On Fri, 4 Apr 1997, Redneck Gaijin wrote:

I went and deleted the first part of this fic as soon as I saw the 'warning
Kun-chan don't read this' bit. In general, I *DESPISE* Ranma fanfics.

I promptly forgot the title of the first half and dug into the second half
today. After the first ten or so pages, even though I knew where you were
going, I couldn't stop reading. The text held my attention and captivated
me, something which is not easy to do when I hate the subject matter.
Excellent job.

	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.

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.
	As for the funural Nodoka must have realized that her own
assumption that whatever fighting was her son's fault and subsequent
insistence that _he_ prevent Akane's blowups may have helped lead to this. 

(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... 

(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.
	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. 

(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....

As a story in general, this is very good.

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" )

HTG