Disclaimers:

The characters and concepts included in the 
text below are the property of their 
respective creators. Their usage herein is not 
intended to conflict with the economic agendas 
of the media distributors licensed to 
misrepresent the source material for 
publication in the North American region. Fan-
renderings of published material sold for 
monetary gain is protected under Japanese law, 
allowing that copyrights are acknowledged. 

Comments for improvement greatly appreciated.


***
SIDE-A : Die_APOLOGETICA 
broken circle
***


Seems fairly customary nowadays to kick off one of these epic 
fanfictions with a load of meaningless speculation about beginnings 
and ends and other concepts of the sort.

	[Ignoring the raindrops running across her face, Kasumi carries 
	her sister's comatose form through a maze of dimly lit streets in 
	the back-alleys of Nerima. A distance away, a cloaked man 
	wielding a key-shaped blade trails her path in slow, deliberate 
	paces.]

By "of the sort," I mean the ones with no real empirical basis. 
Beginnings and ends simply don't exist, because time is a continuum. 
The tendency to flag some event as one of the extremities in a 
sequence is a strictly human practice. It makes life easier, but it's not 
necessarily objective.

	[On-screen at NERV Command, UNIT-01 bashes impotently at 
	a shimmering force-field suspended a few meters in front of a 
	floating girl. Her golden twin pony-tails and the silken material 
	of her black dress billow in the breeze. The orange text at the 
	bottom of the display reads, "AT-Field - Pattern Blue : Signature 
	- TYPE-MOON."]

The problem really is that the human mind works more smoothly 
when you view things using categorical discrimination. It makes 
reality finite. You're more likely to call a gray black or white than 
name the particular gradient it is.

	[The roar of the cheering crowds at the Tenkaichi Budoukai is 
	deafening. A younger Jiraiya grins at the obviously amateur 
	stance of his middle-aged opponent as the referee signals for the 
	match to start. Jacky Chung simply smirks back.]

Once you move away from color and apply the same reasoning to 
more complex matters, you begin to encounter concepts like heroes 
or villains or good and evil and fate and justice and the like. None of 
these things actually appear in the real world, of course, but people 
talk about them like they do all the time.

	[Leaning against the Silence Glaive for support amidst the 
	rubble of a collapsed building, Sailor Saturn glares into the skies 
	of Tokyo. In the still air, the hulking hand of the RahXephon 
	bears in its palm a slender redhead, who without regard to the 
	destruction below continues to sing.]

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a process a bit like fractal compression, 
whereby the whole universe -- which is somewhat more difficult to 
understand than we'd like to believe -- gets gutted and processed into 
a nice, clean palette of absolutes. The world we see is painted in 
maximal contrast, because that's the only way it can fit into our little 
heads.

	[The massive biceps on Kasumi's arm ripple as she sends her 
	opponent sprawling across the tatami like a rag doll with a flick 
	of her finger.]

Simplicity is divine, but when you wear glasses cut to reduce, 
massive distortions tend to appear, usually resulting in caricatures of 
things where the nose and forehead and chin are rather more 
prominent than other essential features. 

	[Against the backdrop of a medieval castle, Ranma clashes 
	blades with a figure in a full suit of armor. His opponent's cloth 
	hood is tattered by the sonic impact of the broadswords, and 
	falls away to reveal the aging face of Demon Lord Piccolo.]

When you get down to it, then, what you've got going in these epic 
fics is a sort of discriminatory distortion that has very little to do with 
racial tensions and a lot more to do with those kiddy-friendly fairy 
tale rewrites where Cinderella doesn't murder her stepmother in cold 
blood.

	[Yagami Raito cackles as he gives into the Riot of Blood.]

The thing that always bugged me about the type of exposition I'm 
describing here is that it all just seems like a huge waste of time. 
Stories with fictional content are still real, in the sense that the better 
ones typically mean something when they're done and over with. 
Talking circles around hypothetical absolutes, though, is ... well, a bit 
pointless.

	[Ranma's face bears a sinister grin as his clawed fingers dig into 
	the flesh of Akane's neck. Soun, face empty of emotion, draws 
	his katana from its ornamental sheath and charges the boy.]

So, it's highly irrational, but people still do it. Why? Is it because 
they're insecure or something? Do they need to reaffirm their 
narrative voices so to prove themselves, or are they compelled to 
document their own cleverness in digital format for whatever sick, 
perverse reason? Maybe it's a mating ritual of some sort?

	[Naked, a fourteen-year-old Ukyou climbs the wire fence along 
	the sides of the school roof. Standing atop the railing for a 
	moment, she turns to smile sadly at the pigtailed boy banging at 
	the window of the door to the staircase. She looks away from 
	him, and after what seems a moment of reconsideration plunges 
	headfirst to the ground.]

