On Friday, July 25, 1997 9:43 AM, Mr. Otakki wrote:

A fellow Minnesotan!  Hooray!  As an aside, my sister graduated from
Carleton.

If anyone out there cares to, I'd appreciate some notes on what the more
serious aspects of the characters in Ranma 1/2 should be/are (you can 
even include references for my sake).  Be it notes on just one or two, or
a large novel of notes, I'd appreciate it.  I think it'd help me out a 
great deal in creating meaningful dialogue and character development.

Well, okay.  Let's get the ego gratification out of the way.  My series,
"Thy Inward Love", is by no means dark, but it does take the Ranma
characters and put them in a more "real" setting.  By "real", I mean
that their actions actually have consequences.  :)  It focuses on the
characters rather than on general zaniness, and tries to cast them in a
realistic light.

For the ultimate in darkfics, I'd recommend Zen's "The Bitter End".
Every single person in that story (except Ukyo) ultimately contributes
to the degradation of Ranma's life.  It brings out the worst in a lot of
the main characters (except Ryoga, who's kept around sort of as a
control.  Oh, and except Ukyo, too).  The thing about it is, Zen has
made some logical extrapolations of the main characters.  They are
extreme extrapolations, but still logical.

Nicholas Leifker was written some very emotionally charged stories, all
of them in some way dealing with raw feelings in the Ranma characters.
Highly recommended.

Another serious look at Ranma feelings, in a more positive sense, is
Joseph Palmer's works.  Very studious, very deep, quite touching.
Consider the ultimate in Warm and Fuzzy Feelings (WAFF) fanfics.

A good place to find all of these stories is Taleswapper's home page.
Taleswapper is a guy who quarterly reviews what he considers to be the
best of Ranma fanfiction.  He also has links to each of the stories he
reviews.  All of the above authors can be found there.  You can find him
at:

http://members.aol.com/talswapr/index.html

Ethan Tsai

Hope you find this useful.  Good luck on your writing.

-Richard