I have slightly mixed feelings about this story.
On the whole, I liked it a lot. (I am pre-disposed to like Ranma/
Ukyou match-ups, especially when they're credible ones, as opposed to
the ever-popular FanFiction.net favourite Akane-is-a-psycho-bitch-
killer storylines. And hey, I even hope to see more of "The Unbroken
Circle" someday ... though I kind of doubt that's gonna happen.
Heh. But anyway.)
But there were elements of "Descent" that didn't work for me. Two
that didn't work at all, and one that just felt too easy.
The first of these was chapter 1. Pretty much the whole chapter.
Not because of the content, per se, but because of the way it de-
focuses the story. You are telling a short story here -- only 26500
words total -- and one of the cardinal rules in a short story is that
you need to concentrate on the main story; you simply cannot afford
to spend a lot of time on side plots.
In this case, the question of Shampoo may be of interest -- but once
it's dealt with, it vanishes from the story and becomes irrelevant.
"Show, don't tell" is an important principle of story-telling, but
there are times when it works against you. Can you really afford to
spend 5000 words -- a fifth of the total! -- on a sub-plot that
doesn't actually have any bearing on your main story? Instead you
could spend a few hundred words on telling us how the problem was
dealt with -- perhaps having the topic emerge in discussions between
Ranma and Nabiki -- and then move on, without having basically
distracted the reader for a whole chapter.
The second point that didn't work for me was when Ranma follows Genma
"home" to find he has a second family -- or, at least, a daughter
than Ranma didn't know about. It's harder for me to analyse what it
was that I didn't like about this -- perhaps it's that I've come to
dislike the blatant Genma-bashing stories that I tend to overreact
when I see anything that even looks like that. But this story isn't
blatant Genma-bashing; it's a good deal more subtle than that
(unsurprisingly, coming from you). In the end, all I can really say
is that when I first read that scene, it left me feeling, "Where the
hell did *that* come from?" On re-reading it, it still comes across
that way. So it could be just me, rather than a story flaw. I don't
know.
The third point, the one that felt a little too easy, was the
revelation that Genma was eta. During the revelation scene, when
Nodoka bursts out, "You swore a contract on your life that no one
would find out!" I thought, "Oh, wow. So *Nodoka* is the burakumin!
That's different. And I can *totally* see that." Only it turned out
that she wasn't, and Genma was after all, and I felt a little
disappointed. That's all. :)
Incidentally, I note the following from Wikipedia (not necessarily
the most reliable of sources):
-- Anti-burakumin prejudice, while perhaps persisting in older
generations, is nowadays virtually a thing of the past.
-- In any case, in modern times it tended to be centred in the Kansai
region, being virtually unknown in other areas of Japan (including,
by implication, Tokyo). Ironically this suggests that Ukyou might be
more likely to be prejudiced than the Tendos.
-- The background investigation that Kasumi and Soun had done, to
check for burakumin ancestry, is explicitly illegal.
Um. Anyway. I seem to be mouthing off a lot, and you might be
getting the impression that I hated the story. I didn't. I enjoyed
it quite a bit. Your writing is as strong as ever, and I'm
definitely always glad to see more of it. But ... well, for better
or for worse, this is what I thought.
Cheers,
Angus
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Angus MacSpon Email: macspon@ihug.co.nz
ICQ: 65719513 http://shell.ihug.co.nz/~macspon/
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