I would have to admit that I am not entirely certain what you are trying
to accomplish by this, save annoying a large percentage of the ML with
your assertions. Nevertheless, this is not a Ranma fic, and I told
myself that I would attempt to C&C the majority of the non-Ranma fics
that come along. Due to the apparent motivations behind this, I will
proofread the first section as an academic work, and the second section
as a fictional work. I will not be correcting punctuation.
On 3 Oct 2002 at 10:12, Gillian von Karmann wrote:
PREVIOUS CONSIDERATIONS
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1) This short fic IS an "Out-Of-Character" story. If you just hate
O-O-C stories, then simply do not read this one. You were warned.
Please do not come tell me that this fic is a bad fic *only because
it is O-O-C* and you don't like O-O-C fics because O-O-C fics ipso
facto are bad fics --- unless you really want to be:
a) flamed back and b) duly called "baka yarou" and "kisama",*minimum*.
OOC, right. I have no inherent dislike for fics of this type, though I do
question the purpose behind using existing characters if you are not
going to attempt to make them behave somewhat as the original characters
would.
2) Good artworks usually are full of symbols of universal/
traditional/esoteric nature. Quite unfortunately, as time goes by it
becomes more and more difficult to find persons who can realize the
presence of the great symbols and comprehend correctly their
respective meanings.
You want to rewrite your first sentence, as
"universal/traditional/esoteric" not only is poor grammatical form but
also is potentially misleading; the three adjectives are not closely
enough related to be used in this manner. Separation by comma would be
more correct here, producing "symbols of a universal, traditional, or
esoteric nature." You might want to consider using "Good artwork...is,"
rather than "Good artworks...are."
At the beginning of your second sentence, "quite" is unnecessary. I
would also replace "more and more" with "more," or "increasingly."
"Realize" is an incorrect word choice; I believe you meant "recognize"
here. "Comprehend correctly" should be "correctly comprehend."
>From a content perspective, you need to provide examples here. You have
made an assertion and need to back it up with evidence. While what you
say may be true, it will not be taken seriously without proof.
Of course the symbols that appear in
anime and manga are not "just for decoration". And because of
their undeniable strong influence upon the collective psych, one
cannot seriously consider that the symbols were used only for
helping the manga editors and TV network owners
make (more) profit. Unless you keep this in mind you will not be
able to appreciate or evaluate this fanfic properly.
You say "of course," but you fail to provide any evidence that this is
the case. Just as in the first section, this is unacceptable. As a
general rule, you should not start a sentence with a conjunction; if you
feel you must (and such is not required in this case), then you must put
a comma immediately following the conjunction.
Here, you are essentially making a counter-argument to an argument that
has not been raised previously, specifically that the use of symbols in
anime and manga is motivated solely by profit. In addition, to provide a
logical connection between this paragraph and the previous one, you need
to either state why anime and manga should be considered "good artwork"
or show that symbols are also used in popular entertainment, which is not
usually considered on the same level as traditional art.
3) Generally speaking, anime have a fragmentary and not much "coherent"
narration structure. The possibilities of inserting new characters,
additional parallel and concurrent plots, unusual or bizarre
situations, change and development of the original characters, etc.,
are thus made innumerable. Concretely, anything can happen, and
anything can be sure believable as well, where and when nothing
is real. The so-called "suspension of disbelief" before "unbelievable"
or "inadmissible" situations is in fact a process that depends
much more on the current state-of-mind of the reader themselves than
on the author, and effectively it does not have much to do with the
efforts and capabilities of this latter. In this way, some excessively
stupid readers can accept a whole lot of unanswered/unanswerable
questions and blatant absurdities in the anime without an objection
or complaint,but at the same time those same stupid readers certainly
will not approve the presence of new unanswered questions and
not-so-absurd absurdities in a fanfic. Kuso ne.
Again, you must provide proof to back up your assertions. Syntactically,
"anime" is a genre, and thus is a collective singular noun; thus, "anime
has" is the correct usage here. "Not much" is incorrect, and should be
"not very." You do not need quotation marks around "coherent."
The second sentence contains several examples of redundant phrasing,
specifically "parallel and concurrent" and "unusual and bizarre." You do
not need the "etc." at the end, either, though to the best of my
knowledge it is not incorrect to have it there.
I am unsure what you are trying to say in the next sentence, so I will
leave it alone save for the fact that regardless of the meaning, it is
grammatically incorrect. It needs revising in any case, as the meaning
is unclear. Your statement about suspension of disbelief is an opinion,
and not a fact, and should be presented as such. In addition, it is an
opinion that is not generally accepted, and you should consider providing
supporting examples for your position. "Reader themselves" is not
correct, and should either be "readers themselves" or "reader himself."
