At 07:45 PM 10/6/98 PDT, Freemage . wrote:
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 18:57:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mike Loader <mike@thekeep.org>
To: fanfic@fanfic.com
Subject: [FFML] re: Ill Met By Starlight, Assorted responces
Sorry for any delays. :) All C&C will get personally responded to; I'm
just in the middle of a test cycle and a nasty cough, and Suasn's
practically cut off from the net. We're slow, but we do write back,
honest. ;)
Anyhow, general answers to comments:
OK, now that I know it's done, I'll finally break down and comment.
Just a reminder folks! Mike's stuff has the double arrow, the >>
Freemage's words have the single arrow, the > okay?
Y'all hunky-dory? ^_^
* Ukyou didn't deserve to get killed like that, I was disappointed -
Ukyou
certainly didn't deserve what she got. In fact, she got shafted pretty
bad; a nasty death for trying to help out a friend and get some closure
on
her love/hate relationship with Ranma. People don't always get what
they
deserve, and dramatic necessity is a bitch.
I've gotta admit, this was probably the roughest part of the fic for me,
for the reasons you put up above. I _almost_ bailed, right then and
there. I guess, in that respect, it was a good thing that I had just
thrown an entire storyline to Hell, sans handbasket, by having Genma
commit seppuku with one of Ukyou's throwing spatulas. I guess I'm
saying, "Damn, I wish it hadn't been so... right. Storywise, I mean."
* The Hibikis deserved worse than they got, especially considering what
happened to Shan and Ukyou - Maybe. Again, people don't always get what
they deserve, and who appointed you God? Part of life is that rewards
don't always fit deeds, and this can be a good thing. Don't decide what
other people should have got unless you want someone to look pretty
critically at what YOU deserve. Considering the amount of the world
living
in poverty, and our own high-tech, adequately-fed state... are you SURE
you deserve all this?
Must... resist... flippant, wise-ass, and totally inappropriate response
(if you know me, or have seen most of my posts, you'll know how hard this
is for me)
Actually, I agree. We don't necessarily get what we deserve. Life isn't
fair, I never said it was. Mind you, just because life isn't fair does
not mean we should act in an unfair manner now, does it? That we do not
always get what we deserve is no argument to not act in an altruistic
fashion; rather it is a stronger argument to do so, to help create a
world in which people are treated in a fair manner.
Still, one could wish that the Hibikis might get a little something
for their actions, or at the least try to make up for what they
have done (more on this later).
I am _far_ more tolerant of the Hibikis' fates than some of the other
commentators. One important thing to keep in mind is that they, too,
finally reached the point where they could make a final choice, and they
turned from the precipice. Redemption is usually a very messy business.
Did they? Did they ever really make the final choice? Have they started
down the path of redemption?
They did not kill Ranma. Yes.
They have foresworn their vengeance on Ranma. Yes.
But did they really turn back from the precipice? Not necessarily.
Mariko and Koji wanted to kill Ranma, wanted to him to die, painfully.
In the epilogues (read 'em before you go on, at least the first two),
one of the reasons they give for stopping their vendetta is that Ranma
is in more agony, experiencing more suffering, in his current
condition than they could ever hope to give. Sounds like they gave up
on vengeance because there was no need-- it had already been achieved.
Where is the atonement? Where is the sense that they have to make
up for past wrongs? Yes, they mention that they came close to becoming
the monsters they saw Ranma as being, but all that comes from it is
an agreement that they shouldn't become like that again.
There does not seem to be any real remorse for what they did to
others, what they put other people through; they feel bad for selfish
reasons. If they really wanted to atone, would they not at least try
to ask forgiveness? Perhaps not from Ranma, who is incapable of
understanding it, much less giving it, at the time, but at the very
least from Kasumi. Where do they try to make up for what they have done,
is my question I must ask before I can believe in any real redemption
for them.
And I think Ep #2 shows that things are not going to be easy for them,
even if they did "get off". Mariko, in particular, is quite clearly
showing signs of being unable to return to anything resembling a
"normal" life--she's been in the pressure cooker too long, and, like
some deep-sea fish, can't survive _without_ that constant stress. Place
her in a calm, restive environment, and watch her blow up.
Which is even worse, because I had the feeling throughout the story that
if one placed Ranma in a calm, restive environment, he wouldn't blow up.
I got the feeling that he might have eventually got what he needed.
After all (and I've said this before), Ranma was not the one who
kidnapped Akane, who kidnapped Ukyo. Ranma was not the one who laid plans
to kill someone else, who spent all his time searching for a person
to kill. Ranma was not the person who set traps for others, or who
involved innocents, or broke fingers and took hostages.
Did anyone get the feel that the monster they were trying to kill
at the end was not Ranma, but themselves? That Ranma merely became the
symbol for this internal beast, and by killing him they would only be
removing the symbol, and not the reality?
Of course, in a way, Mariko's survival let Akane off the hook, too. Had
the younger Hibiki really perished in their fight, even accidentally, it
would have haunted her to the end of her days, possibly even destroyed
her.
And it would have been her own fault.
I know I'm going to get ripped, at least in people's minds, for that
one. Tough. I can hear her defenders now. "But she was just trying to
do the best she could for someone she loved." "She didn't do anything
wrong." Bull.
