Soulriders 5.0: Legend of the Unending Games

Recap: Identity book one - Tribe of the Ki Sorcerers

At the end of the Ranma manga, our eponymous hero, Ranma Saotome, slew the Phoenix King Saffron at Jusenkyo, hoping to save Akane from certain death.  As he cried over her inanimate body, he admitted his love for her, at least to himself, and lo, Akane awoke.  In celebration, the Tendo and Saotome families planned a great wedding, which was spoiled by Shampoo, Ukyo, and others.  Identity begins in the aftermath of those events, with Ranma driven to return to Jusenkyo, thinking his cure necessary to prove his manhood and worth.  There, he's met by a party of Ki Sorcerers, and after a tense battle, they take him captive.

The reasons are complex.  The Sorcerers of Qinghai live a secluded life west of Jusenkyo.  From the battle with Saffron, their isolated existence was disturbed.  The Sorcerers have a Jusenkyo spring of their own, and they use this spring to change their genders, suppressing sexual desires and feelings of affection.  To exert ultimate control over the dangerous magics they wield, they use a Sieve--a single person who drains the village of strong emotions and magic, lest those powers erupt in a cataclysm.  The battle with Saffron has sated the Sieve, and it is village tradition that the person who did this deed take his place.  Coerced into helping the Sorcerers, Ranma quickly points them to Saffron, unwilling to tell them he killed the Phoenix King, lest their anger with him prove a danger.

This is the sage for which the first book of Identity unfolds, for as Akane, Shampoo, and Ukyo journey from Tokyo to save Ranma, he works to subvert his captors' and earn freedom on his own, learning the Sorcerers' magic to aid him.  Tribe of the Ki Sorcerers concludes with Ranma having escaped the Sorcerers' clutches after a climactic battle between them and the Amazons, but this freedom comes with a catch:  the Sorcerer captain and advisor, Kohl, has aided their escape for a purpose--to stay with Ranma, to get the Amazons off their doorstep, for now, it is understood that Saffron wasn't meant to be the next Sieve.  It was the one who slew him instead.  The Sorcerers have let Ranma go, but they still mean to break him.  That is where we begin with book two.


Cast of Characters

A quick description of new characters and how events have changed the cast we know from the manga.

The Nerima party

Ranma Saotome:  A misunderstanding with Akane and Ukyo drove Ranma back to Jusenkyo, and in Sorcerer captivity, he's put his aptitude for learning other techniques to good use.  Ranma acquires an array of ice magic abilities, materializing deadly spikes from the air and explosive orbs.

Akane Tendo:  Feeling massive guilt over her hand in Ranma's disappearance, Akane has admitted her love for him and joins the party to China to stage a rescue.

Ukyo Kuonji:  While in China, Ukyo's shop is run by her father, a now-successful chef based out of Osaka.  In pursuing Ranma, she hopes to earn back some respect from her father as well.

Shampoo:  Shampoo's status within her tribe is complicated by Ranma's disappearance.  In particular, while Ranma's captured she can return freely to the Amazon village and can exert tribal right to raise an army to save him, but when he is free, she must return with him or not at all.

Cologne:  Twenty years ago, Cologne was one of the three Speakers of the Elder Council, and to smooth over relations between the Amazons and the Sorcerers, she offered her granddaughter, Ceruse, to marry a Sorcerer prince.  Ceruse and her husband disappeared, however, sparking a bitter war.  To this day, Cologne hopes to uncover the truth behind Ceruse's disappearance and pursues this mystery with great abandon.


The Sorcerers

Making their village west of Jusenkyo, the Sorcerers protect themselves in a "Maze," an illusion that confuses anyone without affinity for magic, preventing their entrance to the village--or, in Ranma's case, preventing escape as well.  Ritually, new babies are cursed in their sacred spring, changing their genders.  They grow up believing that this is imperative, for otherwise their affinity for magic would lead to acts of catastrophic power.  The spring dulls their magic potential somewhat, providing control instead, but the defenders of the village, the Sorcerer Guard, do their duty in their original bodies, using magic to its fullest extent.  In this, they maintain dual lives--an identity while in the Guard, with a new name and responsibility, and an old life as a common villager.

Sindoor:  The leader of the Sorcerers, often addressed as "Lady."  Little is known about her except that she practices magic very sparingly but is utterly formidable when she does.  As the Amazons invade the Sorcerer village again, she repels them with extreme force--an attack that reduces all in its cone of effect to ash.