I recommend the former.
Your final sentence needs complete revision, as it is neither logically
consistent in its own right nor supported by your previous statements.
It is also needlessly offensive to the reader. Again, "anime" is a
collective noun and as such you do not have "the anime." Your Japanese
grammar is incorrect; "kuso" is a nominative and as such must be followed
immediately by a copula in this case. "Ne" is not a copula and will not
suffice here.
Breaking this one into several parts:
4) I am a person who (still - ?) loves the good anime *and* has a
reasonably huge and well-formed general knowledge. I am perfectly
aware that I am an avis rara. I also know that most anific readers
and authors do *not* enjoy _actual_ good literature, especially
because they were "educated" (read: programmed) to both ignore and
despise good books, good music, good film, for the self-evident
reason that real good artworks are *not* suitable for global mass
production and extra-fast megaprofit. Sou desu yo!
You do not need the parenthetical in the first sentence. Again, you must
provide proof for your assertions if you wish for them to be taken
seriously. First, you must provide a context; state what you consider to
be "good literature." Next, upon providing that context, at the very
least you should provide several solid anecdotal examples, though
statistics are always preferable. "Ignore and despise" is logically
inconsistent, as despising something is an active emotional state while
the act of ignoring something is essentially passive. You are missing a
conjunction in your list. What you call "self-evident" is not; provide
your reasoning for this assertion. The use of Japanese here is both
gratuitous and meaningless, as that phrase is generally used to emphasize
something someone else has said rather than one's own words.
Therefore authors like myself often are called "bad writers" and our
works frequently are regarded as "bad fics". Well, presently
I am not sorry to have to say that I really don't know how to
produce "good fics" --- for I really have no interest in doing it.
Whenever I write, I sincerely concentrate all my energy and efforts
upon making good LITERATURE, i.e., a decently-done job.
I wrote Revolutionary Girl Sailorsaturn[BSSM],
To Whom I Give My Heart[EVA], Sayounara[SMJ], --- and all of them
are *not* "good fics". SMK is not a "good fic" either. If you're
still expecting to find an extra-cheap and easily-eatable story
in here, you're just in the wrong place.
You do not define "good fics" here, so the reader has no point of
comparison. Also, by bringing your own work into this, you cheapen your
point by making it personal. Some sort of paragraph transition is
necessary. The use of "therefore" implies that the argument in this
paragraph is a logical continuation or derivation of the previous
paragraph's, and this is not currently the case. "'good fics'--for" is
incorrect, and should be rewritten "'good fics,' as," though it is
possible that this is merely a stylistic preference on my part. "Decently-
done job" does not sufficiently expound upon "good literature" to be used
in the way you do; provide a more concrete definition here.
"SAILOR MARIONETTE KNIGHT"
"No, this is not a nightmare, my dear odango atama", spoke Hotaru
to her rotten carbon-copy, whose naked body was being kept
immobilized, totally controlled by the irresistible mental power
of the avatara.
"Avatara" is not a word, as far as I know. I would use a word other than
"carbon-copy" here, also.
Lying face up, Tsukino Usagi had been rendered
uncomfortably numb: she could not open her eyes, she could not use
her mouth to cry for help, could not move her arms and legs.
All that she could do then was wait...
Technically speaking, numbness is neither comfortable or uncomfortable,
though I see what you intend by this. "Then" in the last sentence is
unnecessary.
Before this day, she and the bionic girl had been one spirit that owned > two souls and two bodies; but now, the big error that Professor Tomoe
had committed several years ago was finally about to be corrected; from > this moment on, the two sailor-suited warriors did have to become one
single and brand-new entity.
Again, you should avoid beginning sentences with conjunctions. "Did have
to become" is awkward, and should probably read "had to become" or
"needed to become."
How does Professor Tomoe figure into this? His error, according to SM,
lay in allowing Mistress Nine to possess Hotaru, and that error had
already been corrected--by Usagi herself and the other Senshi.
"Open your thighs wide", the cybernetic mistress calmly commanded;
Usagi's mind and body just could not help obeying, so she promptly
spread her lower limbs, showing the winged ark that contained her
holy grail, granting unlimited access to her sacred heart.
"Just could not help obeying" sounds awkward here. I would remove "just"
to correct this. If Usagi is spreading her legs, simply say that; "lower
limbs" adds unnecessary complication to your prose.
Hotaru pushed an unusual speculum into the five inch deep pink sheath
of Usagi, transforming in this manner that compressed empty space
into a fully-expanded cavity, and placed into Usagi's matrix
the output plug of an appropriate spiraled optical cable; then she
connected the input plug of the cable to her own navel.
