To: fanfiic@fanfic.com
From: redneck@txdirect.net (Redneck Gaijin)
Subject: Re: [FFML] [Fic][Ranma] Bitter End
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On Fri, 4 Apr 1997, Redneck Gaijin wrote:

	I strongly advise you to get ahold of and read the first half of
this story.  What would probably seem an irrational jump into the realm of
OOC is pretty well built up in part one.
	Say the word (sometime tonight) and I'll send it to you.

It would have to be ***SPECTACULARLY*** built up to explain it.

However, I still don't much like the idea of this, because despite your
Author's Notes, I am still left with the notion that the text, from Akane's
first hearing about Ranma's 'free lessons', is done with the singlular
purpose of getting Akane to kill Ranma.

And quite frankly, I do not believe that:

(1) Nodoka would EVER give up her katana.

	She was passing it on to the next generation (at the original
wedding), sounds fairly understandable to me.

Absolutely not to me. 

One of the things about the classical samurai mindset, which Nodoka seems

to have bought into wholeheartedly is: your sword is part of you.

***YOU NEVER GIVE AWAY YOUR SWORD.***

Akane should have been given her own.

(3) Akane ever gets as mad as you have her. (This is a major point, you
drill it into the reader's head that Akane's anger has been getting steadily
worse. This seems to me to be rationalization in order to have her, at the
end of the fic, ready to kill Ranma and Ukyou.)

	The cycle of doubt, low self-esteem, and mistrust and leads into
Akane at the beginning of part two is fairly well pointed out in part
one... 

None of which was not in the source. Before, Akane dealt with it- otherwise

she and Ranma wouldn't have married. There just isn't enough to support her
becoming a homicidal maniac.

(4) Akane can so utterly fail to listen. Akane at least -tries- sometimes to
make her relationship with Ranma work... but in this story, she does
absolutely nothing but be a hair-trigger emotional psychopath. In fact, now
that I think of it, she is very OOC by the end of the 'fic, but she has to
be so she can kill Ranma.

	She _does_ fail to listen!  In the manga Akane frequently assumes
Ranma is intentionally insulting her about her cooking or actively
flirting with other women despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

(1) Ranma DOES intentionally insult her cooking.

(2) The fiancee misunderstandings get straightened out. Akane is capable of

accepting guilt when she is in the wrong (although Ranma will spoil the
effect by pissing her off again). In this, Akane has made multiple and
specific efforts to not hear what Ranma is saying. She is working to stay
mad at Ranma, something which is 100% OOC.

	Zen seems to have taken a very unpopular but fairly plausable
question and run with it, namely "What if Akane's violent tendencies
_aren't_ cured by marriage to Ranma?", and ran it to a very unpleasant
conclusion. 

No, IMHO he's made a conclusion and guided events towards it. And I believe

the result, well written as it is, does an injustice to the two principal
charas.

(5) Ranma wouldn't avoid or defend himself from Akane. Ranma's emotional
calm in this fic seems a bit much, but more importantly although he might
not attack Akane, if she attacked him with a potentially lethal force he
would NOT let it hit him. 

	At the beginning he did his best to avoid her physical attacks
	Considering the emotional damage done to him by the end....

The path he took to get him to the full-bore-victim he is when Akane kills

him is suspect from my POV. 

As a story about Ranma and Akane, it doesn't wash. Not for me.

	Maybe it's because I'm less attached to the 'Akane gets Ranma and
Lives Happily Ever After' scenario, but I found to be an upsettingly
realistic Worst Case story (far moreso than the far more typical plotlines
such as "Shampoo Attempts Double Assasination" )

I find both versions to be outside the purview of R 1/2.

Is it just me, or are we as Americans incapable of taking a foreign comedy

series and LEAVING IT A COMEDY???

...sorry.

in any case, let me put it to you this way.

The fact that Ranma and Akane got married implies that the two learned to

open up, and more importantly, to listen to each other.

And then, as soon as they're married, they lose that ability, and Akane

blames the existence of life in the universe on Ranma while Ranma sits
around and says, "I deserve it..."

This can happen in real life, true, but in this specific case, considering

the two individuals in question and their history together, I can NOT see it
happening here.

Redneck

Kris Overstreet, will write for food... | "The universe is already mad.
http://www.txdirect.net/users/redneck   | Everything else is redundant."
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