What are you reading?

[Yuthirin]

I was drawn in by the 'Sasaki and Kyon' tags.  They did not appear anywhere in this fic:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8286715/1/The_Forgotten_One

Neither did Haruhi.  It appeared to be a story about some original characters who happen to share names.

Oh, well.

MAYBE THEY WERE THE FORGOTTEN ONES!

[Jason_Miao]

I figure the author will get more out of Kunzite than merely using him to attack Ami.

Maybe she'll end up with a General collection.

[Anastasia]

I figure the author will get more out of Kunzite than merely using him to attack Ami.

Maybe she'll end up with a General collection.

I would love that just for Beryl's reaction.

[Arakawa]

So... Dark Lords of Nerima.

Who wants to brave finishing part 2, so that they can ascertain whether part 3 is worth the effort of making it through part 2?

I got curious. (Not sure what's so bad about part 2 -- most of the egregious stuff was so obviously setting up for the whole "and the aftermath of the battle gets reset" thing that it was mostly <shrug>. Anyone care to enlighten me as to what I'm missing that made people give up on reading it?)

The scoop about part 3 is roughly as follows:

Spoiler: ShowHide

• Time skip past the end of Sailor Stars. But while covering the timeskip we get to watch Ranma+Ryoga+Mousse sort-of-inconclusively beat up on Death Phantom for a while (until he gets bored with them and decides he has more important things to do elsewhere), which was kind of oddly underwhelming.
• After Stars, Sailor Senshi are apparently up against some kind of vague zaibatsu thing. (They still have zaibatsu in the Ranma/Sailorverse?) Their CEO is the kind of martial lunatic who thinks it's a hoot to take out bounties on his own head just so he can be entertained at breakfast by yakuza assassins bursting in to try to kill him. Oh, and apparently Mousse has some vague dark past thing going on with them. Will have to see where that goes.
• Bunch of vaguely tedious stuff with Mousse and the Kunos, plus Shampoo and Akane. Hooray if you like ridiculously mature handi-capable Mousse, I guess.

Really the only things you need to know about part 2 if you didn't make it all the way through are:

Spoiler: ShowHide

• Everyone in the Ranma universe ever gets together into one giant army.
• MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS EVERYONE DIES. Then Sailor Moon resurrects the good guys as per the usual drill and after a bunch of effort they regain their memories.
• As a result of learning experience that happens during MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS (namely getting killed), Kuno is now kind of sane and has given up on girl!Ranma and somewhat backed off from Akane.
• Oh, and Mousse is slowly going blind or something.

In short, surprisingly a lot of focus on Mousse so far... not overwhelmingly so, but it stood out. So far, based on the first chapter, the recommendation is inconclusive. Will have to see where the guy is going with this.

[Jason_Miao]

I got curious. (Not sure what's so bad about part 2 -- most of the egregious stuff was so obviously setting up for the whole "and the aftermath of the battle gets reset" thing that it was mostly <shrug>. Anyone care to enlighten me as to what I'm missing that made people give up on reading it?)

Because it completely switches focus.  Part 1 was a melding of Sailor Moon with Ranma-styled comedy, which worked nicely. Up to where I read, part 2 seems like it tried to be Tom Clancy except with less American nationalism and military experience.  Military-oriented fiction isn't bad in and of itself, but there's an issue of setting expectations and then failing to meet them - if he'd started part 1 as a military oriented story, then switched it to a slapstick comedy in part 2, I'd be equally annoyed.

That's not to say that one can't expand by adding genres - e.g, the first Star Wars started as space opera, and ended as space opera with a large dose of mysticism thrown in.  But had Empire Strikes Back turned into a fantasy-romance movie, it would suck.  It might be the best fantasy-romance movie, but the audience wouldn't have been looking for that.

[Dracos]

Switching Genres with continuous stories often loses huge swaths of readers and rarely gets new ones for it.  The reason being that new readers have to get context, often involving large amounts of story in a style they aren't interested in (since they didn't read it originally).  And some subset of current readers just won't get why the genre just changed on them.

[Arakawa]

Because it completely switches focus.  Part 1 was a melding of Sailor Moon with Ranma-styled comedy, which worked nicely. Up to where I read, part 2 seems like it tried to be Tom Clancy except with less American nationalism and military experience.  Military-oriented fiction isn't bad in and of itself, but there's an issue of setting expectations and then failing to meet them - if he'd started part 1 as a military oriented story, then switched it to a slapstick comedy in part 2, I'd be equally annoyed.

The evil-zaibatsu thing seems very much in line with what you just described i.e. Tom Clancy. The problem with that (aside from switching genres) is that with a Sailor Moon / Ranma crossover, the somber approach the author is now taking the story looks set to suffer plot fatigue. (Been through that problem myself...)

That gigantic cast from two series? Great when you're doing slapstick comedy and you don't need to remember more than one or two points per character. You can overlay these with complex traits, but the plot hangs off the simple traits, which enable the author to throw together any insanely complex Rube Goldberg gag that anyone familiar with the cast can still follow.

But sice Part 2 everyone's grown their own messy character arc (I singled out Mousse in my initial appraisal, but he's just the character whose arc develops the furthest, more or less efficiently; stuff happens to the other characters that's much less memorable and harder to follow). It's kind of hard to keep track of every side character having these somber growth experiences and it looks set to kill the momentum of the story.

In short, attempting to develop *everyone* in a complex ensemble cast is a tall order, and it wasn't even what made the fic interesting in the first place. (More realistically, in such a complex cast you would have many arcs; each arc would focus on developing a handful of characters while keeping the rest mostly static, to give the reader *some* stable point of reference.)

Still, part of me wants to wish the guy good luck and hope it will all amount to something. It's just the approach he's taking to telling whatever story is in his head is a massive pain to pull off, even at best.

[Dracos]

There's a lot also to be said for knowing when to end it.

Ending with the first and not continuing would've left us all going "Man, that was pretty cool, I can't wait to see the author's next work".  Instead, I'm fairly sure a lot of us don't even check his page  or watch him as it's all updates on an increasingly mess built atop a fic we once enjoyed.

*shrugs*

Still, fanfic isn't simply a consumed entity, but also the entertainment of the author writing it.  So if he wants to run his story into a mess of backstabbing, power to him.  I'll go read something else.

[Jason_Miao]

Clicking around, I found this, a Madoka story.

[Brian]

Thirteen chapters in before you chose to share a link...?

Here's chapter one for anyone interested: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7267553/1/Full_of_Sound_and_Fury

Edit: Poked at chapter one.  That's ... Olg, right?  As a quick observation, you have a very stiff sentence structure, specifically sticking two or more events together (per sentence) with 'as'.  It may change later, but made the first few paragraphs scan like a dry list of actions.

[Jason_Miao]

Thirteen chapters in before you chose to share a link...?

The 13th story in the slushpile of unrelated short stories/scenes caught my eye (not that the other ones are inferior, but I am not familiar with some of the series, so didn't read a number of them).

That's ... Olg, right?

Yes.

[Brian]

Ah, didn't know it was a slushpile.

[Yuthirin]

So... Dark Lords of Nerima.

I still enjoy the series. Why does everyone hate this? :(

[Brian]

Which series?

[Yuthirin]

Whooops, missed the fact that there was anothing page! Yay for not reading things!