Haigeki Discussion

[Brian]

Don't know why you think that comment would be bad for tvtropes--  It's pretty critical if we want to prove a distinction.

However, tvtropes doesn't have a trope acknowledging the spamfic in the first place, so this is the class, not a sub-class distinction.  If it DID, my argument would be, "Spamfics tend to stand alone -- the authors of these tend to post multiple of them as a single 'chapter', or at the very least, dozens of unrelated fics in a single volume as individual chapters.


Also, I believe we have successfully hijacked what was originally a hijack thread in the first place.

I'm So Meta Even This Acronym

[Arakawa]

Soo, the Haigeki update. Chapter 6.

I think it mostly involves this thing called 'agony'.

[Anastasia]

From the other thread: Yeah no, think I'm passing on this fic now. I have a relatively high tolerance for unpleasant events in a fic, but a chapter of Ranma getting tortured is so far away from what I liked in this story that I want no part of it. I've read fics that do much worse to Ranma (Her War) and liked them, but this one really annoys the piss out of me. No, this fic really didn't need a captured and tortured interlude, thanks.

[Arakawa]

Kind of a bummer, really. I'd be more interested in the notion of a villain who wants to subject Earth to a planetary scale magical girl transformation, if it wasn't preceded by half a chapter of Ranma doing time in a Skinner box. When the writer lingers a bit too long on the details of the Skinner Box, you get the feeling that the point of the fic is just to watch Ranma suffer and gradually turn into a Real Girl.

e.g. let's say Ranma eventually defeats the Pretty Princess Institute, but is stuck as a magical girl afterwards. Feh.

But we've been over this, in large part. I'm not as annoyed at the agony/bliss stuff as you'd expect, since it's mostly the fic proceeding to go in the direction we predicted it was going to go. But that really is the problem. Too much of the fic has become predictable (next chapter is just going to be Ranma meets Skinner Box round two, right?), and "it's so predictable I can invent a more surprising way for it to go" is probably a good reason to drop it in my book. -_-

[Dracos]

Well, there goes any interest in reading this chapter.

I gotta agree, torturing the protagonist is very rarely ever a sign that good stuff will come later.  Her War works because its from the perspective "I murdered EVERYBODY involved and saved the day, even though I went through a long horrible journey to do it".   I nearly stopped Time Braid when it went that route (and did ignore it until the scenes finished) because ending on a 'They are being tortured, the bad guys are winning' is not a cliff hanger so much as a Downer.  Ky Lewin's Naruto fic (Damn horrible thing) also went from Good to bad to horrible (Worst single scene I've read in naruto fanfiction).

I'd almost say it practically doesn't work from a forward facing story.

[Jason_Miao]

Just got around to reading this now.

...you get the feeling that the point of the fic is just to watch Ranma suffer and gradually turn into a Real Girl.

I will note that this fic was advertised by Ozzallos, who over the last few years, seems to be fairly focused on turning men into women.  So I am not overly surprised by this, even if I am disappointed.

[Arakawa]

I do note that two things have become clear(er) in hindsight.

It seems right now the power levels are:  Normal Person > Martial Artist > Nerima Tier > Ranma Tier > Weakest Magical Girls > (The Good Guys) > Advanced Magical Girls > Syaoran > (Ranma Current) > Hecate/Pluto > Strong Magical Girls > The Director/Mary Sue (Note: Hecate/pluto might be on the other side of strong magical girls.  Can't tell, they can Walk Through Timestop).

Turns out the main villain really is a Mary Sue. Note that her defense is cited as being magically out of the reach of any attack. So you would need an "attack with infinite reach" -- i.e. a <insert Mary-Sue-destroying Macguffin> -- to hit her.

And I've lost track again really on what all these magical girls are for.  They're making them, to experiment on the process of making them?

Brainwashed Army of Magical Girls! Which will -- assuming everything goes as planned for the next century -- eventually re-terraform the Earth in a giant tenki in order to... um, here we lose track again. Save the whales, or something?

Presumably the giant tenki would turn 1% of the human population into magical girls/boys and kill the other 99%. There's something about how they wanted to do this thousands of years ago in order for the Earth to function as a power source and stimulate the Silver Millennium economy, but the Silver Millennium economy doesn't exist anymore, so that can't possibly be the reason...

Okay, it's a gratuitous villain with a death ray. Powered by brainwashed magical girls.

[Brian]

...really?  So glad I passed on reading this. o_o

[Jason_Miao]

Turns out the main villain really is a Mary Sue. Note that her defense is cited as being magically out of the reach of any attack. So you would need an "attack with infinite reach" -- i.e. a <insert Mary-Sue-destroying Macguffin> -- to hit her.

