"Alan Harnum" <harnums@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

So, after God only knows how long, we come to the final prelude.  
What a long, strange trip it's been.  :)

Yeah... with emphasis on "long." :-)

       "Huh? You mean I don't get to sleep in the tent?"

Yeah, that was my reaction.  Ranma gives in way too easily to this
situation, without any sort of argument.  

I'll add a little more discussion here.

'fucked' is not the word I would have Ranma use here.  'made love'
would sound a lot better in the context. 

See below.

       Hakano continued, as if ignoring them. "Your best friend, who
was always there for you to confide your innermost dreams and feelings;
who always listened to you without judgement or thought of self."

       Ranma stared, dumbfounded. "I have innermost dreams?!"

       Akane bent over to whisper in his ear. "They're talking about
Ukyo."

Subtle, Gary.  Subtle like a hammer.

Well, there IS a Shakespearian precedent for this sort of thing... :-)

Funny formatting.  There's a few others like this throughout the
chapter - don't know if it's you or me.

My fault; will fix.

       Kasumi closed her eyes and just sat there, not moving. Minutes
passed. Ranma fidgeted. What was he supposed to do now? He looked at
Akane, whose eyes were fixed back on Kasumi.

I'm not sure having the 'back' is entirely necessary here.  The
sentence would probably sound better without.

Okay.

       "I HEARD YOU!" Her mallet crashed down, making a large bruise 

on

Ranma's skull.

"Actually, mallets are used throughout the manga by all the 
characters, and not just Akane..."

Ack... meant to change this, and forgot....

       "Who was it, Ranma? Hiroshi? Daisuke? Maybe some handsome guy
you met for a one-night stand? Ranma, you.. you SLUT!"

Akane goes from rage in this sequence to calm sitting and waiting in
the next without a transitional phase.  I'd put one in (an admonishment

>from Kaede or Kasumi after her outburst), because otherwise there's

an obvious continuity gap.

Good point; I'll put something in between.

       He looked back at his sister-in-law, in hopes that she could
offer him some way out of this mess. "Kasumi, what... what can we do?"

       Kasumi answered dryly, "You can have a baby."

Has Kasumi acquired the ability to speak dryly during her studies with
Kaede?  ;)  

Yup. Standard training for a priestess. :-)

Quite honestly, Gary, I fail to see the point of the doctor being a
Christian or not as important to anything in the story.  Is there a
specific reason for the mention?

It's intended as a bit of satire. Not against Christians in particular,
but against anybody who applies one standard to his/her own set of
beliefs and another to someone else's. (Well, you wanted subtlety....)

Gary, I would be really careful with the language in this chapter.  
Words such as 'cunt', 'fuck' and otherwise carry a lot of baggage 
around with them.  Each time I've seen them used in this chapter, it
has been like getting an electric shock - they aren't the kind of
terminology I've gotten used to in the previous nine chapters.

See below.

       He only hoped she wouldn't want to do it girl-girl all the time

>from then on.

Which is part of the problem I have with this sequence.  The idea of
Akane deliberately going out of her way to seduce Ranma in his girl
form doesn't strike me as plausible without some glimpse into her
thoughts.

Not easy in the limited Ranma-only perspective that this story uses, but
I'll see what I can do.

       "Darn that Pantyhose!" Ranma said. "Who does he think he is,
coming in here and...."

'Darn' from Ranma after all his use of 'fuck' and otherwise?  Make it
a 'damn', at least.

Another attempted pun fails....

       "I know the one you mean. Mousse tracks. Go easy on that stuff,
Ranma. You don't want to get fat."

I presume this should be 'Moose tracks', unless you're making a joke.

... and another. :)

       Their mouths met in a long, slow caress. For Ranma, it was like
something out of a fairy tale. A magic kiss that transformed the ugly
monster back into a desirable human being. If he had to be pregnant, he
was so glad that she was there to help him through it.

Last sentence reads clumy.  I would recommend:  "If he had to be
pregnant, he was glad she was here to help him through it."

I'll think about this.

I cannot fault it in any way beyond tone.  I simply don't like the way
the subject matter was dealt with.  To some extent, this may be my own
uncomfortableness with the matter of pregnancy... I can tell that you
did a fair bit of research into the topic, and that shows.  The method
of getting Ranma impregnated I found rather grotesque, but interesting
all the same.

There isn't really one I can think of that isn't grotesque... believe
me, last time I did it it was *way* worse. :)

On a deeper level, though, I simply find the tone so very different 

>from the other HaM preludes that I feel as if I'm reading a different

series.  The repeated (and, in my opinion, generally uneccessary) use
of crudities like 'fuck' and 'cunt' made me cringe in places.  This
tone of crudity which prevails throughout the chapter is my major
problem with it, and it is what prevented me from enjoying this
chapter as much as the others.

Sorry you feel that way. My intent was not to make anybody cringe. My
intent was to tell the story the way that would be natural for Ranma's
own internal narration. Ranma, while not stupid (IMO), does have some
very rough edges.

How would Ranma refer to his female you-know-what? It's hard for me to
imagine why he'd use technicalese ("vagina") or Beavis-and-Buttheadisms
("thingy") or avoid direct reference to it at all. Not only that, but
this is a situation where he's trying to assert his own manhood to
himself, so it seems likely to me that he could become more vulgar than
usual to overcompensate.

Well-written as always, but this problem of tone left me unable to 
enjoy it.  For me, at least, it ended the preludes to the main series 
on a somewhat sour note.  I am now awaiting the main series in the
hope that it will take some of this away.  If I'm the only one to 
mention this... take it with a grain of salt, then.  Everyone has 
different tastes.

No problem, Alan. You're the only one so far to complain about the
language -- and this chapter was the clear favorite among readers on my
web page -- but I respect your opinion. I'd like to hear from other
readers on this before making any decisions. Yours is only the third
response I've gotten on this revision.

And thanks! Even if we don't agree, I greatly appreciate hearing your
thoughts on this.


Gary