Subject: [FFML] Re: [Fic][Ranma/Love Hina] Chasing Dreams Chaps 1-2
From: elisteran
Date: 12/1/2003, 4:28 AM
To: ffml@anifics.com


Shade <rowan_phoenix@yahoo.com> writes:
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 1: Memory
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The scene was blurry and faded by the passage of time 
and numerous impacts by blunt objects to the head.

But he could still see the sandbox. 

And the plump stuffed beaver animal doll. 

Seems like excess redundancy. 'stuffed beaver doll,' perhaps?
 
With a yawn and a groan, he threw off the warmth of the blanket 
and sat up on the beaten up old futon.

It might beat sleeping on the ground but not by much.

The Tendos didn't have the slightest clue of how good they had it here.
There had been times on the training trip when Ranma would have happily
kicked somebody else's ass to be able to sleep on a real mattress.

The brisk morning chill in the air worked better then any cup of coffee 
to shake the last cobwebs of slumber from his body. 

Does Ranma drink coffee? I don't think so. If there's no evidence that
he does, it's probably best to stay closer to his perspective.

From his new vantage 
point he was able to see that the angle of the light streaming in from 
the window was relatively low, indicating that he probably hadn't overslept much.

A pity, he could have used the extra rest.

One quick glance across the room was enough to verify that Genma
wasn't here.

They sleep side-by-side, not across the room from one another. 
 
With a regretful look, he got up and stepped away 
from the tempation of simply going back to sleep.

A regretful look at what? He had been looking across the room, at
Genma's place. At first I thought he regretted that Genma had already
left.
 
The tense feeling that had been hanging in the empty
cavern of his stomach turned cold and queasy as 
he returned to the Tendo home.

Something was up.

The excited voices coming from the 
living room could only mean one thing.

Trouble.

He entered to find the household in an uproar.

Soun was weeping, whether in happiness or sorrow 
he didn't know. Not that it made much of a difference
to him either way.

This is a little ambiguous whether 'him' is Soun or Ranma. The
ambiguity is amplified in the next paragraph.
 
Nabiki was eyeing him like a piece of expensive meat 
or a large denomination yen note. It was hard to tell
the difference sometimes with her.

Not a good sign. 

Looking at Kasumi didn't help. She would probably
still have that same happy little expression even
if Martians were to suddenly invade the neighborhood 
with handheld Deathrays while screaming about 
"Love and Peace!"

"-Rich!!"

Hmm?

What was going on?

were those yen notes his old man was holding? 

Were 
 
Where the heck did he get so many of them?

They were all 1-yen notes, and he was preparing to go out to a bar for
a night of heavy drinking.

"You better hurry if you want to make it to the graveyard before that storm hits."

He pointed outside to the grumbling dark clouds slowly moving toward the district.

But when he turned back, the boy was already gone.

He shook his head and sighed.

"A dream? Or will we wait to see?"

I don't understand this line.
 
Too impatient to wait outside, Ranma walked in without
waiting for a response. He was greeted by an empty interior
that was surprisingly in better shape then the outside
would have led one to believe.

A bowl of rice cracker snacks on a small beaten up coffee table
tempted him for a moment. He was extremely hungry, having dined
on nothing but cold water and some complimentry samples snatched 

complimentary 

from various foodstands on his way here. But there was a cold lump 
in his stomach that made the very thought of eating repugnant to him
at the moment.

Right now, all he wanted was to rest.

As he made his way through the first floor searching for a quiet 
place to collapse in, a familar scent reached his reddened nose.

Has he entirely forgotten that he's an uninvited guest here? This
starts the scene feeling a little unlikely...
   
Then she dived in after her friend.

The swirling water was slightly cloudy from the natural 
minerals of the hot spring, compounding Naru's own problem 
of nearsightedness as she tried to make out Motoko's form.

But she could see well enough that the kendo girl had brought 
her sword with her into the bath again. Granted it looked a bit
smaller underwater, but what else could that thing sticking
out of her lap be?

Both her hands reached out to seize it.

Why was she grabbing it? You explain later on what Mitsune is
trying to do, but it's not clear why Naru is going after the
sword. 

