Putting Your Heart in the Right Place
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Putting Your Heart in the Right Place |
| Author(s): | John Walter Biles |
| Date(s): | 1993? - September 22, 1994[1] |
| Length: | 15 parts |
| Genre(s): | |
| Fandom(s): | Ranma 1/2 |
| Relationship(s): | |
| External Links: | Home Page Later |
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Putting Your Heart in the Right Place is a Ranma 1/2 longfic by John Walter Biles.
Summary
A 15 part series. Gosunkugi finally finds a tutor who can teach him real magic ...but only if he learns to put his heart in the right place. Before his quest is through, Nerima will never be the same!
Legacy
More than three years after its completion, Right Place remains for me the most influential of Ranma 1/2 fan fiction works. Its accomplishments reach far beyond the scope of Biles' writing skills or Right Place's relative quality. The fic set the standard for extended "continuation" fanfics, paving the way for numerous successful fics of comparable extent and nature. Right Place also redefined certain elements of Ranma 1/2 for fan fictional use, with the result that many of Biles' reinterpretations have usurped the status of fanfic "canon" from Takahashi's originals. Most importantly, Biles' comedic magnum opus shines like a beacon, continuing to inspire madcap "original-flavor" fics, even after serious and grave stories became the norm in the Ranma 1/2 fan fiction.Right Place was not the first continuation fic, and it may no longer be the best. But it will always be the yardstick by which I measure attempts to maintain the anime spirit of Ranma 1/2 over a story of significant length that is set at the end of the existing storyline (though Biles completed his fic more than a year before the manga ended its run). [...]
Specific choices that Biles made in departing from or adding to Takahashi's universe are continuously repeated by authors to this day. Consider Biles' characterization of supporting players Ukyou, Mousse, and Gosunkugi. Clearly, his reinterpretations of these characters have had greater impact on fan fiction than have Takahashi's original conceptions.
The popularity of Biles' story and its great "crossover" appeal have done much to spread through the Ranma fanfic community the idea of Ukyou as Ranma 1/2's tragic heroine. While Ukyou's characterization in fan fiction is broadly diverse, she is most often portrayed as the clear Silver Medalist in the competition for Ranma, and as a very good sport about her second-place finish. Even more canonical is Biles' Gosunkugi: the spooky outcast created by Takahashi is reinvented as a fantasy antihero. It is atypical in fan fiction for Gosunkugi to be portrayed as anything but a sorcerer-in-training, and he rarely is depicted as anything less than wholly benevolent. [...]
Right Place's Mousse is contemplative, gentle, and poetic, a far cry from his whiny manga characterization or the even-more-constipated anime version. The effect of Biles' reshaping of Mousse on Ranma fan fiction has been nothing short of dominant: fanfictional Mousse portrayals are almost universally positive; contrast his situation against the much wider range of depictions for Ryouga and Kunou, who in Biles' story were far more conflicted than Mousse.Taleswapper[2]