Quite possibly, it's that it's just unacceptable to our tender minds that 
absolutes like freedom, justice, and destiny don't -- and *can't* -- at 
all approach reification, no matter how much phallic anxiety leads us 
to fantasize about piloting giant robots and striking down any infidel 
that dares stand in our way. Reality isn't something we can face.

	['Sometimes,' he writes, 'the difference between Zero and One is 
	no difference at all. Sometimes, the difference is all the 
	difference in the world.']

So to quiet that little voice that agonizes over Malthus and the 
overcomplexity of the human condition, then, our friends in the 
business of epic fanfics unload themselves in gratuitous spews of 
speculation on this fairy tale worldview. 

	[*Shnnnck*, *ssshhpt*, *ssshhpt*, *ssshhpt*.]

And we the readers take part in this communion, and the ceremony of 
innocence is drowned in a sea of gunk or LCL and all that good stuff, 
but the thing to remember is that it's ultimately all self-delusion. 
Maybe, just maybe, it's time we gave the universe a nice, solid look 
in the eye ...

	['I win ...' says a voice to nobody. Somewhere, eyes close.]

Maybe it's time for folks to stop annoying people with pointless 
vignettes and get on with the bloody fiction? 


--- - --- - --- - --- - --- - --- - --- - ---
[c]asting [t]he [c]rying [d]ream 
a ranma 1/2 multicross
by fallacies

pr0logue-teaser : [kyouzai kyougu / khaos]
"the end of the id"
--- - --- - --- - --- - --- - --- - --- - ---


***
SIDE-B : Die_GEBURT_Der_TRAGODIE
another world, thirteen years ago
***


Ranma willed the blood to vanish from his hands, but as if to mock 
him it continued dripping into the puddle at his feet. The sounds of 
battle filled the sky.

"Do you believe yourself to be special, child?" someone asked. "You 
claimed to love her, and vowed that under your watch she would 
never fall to darkness. Look at what you have done instead. This is 
the control you so pride yourself in as a martial artist?"

A few meters away, Akane's smiling corpse lay sprawled across the 
stone slabbing of the steps. There was a tear in her blouse between 
the breasts, which continued into the open cavity he had created in 
the space once occupied by her heart. The stain on the cloth around 
the wound steadily grew.

"That we cannot forcibly alter you as we have the others means little. 
You are not impervious to our influence," said the voice. "There 
exists in the world only a single truth, and it is inescapable."

Ranma tore the few remaining shreds of his shirt from his torso and 
turned to glare at the source of his torment. 

"You really have nobody left to blame but yourself," noted the 
speaker, an elderly gentleman in a large overcoat and bowler hat. 
"We are not capable of generating hate where it does not originally 
exist. Our power acts only to disperse the dishonesties with which 
humans veil their hearts -- the cage of the super-ego. Did you think 
this woman-child strong enough to resist us where so many others 
have failed?"

With each step, Ranma left a print of crimson on the granite. "Don 
Genosai," he hissed.

"You insulted her," said Genosai, removing the long white scarf 
draped around his neck with a gloved hand. "You bested her in all the 
matters that she cared for the most ... Did you believe she forgot, that 
she would somehow grant to you her mercy and forgiveness 
unconditionally? You answered your deserved share of chaos and 
pain with self-pity, pride, and righteousness, that in the end, you were 
all but blind to the truth that all mortals suffer comparably. Did you 
believe yourself alone in your agony?"

Ranma reached to grasp the old man's collar, but as his fingers closed 
in, the man vanished.

"She tried to murder you," said Genosai's fading voice, "because of 
_your_ apathy."

No longer caring that he might yet again kill, Ranma quickly located 
Genosai's ki signature atop the Furinkan clock tower. Leaping 
upwards to the roof, he caught the edge of the building and used the 
remainder of his angular momentum to flip himself and send an axe 
kick at Genosai's face. The old man back-stepped and allowed 
Ranma's foot to hit the concrete. The front of the clock tower 
shattered.

"And so too does this heart fall to shadow," said Genosai, smiling. 

In his hand, the scarf he held reshaped itself into a white katana. The 
city burned, and the clocks struck zero ...


***
The spring has passed,
And the summer come again.
~
End Prologue-Teaser.
***

There is only one series.

             .---Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List----.
             | Administrators - ffml-admins@anifics.com |
             | Unsubscribing - ffml-request@anifics.com |
             |     Put 'unsubscribe' in the subject     |
             `---- http://ffml.anifics.com/faq.txt -----'