She was passing it on to the next generation (at the original
wedding), sounds fairly understandable to me.

Absolutely not to me.

One of the things about the classical samurai mindset, which Nodoka seems

to have bought into wholeheartedly is: your sword is part of you.

***YOU NEVER GIVE AWAY YOUR SWORD.***

I always thought it was the clan sword, and she would be obligated to pass
it to the next generation. She could give it to because the sword belongs
to ALL of the Saotomes. In Zen's fic, the katana _is_ portrayed as the clan
sword (Nodoka stated that the Saotome line had ended, and the broken sword
symbolized that).

Whether or not the sword is Nodoka's or the clan's is open to
interpretation. Personally, I don't think she's skilled enough to even
recieve a pair of her own. <G>

Akane should have been given her own.

Results would've been the same, so it has nothing to do with the state of
Ranma and Akane's relationship.

(3) Akane ever gets as mad as you have her. (This is a major point, you
drill it into the reader's head that Akane's anger has been getting
steadily
worse. This seems to me to be rationalization in order to have her, at the
end of the fic, ready to kill Ranma and Ukyou.)

     The cycle of doubt, low self-esteem, and mistrust and leads into
Akane at the beginning of part two is fairly well pointed out in part
one...

None of which was not in the source. Before, Akane dealt with it- otherwise

she and Ranma wouldn't have married. There just isn't enough to support her
becoming a homicidal maniac.

She isn't portrayed as a homicidal maniac. She's _definitely_ someone that
can't control her anger. All it takes for her to kill is to lose control of
herself for a while. She isn't crazy, she has a very serious temper
problem, and there isn't anything "just" about having a temper problem. It
causes a lot of second degree murders.

(4) Akane can so utterly fail to listen. Akane at least -tries-
sometimes to
make her relationship with Ranma work... but in this story, she does
absolutely nothing but be a hair-trigger emotional psychopath. In fact, now
that I think of it, she is very OOC by the end of the 'fic, but she has to
be so she can kill Ranma.

     She _does_ fail to listen!  In the manga Akane frequently assumes
Ranma is intentionally insulting her about her cooking or actively
flirting with other women despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

(1) Ranma DOES intentionally insult her cooking.

Okay, this deserves some kind of reprimand, but not HITTING! Also, she does
absolutely nothing to prevent Ranma from insulting it in the first place;
learn how to cook. In fact, she denies that her cooking is bad. She's
attacking the symptom instead of the disease.

(2) The fiancee misunderstandings get straightened out. Akane is capable of

accepting guilt when she is in the wrong (although Ranma will spoil the
effect by pissing her off again). In this, Akane has made multiple and
specific efforts to not hear what Ranma is saying. She is working to stay
mad at Ranma, something which is 100% OOC.

No, the misunderstandings are incidental to the real problem. If Akane had
more effective listening skills, more control over her anger, not jump to
conclusions, and doesn't hit Ranma to solve problems... (I mean, if Shampoo
is glomping Ranma, HIT SHAMPOO!!! SHAMPOO!!! She already GAVE you the Kiss
of Death! Ranma doesn't hit _you_ when a boy's going after Akane; he hits
the offender!) All of these problems have ended tighter (and less violent)
marriages than theirs; they are LETHAL to a marriage.

It's also an escalating spiral. Akane has established that hitting Ranma is
the way to solve problems, and once you get into an abusive cycle, it's
very hard to get out of one. No matter how many times you appologize,
unless you correct the basic problem (Like, say, listening Ranma out.), it
will only get worse. It could realistically build up to that point. It does
build up to that point.

A lot of abusive spouses do appologize for their abuse. They appologize
profusely. That _doesn't_ prevent them from doing it again.

     Zen seems to have taken a very unpopular but fairly plausable
question and run with it, namely "What if Akane's violent tendencies
_aren't_ cured by marriage to Ranma?", and ran it to a very unpleasant
conclusion.

