On Fri, 07 Nov 1997 12:21:13 PST, "Soren Smith" <freemage@hotmail.com>
wrote: >>
On Sun, 09 Nov 1997 06:30:20 EST "Gary Kleppe" <KLEPPE@execpc.com>
replied: >

B)  Characterization.  In FF's this is even more important.  When a 
story is told first-person, every action the narrator takes is 
amplified, so that even slightly OOC behavior is blown out of 
proportion.  Even the style of narration has to be IC (a number of Ranma 
fics told from Ranma's POV forget about this, giving him a level of 
self-awareness he rarely displays).  Unless told as a distant 
retrospective, characters should use the same ``voice'' that they use in 
the source material.

Gotta disagree with ya here. The way people talk is not always the way
they think. Ranma IMO presents a certain face to the world because
that's what he's confortable having people see him as. I do believe he's
capable of a greater self-awareness than you'd know from his usual
dialog, even if he'd rather not admit it to someone else or even to
himself.

It makes sense for Ranma to have a deeper awareness of himself and 
the people around him but to hold it back. As a young child Ranma only 
had Genma to talk to on the road <most of the time>and I'm sure he did 
not encourage Ranma to talk about emotions or feelings, except as they 
related to the art. That lack of encouragement has more to do with what 
Ranma shows the world now than anything else. You can make the 
argument that when fan-fic writers show Ranma to be more sensitive or 
have a great self-awareness they are being non-canonical <sp?> but to 
say that the characters themselves are OOC is not necessarily true.












                                                                       Carlin