-----Original Message-----
From:	Dave Eddy [SMTP:dje@progress.com]
Sent:	Thursday, February 26, 1998 4:52 PM
To:	Doug Murphy
Cc:	ffml@ffml.fanfic.com
Subject:	Re: [FFML] A *little* personal experience (was Clothes Make the... part 7)

Doug Murphy wrote:

[snippity]

Please, please *please* use some indicator to show you're quoting text and
*wrap your lines*, manually if necessary (as I do).  Many people use text-only
mailers and/or html-enabled mailers that don't wrap the lines unless they
think it's html.

---
Hmm, I just recently reinstalled Microsoft Outlook and I thought it defaulted

to word wrapping... Guess not.  I'll either get Outlook in gear or I'll start doing

this manually.

(This message is double-spaced, but hopefully I won't have to do that after today)
---

Regarding the text of your e-mail... yeah.  I won't bore you with homilies.
I was interested by what you say about the path of emotions, though.

It's a pity that there is a "side" to this issue, though I think a number of
people feel threatened by Ranma's emotional path in this story... Him,
the quintissential macho and a character I imagine a large number of
people would like to identify with, suddenly projecting something that
scares some people.  (Many people?  A good way to get into a fight
is to challenge a (typical) guy's masculinity.  Trouble is, many people
on this list aren't typical.)

---
Last spring I had the opportunity to attend a writing convention for teens 

sponsored by the University of Tennessee.  Up until that point I had never met 

another 'writer' face to face.  All of my friends have at one point tried to sit down 

and write a story but none of them kept going after they realized they weren't hot 

stuff.  Now, in case my last post made me sound like a freak of nature - I am 

*totally* normal in appearance.  I also have an ability that is missing from most 

'deviant' people, and that is the ability to act normal when I want to.


Anyway I went to this convention in total normal mode... and within an hour I'd 

met some of the weirdest (and smartest) people I've come to know.  It seems that 

*no* author/writer is typical.  The fact that we will sit down for hours a day to work 

on something that will be read by maybe 20 or 30 people is unique in itself.  As 

that convention continued I continued to meet yet more weird people, and at one 

point I met this absolutely great-looking girl and later that day we had our first 

date.


3 months later she finally told me she was bi.  Go figure, I should have expected 

that considering where I met her.  It wouldn't surprise me if half of the FFML was 

composed of people with distinguishing abnormal traits, but hey;  That's why I like 

this place.


Concerning what you said; It may not be so much as Ranma scaring anybody, it 

would be more like nobody understanding Ranma.  How can they?  I used my 

past experiences with gender problems as a reference to formulate an argument


to support Ranma's characterization, but even I can't truly understand his 

situation.  I've never turned into a girl with cold water and there is nothing to really

compare that to, so I had to make some assumptions as to how that curse would 

affect him.  Also, most people that read "Clothes Make the..." probably don't have 

any identification with it, so it confuses them or they contest Ranma's 

characterization.


I identified with it nearly immediately, and I can say with certainty that Ranma is 

being portrayed perfectly as a teen who is losing his gender identity.  No, he's not

acting like Ranma Saotome would, but that's because the Ranma Saotome the 

FFML knows and loves ceased to exist when Kasumi caught him dressing up as 

a girl in the first chapter.  Maybe it was before then - I've never known Ranma to 

wear any female clothing willingly, but still; If it can be accepted that he secretly 

liked wearing girl's clothes I see no reason to believe his characterization is off in

the later chapters.

Draxon-X@bellsouth.net