Shortly after rereading Taleswapper's essay on Annoying New Characters, I
started reading "The True Cat Fist" by Jeff Groves and currently on RAAC.
I wonder if Jeff read Taleswapper's essay before writing the fic since he
manages to incorporate almost every single quality that Taleswapper
dislikes about ANCs in Ranma fics.  Exceptional martial artist with
strangely named attacks - check.  Successfully romances Nabiki - check.
Perfect beyond belief - check.  Steals the story away from the Takahashi
characters - check.  The story wonderfully, if unintentionally, illustrates
the points raised in Taleswapper's essay. It is a pity that Jeff seems to
have put a fair degree of effort into writing a mediocre fic.  

I am commenting about it because otherwise it is not a badly written story
and illustrates that a story can be well written technically and still be a
mediocre or bad story.  Recently, I have had the impression that too many
of us on the FFML only read a story when the spelling and grammar are
correct.  Certainly, mea culpa.  The very fact that I read through a story
that had little appeal for me demonstrates this phenomenon.  Although a
good story should be independent of the quality of the spelling, often I
skip a story because of poor aesthetics (repeated misspellings, poor
formatting, and the like), perhaps because stories with poor aesthetics are
rarely well written.  Misspellings, poor grammar, and bad formatting signal
to the reader that the author did not put much work into the story.  If the
author doesn't care about the story, then why should the reader? .

What should critics look for in a story?  We use terms like "character
development", "plot", "consistency", but each of us have a different idea
of what these mean.  I would like to see some discussion on the FFML about
what we look for when reviewing a story, what we like, what we dislike,
i.e. what makes a good fanfic.

                                                          dml