I'm a little puzzled at the physiology of it (3 days with no food,
little sleep, being soaked by rain, when every other part of his body
seems to be relaxing) don't seem like the ideal conditions to produce
sword-like members, but...
 
The results were...unexpected.

~~~~~~~~~~

The first sign for Ranma that something was seriously wrong 
was when a pair of semi-hard points impacted against his back.

The soft pillowy cushions that followed immediately afterwards
reduced the number of possibilities that those nubs could be.

Even a Saotome was able to put two and two together and get four.

But when somebody else grabbed him from the front, he stiffened in shock.

Literally.

And then he made the mistake of opening his mouth to scream....

Later you indicate that he was trying to scream underwater. But why is
that? The visualization seems unclear. If he's sitting low on the
ledge, if he's leaning back, it'll be difficult for Mistune to grab
and have full contact with his back... if he's leaning forward, Naru
will have a hard time. Similarly for both supine and prone positions
if he's floating in deeper water. 
 
Motoko was long overdue an attack from the 'Big Sister Bust Size
Checker'.

Yeah, attack the one with the sharp steel sword and a temper. 
 
And she did so love seeing that prudish warrior blush. Although as she rubbed 
herself up against Motoko's back, Mitsune was amazed at how hard the corded 
muscles there felt. It was a little embarrassing to admit, but it was starting 
to turn her on. She'd always had a weak spot for a nice solid back, and from this 
angle it was easy to forget her target's true gender and imagine she was embracing 
a long haired guy instead.

Ah... I'd drop the 'see Ranma, get instantly turned on' element; it
immediately makes me think of bad lemons.
 
 
For a moment, all was quiet in the hot spring.

Then Ranma's head erupted from the water, gasping and choking from his 
belated attempt to scream underwater. Next to surface was a naked 
wide-eyed short-haired silver-blonde woman clinging to his back. 
And finally to cap off the madness, another naked girl emerged between 
his legs holding onto him with both hands like a crazed video game 
addict grasping a joystick.

"EEEEEKKKK!! Pervert! Rapist! Molester! SOMEONE HELP ME!!!"

Narusegawa screamed in horror as she finally comprehended her situation 
and started to flee. But in her panic, she forgot all about her firm grip 
on the young man.

"OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!! LET GO!! LET GO!! LET GO!!!"

Ranma started yelling in pain as he was dragged along behind the screaming girl 
by an appendage not designed to tow the weight of two people all by
itself. 

And this is even harder for me to visualize. She almost certainly was
facing him in the beginning, when she grabbed with both hands. But now
she's fleeing? If she turns to run, how does she keep both hands on
him? Even if she just backpedals, which seems unlikely to fit the
description... that's a very awkward angle to keep her arms at
(assuming reasonable proportions), and sharply limits the distance she
can get between her and him.
 
Back and forth the trio went, as Naru kept going around in circles in a futile 
attempt to shake off the pursuit that she was pulling along after her.

Finally Naru simply couldn't take anymore, her hands letting go at last
as she spun around in order to deliver one of her devastating anti-pervert 
haymakers.

So she was facing away, and the two hands really don't make much
sense.

 
Mitsune saw what was coming and shoved off of the martial artist's back 
in order to get out of the way.

Ranma stumbled and tried to recover his balance. But a sudden spasm
of dizziness struck. He felt so lightheaded that it was difficult 
to think coherently.

{So hot. Stayed in too long. Don't feel good.}

One foot slipped on the wet rock floor and he started to fall. 

His hands reached out in a futile attempt to grab something in order 
to stop the inevitable.

*GLOMP**GLOMP*

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Aah!"

The sudden sensation of being grabbed threw Naru's aim off.

Instead of clobbering the pervert in the head, her fist went wide and 
skidded past his ear. Unable to recover her balance, she found herself
being pushed down by her target. Naturally, she assumed the worse.

{Noooo! He's going to have his wicked way with me! And the worst part is 
that it actually feels pretty good! Oh why do I have to be such a sucker
for this kind of forceful seduction right out of a trashy romance novel?}

