"- Yucca" <yyucca@hotmail.com> wrote:
Ah! Come come now, C&C, all of you!!!
Righto.
First of all, the stuff about Akane's cooking is extremely overused in
fanfics. I can't even begin to count the number of fics that have opened
with her trying to force Ranma to eat something. Though this sort of
thing was rather infrequent in the manga, for some reason I'll NEVER
figure out, people seem to think that this sort of scene is an
obligatory part of "original flavor." It isn't. If you must use it, at
least use it in a new and different way, and try to tie it to the plot
of your story.
Try to get to the meat of your story -- which seems to be Ranma ending
up in the crystal -- as soon as possible. Don't waste time showing a
whole bunch of fanfic cliche stuff that has nothing to do with it. Look
at the Shinnosuke arc in the original series, for example. Though this
is one of the few storylines that *does* start with a fight over
cooking, Akane's memories of the forest resurfacing are shown right
away; the cooking thing at the dojo only goes for a couple of pages, and
it takes a completely new turn as Akane manages to make a normal-tasting
curry.
In general, I found your characterization of Akane lacking in the depth
that she has in the original. Again, study the manga for the right way
to do it. (You can download a good bit of it, free and translated into
English, at <http://ranmascan.dhs.org>.) Akane in particular is nearly
impossible to write well if you've only seen the anime.
Gary Kleppe
http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics.html