This passage is needlessly complicated in phrasing, I would say. "Sheath
of Usagi" is awkward and should be rewritten to use the possessive form.
A cavity cannot, by definition, be expanded in any manner beyond
enlarging it, and I don't think this is the meaning you're looking for
here. Perhaps "exposed" would work better? "Appropriate" should be
"appropriately," as you are using it as an adverb.
After a pause of fifteen seconds, she did the same thing to herself:
connected the output plug of another cable to the maiden circuit
inside her womb and attached the second input plug to the belly
of the altered clone.
I know I said I wouldn't comment on punctuation, but you can't use a
colon here. If you remove "did the same thing to herself:" then it works
fine as a single sentence.
Soon afterwards, Hotaru exclaimed: "Angel Power, wake up!".
This action made Usagi feel the presence of a hard, hot and pulsating
cylindrical egg forming around the walls of her paradise city, and,
just as if it were a natural intromittent organ, the luminous
aethereal sword of Dis little by little grew outwards, making its
shining head visible outside the vertical lips of her golden rose.
Hotaru experienced the same blissful sensation, most happy to see and
touch the blue seed that had just been born of the fiery wild fish at
the bottom of her spine... and even better, she was most happy to feel
that now her SuperSolenoid engine had been definitely made free to show
the whole splendor of its potency.
Okay, this paragraph reads as if you simply took a number of euphemisms
for female genitalia and threw them into a random phrase generator; in
other words, it adds absolutely nothing to the story. The final phrase
(everything after "and even better") is far too wordy, specifically in
the area of adverb usage, and I would strongly recommend rewriting it.
By last, the kami stated: "*IT'S DONE.*", and kissed the mouth of Usagi.
A glowing cloud made of bluish green ectoplasma rapidly appeared,
protecting the ultrasonic Moebius ring from the eyes of the mortals;
when it disapppeared seven minutes later, there was no Tsukino Usagi nor
Tomoe Hotaru anymore: the two females had been technomagically combined
into a new mechanical form of life --- the unexpected allmighty
reincarnation of... Agni, the Ram of Mars.
"At last" rather than "By last." Again, use the possessive form to refer
to someone's body part. Who is the kami here? Hotaru? Moebius rings
cannot, to the best of my knowledge, be ultrasonic, as sound cannot take
discrete forms. You need to rewrite the semicolon-colon combination you
have here, as it is not grammatically correct. "Almighty" rather than
"allmighty."
The job that she had to do was extremely simple: to save her planet.
That is to say, to stop the ones who were destroying their own
homeworld, and to prepare mother Earth for wellcoming a truly decent
type of people at last.
The first sentence should be revised, as your colon usage is incorrect.
The second sentence does not have a verb; infinitives do not suffice
here. "Welcoming" rather than "wellcoming."
There existed only one way to do this job: by
exterminating both the unforgivable insane part of mankind --- whose
stupid ways of living, acting and thinking were just and only a very
efficient way of raping, mutilating and poisoning the environment in
which it lived ---, and the abominable confederation of the
self-entitled "Enlightened Ones" --- these were the beings that had
created the human race, many thousands of years ago, by means of
badly-done genetical engineering, whose only and evident goal was to
produce conveniently useful puppets, dolls and marionettes from
corrupted versions of the genome of the Elohim.
This is technically all one sentence. Revise it. I'm not going to make
specific grammatical suggestions here, but I would recommend trying to
write this passage without dashes or colons, and with as few semicolons
as possible. This passage does not read as fiction, but as a
philosophical tract; while that may be what you intended, and while some
very well-known authors (Ayn Rand, for example) have done the same thing,
in my opinion you are being far too heavy-handed about it here. Try
lengthening this section, so that you can write this more subtly. As it
stands, you are simply using the characters as a blunt instrument to hit
the reader over the head with your political views.
Riding the white flying unicorn long known as Kalki, the newborn overgod codenamed Venus left for her successful mission.
Point of fact: Kalki rode a white horse; he was not himself a white
horse. I would suggest making the fused Hotaru/Usagi an avatar of Kalki
rather than Agni, as the desires you ascribe to her/them are more in
keeping with the presentation of Kalki than Agni, who was seen as a
protector of man. I like your reference to the SMJ opening theme, by the
way. Very cute.
The year is 2012; the place: Toukyou, Niqpon; the month, December;
the day, 22nd; the moment: Saturday afternoon.
Tokyo is not romanized Toukyou in any romanization system that I am aware
of. I believe it should be "the day: the 22nd." Here would actually be a
correct place to use colons, by the way. Afternoon is not a moment, or,
at least, not what I think of as one.
As always, make what you will of this. In the end, it's your story, not
mine.