I don't want to sound mean and your story overall is not that bad, but I really don't see how this is a Ranma fanfic. You have a charcter named Ranma, but he has very little in common with Ranma Saotome. You could have called the character Bruce Wayne and posted it as a Batman fanfic with almost as much justification. Having an annoying origianl charcter named after the author as the central protagonist doesn't help the story much either.
I will give you that there is a connection to sailormoon even if none of the charcter act much like they are supposed to.
Overall I think you would be better of doing a search and replace of the names with made up ones and posting as an original story. Nobody would accuse you of ripping of Ranma or sailormoon if you did that.
Author's response
Hey, thank's for the response. In all honesty, I'm not surprised at all about this, and I'd agree with you completely if I didn't know the whole story behind it either.
I supposse I could re-organize it into its true form here so it would make more sense. You see, TBP is really nothing more then an oversized prolouge for the real story, Dual Shadows.
Way back when I worked out the idea for TBP, I presented two prolouges to a number of friends. One was the prologue that became the start of TBP, and the other was what became the beginning of Chapter 5. I presented two plans to go along with the prologues. If I used the first Prolouge, I would write TBP. If I used the second, then I'd use flashback scenes thoughout the real story to tell the TBP arc. All of my testers agreed it was better to write TBP then to use flashbacks, so that's what I did.
Over time, the who mess has (on my hard drive at least) become the Phoenix Trillogy, as I've got an epilouge story planned out for when DS is finished.
Anyway, I completely agree that Ranma is out of character seriously in TBP, but that's a major point in DS, as a huge portion of it is the Real Ranma battling against his own mind as that past Ranma tries to take over. This is, in fact, true for most of the characters in the story. The Senshi will be having just as many problems as Ranma will.
Anyway, if I replace the names, the the sequel and true story would make no sense what-so-ever. It ends up being a double edged sword, you know? Either I'm screwed with TBP or I'm screwed with DS. As Dual Shadows is the story I really want to tell, I'd rather not be screwed with it.
Oh, and as for the ANC name, its not my fault. I was never going to write stories under the pen name Tomas. I stole the name from the Riftwar books for an email account to do my fanfiction stuff by, but when I asked Tannim, who ran a rather large Ranma crossover archive way back when, he put my name down as the email account fake name rather then the name I asked him to put me down as (Nighthawk). Unfortunately for me, it stuck and I'm still living with the consequences.
Since I've started work on DS, I've thought about going into TBP and changing the ANC's name to fix at least that problem. And you know what, I think I will do that today. Expect it to be fixed sometime this afternoon/evening.
As for the purpose of the ANC, it had three of them. The first was to give a view of what was going on away from Ranma. The second was to get killed in Chapter 5, as I almost always have to have that dying hero saying goodbye scene in my stories. The third was to provide a board for different characters to develope off of.
Anyway, I just want to say that I agree with your review and think its very fair. Thank's for sending it along and giving me a chance to respond to your complaints rather then just going "Bah" and putting me on ignore. Its things like this that make writers better.
Sincerely,
Thomas (Tomas Megarson) Sticka