No, IMHO he's made a conclusion and guided events towards it. And I believe

the result, well written as it is, does an injustice to the two principal
charas.

And you don't do the same thing? Zen considered a possibility, that the
beatings could lead to Ranma's death, and showed how it could happen. And
considering, it could VERY easily happen. It happens all the time.

(5) Ranma wouldn't avoid or defend himself from Akane. Ranma's emotional
calm in this fic seems a bit much, but more importantly although he might
not attack Akane, if she attacked him with a potentially lethal force he
would NOT let it hit him.

     At the beginning he did his best to avoid her physical attacks
     Considering the emotional damage done to him by the end....

The path he took to get him to the full-bore-victim he is when Akane kills

him is suspect from my POV.

That's your POV, and what's suspect about full-bore-victim? Ranma's morals
don't allow him to fight back physically, Nodoka made him promise not to
fight back verbally, and thus was left with no defenses against Akane's
wrath. Eventually, the emotional damage alone will make him into a victim.

Think about it. Ranma is somehow causing Akane to blow up, and he can't
figure out why! He doesn't want Akane to be angry, and he feels shame for
making her angry. He tries his damnedest to revamp his behavior, and it
doesn't seem to work. He feels helpless about it, and he becomes depressed,
which can be as crippling as a broken leg.

As a story about Ranma and Akane, it doesn't wash. Not for me.

     Maybe it's because I'm less attached to the 'Akane gets Ranma and
Lives Happily Ever After' scenario, but I found to be an upsettingly
realistic Worst Case story (far moreso than the far more typical plotlines
such as "Shampoo Attempts Double Assasination" )

I find both versions to be outside the purview of R 1/2.

Is it just me, or are we as Americans incapable of taking a foreign comedy

series and LEAVING IT A COMEDY???

NO! I've seen a lot of funny stuff about Ranma 1/2. Go look in the RAAC
archives. And you've been with us a while; you should know that there is a
lot of silly stuff happening with Ranma. But just because a series is
comedy _doesn't_ mean it can't be used for tragedy.

The fact that Ranma and Akane got married implies that the two learned to

open up, and more importantly, to listen to each other.

Arranged.

Besides, a lot of couples get married but don't really know how to
communicate with each other. Those that don't learn are called 'divorced'.

And then, as soon as they're married, they lose that ability, and Akane

blames the existence of life in the universe on Ranma while Ranma sits
around and says, "I deserve it..."

No, they don't. It started out very happily, with absolutely no problems,
and then the _old_ problems crop up again, and they're not prepared to deal
with them. They instead try to sidestep them and recapture the joy of
honeymoon, but the underlying problems are never solved, and it gets
worse...

This can happen in real life, true, but in this specific case, considering

the two individuals in question and their history together, I can NOT see it
happening here.

Their history is that they fight and don't communicate. 1) Akane has a very
short temper and doesn't realize that she has to keep a firmer control on
herself. 2) Akane rarely listens to Ranma; she never has listened well. She
twists the words around and doesn't believe him anyway. 3) Akane passes all
the blame onto Ranma. She can't acknowledge that her her cooking just might
be unwholesome and hits Ranma for his insults, and does nothing to correct
the root of the problem, her bad cooking.

All three are examples what marriage councelors call 'the Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse'; serious relational problems that, if not solved, lead to
divorce or worse. In fact, these problems are considered _more_ serious
than shouting and throwing things! Unless Ranma and Akane get some serious
help, Bitter End would be a very real possibility.


                           ---------------------
##   ## ##   ## #######  ##   ##  AKA Tom Jefferys, Time Lord for Hire
##   ##  #   #   ##   ## ### ###    "Have TARDIS; Will Travel."
## # ##   ###    #####   ## # ##  Weilder of ANVIL and SPAM!
### ###    #     ##  ##  ##   ##  <wyrm@mail.utexas.edu>
##   ##   ###   ###   ## ##   ##    <JEFFERYSTR@rascal.guilford.edu>

Darwin was wrong: Man is still an ape!