On Fri, 7 Jun 1996, Caroline Ann Seawright wrote:

All I'm saying is why screw around with the characters that people know and
turn them into something that they aren't? They may as well be an original
piece if they aren't recognisable as the actual character, apart from the
name and physical traits. I'm sure someone could have Kasumi actually being
an axe wielding psycho going around comitting mass muder when she's not doing
housework, but that's totally against what the manga states to be the truth.

	Wow... Cool!  I just _love_ the truth, particularly as espoused 
by the Book of Ranma.

	What if _I_ see Kasumi as being a latent psychopath?  We've _all_ 
read things in Ranma, after all.  That's why we have lemons.  Ranma and 
Akane _certainly_ never screw like rabbits in the manga, and yet we seem 
to have dozens of fanfics depicting same.  The whole point of fanfic, it 
seems to me, is to pursue our perceptions of our favorite characters 
through new and different situations.
	What about the myriad 'fics placing Ranma in a new situation, and 
examining his reactions?  I can't think of more than three or four 
Ranmafics that _don't_ diverge from the strict Takahashi canon.  How many 
people on this list have actually read _or_ seen all of Ranma?  How many 
have done so in the original Japanese?  How many have even taken the time 
to read all of the summaries? 
	If I look over the work you've submitted to this list, are you 
confident that I'm not going to find divergences in continuity.  Would 
your writings stand as a seamless continuation of Rumiko Takahashi's 
work?  Somehow I _seriously_ doubt it.
	But, then again, so what?  In the few Ranamfics I've written, I 
wasn't _trying_ to write as Takahashi might have.  I'm pretty sure she'd 
do a better job at that, anyhow.  I wrote from Ranma, calling it as I saw 
it -- which is, I would submit, what most other writers on this list do.  

It says that 'Kasumi is the perfect saint'. And someone could have Ryouga
fall in love with the male Ranma, and they could go off and do whatever
together as a happy couple. But that's totally against the manga, too. There
has to be a reason for the change stated in the fanfic, if it's a serious
fanfic (ie, one not just done for laughs), so that people can understand
the changes in the character - otherwise they just see the characters they
know mutilated and wrong... What's the point in that?

	So -- let's get this straight.  My options are either to write 
stories that conform strictly to the Ranma universe ... (as judged by 
you, I presume) or to write a story whose characters are "mutilated and 
wrong?"  
	Indeed -- it would seem that, in addition to adhering to some 
sort of strict canon, we also have to cram our work into some sort of 
familiar quasi-Aristotelian style of synthesis.  
	My impressions and ideas about the Ranmaverse probably don't mesh 
well with yours.  I _could_ write 'fics that assiduously hold to canon 
(I've read the synopses, many of the manga and seen about half of the 
animated episodes, BTW), but why should I?  It seems to me that _plenty_ 
of people do that (many of them quite well, I might add).

	It wouldn't hurt to leave a bit more lattitude.  We aren't making 
sausage here, you know...

CHL