Stormfury said:
Contrabardus said:
Stormfury said:
Ozz is a technically good writer, the major issue people have is he usually doesn't write Ranma, he writes an OC in Ranma's shoes. Some of his stories are enjoyable enough that I can ignore that. Some aren't. The ones that aren't are the ones where Ranma seems to choose to become female, rather then circumstances forcing him to be.
If by "technically" you mean that his grammar isn't bad, then yes. There were a few small mistakes here and there, but overall the structure was decent. It was readable and clear, but that didn't make it good.
The biggest problem with the story was that he didn't seem to know any of the characters. No one was behaving properly, and not in an Anime vs Manga way. The guy clearly only knew both series from the fanfics of others. He didn't have a clue about the culture, powers, or personalities of the actual source material. It was pretty much all pulled out of his ass using little but the names, locations, and a vague understanding of the basic relationships between the characters.
No one was in character in this story and the premise was rushed and poorly plotted out. It wasn't a case of just one character being off. It's just terrible fanfiction, the only thing good about it is the grammar side. He's got a decent grasp of the language and writing rules. Unfortunately that doesn't make up for the rest of it.
I meant in that everything EXCEPT established characterizations is good- he writes good dialogue, handles descriptions and narrative very well, and all in all is a high quality writer in that sense. It's just the characters, and the problem with that is that its fanfiction hes writing, not original stories.
If he was writing his own original characters like this, there'd be zero problems and he'd be a great writer. But since he twists established personalities however he feels (and come on, 99.9% of every person who has ever used a sailor moon character in a fanfic does the exact same thing with the senshi), his stories start to get hurt. Especially because his take on Ranma-chan is one that is completely countered by established canon.
That's basically what I said, but he also gets cultural details wrong and never gets a decent flow to the narrative.
I don't know that he'd be that great of a writer with an original story. The plot here seemed rushed, the pacing was poorly done, and his grammar was far from perfect. It's not just a character issue, the story structure outside of the grammar elements was a mess. Characters dropped in out of nowhere and were never explained, things were plotted poorly, and the character personalities conflicted with the story's established logic even within the story.
I've read and enjoyed a few fanfics where the characters were OOC, this was a complete mess that was hard to follow from the start. It seems to assume that the reader should know an awful lot. A certain amount of that is expected with Fanfiction, but this kind of took it a bit too far. If this was an original work that was the same quality as this fic, it still wouldn't have been good.
It wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen by a long shot. It was readable from a grammar perspective, I knew who was saying and doing what, and where everything was set. It just did a poor job of setting things up, jumped around too much, and never established a clear arc or direction. The characters being 'off' only contributed to that and were really just a symptom of a larger problem.
I don't hate Ranma/Sailor Moon fics, and no particular flavor of that is particularly odious to me outside of fetish stuff that is extremely outside of my taste. Even then it's just something I'm not into and I wouldn't inherently label it as 'bad'. I'm also not very familiar with Ozzalos or his work, so it's not like I have a bias against the guy. I've heard the name around before, but haven't read anything but this from him as far as I can recall.
This fic just sucks. It's a poorly written story even though the technical grammar aspects are sound. The structure is off, it's poorly paced and plotted, the characterization is bad, and it's just not a well written story.
