teflon cat wrote:

To tell the truth, I always found "A Stained Glass Mind" to be kind of
depressing.  The Ranma in it is just as sick and twisted as the Ranma

>from "Ill Met by Starlight".  I kept hoping that once Ranma felt safe

enough with the Tendos, he'd lose the need to pretend to be different
things in order to deal with the outside world and just be able to be
himself again.

i believe you are missing the whole point here.  This is a work of fiction, the real laws of life typically do not apply.  Ignoreing what works in real live is what makes stories interesting.  And PRETEND to be diferent?  You missed the entire point of the story.  The point was that he DID have other personalities, it wasnt just one person acting diferently...

This will probably be my last response to the list, as we may be moving
too far away from ASGM.

I'm willing to ignore physical laws easily enough in stories, but I
still expect people to be people.  You said it wasn't just one person
acting differently.  So how many people was it?  I just count one person
there, and his name is Ranma.  This isn't like some story where magic
puts another person's mind in Ranma's body.  These other personalities
are just aspects of Ranma's mind.  You can't talk about them as if they
were people.

A different personality is not the same thing as a different person.  We
all act and think differently in different situations.  The tragedy is
that Ranma in ASGM has taken this to such extremes that he's started
acting as though the different personalities are real people.  They
aren't, and it disturbs me when any other character treats them as if
they were.  In the end, it's always Ranma, no matter what mask he's
chosing to hide behind.

in closeing i would like to say:  put on your glasses, you are obviously not seeing this story clearly.

I am wearing my glasses, thank-you.  Since so many other people enjoy
the story without any qualms, I guess a lot of people don't see it the
way I do.  That's fine.  For me, though, reading about different
personalities as though they were separate people is just creepy.

I'd be interested in any response the author has to this.  Are we (the
readers) really meant to be sympathetic of the efforts of "the Tribe" to
stay intact?  Or is it one of those things where we're supposed to
identify with the Tribe, but at the same time know it isn't a good thing
for Ranma to exist that way?
 
-- 
Matthew Campbell
E-mail: mgcampb@clemson.edu

"Margaret's explanation, which I liked better, was that you 
had to learn a culture until you knew whether the person on 
the other side of the table was following a cultural norm 
different from yours, or just an asshole."

- EARTH MADE OF GLASS by John Barnes