Subject: [FFML] Re: [Ranma][Fanfic] Waters Under Earth - Chapter Forty
From: Alan Harnum
Date: 12/17/1999, 10:59 PM
To: Gary Kleppe
CC: ffml@fanfic.com

At 09:51 PM 12/16/99 -0600, you wrote:
Here it is at last - after nearly two years, the final chapter.  
The epilogue and author's notes will be out very soon, hopefully 
by the weekend; I considered delaying the release of this 
chapter until they were finished, but then decided that you've 
all waited long enough already.

That would make us waiters under Earth then? :)

(Yes, I know *you've* heard that joke before, but the vast masses out
there haven't. :P)

And you felt the need to inflict it upon them after inflicting it on me,
right?  :)

    Oh, gods, she thought.  Oh, my dead kings, I do not wish to
hear this.

    "And it wasn't her and I, it was you and me."

The inconsistency here is jarring (at least to a grammar weenie like
yours truly). Either I should be me (for standard, informal speech) or
me should be I (for the formal tone that he seems to be using here).
Unless you're trying to show that Ranma's personality is still somewhat
in flux, I'd really suggest picking one or the other.

As trying to show Ranma's personality still being in flux was the
intention, I think I'll be leaving it.  

    "Of course I have to," he answered, even though she could 
see no way he could not know she knew the answer before he spoke
it.  

That last bit seems unnecessarily convoluted.

Yup, see what you mean... I can express the same intention without using as
many pronouns.  Will fix.

    After taking a tight two-handed grip upon the still-visible
section of the staff, he began to churn the stone.  At first, it
felt like trying to shift a mountain;

Actually, that kind of IS what he's doing.

Point.  :)

    He released the staff, and stepped back as it continued to
spin; whether with stored energy or of its own volition, he could
not say.  He pictured the rippling blur spreading out, like rings
spreading across a pond, transforming, changing... until there
would be not stone, stone no longer, no, water...

    Water.

"Why does it ALWAYS have to be WATER?!?"

"Duhh, you're the Lord of Waters.  Think about it."

    "This deed is pleasing to my eye, servant," she said kindly.
"So Tang Jin shall live again, and be a light against the Dark.  

Yes, Tang's not just for breakfast anymore.

.<

    Do you know why you must bathe here again? the Lady of
Change asked him, in a voice that sounded silent within his head.

    He answered, silent in return, that he did not.

Figure it out, Ranma. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

I think it's actually between godliness and good hair these days.

    Through her, we tried to teach you to another way of seeing.
You learned it well enough; not as well as we might have hoped,
but it let you make the right choice when the time came; to reach
out with the hand of compassion, rather than the hand of 
destruction.

Ah hah, right here's yer gnostic feminist propaganda. :)

I confess it all; you've found me out.  

    Over sandy dune and dip of sand he went searching for the
weeping's source.  This finding was a harder one than that of
earlier; Tang Jin had lived on in twisted form, but Wurdsenlin
had seen the dying of forty centuries while it lay dead.  And
there was no water to guide him here, as there would have been
anywhere else.

C'mon, even a desert has *some* water in it. BTW, most deserts aren't
sandy.

Noted, and noted.  However, this desert is hardly natural, as I repeatedly
made clear in the narrative.  The prime inspirations behind it being Part V
of Eliot's "The Wasteland" (Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no
water and the sandy road...) and Shelley's "Ozymandias", the improbability
of a waterless, sandy desert quite frankly took second place to mythic
resonance and literary analogy.

I mean, c'mon, we're dealing with a setting that also has magic pools that
change people's shape.  The landscape is hardly natural in the first place.
 :)

    His mind mapped them; in minutes, he knew them as intimately
as he knew himself.

Which, considering that this is Ranma, might not be all that well....

Point.  :)

    Upon his brazen throne, he waits, and no longer upon the
tower.  His eyes, be they of hammered gold or molten fire, do not
see as the eyes of mortal beings do; at once, he is within this
chamber, and upon the tower as well.  Born one, or become one, he
is a god; much power he holds within his hands.  

"Much power?" Seems a little vague. How much power?

I seem to recall much being used in poetical language as a synonym for
"great" or "enormous" before, but I can't cite a reference offhand for the
life of me... may just change it.

    His own god is on the move.  With glee, Baazel witnesses his
power.  What hope have they?, he thinks.  What hope have any?  

? or , Pick one.

I thought that's what I should do, but it looked funny having the question
mark without the comma.  Will fix.  

    A second later, he landed on his feet in the small chamber 
of dark rock veined with moon-coloured crystal.  The Lady's lake 
- really no more than large pond - glistened in the centre.

'than a large pond' (and is there any way to move that dash up to the
previous line? It looks bloody weird where it is.)