Kohl/Wuya:  Kohl is Sindoor's advisor publicly, but in secret, he is also the Captain of the Guard, Wuya.  Wuya is his birth body, but he identifies himself as Kohl always.  He has long had Sindoor's favor, for reasons he knows not.  He is gruff and stoic but not without pride.  His reasons for leading stem from the past.  As a trainee in the Guard, he became involved with another in his class, and their closeness is what sated the previous Sieve.  While Kohl was allowed to continue his training, the other--Tilaka--was broken in spirit and became the new Sieve.  Kohl seeks to have Tilaka replaced so that his friend won't have to bear that responsibility again.

Tilaka:  Having been Sieve for several years, Tilaka is strongly driven by seeking out powerful emotions to fill the void within her.  She was born male and spent all her time as Sieve that way, but she considers herself female in keeping with tribal tradition.


The Amazons

They called themselves the Tribe of the River Warriors until disastrous defeat at the hands of the Sorcerers killed many of their men.  Now, branding themselves Women Heroes, their hatred for the Sorcerers is strong.

The Council of Elders:  The Council is a small body of twelve representatives, all from powerful families.  To maintain a separation between persuasive influence and real power, the Council is divided in two parts--the Silent Nine, who may not speak in open chambers but hold all power to vote, and the Three Speakers, who direct and control debate but can never vote.  Cologne was once Second Speaker, a position she relinquished after insisting that the Sorcerer War continue.  Today, the Speaker positions are filled by Surma, a former student of Cologne's; Thanaka, a populist, hawkish individual; and Bindi, the First Speaker, who stubbornly seeks a peaceful solution.

Context for this, if you need it at all, is that like many here, I've been reading fanfics for two decades now and general fiction for much longer.  Unlike perhaps most of the fanfic community here at this point, I still enjoy reading Ranma fanfics and gladly seek them out.  I don't care on relationship choices as really I've seen plenty of enjoyable stories taking every angle imaginable on that question.  Long fics are actually my general target, with over a hundred thousand words on ff.net usually a minimum requirement for me to look at a fic without a personal rec or already having a hook on the author.  I read epic, horror, etc, and though my usual preference is adventuresome martial arts where good things happen to the hero, that's not really a requirement to have me look.  Basically, it should've been easy to get me to at least read a bit of this, but it didn't happen that way and I won't put it just at "It's because you chose a matchup that's unpopular".

I've not, prior to today, read any of your fic.  I'll glance over a bit later, but I don't think your writing is at all your problem and at a glance, you've got decent enough technical chops that you shouldn't have a problem there.  I've been to your FF.net page three times before today, and also this page, and in none of those did I end up actually opening up and reading the fic.  I encountered it prior to your first posting here, off of someone's favorite list.  Something distracted or discouraged me each time and I closed the page entirely.  It didn't even make it to the small horde of 'should read this when I feel the whim'.   Looking today and ignoring the details you gave in your post about what the fic contains, I almost immediately have the same impulse of closing it and not looking back.  I don't think this is solely driven by a personal taste issue (Though that is part of the narrow problem). 

I think in fact, there's a lot of problems with the delivery of your fic concept that drives people away from it, which means you have a significantly reduced audience base to ever give decent C&C on it.  This makes it particularly hard when writing a continuation work to get any decent feedback.  Calling out for it hard is one way to get over this barrier, but if you don't understand the barriers that are blocking folks off from reading your fics, then it's likely something that is going to continue to frustrate you.  I'm gonna give a solid try here at elaborating on some of them, so that hopefully you can see them and I apologize for any patronizing tone that will come with it.

I'll start with an easy one.  Ranma is a dead fandom.  Very dead.  Most of us here who have read fanfics in it were reading fanfics from it in the early-mid nineties.  Outside of the 'let's turn Ranma into a girl' crowds, there isn't much in the way of a live and active community that is dedicated to reading those fics anymore.  It's mailing list groups are dead.  It's fan sites are pretty much historical wikias at this point.  It's awards and large archives have mostly vanished from the web.  For all that it was once a thriving community to write in, writing a pure Ranma fic is something that is just particularly hard to get readers for these days.  It's not like a small current fandom, where you can at least track down a small group to work with.  Having no community is crippling to getting feedback.  When you post fics in them, nobody really sees them for the most part.  How do you work around there?  Many fanfic writers use crossovers in order to leverage accessibility from multiple fandoms but that's really just part of it.  You need community, connection, a few people at least ready to go with you down the road early.  I see you reached out on TvTropes and are doing so here.  This is a good start, but also probably on both a late and too little one.  Basically, without a community around, it's very hard to get much feedback at all on a fic but also to have a vision of just who might want to read your fic.  Basically, without this, you cannot Know Your Audience, and that makes selling your fic to them real darn hard.

