Oh! And, again, C&C is really needed, here. I'm not all that good at
writing serious fics, and this is going to be...well, not completely
serious, but not completely comedy, either. Kinda like "Army of Darkness,"
only...different.
Anyways, sorry for ranting like I have been, and I'll now get to
the...thing.
Well... your author's notes were longer than the story itself, so that's
sort of an awkward start.
No need to tell us too much of what you're planning. The story
should - in the end, it must - speak for itself.
That being said, you haven't given us a whole lot to go on here, but
I'll see what I can suggest about what you've got so far.
Surprisingly enough, Ranma wasn't all that sad about leaving. He
HAD been thinking this over for a long time,
and he HAD weighed all sides of the issue (a first for Ranma), and he had
eventually come to the conclusion that leaving
Your formatting is very strange. You've got one long sentence, then a
shorter one, then a long one, and so forth. You might want to get that
a little better worked out - just makes it easier on the reader.
was the best choice. So, all in all, he wasn't sad. Depressed, yeah,
because he was leaving behind friends, family...no,
that's not right.
I'm not sure how you're drawing a distinction from Ranma being
sad and being depressed. I don't get enough sense of what his
emotions are from just those terms.
The reason he was leaving in the first place was because
he'd never had those things. No friends, no
family, no nothing. All his supposed friends were just nice to him to
either get in good with his female side or to keep out
of his male side's wrath. No, he had no friends.
It seems clear that your whole point of this intro is to set up Ranma
leaving Nerima on his own, but this just doesn't seem like him. In
the original series, Ranma is more likely to assume friendships where
they aren't necessarily in place rather than dismissing friendships
which do exist. I think he saw Ryouga and even Mousse as friends
long before either of them would even think about admitting it.
And also remember that there are some people here - Ryouga,
Shampoo, Mousse - with whom he has fought side-by-side against
some very, very dangerous adversaries. That doesn't mean they're
perfect buddies, that they don't have their own agendas, and that
they don't have their conflicts. But if Ranma doesn't respect and
value his own comrades-in-arms, then he had better have an
extremely good reason.
Otherwise, he comes across as being very selfish and small.
I don't think that's what you want, though I could be wrong.
Family? That's a joke. Genma hadn't ever been a REAL father, and
he couldn't even see his mother as himself, so
he didn't have any family.
By the end of the series, he could see his mother as himself, but
you might be setting this story sometime before then. As for
Genma as not being a real father... well, Genma-bashing is a
popular sport in the fanfic world, and Lord knows the character
has a lot of flaws. Nevertheless, he gave Ranma the most
important thing in his life, which is martial arts, and in the series
Ranma does seem willing to forgive him for pretty much every
offense (after a bit of pounding, of course). So his absolute
dismissal of Genma as a father, again, seems very strange
and unconvincing.
Akane? Nabiki? Kasumi? No, no, and no.
Akane...he loved Akane (he had finally come to
accept that fact after deciding to leave), but she didn't love him. no
chance of a family, or even a friend, there. The mallet
of doom speaks for itself in those occasions. Nabiki...three words: yen
hungry monster. Nothing else to say.
Kasumi...she was so nice, but when it came right down to it, she was an
airhead. At least, that's what it seemed like.
Ranma had caught a few glimpses of remarkable perception and intelligence
>from Kasumi, but he could never get her to
admit it. Kasumi had too many secrets, too many masks, and too many false
smiles. Ranma just didn't feel comfortable
around her anymore.
So he's decided he loves Akane, but he doesn't think she
loves him back. Why? Because she hits him? It never seemed
to really bother him before. Has he told her that he loves her?
Did she reject him? If so, why?
And all this about Kasumi's secrets and masks... you just are
not giving us enough to go on here. Where does that come
from? How has he gotten this impression?
Mr. Tendo? ...Shut up.
Who is he telling to shut up? Is Ranma telling someone to shut up, or
the narrator? That's very confusing.
Ryoga? Shampoo? Ukyo?
Nope. Nothing for Ranma in Nerima.
Boy, in the paragraph above he dismissed Nabiki with a single sentence.
Now he dismisses three good friends with a single word.
It's just not convincing to me that Ranma would, after some
indeterminate period of thinking things over, simply decide that there
was nobody worthwhile in his life and just pack it up to move on.
I'm not sure that I could be convinced of such a thing at all, but you'd
certainly need to write a lot more explanation than we're given here.
Maybe you want to get on to other things. If you're trying to tell
the reader: "This is the premise. Just accept it and read on - the
real story comes later," I'm afraid that I, at least, am not that
interested in going along for the ride. Since you're writing fanfiction,
you have to deal with stories and characters which have already
been established. If you just dismiss almost everything that's
gone before for convenience in order to isolate one character to
use (or set up your story in some other way), it doesn't seem like
you have a real handle on the characters.
If you want to isolate Ranma, to send him off alone into a journey by
himself for the purposes of your plot, there are other ways to do it
without making him seem like such a selfish little prick. Maybe he's
looking for a cure. Maybe he's trying to learn a dangerous technique.
Maybe he steps through a magic looking-glass. Does he have to
suddenly decide he can't stand his friends and family?
Quite frankly, I would be more willing to accept that all his family
and friends were killed in a freak exploding toilet accident than to
accept that Ranma suddenly decides they're not worth his time
anymore.
Well, I'm sorry I don't have more positive to say, but it was a very short
prologue and it needs a lot of work. I wish you luck in your writing
in the future.
Grayson Towler
http://www.rigroup.com/~grayson/relentless