I'll just knock 'lake' down to the same line as the dash.

    "You need not fear that fate," she said, as though reading
his thoughts.  "I saw his heart's desire and gave him new office, 
and with it a great role to play that is not yet played out.  The
power was always in his blood; I merely wakened him to my 
service."  Here she paused for a moment, and regarded him with
dark-starred eyes.  "Your part goes beyond service to any one of
us."

Insert your own hentai comment on that last line. It's just too easy.

Only because you people are acclimatized to take anything as a hentai comment.

Akane:  Ranma, can I borrow your pencil?

Ranma:  Sure, Akane, but keep a firm grip on the shaft so it doesn't slip
out of your hand.

    His hand of metal flexes; strong before, strong enough that 
he was cast out, but he had aid then.

Switching "he" between Ranma and ol' Baz is confusing, but I dunno what
could be done about it.

Pronoun confusion for Baazel's scenes, as I said to Vince, is deliberate;
Baazel (though he believes differently) isn't really an independent being,
and is tending to mess up his pronoun assignments because of it.

    Burn him forever.
    
    "Burn," he says, out loud, relishing the sound of it.  
    
    Burn everything forever.

Au contraire. After a certain amount of time, you see, the oxygen would
be used up, and....

Paraphrasing Huxley, literary criticism is the slaying of a beautiful piece
of writing by the introduction of an ugly fact.  ^_^

monstrous shadows all around him.  Beneath silver archways
adorned with skittering runes he walked, across floors of 
glistening gold.  The castle was a beautiful nightmare; a 
childish fancy twisted into something mostrous.  No sense of
scale pervaded it; some rooms could have been ballrooms for 
giants, and others prisons for dwarves.  Marble and jade and

dwarfs (I think)

My spellcheck okays "dwarves" as the proper plural form; it may be a
British spelling ("We don't have American spelling in Canada!").

    Ranma tried to think of something, anything, to say.  But
then he remembered Shangai, and they robbed him of any words.  

Didn't remember how to spell it, though, I guess. :)

Boh!

    There's an old woman locked in a cell of stone.

Why the present tense for this line?

I'm paraphrasing an old Police song, actually.  :)  (Obscure references?
Yeah, we got 'em.)

    Combat meant to end in the death of one combatant is a hard 
thing to describe, even for the one who experiences it.  To give 
adequate voice to the sensation - the sense of walking a line as
thin as a razor, with death on either side - makes it seem 
almost balletic in nature.  It is not; there is nothing so formal
about it, it is mere mad hell of pain and fear, and death avoided
by the breadth of hairs.  

    In the end, the resort is to simile and metaphor - and yet
there is a point where those too break down.  "They came together
like two bulls" - but analogies fall apart in the end, and there
can only be the cold and clinical summation.

I think you cut-and-pasted from "Invisible I" by mistake here, Alan. :)

No, there aren't enough brackets.  :)

    Baazel's eye of fire was already growing dim as Ranma knelt
down beside him, and his eye of gold had lost its sinister 
lustre.  He seemed smaller than he had before, his elaborate
armour diminishing his own size rather than enchancing it.  
Wounded and dying though he was, his eyes - both golden and fiery
- moved to focus upon his slayer.

    "You could have been so much more than this," Ranma said
sadly.  

"Like a hotel manager in Torquay!"

"I never really wanted to be the Ravager... I wanted to be..."

"A lumberjack?"

"No, an orthodontist, actually."

    Could Baazel, he wondered, have escaped becoming Ravager and
World-Hater, any more than he could have escaped becoming Lord of

Suggest "any more than Ranma Saotome could" (Bloody pronouns....)

    Queerly shaped, too, in a teardrop wedge as ancient-seeming 
as a glacial drumlin.

Is there any other kind?

Not to my knowledge.  "Glacial drumlin" is probably redundant.  Will fix.

END OF CHAPTER 40

Hokay, I can't really comment on the mythological aspects of this, being
but an ignerr'nt scientist/computer geek type. :) 

Yeah, you probably don't know what a synecdoche is, either.  :)

The writing was as
good as WUE gets, which is to say as good as fanfiction gets, with the
series' trademark vivid descriptive work and consistent style and tone.

*^.^*

The pacing, however, seemed a bit strange to me; the thing with the
Oldest One came and went in a very short space whereas it seemed to me
like it (being a major climax) should've been a longer party of the
story.

I thought about it, and decided that I couldn't really make it much longer
without it becoming bloated.  The whole sequence between Ranma and the
Oldest One already takes about 400 lines in total--nearly 1/5th of the
chapter.  

Looking forward to that epilogue... and the sequel! :-)

Epilogue coming soon.  Sequel?  No sequel.

Thanks for the comments, Gary.

Ciao,
-Alan Harnum


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