Next one, I'll just dash by.  You start with a matchup declared right off the bat.  Ko, Brian, these are both people you instantly lost by doing that.  They never even opened your fic prior to today to see if they might like it anyway or give you feedback to a point, because started with declaring matchup.  This divides your potential readerbase.  This might be what you want to do, because a fic shouldn't be all things for all people, but it's a bad habit that is often encouraged.  With summaries and openings, you should be hooking people on why they want to read your fic, and unless that fic is a shipping or romance fic, who is going to boff who is not a high priority there.

But that isn't alone there.  I'm gonna tap another fic that's far more blatant down that road: http://www.fanfiction.net/u/36632/Speaker_to_Dreamworlds : Ranma and Akane: A Love Story.  It's got a fair bit in common on face (Meant as a multibook thing, clear matchup stuff).  I pinged the channels a bit during this, and most people who had heard of it had at least read it a bit.  Partially from it coming from another time, but a lot has to do with how the fic itself is sold.  It's original web page was amazingly inviting as a hook to check out the author's universe he was setting up.  Even the barren ff.net page gives a more sharp hook to try and pull people in: Can Akane finally become a Hero? Can Ranma become a Hero ... again?  I don't know.  I don't know the context, I don't know what's going to happen, so I'm more likely to take a look at the first page because that summary is telling me that this is a story about these two characters and their relation to being a hero.  When I read yours, I take that Ranma has already hooked up with someone, and dumped them, and now is dealing with some villians that hate emotions.  Wow, that's seriously charged stuff going on, and the train on it left before I even arrived at the station.  This is not a good hook, as it tells too much in too complicated a manner.  I shouldn't know a villains motive before I even meet them or have opened your fic.  You're also telling me right here it's a psychology fic, both in the title and the summary.  I'll get back to that in a sec, but just want to point that out.  Hooks though, are important.  Even if someone is recommended to read your fic, if they go there and the five second summary is muddled like that, they'll probably wander off.   For another worthwhile example: http://www.fanfiction.net/u/198979/Black_Dragon6 look at how big human on campus did it.  Not great, but clear and no big complexity being revealed there.  I have footing from that summary into just what I'm going to be starting on. 

A good summary is super important to getting folks.  You summarize Identity in 3 places for those approaching from FF.net (and a lot more detail if we come through SR), and to be truthful, all of them are pretty bad from the standpoint of making the fic inviting for your readers.  Your big one on the front of your page is what most people will stop at.   It's not sharp, it's not snappy, it gives a muddied and complicated view of what your story may be about while also potentially raising a bunch of red flags for people.  Your first sentence, fine.  Then you go into what's happening with the Romance.  This isn't good for hooking folks.  That's part of the story you're going to tell them, so now instead of being curious about what Akane or Ranma is going to do, we already know and may or may not like that.  Your story loses the chance to sell us on it, because if we don't like it, we leave right there.  So, okay, it's a story on Romantic Resolution where the proximity is kept very close and personal between the girls and Ranma following the series?  But the next line tells us that this isn't the case.  Instead the story is about these Ki Sorcerer guys who are very fucked up.  Too much information on your antagonists.  By just here, we've gotten too much on their past, their powers, them being far away, and something incoherent on forced marriages.  This does not deliver them as good antagonists as they instantly come across as very removed from the characters I might care about (The ranma cast), and because they're introduced here, the fic doesn't get its chance to deliver them better.  More specifically, this is entirely off tone from the first part of your summary.  Now I've got two potential stories here?  As a reader, I go Uh here.  Now the summary is giving reasoning on how things have gotten to this point, and now we release the third bit: Hey the fic is really about this psychology question on the worth of love.  Solid close.  Even taking just the one line version, you still give too much on the antagonists.  The end result is that your hook sells your fic as a muddied psychology / star-crossed romance setup.  It's busy and its complicated and most readers are going to simply stop there without even opening the fic.  A good summary/lead in hooks people to actually open your chapter up, whether it is being shared as a forum thread title, an ff.net fic posting, or anything else really.  Most people will encounter a fic through some aggregation (Even as minimal as going to an author's own site), so if the summary is poorly delivered, then most people aren't even going to open the first chapter and try it out.  All that effort and time you sink into writing hundreds of thousands of words doesn't reach them at all.  A bad summary is almost as damning as a poorly written first chapter (as many folks who have 200k+ word fics fail to resolve and then run into the same problem). 

