On Fri, 4 Apr 1997, Redneck Gaijin wrote:

(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.

	You assume they married before Akane had a chance to seriously
deal with it (see below).

	<snip>

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

series and LEAVING IT A COMEDY???

	<smartaleck-mode> But it's no fun that way!

...sorry.

	'Salright

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.

	The beginning of TBE was set only a few weeks, maybe a month or
two, after the botched wedding at the end of the manga.  While Ranma did
manage to admit to himself (and his wife sometime _after_ the fact) that
he loved Akane and tried to work on his interpersonal skills even before
the abuse got out of hand, they did not get in the growing up you (and I)
regard nessisary for a healthy marriage.

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..."

	They never had a chance to develop that ability before their
fathers successfully had them wed, and everyone save Ukyo and to some
degree Nabiki (the other Also Rans preferring to avoid him wather than rip
the emotional wounds open again) _were_ insisting that he deserved it.

HTG