"It's fate, Saotome!"
"I know, Tendo."
"One doesn't cry about," Tendo paused to sniffle, "fate,
Saotome."
"I know, Tendo."
"One--"
Soun again paused to sniffle.
"I know, Tendo!"
"Deals with it--boo-hoo-wah-ha-ha-ha!" They said in chorus.
I enjoyed this scene. It's unusual but hardly inconceivable to see
Genma and Soun sparring, and the dialogue is funny.
"Father and Mr. Saotome are going to ask Grandfather Happosai to
license Ranma to teach this afternoon."
"Oh, no!" Nabiki said. "How are we on first aid supplies?"
I'd suggest that Nabiki is not the "Oh, no!" type. It implies a lack
of composure under stress. She's more the type to take a deep
breath, close her eyes, and then say: "Right. I hope we're stocked
up on first-aid supplies."
"Okay, sis," Nabiki said, "I gotta go. I have to come with a way
to make some money fast over the next two weeks. There is no way we are
going to get through this without having to bail somebody out of jail."
Hmm?
When have we ever seen anybody in the Ranma cast go to
jail? I've always pictured the police in Nerima as cowering
in a corner somewhere and pretending they'd never heard of
the property damage laws.
"Food!" The echoing, female voice in his head told him. "Right
now! Our entire body is one, great big, _empty_ stomach."
"Boy! You got that right!" Ranma whispered to his inner voice.
Down below, you start using parentheses to indicate thought.
Up here you use quotes. Needs to be consistent.
"Yeah, but I don't want to hand her off to the old man. His idea
of training girls is to run them out of the school as quickly as
possible.
He does mean Genma, not Happosai, right?
"Come on! You know that won't work. There are about a dozen kata
she needs to learn and her breathing is atrocious. Hell, if I were to
just get her to straighten out her breathing, she could probably beat
Ryoga in a fair fight."
Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
Takahashi-san isn't always fastidious about keeping her martial arts
skill heirarchy intact, but it's pretty well established that Ryouga is
just a very small step in skill down from Ranma. I'd suggest another
comparison, like Shampoo or Kodachi. Even then, it's a lot to
swallow that she'd jump up in skill so much just by breathing better.
"I don't know. I can't remember her ever just hitting a girl, or
fighting one outside of a prearranged match. When she's mad, she almost
always takes it out on us."
Uh, she boots Shampoo away a couple times, by my recollection.
Generally she doesn't hit Shamps because she can't. She's willing
to hit Kodachi when she's attacked. She is certainly willing to throw
cold water on Shampoo at a moment's notice, which qualifies to
me as an aggressive act.
"That's just an old wive's tale and Ranma doesn't have a fever."
"wives' tale"
"Sure! It's good for you."
"Yeah, but it's a lot better whe...boo ghaff zumbden do go
wiffit," Akane suddenly found herself trying to talk around a piece of
tofu that had unexpectedly materialized in her mouth. "Erm-m-m...Rrnba!"
I have a problem with this scene (apart from the explanation of ki, which
is absurd but no more so than other things in the Ranma continuity, and
I'm guessing it's important for your story). The problem is internal
consistency - here, in this scene, we have Ranma pulling off what is a
silly but undeniably strenuous high-level martial arts tecnhique, the
"parlay de fois-gras" (don't quote me on the spelling). Later, we see
him so banged up that he can barely bathe himself.
This contributes to my overall impression of this chapter as lacking
focus. The internal consistency does not seem to hold up.
"Well, looks like Xian Pu is right on time!" One of her
assistants said cheerfully as she sat down next to Nabiki. "Maybe we
should throw a few more orders at the Nekohanten, just to make sure she
stays good and tired."
This part also makes no sense to me. How can Nabiki generate so
much business for the Neko-hanten? What is she doing? Is she
advertising? Writing restaurant reviews? It seems like she's just
waving a magic wand and generating immense prosperity, which
is something she'd have done for herself long ago if she had the
ability.
"Why do you wish to wait, my son?" Nodoka asked, visibly shaken.
"I do not wish to accept this sword, until after I have handed
you your first grandchild," Ranma said, then glanced over at Akane.
This is a sweet scene, although Nodoka will hopefully have to wait
a while longer. Ranma and Akane are way to young to be parents.
deformed, two meters tall, ex-Tillie tingler lying across his chest.
