What are you reading?

[Dracos]

Finished up to current of:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8953270/33/Genin-to-Hokage

Prolly won't keep following but who knows.  The fic starts very Skeletony and takes a while before it starts putting meat of things not just being bulletpoint tackles.

I do like that it largely delivers a more competent Konoha.  Albeit, one that still isn't very plausible set up to win faced with simultaneous super-Orochimaru, an enormous set of smaller villages ready to betray, and an early acting Akatsuki (2 and half years early or so it seems).  Danzo seems a reasonable black-ops lead...except in 33 chapters, his black ops team never succeeds even once.  Root comes off as incompetent by virtue of really not stopping anyone on screen, while the bad guys get lots of on screen time having very successful horrific sabotage and assassination events in the middle of leaf.

I'm not sure who got promoted in its chuunin exams, except apparently the spy guy.  This is weird since a lot of the Konoha crew came off as really competent in it, and he didn't have any screentime showing any competence in it.

Overall, it seems to grab cues from a lot of other fics (Team 8, Motivation, A few angry words), portray a lot of folks as reasonable, and builds a nice take on a much more believable Konoha the peaceful ninja village than I've seen in many places, but the writing takes a long time to pull out of skeleton-ville, and even then it seems to drift over the personal too much even late.  There's also a lot of people going on, enough so that a large portion of the named cast is just developed enough to be convenient Dupes for Orochimaru (who never fails to dupe anyone in this fic, even if its just his spies saying Do X, It'll be awesome).

[Ebiris]

Been reading Guardian which is a Dragonball Z AU where Goku's spacepod landed on Kami's lookout. Instead of bonking his head, Kami helps him work through his programming while training him to be the next guardian of earth, so he still goes by Kakarot and is somewhat smarter than Goku.

The big thing of it is, he stuck on Kami's lookout throughout near the entirety of Dragonball, aside from a brief excursion to fight King Piccolo, so that leads to lots of cool knock-on effects when Dragonball Z comes around - Chichi's still a fighter, Gohan never got born, Kami and King Piccolo fused early so the Piccolo we know isn't present at all, and the Red Ribbon Army is still around which has a huge impact on the Android Saga.

Give it a read, it's neat.

[Anastasia]

I read some of it. It looks like a case of good ideas without the writing chops to really pull them off. The author's just not that good a writer, unfortunately.

Does the author's writing improve in later chapters?

[Ebiris]

I dunno, I never really noticed anything wrong with it.

[Jason_Miao]

Finished up to current of:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8953270/33/Genin-to-Hokage

Prolly won't keep following but who knows.  The fic starts very Skeletony and takes a while before it starts putting meat of things not just being bulletpoint tackles.

If that's the same fic I'm thinking about, I'd stopped reading it a month or two ago.  I'd kept with it for a bit for the more serious atmosphere, but I came away thinking that it was only atmosphere, and little of substantive change.  Perhaps the fic just a very long buildup and I stopped reading too early before the big fork hit, but that's also indicative of a problem: IMO one shouldn't have to wait through multiple chapters of a fic for something major to diverge. 

Hmm, if we're posting serious-flavored Naruto fics, a fic I'd started reading around the same time as that one is https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9948266/1/Team-7-s-Ascension.  Not exactly a perfect fic either, and not super-realistic (training step 1: forest of death) but much of the standard goofiness is not present.  Probably a bit too Nakama-oriented for my tastes; individual characterizations feel somewhat muted in favor of "we are all a team."  Still, the fic gets the job done.

By contrast, the title of https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9971801/1/Drunken-Space-Time-Ninjutsu is self explanatory.  Note: some foreign-writer grammar, but surprisingly well-written if one is aware of that (mainly incorrect tenses; phrasing is usually okay, although there are still a number of odd spots, but generally nothing that will make you "loose" your mind).



An idle thought: there are probably magnitudes more Naruto writers and there ever were Ranma 1/2 writers, but other than ShaperV's groundhogs day fic, I can't really name any that really interested me much as some of the best Ranma fics.  I wonder if it's because I'm simply jaded, or if the writers really are that much less interesting.

[thepanda]

More writers = more badfic to wade through to find the gems.

On top of that Naruto is way longer than Ranma, with a hefty amount of continuity that writers often at least attempt to pay lip service to. Meaning retreading the same plot points over and over in fic after fic just to get to the divergence the fic is built around. Remember the umpteenth time you had to read the 'Ranma meets the Tendos' scene? Its like that, only taken over a bunch of arcs.

