Temple of Ranma's Sailor Senshi Seifuku

Fanfiction.net has a new bleach/ranma crossover titled Shinigami ½ in which Ranma falls in the Spring of Drowned Shinigami. Then, he is whisked away to the Soul Society to train to become an official Soul Reaper. I started reading it and really got into it. Unfortunately in about the 3rd or forth chapter the author stated that he wouldn’t be adding any of the human characters from the series and I couldn’t read anymore. In my mind the fic just didn’t make sense, because if you only focus on ranma rukia doesn’t go to the human world, and if she doesn’t go to the human world she never meets Kisuke Urahara. She doesn’t have the hogyoku implanted in her so Aizen has no reason to betray the soul society. This horrible domino effect poped into my mind and I ust couldn’t read anymore.

You really can't write, or for that matter usually read, a story especially if you aren't familiar with the source material.

frice2000 wrote:You really can't write, or for that matter usually read, a story especially if you aren't familiar with the source material.

It can be fun if you are familiar with both sources. A Certain Scientific Railgun would go nicely with either Sailor Moon or perhaps Clamp School. But where would you find the readers?

(This is a recommendation for Railgun, by the way. It actually holds to its storyline.

Spokavriel wrote: As a writer it is essential. If you don't know it don't write it. As a reader not as much. But if the writer didn't know what they are writing about the reader will get the completely wrong idea about a series. And if you do it poorly you could spoil a person on a good series for life. Again why it is Imperative for writers.

One of the reasons you don't read stories where it says in the introduction that they really have to learn more about the series. Heck, when I write stories I tell which particular version of f/canon I'm using -- Sailor Moon S anime and Ranma fanon of the more restrained sort, for example. There's a lot of that in Harry Potter fanfic: writers often say that after a certain volume, they're going to ignore the things Rowling said. I can understand the feeling: after a certain volume, I stopped reading the things Rowling wrote. Too damn dark.

While I do tend to agree, that it is a good rule in general to know a good bit about the series used in writing, I can see a lot of exceptions.

I think the easiest example would be where you want to take just one element from a series and incorporate it into a work of fanfiction. I think a good example of this would be the Cloud-Dreamer fic "Wandless Magic." The basic concept was to take one idea from Ranma, the gender switching curse, and abuse the heck of out it in the Harry Potter universe. Zero knowledge about Ranma, aside from the fact that there are water based curses, was used in the fic, but it was very amusing and quite well written.

I also can see the use of a story up to a certain point, as Ellen pointed out. With regard the Harry Potter, I much prefer to just think about the first 4 books and ignore the rest. Much of my favorite Harry Potter-verse fic, crossover or otherwise, stops following canon at some point in the series. In fact, unless writing a continuation piece, complete knowledge of a series seems to be irrelevant. For example, let's say that I wanted to write a Naruto-fic (which I will never do because, while I enjoy some of the fan works, I cannot tolerate the actual series and don't know it well enough to write) that diverged after the Wave arc. Knowledge of what happens after the timeskip doesn't need to apply at all to the story.

And, as usual, I believe that comedy-fics can break any and all rules, so long as they are funny.

Generally, I think better works will tend to come from authors that truly know their material, but I think I'm rambling rather hard here.