a Japanese Laserdisc and British DVD, tends to be cut down.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) features numerous characters from family-friendly media (such as Scrooge McDuck, He-Man, Doc McStuffins, and the eponymous Rescue Rangers) alongside characters from very adult media such as Randy Marsh, Butthead, and Detective Florez. In a Disney movie, no less.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider:
  • Many crossovers in the franchise are this due to the inclusion of Kamen Rider Shin from Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue. While most Kamen Rider instalments have dark and serious themes, they're still aimed at young audiences and can be goofy at times, whereas Shin comes from a movie aimed at an adult audience that contains gruesome imagery, a nude scene, and no lighthearted moments. This is amplified in any crossover including their Lighter and Softer sister series Super Sentai.
  • Kamen Rider × Super Sentai: Chou Super Hero Taisen includes a brief appearance from the protagonists of the Kamen Rider Amazons spin-off web series, which is also aimed at adult audiences, containing many graphic and bloody fight scenes and heavier themes than the usual affair Super Sentai and Kamen Rider tend to deal with. They also reappear in other crossover media still aimed at younger audiences such as video games or stage shows.
  • Kamen Rider Saber + Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger Super Hero Senki has a cameo from the Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger team, a comedic spin-off aimed at adult audiences due to its raunchy humor and more adult jokes.
• "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", the two-part finale of Doctor Who Series 4, was a Crisis Crossover between the parent series, a family show, and contemporary spin-offs Torchwood, which was very much adult-themed, and The Sarah Jane Adventures, which aired on a children's TV channel. "The Stolen Earth" highlights the differences the spin-offs when Sarah mentions that she tries to avoid the Torchwood team on account of them carrying "too many guns", nodding to her teenage son as she does so. Far from offended, Captain Jack cannot resist flirting with her and she seems to appreciate his compliment.
• The adult live-action horror TV series Supernatural had a crossover episode with the children-oriented Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, with Sam and Dean Winchester being sucked into an enchanted television and assuming animated form. The episode is tonally very much adult-oriented, with the Scooby-Doo characters being horrified to encounter genuinely supernatural events and actual murder.
• Sesame Street is aimed at kids of preschool and early elementary school age, but there have been a few appearances of characters from works for older people:
  • Three skits (one about the letter W, one about body parts, and one about brushing teeth) featured characters from Happy Days (Fonzie was in all three and Richie also featured in the tooth-brushing skit). While Happy Days isn't an adult show, it contains risqué jokes that make it more suitable for around middle school age and up.
  • One skit involves the characters C-3P0 and R2-D2 from Star Wars visiting. Star Wars is kid-friendly, but is a bit too violent for kids that young; it's more suitable for ages seven and up.
  • The remake of the song "Monster In The Mirror" features many celebrities who were very popular at the time the song was produced, including an appearance from The Simpsons, which is a series MUCH too adult for Sesame Street's audience of children.
  • A particularly noteworthy example of this trope is a Game of Thrones skit where Elmo asks Cersei and Tyrion Lannister to be more respectful and work with others. Game of Thrones is a show that's way too inappropriate for young kids watching Sesame Street since the former series is famously filled with violence (though not particularly Gorny), foul language and especially sexual content.

Magazines

• The German version of MAD had numerous cases of this with its pages covering animated media, such as the general audience-aimed SpongeBob SquarePants with the adult-oriented Happy Tree Friends. In general, while most of its pages about animated media include only family-friendly works, they tend to feature a decent amount of slapstick-style gore, as well as occasional sexual content.

Theme Parks

• Universal's Islands Of Adventure is built this way. Being an amalgamation of lands based on the child-friendly worlds of Dr. Seuss and old newspaper comics, Greek myths and classical fables, the family-friendly but still dark worlds of Marvel Comics and Harry Potter, and the often terrifying world of Jurassic Park, it's a bit hard to get a handle of who the park is exactly for.
• Some family-friendly theme parks such as California's Great America and Thorpe Park in the United Kingdom have rides based on mature franchises, in these cases, Mass Effect: New Earth and Saw: The Ride, respectively. The former of the two rides has a Lighter and Softer Disneyfied plot than the rest of franchise it is from in order to fit in with the rest of the park.
• Many of the former Paramount Parks originally had rides themed after films aimed at mature audiences, such as Top Gun, Tomb Raider, and The Italian Job. However, these rides have been genericized after Cedar Fair Entertainment purchased these parks, as Cedar Fair doesn't have the rights to any licensed Viacom property.

