Comments on comments, with my own comments added in. :)

curator@discordia.connectfree.co.uk wrote:
[quoting the actual author of the fic, who is Andrea Hill
<email_andreas_art@yahoo.com>]

Please critique this!  I want input!  I want opinions!  I need encouragement!  Just one fan, pleeeeeeease!

Once again, the best way to get all of that is to give it out.

I read this and thought you meant everything in the manga, not _everything_.
I'm making a point of this because there's a tiny little incompatability between anime and manga (other than some slight differences in temperament)
There are several plots in the Manga where Ranma require black, or almost black hair... it's mostly to do with his disguises. But anyhow. It's not all that important.

FWIW, most of those scenes are also in the anime. But I agree with your
point here. The anime hair colors are rather obviously an artifact of
the graphic style, and my suspension of belief always goes down a notch
or two when I see them described in a prose story, much as if someone
were to refer to Ranma as "the girl with abnormally large eyeballs."

BTW, since this story is based on the manga, you (the author) may want
to remove the references to Karumi and Natsume, who are OAV-only
characters (and check the spelling on the names if you do keep them; I
think it's "Kurumi").

One thing on this though; could you please refer to Ranma-chan with feminine pronouns in narrative, at least with respect to physical actions, otherwise it gets rather confusing.
Whatever his gender identity is, he is physically female, so you ought to represent that in your writing.
As for pychological references and dialogue (internal or otherwise) - anything goes. Personally, I think this is a good way of subtley indicating how people think about Ranma, and a way of plotting and possible personality changes.

I strongly suggest you keep your pronoun usage consistent, or at least
don't mix pronoun schemes in the same scene. There is not a distinct
wall in prose between physical actions and the characters' thoughts and
feelings; as in reality, they are often intertwined together. IMO, "he"
is appropriate when you're going for a highly POV-personalized, cerebral
narrative, which is what I tend to favor, whereas "she" works better for
a more cinematic just-the-facts-ma'am viewpoint. But take it from
someone who's read a *lot* of fanfics, switching back and forth in the
same scene is just going to be confusing.

In this case, I'd definitely support the author's choice of "he", since
it shows that the female half of the split Ranma still has the same
mind, still thinks of himself the same way he always did -- something
that is obviously quite important to the conflicts in the story.

Also, I get the impresion that you're confident that Ranma's male gender identity is rock solid, I do think it's likely that after a few years of getting used to being a girl all the time, he'd get used to the idea and start refering to himself in the feminine form (though he would, of course, still much rather be male)

I think given the circumstances of this fic, female Ranma might well
experience a backlash of sorts, i.e. start acting even more "butch" than
he ever did in the series to compensate for the loss of his physical
gender. If the author wants to play it that way, of course.

Moving on - I find the use of incense to split Ranma... interesting and unique... but rather inappropriate. IIRC, incense was only ever used in the manga to mess with people's heads (like the one they used on Happy to get him to change Taro's name, or the one that made Akane fall asleep and act out her dreams).

I'm okay with it as a plot device, though Happosai's plan to make female
Ranma his "love slave" was maybe a bit dubious. Also, I was confused by
this story's reference to a vampire Ranma from a previous incident. Is
this just some bit of added backstory that we'll learn more about later?
There was a double of Ranma in one canon story, but it came out of a
magical mirror, and it wasn't a vampire, but rather a ghost of sorts.

Overall, I think this was quite good. While there are some minor points
I'd disagree with -- there's no indication in canon that Ranma has ever
considered Ukyo his best friend, for one -- I think overall the
characters were handled quite well, and those terms it was one of the
more believable fics of this genre. I especially liked the
Cologne-Nodoka scene. I also liked the treatment of (female) Ranma and
Ukyo, apart from the one glitch mentioned above, though maybe some of
their reactions could've used a little fleshing out. Ranma's giving up
on getting back together with his male self is workable, but IMO it
could use some more development to make it happen. Show us more of a
reason for Ranma to think that the curse is troublesome to Akane and
that she'd be better off without that half of him.

Oh, and it's Konatsu, not Tsubasa (who was never seen again after his
initial appearance), who lives at Ukyo's restaurant. You may want to do
a global search and replace. Tsubasa is also not a ninja (as you refer
to him), whereas Konatsu is. See
http://www.techserv.curtin.edu.au/ranmascan/ -- particularly vol. 35 and
higher, which is where the Konatsu stories begin.

One major technical problem -- the text wasn't line-wrapped. This makes
it harder to quote sections line-by-line, which is one reason I didn't
do a line-by-line critique of this one. I thought the prose was overall
quite good.

Not sure whether I should say I'm looking forward to more, because I'm
not sure if this was the end. It's interesting that we haven't seen much
of male Ranma's reaction from this, nor of Akane's. It's hard to imagine
that either of them would just let female Ranma slip away without at
least making an effort to find out what happened to him.

Anyway, that's my two yen on this; I hope you (the author) will let me
know if any of it was useful, and I look forward to any future work.


Gary Kleppe
http://www.garykleppe.org/comics.html

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