Robert, hi.  =)  Glad you responded.

My single biggest problem with this is the repeated use
of a sledgehammer to drive home the point that Ranma
is being ogled left and right by men and is sick of it. It's
not necessary to bludgeon the reader to death with your
premise.

Well, see, I was actually using the ogling to drive home a point, and that
was Ranma was perceiving things that weren't necessarily true.

I started off with a true ogle, from someone who was just staring at her
chest, to show that ogling did, indeed, occur.  However, consider her first
meeting with Iwao; she sees him and examines his body with her eyes and
finds it well-formed, something she can appreciate as a martial artist.
Then he looks up at her, does the *exact* same thing, and she interprets it
as ogling.  Because of what's happened to her, she's become hypersensitive
to the point of imagining the worst possible things out of all the men she
meets.  Sometimes the worst is true of course - the guy staring at her
chest, the guy who makes the lewd comment when she leaves Iwao's class - but
sometimes it isn't.  The meeting on the train, the last scene with Iwao,
lead Ranma to a revelation that she's been projecting too much too often.

The device I use to depict that is the constant ogling she gets, and how her
perception of that ogling changes over the course of the story.

Also, Ranma's "I hate my life and I hate myself so I'm
going to take it out on the whole f-ing world, especially
the part of it that doesn't have a p****" attitude is really
grating. You could stand to tone down her PMSing
just a *teensy* bit, I think...

Well, I think, to be fair, she takes it on women just as much as she does on
men.  In her mind, men are trying to have sex with her and women are trying
to make her become all girly.  Again, this story is how her perceptions of
their motives changes over the course of her first year in college.

Actually, tone it down a lot. To be honest, the extreme,
excessive angst going on in here is really, really sour.

Hehehe, okay, this I'll plead guilty too.  =)  I'm trying to make a point
that this is a very difficult journey, and it's very much a process of two
steps forward and one step back.  The result is that she tends to angst
about the same things over and over again.

And, I admit, I like writing angst a lot.  =)  So yeah, I might have
overdone it a bit.

The Eternal Lost Lurker

Thanks very much for the comments, Lurk.

-Richard

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