Toys

• Tamagotchi
  • In the early 2020s, Bandai started releasing a number of Tamagotchi virtual pets based on video game and anime properties, including a few that fall outside of Tamagotchi's main demographic of children. Among them are Neon Genesis Evangelion and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.
  • 2005 had Hanerutchi, based off the Japanese variety show Haneru no Tobira ~You knock on a jumping door!~, a show whose claim to fame was a segment in which someone accidentally says "penis" during a game segment.
• Transformers is a series for the most part aimed at children, and even installments and products aimed at adults are still appropriate for older children and teens. This makes it surprising that there exists an official crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion, with the release of an Optimus Prime in the colors of the Eva Unit-01, accompanied by a short story about the ghost of Starscream possessing an angel and Optimus helping NERV defeat him.

Video Games

• Super Smash Bros.:
  • In its first two entries (Super Smash Bros. 64 and Super Smash Bros. Melee), the series was a Massively Multiplayer Crossover that only featured characters from Nintendo's own franchises, the vast majority of which are child-friendly E/E10+-rated video game series, such as Donkey Kong, Kirby, Mario, and Pokémon. Melee is rated T for Teen, but all games represented here were at the time rated for all ages (E for Everyone). Though many of Samus Aran's games are T-rated, they were all released after Melee, so the presence of Metroid didn't raise any eyebrows, and only displayed this trope from Brawl onwards (as it was the first to show Samus in her "Zero Suit" persona); the same applies to the characters from the often T-rated Fire Emblem series (as none of their games were even available stateside until 2003).
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl would be the start of non-Nintendo guest fighters joining the roster, with the very first one announced being Solid Snake from Metal Gear, an M-rated series notorious for its realistic depictions of the horrors of war and violence, sex, profanity, tobacco usage, and political conspiracy storylines. Snake's Brawl arsenal is conspicuously limited to mines, grenades and similar explosive weapons rather than anything that shoots bullets, and while he ordinarily smokes like a chimney, No Smoking is in full effect here.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U one-upped Brawl with the inclusion of the title character from Bayonetta as its final DLC character. Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai admitted it was difficult to tone down a character so overtly sexual in a way that still stayed true to their source material without affecting Smash's own age rating.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, in addition to bringing back all veteran characters in the series (including Snake and Bayonetta), added Joker from Persona 5, a game drenched in sex, blood, violence and profanity, as its second DLC fighter (and first from the Fighters' Pass). Unlike Snake, Joker actually gets to wield a fairly realistic model pistol as part of his moveset (with the attack in question simply called "Gun") - this was jarring enough to players that the line "For his Neutral Special, he wields a gun." from his Content Approaching trailer (April 2019) would become a meme. In addition to this, several of the DLC Mii costumes are based on characters from adult-oriented games as well, such as Travis Touchdown (No More Heroes), Dragonborn (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) and Doom Slayer (Doom). Spirits of Resident Evil characters were also made available, and Yuri Kozukata from Fatal Frame is an Assist Trophy. Lastly, many of the introduced characters hail from T-rated games with a higher degree of violence and/or fanservice elements than others, such as Castlevania (Simon and Richter), Tekken (Kazuya) and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Pyra and Mythra).
• Any Disney crossover game that includes characters and elements from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise becomes this, including Kingdom Hearts, Disney Infinity and Disney Heroes: Battle Mode. Being one of Disney's few major Cash Cow Franchises with a PG-13 rating, filled with heavy drinking and swashbuckling violence, it makes for quite the disconnect seeing characters from the series alongside Disney's more family-friendly fare.
• Kingdom Hearts: The series is a crossover of the kid-oriented Disney Animated Canon and the teen-and-older Final Fantasy games. Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] also adds the equally teen-oriented The World Ends with You to the mix.
• Sega Superstars crosses over kid-friendly Sega properties like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Monkey Ball, with characters from the company's properties meant for older audiences like House of the Dead.
• LEGO Dimensions is full of LEGO version of properties that are meant for wildly different age demographics. From kid-friendly fare like The Wizard of Oz, Scooby-Doo and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, to adult-oriented franchises suitable for teens and older like The A-Team, The Simpsons and The Lord of the Rings, to all-ages franchises like Back to the Future, Doctor Who, and Beetlejuice.
• Due to sharing the same developer, the E rated Super Monkey Ball and the M rated Like a Dragon have had numerous Company Cross References. Namely, Kiryu appears as a playable character in Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania and plushies of the monkeys have appeared as crane game prizes throughout the Like a Dragon series.
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has Gachapin and Mukku, two characters from the preschool show Hirake! Ponkikki appear as guest characters.
• Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Though The DCU had been telling "mature" stories with their properties even back then, having them crossover into the infamously violent Mortal Kombat franchise still seems like a strange choice for an actual installment. DC didn't want to depict their characters getting dismembered (at the time), so this is the only mainline Mortal Kombat game with a T rating. Later, the Injustice games would have Mortal Kombat characters as guest fighters, and conversely, Mortal Kombat 11 included the Joker as DLC. In both cases, the games retained their respective age rating.
• Capcom's side of the Marvel vs. Capcom series includes characters from games all over the rating scales. Ranging from E/E10 series such as Mega Man and Ghosts 'n Goblins to strictly M-rated ones such as Resident Evil and Devil May Cry.
• Pokémon Conquest is a crossover between the lighthearted, all-ages Pokémon franchise and the more serious Nobunaga's Ambition series, which is based on historic Japanese warfare and is aimed at teenagers.
• Power Bomberman: The Guest Fighters include characters from some M-rated franchises, including Metal Gear and Silent Hill.
• Super Robot Wars is a crossover series that involves pulling Humongous Mecha and their pilots from various Super Robot and Real Robot shows. Many of these shows target wildly different demographics, although the games usually aim for teens and older, so any adult themes are usually toned down. For example, in Super Robot Wars X you have series aimed at children like the Mashin Hero Wataru Series, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and The Brave Express Might Gaine alongside series that target older demographics like Code Geass, Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam, and Cross Ange. (In fact, part of X's Fix Fic interpretation of Cross Ange hinges on its characters being paired with and consequently influenced by Wataru's innocent Saturday-Morning Cartoon tone.)
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale mostly drew characters from games aimed at teenagers and adults, such as Metal Gear and God of War, and which are varying degrees of violent and gory. However, a few of the games represented, such as Ape Escape, Parappa The Rapper, and LittleBigPlanet, are targeted toward preteens or even younger audiences. The violence in those games rarely goes beyond cartoonish slapstick, which creates quite a contrast when Sackboy is slapping Kratos around. The game's stages invoke this dissonance; all of them consist of game worlds merging, including some crossover Sugar Apocalypses played straight (witness the monstrous Hydra from God of War corrupting the vibrant toon world of Ratchet & Clank into a grim storm) and inverted (the Ape Escape monkeys turning the Real Is Brown battlefields of Killzone anything but brown).
• Metal Gear Solid, an M-rated franchise, and Ape Escape, which is rated E, had crossover minigames in their respective third entries. The former had the Snake Vs. Monkey minigame, which featured Solid Snake (using Naked Snake's model) catching the apes with a "Monkey Shaker" (actually a modified EZ Gun). Ape Escape 3 had the Mesal Gear Solid minigame in which "Pipo Snake" helps out Solid Snake defeat a group of apes who have hijacked the latest Mesal Gear.
• Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a funny colorful game intended for all ages, has had a surprising amount of crossover costumes with video games geared towards mature audiences, such as Half-Life, Hotline Miami, NieR: Automata, and DOOM.
• The Forza Horizon series, a racing game series aimed at all ages with real-world licensed cars, features a few crossover fictional cars from intellectual properties spanning all age demographics. For example, Forza Horizon 4 has cars from the kid-orientated Hot Wheels and LEGO toy brands (as well as a DLC world based on the latter), the Teen-rated James Bond series and Final Fantasy XV, and the M-rated Halo series and Cyberpunk 2077.
• The kid-oriented Monster Rancher series regularly features special monsters based on other properties by Tecmo, including M-rated ones like Fatal Frame and Dead or Alive.
• The kid-targeted WarioWare series has featured a few microgames based on the T-rated Metroid Prime Trilogy, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Fire Emblem Engage.
• Warner Bros.'s Smash Bros.-esque platform fighter MultiVersus went into this territory as soon as it was announced, placing a sizable number of kid-friendly characters like Bugs Bunny and Finn and Jake alongside Arya Stark from the very TV-MA worthy Game of Thrones and the titular stars of [adult swim]'s Rick and Morty.
• The Yo-kai Watch puzzle spinoff Puni Puni has had collabs with franchises with very different target audiences than the source material; with some examples being the very graphic Attack on Titan and Rebuild of Evangelion.
• Teddy Together and its Japan-only sequel Neko Tomo are aimed at young children, but feature references to The Idolmaster and the Tales series, both aimed at teens and older. The bear and cats also later appeared in cameo form in Cinderella Girls, Shiny Colors, and One For All.
• The PlayStation versions of Shovel Knight, a lighthearted E for Everyone game, have Kratos, the hero of the infamously violent God of War series, as an optional Superboss. The Shovel Knight wiki acknowledges it by describing his exploits as "far too grim to be explained here".
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a relatively low-key and chaste game aimed at general audiences, received a free DLC sidequest that crosses over with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, an RPG aimed squarely at teens and up that is loaded with fanservice and cursing.
• Fortnite is a bright, colorful, lighthearted T-rated shooter, and most of its crossover content falls into a similar tone. However, there's plenty of content from mature franchises available as well, including John Wick, Rick and Morty, Resident Evil, Invincible (2021), The Walking Dead (2010), Family Guy, Metal Gear, Alien, Predator, Doom, The Witcher, Terminator, Dead Space, Alan Wake, Evil Dead, Halloween, God of War, Halo, RoboCop, Bad Boys (1995), Attack on Titan, and more. On the other end, The Nightmare Before Christmas's Jack Skellington stands out in the game as a character from a PG-rated Disney family film.

