[Ranma 1/2] Turing the Wheel

[Jason_Miao]

A fic series by Alan Harnum.

ftp://ftp.cs.ubc.ca/pub/archive/anime-fan-works/Ranma/The-Dying-Of-The-Light/ranma.our-own-damnation

This fic is notable in that it's a crossover with the Lovecraft Mythos, yet no knowledge of said universe is required to enjoy the fic, something I'm aware of, since I hadn't yet heard of the Lovecraft Mythos when I first read this fic.  The villians and dark powers are introduced in such a way that they stand as their own characters, and do not feel as if they've been cut and pasted.

The series is a trilogy and a side story, beginning with Our Own Damnation.  A string of unexplained murders is occuring in Nerima, and the police are out in force to try to stop it. But Cologne has a premonition that what is behind the murders is something more than the police can handle, and so she turns to Ranma and friends.

Thy Fate Shall Overtake is the next part, and all seems quiet since the last fic.  But Ranma and a few friends cross paths with an ancient artifact that could wake a malevolent power that slumbers beneath the sea.  And an enemy wants to do exactly that.

The finale occurs in The Dying of the Light, when the origin of the artifact and the puppet master is revealed.  Seals binding away forgotten enemies weaken, and the long night begins...


This is one of Alan's earlier fics, and it's interesting to compare it to some of his later works.  As a whole, the fic borrows from the Lovecraft Mythos, and seems to aim for the atmosphere that Lovecraft put into his own works.  However, it defers to the Ranma storyline whenever necessary, and Alan doesn't try to overshadow the fic with Cthulhu references like other writers tend to do.  If you're looking for a Innsmouth, or even Nerima written as Arkham, go look somewhere else.

Prose flows smoothly, and no awful spelling errors, or anything similar to that we normally hear people whine about, using their "I only do this for fun" nonsense as if it were some sort of justification for being too stupid to use a spellchecker.  

I do have some problems with this fic, now that I've reread it once more, and I've read more fics since my early days on the FFML.  Most noticibly, there is the forced-matching scheme, where everyone has to be paired with someone.  In fact, the whole point of the side story is to knock out Ukyou's emotional claim regarding Ranma, something that used to annoy me much less than it does now.  Worse, the matches he does come up with are predictable (mostly.  There's ONE he introduces that's not often used).  This wasn't so much of a problem when there were less Ranma fanfics around on the internet, but those days are long, long past.   On the other hand, Alan does force some of the characters to go through a long development process, so it's not quite as bad as I'm making it out to be.

My other issue is the ending.  Ranma endings are usually either silly or sappy.  Lovecraft's endings usually ended up with the hero either dead or in an asylum.  I dislike spoilers, so I'll just say that Alan leaned towards one side, and nowadays, I would prefer the other.

To conclude, this is an early work of an early time, and it hasn't aged as badly as it might have.  But if you're going to read it, you'll probably want to have a bit more patience with the "cliches" than you normally might.  Or, you could go skip it, and read some of Alan's later fics instead.

[Yuthirin]

One word: Incredible.