Happosai had passed out upon the table that he, Soun and Genma had
occupied much earlier in the evening. His eyes were locked wide open and
staring glassily at the stars through a large hole in the roof and
ceiling.
I hate to bash this whole scene at the bar, because obviously a lot
of time went into writing it, but I thought it was easily five times longer
than it needed to be. Possibly ten. I confess I did not have the stamina
to get through the whole thing, and began to skim after about, oh, eight
paragraphs. After that I felt I'd gotten the joke several times over, and
I'd been sufficiently grossed out by the Happosai-Tille and Genma-Under-
the-Table stuff (both parts I found to be very un-funny - Genma has his
faults, but we've never seen him be so crude in that way, and the part with
Happosai? Pure yuck) to not want to progress any farther.
I don't know what to tell you about this. If I were your editor and you
were trying to write a story for publication, I would tell you to eliminate
the entire scene and find some other way to get the large man into
the clinic, which really the only significant practical upshot of the whole
affair (and even that amounts to little more than a throwaway gag with
Akane thinking she's seen a monster). Of course, I'm not your editor,
and this is fanfiction. I'm not in a position to give that kind of advice
and I wouldn't expect you to heed it.
I would, however, recommend a more direct approach to your storytelling
in future chapters. I don't have a problem with entertaining asides and
a rambling narrative voice... up to a point. Like all things, it's a matter of
degree. In this chapter, I thought you went much too far. More on that
later.
(How come we didn't get a goodnight kiss?)
(Why would we? She's a girl. And right now, so are we.)
(I really did want to kiss her.)
(Well so did I! Now get some sleep, will ya?)
Neither version of Ranma really wanted to sleep, but sleep they
did.
This is a cute scene, overall. It was long but I didn't mind that, because
it went somewhere and had a point.
Onna-Ranma rested against the left hand wall of the gorge for a
moment. It seemed he was making twice as much motion to gain half the
distance he should be gaining.
"You shudda thought about that before you grabbed Akane,
dumbass."
Tillie's ex-boyfriend shook his head upon hearing the girl's
voice. She was talking as though she were answering someone he could not
hear. Who the hell is Akane? He wondered. The temperature was dropping
fast. His breath was now making its own contribution to the swirling
fog.
This is a good scene, but I did not like the jarring interruptions by
switching to the ex-boyfriend's point-of-view so often. I would suggest
reducing the number of ex-boyfriend segments to three or four instances,
and perhaps even separating them more distinctly with chapter-breaks.
Interspersing them in with Ranma's dream is disorienting and hard to
follow... which was even more frustrating because this was the scene in
the story that I found most interesting.
- - - -
Well. Long chapter. Over 70 pages in MS Word.
The most interesting part of the story is the "cold dragon" business,
but you are taking a long, long time to get us there. It's good to
let a story unfold at its own pace and not give away too much too
soon, but there comes a point at which it becomes very frustrating
for the reader.
There were some internal consistency parts that I found very
difficult to swallow as well, apart from the ones I mentioned above.
For one, I'm not sure why Cologne is just trucking about attending
to business, after her revelation at the end of the last chapter about
the cold dragon, whatever that is. She does things in her own way,
yes, but the scene at the end of the last chapter indicates that
she knows the cold dragon is something of tremendous importance.
Shouldn't she be following up on her discovery in some way?
Even more difficult for me was the way Ranma's "combat fatigue,"
so prominently discussed in the previous chapter, utterly failed to
materialize in this one. He's laughing, he's joking around, he's
having big meals and finally letting himself fall in love. This is all
fine, and these scenes are mostly well-written... except it doesn't fit with
the picture of the young man strung out to a dangerous degree you
talked about last time. Where is his stress? Where's the paranoia?
Where are the symptoms of his condition?
This lack of consistency makes this story difficult for me to
follow. Straying from the character depictions from the original
source is one thing - different people have their own opinions about
how big a crime that is, but a fanfic author is expected to bring his/her
own interpretations to the table. But straying from the character
depictions within the story itself is a much more serious problem.
I hope you can tighten up your approach in future chapters. The
cold dragon so prominently featured in your title is the most
compelling thing in your story. Ranma's "combat fatigue" was
also very interesting and I'd like to see it explored more - you don't
have to struggle so hard to make him a great guy.
Best of luck with future chapters,
Grayson Towler
http://www.rigroup.com/~grayson/relentless