First, thanks for the praise on 'Golden Years.' I'll be posting it to
RAAC fairly shortly.
Now, to pick and choose those fics which, for my money, deserve C&C. If
your fic isn't mentioned, it means one of three things:
(1) I am uninterested or ignorant of the setting it takes place in (most
SM fics under the former, YYH and Futaba-kun Change under the latter,
for instance
(2) I deleted it by accident from the queue
(3) I detested it.
...so, if you don't see your fic here, you can send it to
redneck@txdirect (NOT redneck@jurai.net , that box is strictly reseved
for this ML) at your own risk. I'm a compulsive reader by nature.
Anyway, onward.
Grading on the following points:
TECHNICAL- basic grammar, spelling, style. Also finer points of writing
style; was the imagery present, was sentence structure flowing, is it
fun and easy to read?
FLAVOR- fidelity to the source material.
BELIEVABILITY- portrayals of the characters, the situations, and what
followed. OOC flames here.
OVERALL- how much I actually liked the story.
I'll also offer corrections & commentary as I go along.
Hm... earliest in my queue is 'Defiance of the Heart' by Katrina
Halbred...
TECHNICAL: Feh, it's a script. Scripts are nice if the medium is comics,
or movies, or radio, but for a text medium more often than not you need
to go ahead and flesh out the prose. It gives the reader better visual
cues to reconstruct your story in their mind, and it allows you, through
subtle words here and there, to portray a POV in ways a raw script just
can't.
Having said that, the story is very obviously written for a specific
audience, that is the ones who are familiar with Ranma 1/2. Although
this is well and good in and of itself, I'd recommend against too much
familiarity with the reader; it never hurts to describe what's happening
more specifically than 'oh, you know this schtick, here it comes.'
Also- and this is a major failing- there is no plot to this story, and
this story needs one badly. Instead of rising and falling action, you
have a string of this-happened-then-this-happened scenes. There is
virtually no conflict, internal or external, to speak of, and not much
of anything is resolved.
tactfulness- no such word; 'tact' is what you're looking for here.
droor- drawer
somewaht- somewhat
Overall, technical: Average for first draft.
FLAVOR- Not very loyal to the original at all. Save for flashbacks,
there was no martial-arts involvement at all. The humor is virtually
nonexistent. Rather than overact or overreact, all the characters are
extremely subdued. Finally, the dream-demon is quite blatantly
preaching, taking the role of author-solve-everything in the case of
Ranma and Akane. This can be done in a fun way; it was not done so here.
Overall flavor: Not R 1/2.
BELIEVABILITY: Believable, sort of, in all cases, although all the major
players in this should be overacting and reacting to the others'
overacting. The feud over Akane's cooking seems to be far too pat for
me; 'Akane can't cook, Ranma no baka, ho hum yawn.' As far as
motivations go, things stay pretty close to, although not spot-on, the
canonical characters.
Overall believability: Pretty good.
Overall rating: Dead-on average, for a fanfic. Vaguely interesting
premise, dull reading. Sorry, Kathryn, this one didn't work. Try again,
though, the potential is there.
...okay, next up is 'Nullifier' by the Webmaster.
TECHNICAL: More script, yay. Your descriptive material is pretty damn
good, though. Why not go ahead and flesh it out completely? Other than
that, it looks pretty good, and it moves along fairly quickly.
(way too long for me to run spellcheck and grammar check)
Overall: Better than average, for a script.
FLAVOR: Hard to say. By and large, this is much too serious for your
average Ranma fic... it could definitely use some lightening up,
-especially- with the tension between Ranma-kun and Ranma-chan in play.
Also, the wilder the situation (and they don't come much wilder than
getting Ranma split in two), the more often in the original Takahashi
would play it for every laugh she could get. You've got all the serious
parts pretty spot on... now have some more fun with it. }:-{D
Overall flavor: R 1/2 in its most serious moments, but not quite the
whole thing.
BELIEVABILITY: Needs work. One of the casualties of script is the
ability to look into the minds of the individual characters without
thought balloons or expositional conversation... and in Ranma-chan's
case in particular, that is a dire flaw in the work. Ranma-chan's
evolution from a female Ranma-kun into a woman needs some serious
shoring up, and in all honesty, you've done about as much as you can in
script mode. The other characters, by and large, are on the money, if
subdued slightly.
BELIEVABILITY: Above average, except Ranma-chan's metamorphosis, which
is way below average.
OVERALL: A fun read, which would be more fun and better overall if
fleshed out completely. If not totally in keeping with the original, one
of the better examples of American fanfic.
...okay, next victim is Mr. Taylor's Spamfic, which I shall only touch
on long enough to mention it's funny as hell. Good show. }:-{D
...and on to Scriviner's "That's 1/2 My Goddess" pt. 6 ...
TECHNICAL: Not bad at all. Generic 'cut down on was' and 'show don't
tell' flames aside, the prose does flow, and the basic structure works.
FLAVOR: Subdued for Oh My Goddess, slightly; subdued for Ranma 1/2,
extremely. Other than that, very faithful to OMG's spirit and R 1/2's
charas.
BELIEVABILITY: Nabiki... needs work. Lots of it. She needs more time to
interact with characters, particularly Akane and Ranko, to flesh out
this incarnation of her. As it stands, I'm left with an impression of
two-thirds Nabiki-the-schemer and one-third Nabiki-the-caring-sister, as
opposed to one character named Nabiki. Not having read parts 1-5 yet,
Ranko's announcement comes completely out of the blue, but this might
have been developed in earlier installments. The remainder seems to be
in pretty good shape, but then this is reading in development from the
as yet unseen earlier eps.
OVERALL: Fun concept, execution shows promise. Give it an edit, build up
Nabiki's development here, and it works.
... let's take up Chris Davies' 'Chris 1/2 ch. 2'...
(loved Ch. 1, BTW)
TECHNICAL: Sparse, but workable. Clumsy in spots, mostly things to be
caught on the rewrite. A common error is slipping a comma into a
compound predicate where it isn't needed; only use commas when both
parts can stand on their own as sentences or when there the subject or
predicate has more than two parts to it. In general, the prose- what
little there is of it- lacks flow. Work on smoothing out the pace of
your paragraphs, eliminating non-action verbs where possible, and this
fic will take off. (All fairly basic stuff to be sure.)
FLAVOR: About standard for a self-insertion fic, just a little bit
restrained. Far too serious, though, and a particular personal problem
which should be filed in the 'believability' section. In general, not
really all that much like the source at all, at least not this section.
BELIEVABILITY: 'Who are you and what have you done to Kasumi?' This
Kasumi is 100% not the one shown in manga or anime; this is the
Kasumi-goddess-of-the-hearth fanfic version. I would find the Q&A more
believable by far coming from Nabiki, who has a tendency to be
suspicious about such things, than Kasumi, who quite literally cannot
conceive of evil from anyone or anything.
Other than this blatant, and common, mischaracterization, spot-on.
OVERALL: Can't wait to see the final version. }:-{D
... and that'll do it, for the moment.
Thanks again for the positive stuff on 'Golden Years!'
Redneck