She moaned softly as the young man's grip on her breasts slid along their 
wet surface. They seemed to be everywhere at once as the lower half of 
his lean form came down on her body. She could feel his hardened heat 
pressing against her thigh like an iron brand, and its touch seemed to 
drain the strength out of her feeble struggles.

This is doing absolutely nothing to reassure me about the bad lemon
vibes. From being so panicked that she forgets to control her hands,
to having a fairly drawn-out line of internal dialogue.... The panic
seems to have been very out of place.
 
"No, not like this...Oh...ah!"

Naru started to close her eyes, believing that this vile rake would 
no doubt take this opportunity to steal her first kiss from her pink 
vigin lips.

virgin


Ranma's nervousness kept increasing as he struggled to keep his head
from planting itself face first in this strange girl's cleavage. 
He was already aware of where his hands were, but they were also the 
only things keeping him from falling all the way down. Had he been able
to think more clearly Ranma would have seen that he could have braced 
his hands on either side of her, but right now the only thing he could
comprehend was that he could not fall on her at any cost.

And so his hands continued their futile struggle to get a firm hold the 
slippery twin peaks.

"Miss Naru, is something wrong? I heard you cry out from my room 
and...WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?!"

I thought she was out training today?
 
 
 
 
"Oof! Kaolla, you really need to start cutting back on the bananas!"

Even her wrist seemed to have gotten a bit chubbier.

Would Shinobu really be grabbing Kaolla by the wrist rather than
offering a hand to help her up? If she's going by the sound of
coughing, (to idnetify where the head should be), she should be higher
up on Ranma's body than this scene indicates (since Kaolla is shorter
than Ranma, her wrist must be closer to her head). Lastly, one of
these things has a bone in the middle of it.


"Ooo...look at all the floating bananas...."

Wait a second. Kaolla's voice was coming from the other side of the kitchen?!

Shinobu blinked several times as this fact slowly penetrated.

If she blinked, has she brought her arm down? Why did it take her this
long to see what was going on? 

Then she squinted for a closer look.

"...."

This wasn't Kaolla.

"!"

And that wasn't an arm she was holding.

"KYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

{Ow.}

He'd forgotten how much Ki attacks hurt. They did less physical damage then
regular attacks, but since they attacked the spirit directly he actually 
felt them a lot more. 

It hurt to even breathe now. Taking quick shallow breaths helped a little, 
but then the fire in his sinuses and lungs erupted into a violent spasm
of coughing and hacking. 

Darkness beckoned at the edge of his vision. 

It would be so easy to just let it all go and collapse.

Well, except for one little detail.

{Eeyoww! That's NOT a lever, you know!}

More physiological questions, here. When Ranma was engaging his
fight-or-flight reflex, he maintained an erection hard enough to be
mistaken for a wrist?
 
 
Distracted by the need to watch behind him for incoming projectiles he registered 
the presence of another person coming up those same steps just a
little too late.

What projectiles? Not high-pressure airwaves or soul-hitting ki atacks?
 


OK. I actually liked the first chapter; it seemed a fairly well done
jettisoning of the Nerima scene for the Hinata Sou. Nothing
tremendously novel, but beginnings are hard to be too novel, and I
will excuse that as being secondary to the story you actually want to
tell.

But as for the second chapter, I thought it was too joke driven. The
physical movements of hte characters seem somewhat implausible (or at
the least hazily described), and the interpretations and reaction
times seem like they were there just to provide excuses for many women
to lead Ranma around by the crotch. (Sheesh, this and the scene in
Quack Experimental Fanfic Excel Fusion Z... I'm hoping that this does
not become the latest fashion in fanfic stories. My empathic pain
receptors will rise in protest). 

So, those are my comments. Hope they make sense and are usable. 
-- See http://www.geocities.com/elisteran for my work and links. Any and all C&C appreciated. .---Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List----. | Administrators - ffml-admins@anifics.com | | Unsubscribing - ffml-request@anifics.com | | Put 'unsubscribe' in the subject | `---- http://ffml.anifics.com/faq.txt -----'