Since we met Garm immediately before we meet the Director, and Garm expressly mentions Fenrir, I presume he'll be used in the same fashion as Fenrir against the Director.  Which, given the timing, feels right.

I am not up to date with tropes-classification (actually, I know next to nothing about it).  Does that make her a Mary Sue?  It seems like a fairly conventional high-powered villain setup-with-fated-flaw to me.  And the writer explicitly mentions Fenrir - it's not as if he's even trying to hide this.

Brainwashed Army of Magical Girls! Which will -- assuming everything goes as planned for the next century -- eventually re-terraform the Earth in a giant tenki in order to... um, here we lose track again. Save the whales, or something?

Save humanity from itself by destroying it.  From a veteran of wars that ended millennia ago.  i.e, paraphrasing the justification of Ben Tre - I don't think it was supposed to make rational sense from a normal perspective, given the context of the original quote before it was paraphrased by the Director.


I don't have a problem with the second half, other than it seems fairly conventional "introduce the final boss, obligatory reveal of evil plans".  I do think the Skinner Box part was overly long, and probably should have been a third of what it is.  The flip side of that is that flashbacks and scene skips aren't something that fits the first-person subjective perspective well (Which is not to say that authors don't cheat.  In the Garrett files, a first-person hard-boiled detective in a fantasy setting, he gets knocked out a lot.).  I did say that straight-up first person is hard to do for non-short story if you're going to stay true to it, and I think that's pretty clear in this chapter.

If I recall correctly when this fic was released, the writer had finished five chapters, and had the rest of the plot.  He'd also declared his intention to release one chapter every two months.  This is chapter six, and I'd be willing to make a small bet that he ran into the limitations of his chosen format at this point.  One way that I've seen to get around this was to have Ranma visiting a psychologist, and being asked to narrate the past - that's still changing the perspective, but it gives you more options as to when to skip scenes, or reserve them for a sudden dramatic revelation at the end.

Anyway, I think it's readable if you start reading until you get annoyed at the torture, then skim it until you get to the part with Ranma lighting his clothes on fire, then go read it again.  It's not a great chapter, but other than the extended torture (which is bad), I don't see anything else that is really intrinsically bad about it other than blandness.

And if you don't even want to skim that much, here's a summary:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Pain/pleasure, for everything.
Michiko gives Ranma a pair of DBZ-scanner glasses as a gift.
Ranma discovers that everyone has gone through conditioning, which leaves them broken.  He's the latest experiment.
Ranma learns quadratic equations and dress protocol.

[Anastasia]

Update ho!

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6892672/7/Haigeki

May or may not read it. If I do I'll post thoughts later.

[Jason_Miao]

No spoiler tag, since I figure anyone who's wanted to read the chapter by this point already has.

Summary: The last chapter plus this chapter is unnecessary overkill.

Details: This chapter is invasion into the mindscape for "adjustment".  Maybe it's just my personal distaste for this sort of representation (1), but if they can "adjust" facets of personalities by breaking into the mind itself, why the hell is the skinner box chapter necessary?  I bet if we asked the writer, the answer would be because "the nature of mechanic X requires Y before Z and therefore..." but from a literary standpoint, the counterargument is to change the mechanics.  Having two different mental-torture chapters is excessive, unless either the writer likes writing about torture or is writing some yet another "Ranma's transsexual destiny" fic (2) and wanted to cut off the mental willpower escape routes.

It's too bad.  I was excited to read a gritty Ranma-adventure story, but suddenly realize that its really a gritty Ozzallos story, now with extra torture.


(1) "VR hacking" and "mindscape adventures" aren't inherently the most retarded concepts I've ever read, but scenes with them usually end up feeling that way because most writers are trying to rewrite the last scene of Snow Crash without actually laying out the the contextual groundwork of the Snow Crash finale in the first place.

(2) i.e those Ranma fics where every chapter is Deux ex Machina where Ranma keeps getting mentally bludgeoned into acting like a girl and enjoying it until he surrenders into femininity.  "Ranma, you must go shopping and get a manicure."  "Why am I enjoying this?  Noooo!"

[Anastasia]

I skimmed the chapter. I have to agree with Jason above, and am more annoyed for another reason. Really, the entire becoming a magical girl think was more than enough motivation to turn Ranma girlier, if that's your goal. These last two chapters have felt entirely excessive and unneeded overkill.

[Brian]

Maybe the author is trolling?

[Anastasia]

I doubt it, based on the raw amount of effort and skill applied. If it is a troll, it's a dedicated one.

[Brian]

Well, there are different classes of troll, though.  I meant, "Maybe he got annoyed at the feedback, and made it worse as a Take That!?"