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.

That was the whole point to the ending.  Ranma's personalities(theo 
ones that survived, anyway. R.I.P. Guardian) were remerged with Ranma, 
and now he was handling his life on his own.  And personally, the only 
thing that got me depressed in the story was Guardian's death and the 
aftermath.  

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.

You're a skeptic, aren't you?

We could argue about that until the cows come home, but the truth is, 
weather the other members of the Tribe were other souls, or just 
personalities, isn't that important.  Ranma believed they were, and 
since it really is all in his mind, maybe it was true then.  

In my opinion, The members of the Tribe were too different to be just 
aspects of Ranma's personality.  Maybe it was started out as normal 
MPD/DID, but as Ranma recovered in the viliage, he didn't put the 
fragments of his mind back together, they all just kinda regenerated 
into seperate people within the same brain, like cutting a flatworm in 
half and both halves become new worms.  Each fragment became a 
whole new person based around a part of Ranma's personality.  Ranma's 
condition had progressed past simply multiple personalities and into 
multiple minds.  Ranma in the story was still the same Ranma Takahashi 
created.  If you had taken out the other members of the Tribe, things 
would've gone as "normal" in the series.

The other members of the Tribe, as I saw them:

Bitter was a lot smarter than Ranma, and had little intrest in the 
Martial Arts.  He preferred to work out his mind rather that his body. 
  Plus he liked Nabiki.  Guardian, one of the three female 
personalities, was the most mature of the group, was psionic, and was 
also pretty much the leader of the Tribe with Ranma.  Play was 
inquisitive and uninhibited.  She wanted to see everything and do 
everything(and everyone.  I'm sure puberty was a rather intresting 
time for the Tribe^_^).  Watcher was, in a hyphenated word, 
Hyper-paranoid.  She may not have thought everyone was out to get 
them, but she knew everyone who was.  She never came out because to 
interact in the world could possibly distract her from watching out 
for danger.  Lyric was a kid, plain and simple.  He was the Outer 
Child.  A little like Play, but WAY more innocent and patient.  Shade 
had one main goal in life:  To destroy anything that he percieved to 
be a remote threat to him.  Not just because of survival instinc, but 
because he wanted to.  I could see him going asleep during the portion 
of Ranma's Martial Arts traing that dealt with pulling punches.  
Neko... was the Neko-ken state, upgraded to a full being.  In the 
original series, Ranma was still himself when in the Neko-ken state, 
he just thought he was a cat.  Neko was Ranma if he were stuck in the 
Neko-ken permenately.  Master is harder to describe, because we rarely 
saw him.  He probably spent most of his time in meditation until he 
was needed.  

When Ranma merges with the remaining members of the Tribe, he bacame a 
whole new person, different from the original Ranma.  Ranma was still 
in dominance, but he now had parts of the others in him as well.  That 
was the main problem I see in the original:  It wasn't an ending.  You 
could've done a whole new series dealing with Ranma's life as his new 
personality solidified.  

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.

In that case, clean them off and look harder.  Perhaps you're seeing 
this from the wrong angle.  The problem is that you're seeing 
different personalities as new people, while we see different people 
sharing a single mind and body.  Reading it your way _is_ 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?

A little of both.  As long as the Tribe stayed in one cohesive unit, 
it was good.  When Guardian was killed, however, everything fell 
apart, literally.  The situation was now too dangerous, and needed to 
be fixed before something bad happened.  

SAMAS



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