haxchan wrote:
> Well, thank you for your interest, and I'm certainly glad you enjoyed
> it. As for needing to know the Manga, I would disagree, as you don't
> truly have to know any of the manga, although being acquainted with
> the story helps to show the contrast between the situation I created
> and the original version. There are parts that will suprise Ranma
> fans, such as Shampoo's death, Ranma's curse being intentionally
> brought on by his father, and Ranma 's curse locked into his female
> body (to say nothing of Akane's story).
>
> As for it being hard to follow, I certainly agree, as reading back
> over it I don't give a great deal of clues as to who speaks, except
> that it almost always follows a back and forth sequence. I wonder, do
> people think a story is bad if certain lines require thinking about
> to decipher who said them? It's especially hard in this case because
> the characters do not follow their usual mannerisms. To be honest, I
> didn't really care about making the dialogue easy-to-follow, although
> that's something I'll consider in the future. Thanks for your input,
> and I'm happy you liked it.
>
> Hey, does a fic have to be easy to follow? Does it work with Panda's
> Dream, in the FFML's opinion? I'm curious.
I would think that _that_ depends on your target audience. I would
suspect that Nanashi and Matt -- when they wrote their respective Soul
of Ice fics -- were not aiming for 'easily understood' when they did so.
If you're writing something that's standard action or adventure or
romance, or what have you, then having it be easy to follow the action
or whatnot works well. If you're aiming for something else... then this
is not always so. I would suggest reading the following fics for
examples of how a fic does NOT have to be easy to follow to be well written:
First off, from Matthew Lewis, the inspiration for my I am Become... fic:
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Flats/9345/rkenqksna.txt and
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/ftp/pub/archive/anime-fan-works/Ranma/type/Soul-of-Ice
(Also, though it's not grouped with the others:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/ftp/pub/archive/anime-fan-works/Ranma/type/ranma.soul-of-ice.synthesis-success.gz
)
From Nanashi, another person who has inspired me greatly:
http://www.rakhal.com/hosted/Nanashi/ranma.deus-ex-machina (and anything
else you can find by him -- it's all great stuff. As an aside, anyone
know where he is these days?)
From Reid Carson, though this one isn't quite as far in the directions
that Nanashi and Matthew Lewis have explored, there is also this story:
http://www.rcarson.com/rcarson/elegy.html Which is quite good.
And finally, one of the masters of esoteric writing styles, Nikholas F.
Toledo Zu. I suggest: http://fanfic.tass-anime.com/ranma.winner and
http://fanfic.tass-anime.com/ranma.blue-kiss as well as
http://fanfic.tass-anime.com/ranma.gossamer-weave .
Hopefully, this will give you enough of an idea of what kinds of things
can be written that don't need to be well written to understand. ;)