And considering one of those arcs is wave, burnout is a real problem in the fandom. More so than it was in Ranma. I can think of only three (long form) multipart Naruto fics that actually finished of the top of my head; Time Braid and that one where team 7 gets a scroll that lets them go back in time. The running joke was that Sakura was the only one that didn't have a reason to go back and change things but went back anyway.

And that one where Naruto gets drafted into root and destroys it from the inside just by being his normal self. Sadly, lost the links to those in the great OS change over earlier this year.

[Jason_Miao]

I can think of only three (long form) multipart Naruto fics that actually finished of the top of my head; Time Braid and that one where team 7 gets a scroll that lets them go back in time. The running joke was that Sakura was the only one that didn't have a reason to go back and change things but went back anyway.

And that one where Naruto gets drafted into root and destroys it from the inside just by being his normal self. Sadly, lost the links to those in the great OS change over earlier this year.

Time Braid is the ShaperV fic of which I can never recall the title.  I know there's a link in this thread somewhere, probably in one of Drac's earlier posts.
I posted the second somewhere on this thread.  Not very helpful in tracking the link, but that's the best info I have.
I happened to remember the name of the third fic, and I also happened to have the URL in cache: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5288868/1/Uprooted

[Ergoemos]

An idle thought: there are probably magnitudes more Naruto writers and there ever were Ranma 1/2 writers, but other than ShaperV's groundhogs day fic, I can't really name any that really interested me much as some of the best Ranma fics.  I wonder if it's because I'm simply jaded, or if the writers really are that much less interesting.

Funny, I have never seen any Ranma fics that catch my eye more than a few chapters, simply because none of the characters seem all that likable. I am nominally more familiar with Ranma's actual canon, but I dropped it for a reason. I did get pretty far in the Familiar of Zero crossover, though I lost interest with time.

Now, if anyone can recommend a story that deals with actual gender identity issues, or some interesting diverging identity issues (as in, female Ranma has an individual personality with separate needs and wants as a human being), that could make for some really interesting text for me.

[Dracos]

More writers = more badfic to wade through to find the gems.

On top of that Naruto is way longer than Ranma, with a hefty amount of continuity that writers often at least attempt to pay lip service to. Meaning retreading the same plot points over and over in fic after fic just to get to the divergence the fic is built around. Remember the umpteenth time you had to read the 'Ranma meets the Tendos' scene? Its like that, only taken over a bunch of arcs.

And considering one of those arcs is wave, burnout is a real problem in the fandom. More so than it was in Ranma. I can think of only three (long form) multipart Naruto fics that actually finished of the top of my head; Time Braid and that one where team 7 gets a scroll that lets them go back in time. The running joke was that Sakura was the only one that didn't have a reason to go back and change things but went back anyway.

And that one where Naruto gets drafted into root and destroys it from the inside just by being his normal self. Sadly, lost the links to those in the great OS change over earlier this year.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5288868/1/Uprooted

Good fics deserve relinking.  The fic fails to be great, but does manage silly well.

[Jason_Miao]

Funny, I have never seen any Ranma fics that catch my eye more than a few chapters, simply because none of the characters seem all that likable.

Heh.  It's a romantic-comedy at heart, with the "comedy" aspect oriented to slapstick.  No one has a truly likeable personality, because that wasn't the point of the story in the first place (if you seek romantic comedy with likeable characters, Maison Ikkoku might be a better bet).

I am nominally more familiar with Ranma's actual canon, but I dropped it for a reason. I did get pretty far in the Familiar of Zero crossover, though I lost interest with time.

There was one that lasted more than a few chapters?  Have a link?

Now, if anyone can recommend a story that deals with actual gender identity issues, or some interesting diverging identity issues (as in, female Ranma has an individual personality with separate needs and wants as a human being), that could make for some really interesting text for me.

There are quite a few of those.  To be honest, back in my FFML days, I stopped reading the gender identity ones because there were so damn many of them, so only really looked at the ones where people were actually talking about them.   

Kenko's writing, although sound, never really grabbed my interest, but evidently there were a number of women who were surprised to learn that Kenko was male because he wrote female mindset so well in Girl Days, so that might be a candidate for a light humor fic.  Richard Lawson's The Bitter End is Ranma in college, stuck in female form, and told in the perspective of a guy who would really like to shag her (but romantically, so it's okay!).  Might deal with the identity issues.  Was considered one of the great fics of the day, but haven't read it in awhile, so not sure how it'd hold up.  Angsty romance.  Can't remember the title of the fic Scott Zoogz(sp?) wrote, but evidently it landed him notariety in TG circles, so might be worth tracking down.