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE! generally does a good job of making sure its matchups are fairly reasonable both thematically and tonally... except for occasional oddballs like "Goro vs Machamp".
• From Flash-Gitz Animation:
  • "Racist Mario" revolves around Mario deciding to purge Mario Kart of all the non-Nintendo characters due to his Fantastic Racism against them. He eventually meets his match when Kratos shows up, culminating in a Colossus Climb when Mario eats Toad's mushroom head for a Power-Up and Kratos scales his gargantuan form, gouges his eyes out, and bangs Peach and Daisy as his reward.
  • "Kratos vs. Elsa". Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Kratos and Atreus try to kill Elsa due to Kratos' homophobia and Elsa being a gay icon. Turns out it was actually a Secret Test of Character, as Kratos wanted to see if Atreus was tolerant of gay people. When Atreus fires his arrow at Elsa, Kratos decides that he failed the test.

Web Video

• Cartoons in Danganronpa: Asides from the fact that the series is based around the mature Danganronpa franchise, most of the characters involved are from series aimed at or are at least appropriate for children, with the glaring exceptions of South Park and Rick and Morty. It gets lampshaded in the "Teaching Charlotte French" short when Dib notices that Kyle, Cartman, and Morty all swear more often than anyone else.
• Masahiro Inoue's indie Tokusatsu production Jisariz, aimed at adults, features two of the villains from Dogengers, which tends to be more family friendly.
• GTA... but with talking trains!! crosses over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Thomas & Friends, faithfully retelling the events of the former's "Wrong Side of the Tracks" mission in the much more family-friendly style of the latter.

Western Animation

• Blue's Clues & You!, being a reboot of the original Blue's Clues series, is intended for the Nick Jr. audience of young children. So having an appearance from Samantha Bee on her immensely raunchy late-night political comedy series Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is VERY jarring.
• Robot Chicken: Most sketches are Dark Parodies involving "mashups", a collision of two pop-cultural items (usually one "innocent" and the other "mature") degenerating into chaos, like Mario and Luigi travelling to Vice City.
• Superman: The Animated Series: "The Main Man" featured Lobo, who is a more adult oriented character. It doesn't help that the Lobo (Webseries) is rated TV-MA.
• Young Justice features an appearance from the adult-oriented character Lobo. While this wouldn't be too unusual for the Audience Shifted post-cancelation seasons, this was back when the show was still airing on Cartoon Network.

---