Gonna give another good example of doing this: Kakashi made a mistake. Shikamaru is smart. Shino is skilled. Naruto is strong. Maybe something amazing could happen, with the right ... motivation.   - Here we get a quick glimpse of a few of the characters that we're going to be interested in with this fic.  We're given quick sound bites on them, as well as a good hook: a mistake has been made and yet it may have provided interesting motvation.  To do what?  We're not sure, but a lot of people very quickly took notice of that byline despite it not being advertised in any community at all.  Basically, (and I'm a god-damn hypocrite at saying this): A concise and short summary that provokes a solid question or image in the reader's mind is superior for getting people to open a story and check it out.  The more people that get that far, the more reviews and commentary that you will get, because they've actually given your story a chance to begin with.

The same thing, btw, goes for 'book 2/season 2/etc'.  Sure, most authors think the important thing is to inform people what went on before, but that is a mistake.  The important thing is to sell people why they want to read this new book on its own merits.  Check your first post.  It's all about what already happened.  Rereading it, I'm still not sure at all what story I'd be reading if I opened chapter 1.  This isn't good for getting new readers to come and check out a work for commentary.  When professional authors release book 7 of a long running series, they don't have the back cover be 'and this is what came before', because it is far more important that they seize the imagination with what the characters will be dealing with now.

Okay, enough beating that horse.  Next up.  Psychological Fiction is something that has a small audience.  I may be wrong that this is a psych fic, but every summary you've written on this has pounded that through to me, over-top of anything else the fic might be about.  It's a critical element the fic is interested in.  This is going to leave you far more in the "Fine, but not for me" situation with readers than any other type of fic, because you're not inviting them into your universe or pulling them to get into your characters or building a myth.  Instead you are exploring a question, and not a philosophical one, but one that is pretty much phrased in a psychological torture experiment way (That's how I took it anyway).  We've got this whole bunch of seriously messed up killer people.  And they're just like Ranma.  And they kidnap him, in part to make him like them?  And we're exploring at all whether this might be right or not?  And they've also got a bunch of shared situational things with him?  A lot for some reason.  This in the best of situations leaves you with a very narrow audience, no matter how skillfully you deliver the story it is going to be.  On one hand, when you are writing this kind of fiction, you almost have to suck it up and take it.  You've chosen a very narrow subject that is uninviting for most people to even contemplate.  You're going to have trouble getting feedback on it.  On the other, that's taking failure to get such too much for granted.  The Story of B is a question based story, focusing on a Philosophy of Population versus Food, but it was able to be accessible to a rather broad range of folks because while the story was about investigating and exploring the question, it was also about a man's journey of spiritual discovery, and it's initial hook was something more accessible than that: An evil group of priests that hunt down and eliminate potential anti-christs.  Yeah, religious assassins basically.  A concept that is super easy for the common person to get an image of without them having an interest in philosophy, farming, population growth, or any of the myriad of other topics the book actually covers in exploring its question.  The key I am getting at here is to not put the cart in front of the horse.  To write a philosophical or (bleh) psychological fic and attract readers, do not start with the Question.  Don't expose it.  If you want to just deal with the question, go write a psychology paper.  If you want to tell a story that people listen to, start with the story of how that question is going to become relevant and why people will be interested in that story.  From the title through to the summaries and even the start of your fic, you deliver an impression that exploring this question is more important than telling the story, and that's something that drives people looking for a story away.

Okay, let's see, what else...  This is just kinda petty of me, but I gotta note it, because it did drive me off once.  You've got some ideas on your front page.  Big deal, lots of authors do that.  It's not a great habit, but one of the downsides is I'm going to look over them despite them having nothing to do with the fic I'm scrolling down to go read.  In this case, I see your planned continuation of Zen's Bitter End.  And frankly...it offended me.  Zen (Who happens to hang out on the irc server, btw) wrote a story with tremendous proximity and coincidentally powerful emotional delivery, working primarily around a small handful of characters and exploring a tragedy brought about by a painful psych condition.  Basically a descent into insanity and how it harmed those around them, kept very gritty and grounded.  The Color Red is a pitch for ...that Akane to have become a dimension traveling monster?  What the fuck?  I could see working off of a Skysaber or Metroanime Akane and getting that, but from Zen's fic?  I know fanfic authors by definition play fast and loose with other people's ideas and universes, but still...  having that kind of thing front and center on your page delivers to me "This guy has a very wacky perception on these characters and you probably won't like it".  Probably not the message you meant those ideas to send, but that's often the problem with having a raw concept snippets before your fics: They can tell a lot that might not be good.

Okay, that's probably way more than enough.   There might be more worthwhile to go over and hopefully some folks will go into the actual fic, but I hope this helps illuminate some of the core of why you were having such trouble getting people to start reading it, despite technical chops.  A muddied summary and uninviting hook will convince most people that the fic isn't their thing before they even give it a shot.