Andrew Huang wrote:
2. Older eries
BGC, AMS, and Tenchi Muyou have been favorites in the past, but
are not doing nearly as well as the above. AMS and Tenchi are
sufficiently popular, but they lack the involved plotlines. AMSs has
only 5 OAV episodes, and the manga is not very easy to find. Tenchi has
13 OAV episodes, which does lend it a little more basis, but nowhere
near SM and R1/2. True, they have the manga and the TV shows, but the
manga is also difficult to get to, and branches off from the second OAV
series. The TV show is not nearly as popular as the OAV. BGC suffers
from both limited storyline and smaller fan base.
You did leave out two important series. First, there's the Dirty
Pair, which at one point (1992 or so) had more fanfics than any other
series, and was in a way responsible for what followed. Second,
Kimagure Orange Road, my personal favorite. There aren't a large
number of KOR fanfics any more, but the ones there are tend to go on
forever. ^_^ They're the archeypal epic stories.
5. Rise of the new
So, with alarming regularity, Ranma is being shoved aside, both
silently and publicly. Unless it's part of an established, well-liked
series (Lesson in Love, DnR/DnU, TMTC/TPOH, etc.) or written by a proven
author (Biles, Lawson, Palmer, etc.)--often it is simply deleted out of
hand. It is unfair--but that is life.
This, I'm not certain about. Before this last summer, I'd never
written anime fan fiction. Yet I've gotten dozens of responses about
Blue and the first two parts of Soulmates. That's enough to convince
me that they're still being read by a majority of the list, and that
new authors aren't being ignored out of hand.
Along with that, suddenly, fanworks based on other series--back
to Tenchi, or now El Hazard, and especially Evangelion--are receiving a
lot of attention. People are scrabbling for a breath of freshness, once
applicable to innovative Ranma fanfiction, now a near impossibility.
There has been talk of forming voting forums for non-Ranma fanfiction.
I don't mean to insult anyone who writes fanfics based on these
series, but I have to question whether it's a "flavor-of-the-month"
reaction or not. In EVA's case, I'd guess it probably isn't, since
EVA has gained almost the same kind of popularity as SM and Ranma.
But Tenchi's popularity seems to be cyclical, and it's too early to
tell for El Hazard.
7. Personal notes
Okay, now I'm going to break out of the relative objectivity and
put in my own opinion. Ranma got me started into anime. Ranma fanfiction
also got me started into anime fanfiction. And I am one of those who has
become tired of Ranma--both the anime and the fanfics.
I've been headed in the same direction, but there's one more
consideration for me: length. I'm far more likely to read shorter
chapters. Part of this is time constraints, and part is reluctance to
start what appears to be another drawn-out fanfic series. I'm more
likely to read 3 350-line chapters than one 1000-line one. (Assuming
prose, of course; script scans faster, so can get several times that
long.)
This applies only to Ranma fanfic, though. Why? Partly because
there's so much more of it; I'm sufficiently intrigued by a Greenwood
or KOR fanfic to read it regardless of length. (I also don't read SM
at all, so that eliminates the other large group of fics.) Partly
because almost all of the long stories I -am- following right now are
Ranma.
Scott Schimmel http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~schimmel/
Ex ignorantia ad sapientium; "You really aren't normal, are you?"
ex luce ad tenebras. -- Miki Koishikawa