Gary Kleppe writes:
James Barnhill wrote:
This may in itself be the reason that people have grown tired of Ranma
fics and have openly complained on the FFML. Without some veriety on
the ending all such stories with the same pairing in the end become...well......boring.
Who gets paired with whom has NOTHING to do with how interesting or
fresh a story is. There's hordes of formulaic "alternative pairing"
stories out there that pair Ranma with everyone from Ukyo to Sailor Moon
to Bess the dog. This kind of story is easy to write when you don't care
very much about the accuracy of your characterizations, and changing
Ranma's partner doesn't change the fact that it's essentially the same
story each time.
Let me just echo this strongly. After all, "Hearts of Ice" looks to
be a "Ranma gets Akane" story. Is it boring for that reason? I don't
think so. Or suppose Ranma does indeed end up with Setsuna, as I'm
rooting for, in "Nuke 'Em Till They Glow." Could anyone say, with a
straight face, that that element makes the story fresh, as opposed to
the seriously demented humor? If instead Setsuna succeeds in passing him
back to Akane - is the story suddenly stale and ordinary? Hardly.
What's stale and boring are the fics which are written with the
primary intention of pairing up Ranma with any other character. I've read
at least two dozen stories in the last month alone, matching up Ranma
(or sometimes Ryoga) with some other character, and they get old really
fast, no matter how novel the match-up. Write your story with the idea
of telling an interesting story, and if Ranma (or whoever) happens, as
a natural consequence of the story you're telling, to end up with
Hazumi from Combustible Campus Guardress or Noelle from Tenshi ni Narumon
or Arisa from 801 TTS Airbats, you'll make your readers happy.
Reid Carson
rcarson@rcarson.com