There are a number of "split Ranma into male and female halves" fics ... these usually involved blunt plot devices to trigger the change, which was then largely ignored in favor of the drama that the writer actually wanted to introduce, so I didn't read many of them.  I actually recall reading a few "new personality" fics I liked, but most of them were just an excuse to introduce an ANC, so are not so memorable (although I remember Anand Rao's Stained Glass Mind, that was about MPD rather than an OnnaRamna personality).

But yeah, if you're looking for deep exploration of personal or societal values, Ranma fics might not really be up your alley (although Naruto doesn't quite strike me as a viable alternative)).  Not that people didn't try, but at the end of the day, martial arts slapstick fight is not the best literary vehicle for defining the meaning of self and such.  OTOH, Eureka, Black Dragon's fics, and others which would rather skip all that in favor of awesome ways to escape trouble that Ranma's mouth got him into, or Action/adventure/romance tend to work with the strengths.

[Anastasia]

Richard Lawson's The Bitter End is Ranma in college, stuck in female form, and told in the perspective of a guy who would really like to shag her (but romantically, so it's okay!).

Pretty sure that's not the fic you're thinking of.

[Jason_Miao]

Richard Lawson's The Bitter End is Ranma in college, stuck in female form, and told in the perspective of a guy who would really like to shag her (but romantically, so it's okay!).

Pretty sure that's not the fic you're thinking of.

Gah, you're right.  Good catch.  That was the classic fic about Ranma getting abused by psycho Akane, by Zen.

Lawson's were Thy Inward/Outward SomethingOrOther

[Merc]

I read some of it. It looks like a case of good ideas without the writing chops to really pull them off. The author's just not that good a writer, unfortunately.

Does the author's writing improve in later chapters?

I dunno, I never really noticed anything wrong with it.

Chapter 31:
(Kakarot) "But...Master-"
"Buts are for pooping." Kami replied, cracking his neck.

There are a few moments like that which just feel out of place... That said, outside of a few minor spelling and grammatical issues, the main problem is that the author doesn't spend as much on description as he could, so sometimes it feels a bit flat or like that old chestnut about telling vs showing. There's not as much buildup on some scenes that could use it and the pacing sometimes suffers because of how quick some things happen.

I still think it doesn't suffer that badly writing-wise, even if it could use definite improvement. And there's enough neat stuff that I think it's worth reading, like Eb suggested.

For Dune though, the writing doesn't really seem to have improved from the first couple of chapters, at least by chapter 31 and there's 68 of these, so I'm maybe halfway through? So if it was bugging you that badly from the get go, it won't get that much better probably.

[Ergoemos]

But yeah, if you're looking for deep exploration of personal or societal values, Ranma fics might not really be up your alley (although Naruto doesn't quite strike me as a viable alternative)).  Not that people didn't try, but at the end of the day, martial arts slapstick fight is not the best literary vehicle for defining the meaning of self and such.  OTOH, Eureka, Black Dragon's fics, and others which would rather skip all that in favor of awesome ways to escape trouble that Ranma's mouth got him into, or Action/adventure/romance tend to work with the strengths.

Well, like I said, I have seen about five episodes, if that, of Naruto, and my only real exposure to it otherwise is "Team 8" and "Dreaming of Sunshine." The first one is great, the second one is somewhere between good and okay.

I have seen at least twice as much Ranma, but cannot, for the life of me, enjoy nearly any of the fanfiction, probably because of exactly the reasons you mention.

I think I just tend to like fanfiction that takes an origin story that is interesting to me, but where canon takes a completely different direction than I am interested in. I will have to look up your suggestions, if only to glance through.

Funny, I have never seen any Ranma fics that catch my eye more than a few chapters, simply because none of the characters seem all that likable.

Only Ranma fic I have come close to finishing (Might have, actually), is Zero Interface, which, aside from having a mostly-for-fun plot of Ranma taking on the form of the girls he is kissed by (harem in a fanfiction of anime, wha?) does seem to have a relatively reasonable, non-cartoony take on each of the characters. Don't think it is updating anymore though.

[Jason_Miao]

I think I just tend to like fanfiction that takes an origin story that is interesting to me, but where canon takes a completely different direction than I am interested in. I will have to look up your suggestions, if only to glance through.

We appear to have the same tendencies in fanfic writing, even if we may not share the same genre tastes. :)


Speaking of odd fics, I'd thought this had been linked here before, but couldn't find it.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7668586/1/Exit-Pursued-By-a-Bear