On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Nick Leifker <nightelf@thekeep.org> wrote:

Just a question for you all out there.

If you had a brilliant idea for a story, one that would knock the socks
off people, but one that you knew would get bad press from a few
overzealous, overauthoritative people, would you write it?  Would you
release it, knowing that it would cause you a lot of unnecessary grief?
Would you even think of it, when narrow-minded people are blasting
other characterization ideas right and left?  

I had a brilliant idea for a fanfic once - one that sat at the back of my
mind for months.  However, I was so wrapped up in what I thought was
'right characterization' that I thought it not worth the effort to write.
I didn't write it for a long time - not until I found that there was
actually a decent amount of evidence to support the view.  

The original version of "Clothes Make The..." was released a short time
later.  I braced myself for OOC flags flying... only to find that only one 
person replied to call it such.

	I think... Who was the guy who directed Ghostbusters?  Anyways he 
said that in his film's he could implisitly ask the audiance to take one 
element on faith, in Ghostbusters it was that ghosts existed and could be 
caught, in Dave it was that there was someone who looked exactly like the 
president.  In fanfiction, you can always get away with one big change from 
the cannon if you just make it explicit and try to keep everything else a 
decent extrapolation from the origional.  In CMT, Ranma embracing his 
feminity was the one big departure from cannon, but since that was the 
implicit core of the fict, readers could simply look at it and say, "That's 
thoroughly OOC, but what if?"  Now if the Fict had involved Ranma embracing 
his femininity, Kasumi turning into a foulmouthed Nymphomaniac, Genma 
developing a backbone and Nabiki becoming a nun, you would have had 
troubles.

Gary's goal is to see that the characterizations are as close to Takahashi
as possible.  However, by encouraging this 'right characterization', he
closes doors, rather than opens them.  My goal is different.  I want to
see the best stories out there.  I don't want to see good writers give up
on good ideas because of anyone's intimidation.  

	Well, the trick is that the characters were developed by someone 
else, and when we fanfict writers work with them, we are basically taking a 
shortcut of writing a story involving people that everyone else knows.  The 
quality of writing is the most important thing of course, but the simple 
fact is that when the characters are acting dramatically at odds with their 
established behavior in the origional, it's a distraction from the writing. 
 Unless, A: the variant is the point of the fanfict and the readers know it, 
or B: the variation is the result of events depicted in the fict.  Existing 
characterisation shouldn't overpower inovative ideas, but the ideas 
shouldn't throw everything away either.
	IMHO of course.

I make no apologies for what I said.  I still say Gary's a hypocrite, as
he expects of others what he himself isn't able to give.  I still say
Gary's harming fanfiction, for the reasons above.  And I have yet to hear
a response from him that he would EVER be willing to do otherwise.
Perhaps my earlier message was too inflammatory, but the reasoning behind
it has yet to be disproven.  

In the 'best friend' debates... Gary, it is true that there was no
Ranma/Ukyou heart-to-heart.  However, whose to say that their wasn't?  Can
you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their wasn't?  You claim
'indirect evidence'; perhaps there is.  However, indirect evidence is not
*proof*.  Allow others the same leeway you give yourself in your writing;
this is the hypocricy that bothers me so much.  Also, there is 'indirect
evidence' that points in the opposite direction; after all, Ranma and
Ukyou are friends.  Is there any friend you have that you've never sat
down with and *talked*?  If not, then they're not much of a friend, are
they?  And, yet, Ranma was willing to help Ukyou out on a number of
occasions.  Unless, of course, they're *more* than friends... ^_^

	Ranma will help out almost anyone.  Including Kodachi.  He 
consideres Ukyo his friend, as well as Shampoo and Ryouga.  However he 
hasn't shown himself to be a person who reveals much of himself to others, 
and if he has revealed more of himself than usual to Ukyo, she hasn't 
demonstrated any sign of that kind of knowlege.  Frankly in the HiruShutenHa 
storyline, she initially showed less insite into Ranma's character than 
someone with only casual knowlege of him would.
	So, as someone summed it up on the list earlier, does Ranma consider 
Ukyo his friend, yes.  Does Ranma consider Ukyo his best friend, there is no 
evidence either way.  Does Ranma treat Ukyo as a confidant and sympathetic 
ear, very unlikely as she has not shown the insite into Ranma's character 
that would lead her to develope.

Finally, to the person who said that people do not put their souls in
darkfics... we all have dark sides to our souls.  Indeed, good darkfics
are good BECAUSE the writer puts their soul into it.  I've met some of the
best writers out there, and know about the pasts of many of them.  Trust
me, there are shadows on their souls - nothing dangerous, but simply a
place where the soul still mourns.

-- Nick