I wouldn't use such a tack. If I were to defend Akane in this case, I
would start off by mentioning that it was Mariko that started the fight,
that Akane offered another option before hostilities began. Mariko knew
the terrain she was fighting on better than Akane (marginally). She knew
it was a precarious place to fight. She could have chosen not to, but
she did. It was a fight, with a winner and a loser, pure and simple. If
Mariko had died from the fall, well, it was not intentional, it was an
accident. The luck of war.
If one were to argue that whether or not it was intentional, Mariko
was still just as dead... well, does not the legal system recognise
intent? Is there not a difference if I slip and fall, crashing into you
and accidentally break your nose and if I walk up to you and punch you
in the nose, breaking it? Do not tell me that intent counts for nothing.
There are times that intent counts for everything, where success is
irrelevant and at times impossible (fighting for a hopeless cause). The
gesture is important at times, even if it is refused, even if one knows
it will be refused.
Yoda has it backwards, it should be: try, or try not. There is no do.
Inaction _is_ action. The term "enabler", from the drug/alcohol-abuse
recovery community is pertinent here. Ranma gets away with so much
because Akane is so passive when it comes to dealing with him. She lets
her love so blind her to what's going on that it makes it easy for him
to get at the others. And, until the end, when she finally is forced to
confront what Ranma really is, she fails to try to force him to get
help, or even ask others for help in helping him herself.
She seems to believe that she can handle his psychic scars, even when
she has plenty of evidence that she's way out of her depth. That's
pride--or more specifically, that's hubris. As Madeline L'Engle once
wrote, "There's a kind of pride in thinking we can save the world.
There's even a kind of pride in doing good." Does that mean we
shouldn't try to do good? No. It means we must be brutally honest with
ourselves in our capacity to do good.
And it is this that Akane fails to do. Her attempts at creating a
"safe" environment for Ranma, one where he can recover, are akin to the
"good Samaritan" who pulls an accident victim out of a car to make them
more comfortable, and aggravates a spinal injury instead.
Again, we come to intent. Akane, and later on Ukyo, are the only ones who
even conceive that Ranma needs help. Nabiki? She wants Ranma out of the
picture, away from her, away from her family, by any means necessary.
Mariko and Koji? They want to help Ranma... to an early grave. Even
Genma, Ranma's own father, leaves to contemplate whether or not he should
kill his son (or more likely whether he _would be able to_ kill his son).
Shampoo? For her it's a case of Ranma's life or her's, because she
would surely die/kill herself if she married Ranma as her law dictates.
She? I actually see Shampoo's reason for wanting Ranma dead as the most
'valid'; it is a case of either him or her. Self-preservation and nothing
more.
Now, one could blame Akane and Ukyo for not being more strident in
their attempts to help Ranma, for not getting him the help he needed, and
yet at the very least they were helping him. Almost everyone else was
exacerbating the problem, making things worse, while Akane and Ukyo were
trying to make things better. Who knows? Without everything else happening,
they might even have been able to provide Ranma what he needed, or help
him acquire the treatment he needed. All speculation, of course; just a
bunch of ififif....
Flames off the list, please.
* Ranma gets off awfully easy - Ranma spends the better part of the
next
few years being ripped to pieces by imaginary cats. I suppose you could
call that easy.
Nope. Uh-uh. I had one _week_ of moderately bad nightmares that had me
afraid to go to sleep. Several years of much, much worse than that, and
I would currently be typing this from inside the bell tower, with a
rifle across my lap.
Even those who hunted him and wanted him to die painfully stopped because
he was suffering more than they could make him. Death would almost have
been a kindness, in a way.
* Was Ranma evil? - Yes and no. Calling anyone 'evil' is hard, just as
hard as calling anyone 'good'. People themselves are not good or evil;
they're people. The actions they do, the thoughts they think, the
things
they cause; all those can be good or evil.
The evil men do lives on, while the good is oft interr'd with their bones.
(I'm horrible with exact quotes, but it went something like that at least)
Butbutbut, how otherwise can a person be defined besides by his actions,
or his thoughts? Not even his thoughts, really, because how often do you
have access to someone else's thoughts? Only if that person tells them, and
that's assuming the person isn't lying.
We know people by what we observe of them, which is how we classify
them as evil or not. Now, this kind of shafts the whole intentions mean
something argument, doesn't it? After all, I might do a lot of bad things
for a good reason, but that still does not make the actions good, right?
The ends do not justify the means, and the path to hell is paved with
good intentions, to use a few cliches. And yet... and yet I cannot bring
myself to believe that intent counts for nothing, that actions make
people evil, but intent makes them good....
Does this make sense? It's late for me and I'm probably rambling a bit.
I'd go deeper into it if I wasn't sure that I'd end up confusing me
and you further. Discussion about it at a later date, and privately
since I'm getting a little too abstract to post on the list (it's
supposed to be about fics, darn it! What am I doing, talking about
intent? ^_^ )
Matthew "Maybeso" Lewis is:
That guy with "Maybe" and/or "Definitely" in his name on IRC
See him on FFIRC! [bachman.newberry.edu fanfic]
Sojiro_Seta on Kawaiimuck
maybeso@ican.net
_________________________________________________________________
"Yes," Ranma said
One word, one tiny insignificant little word, yet it
would make all the difference.
--Soul of Ice: Thesis (upcoming)
_________________________________________________________________