On Sun, 30 Jun 1996, Michael White wrote:

At 11:24 PM 6/29/96 -0500, Scott Johnson wrote:

*snip*

Of course, a lot of the success depends on how much of the original 
setting can be detached from the characters.  Sailor Moon, I've found, 
works reasonably well, because even without the core characters, you can 
extrapolate to bits of the Dark Kingdom or members of the Sailor Senshi 
who could easily have been somewhere off in the background of the series 
- you keep much of the dynamic while giving yourself enough leeway to 
create.  It might be a bit harder with BGC, but you've still got GENOM 
and many of the social dynamics to work with.  With something like Ranma, 
though, I think it wouldn't really work - remove the Ranma characters 

>from Ranma and all you've got left is another generic martial arts/comedy 

setting, aside from the Jusenkyo curses.

Myself, I feel more *restricted* by using existing characters. You can't
really change them drastically, and you sure as hell can't kill them, so if
you want to do something really drastic you're going to have to bring in
secondary characters - basically red shirts - and use them. I'm infinitely
fascinated by the BGC world, but I'm not patient enough to put up with that
limitation :^)


									- MW

Can't kill them?  One of the best 'fics I've ever read was Nightelf's 
"Sunrise" (I think that was the correct name) in which almost ALL of the 
established characters were dead.  I seriously considered killing one of 
the established characters in Bubblegum Collision.  I have never had any 
problem with the death of an established character, and it seems to 
happen often in the stuff I've read.

Just my opinion,

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Stormwalker <temporarily at pingley@post.cis.smu.edu>
"Chaos is a good thing"
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