Of course it's my view.  I'm not "imposing" it on anybody, but I am voicing
it during the course of a criticism.  And how does calling it "nonsense" not qualify
as one of these personal attacks which we're trying to avoid?

that was my opinion, for whatever thats worth.

Your opinion, served up with an insult.  I believe that's what you're
preaching to me about, is it not?
 

To set the record straight, that is not my view.  My apoligies if I did
not make that clear.  There are certainly a great many stories which
are not even remotely original flavor that I have enjoyed immensely.

Yet can you find a place for a work where a character is acting oddly?
Not just a foriegn situation, but a character too?

Of course I can.  Is it necessary for me to provide a complete list of 
which fanfics I enjoyed and why in order to offer a critique on this one?
The more oddly a character behaves, the more it is incumbent upon
the writer to provide an explanation for that odd behavior.  I felt that Mr.
Eddy didn't succeed in that this time.  One of the reasons why I
critiqued this story is because it was not up to his other efforts - 
certainly Ranma and Akane are not in character in "The Masks We
Must Wear" and the stories which have followed that one, but he 
does an excellent job of explaining why they're different.  He presents
a compelling alternate version of the Ranma universe, and as such 
I'm far more willing to accept certain hiccups of continuity.

Again, the phrasing seems to be-"yeah, I like some things that aren't
original flavour as long as Ranma is still acting like Ranma."

If Ranma is a completely foreign being, why write the story with Ranma
as the character?  Even something as far out as "A Faint Hope" succeeds
because it preserves the characters we know, albeit in a wildly different
situation.  If Akane just mirrored Han Solo and was called Akane, what
point would there be in writing the character as Akane?  
 

If it isn't, then you must belittle -yourself-. Your arguement comes off
as being high-handed.

I disagree.  

NO ONE has any voice in what is -right- in fanfiction, save for grammar
issues. 

Look, you're acting like I brought my critique down from a mountain carved
in stone slabs.  Of course it's all subjective, and I haven't been elected or
appointed as any kind of authority as to what is right and wrong in writing
of any sort, fanfiction included.  
 

To have others to adhere to the opinions that were pointed out in your
response to Dave Eddy's Nekophobia, many -good- fanfictions would never
have been written.

Including Nekophobia.

Oh, please.  Now this really is going too far.  At what point did I tell Mr. Eddy
that he should not have written "Nekophobia?"

At what point did I say that you said that he shouldn't have?
[. ..checks the above grammar. . .] 
Yeah, I meant to say that. . . yeah. . .

Let me reiterate what I did say: If Other fanfiction had Adhered to the
views stated in your reply, which is to say that they met with the base
ideas displayed, than many of them would have been scrapped, including
many of Richard Lawsons stories where Kuno is definitively out of
believable character, (just to use an example).

Suggesting that I am laying down some set of laws under which most fanfiction
could not be written is fundamentally the same as suggesting that I think that
most fanfiction should not be written at all.  That is neither intended nor implied
in the argument I made.  I was attempting to suggest that "Nekophobia" could
have been a better story, not that it should not have been written.  You continue
to imply that I would advocate trashing the whole thing, and that is an unfounded
assumption.

Either way, you should have put this on the list too. Its really hard to
get people to start producing or contributing, and by having this
arguement, we can see how many people we can get involved, which should
be our ultimate goal.

I did post this to the list.  I'm posting this reply as well.  

-TJ

Grayson Towler
grayson@rigroup.net

http://www.rigroup.com/~grayson/relentless