Hello. I wonder how many people will read this. Well, I don't think it'll be too long.

At the moment I'm in a Ranma 1/2 kick. The series is a lot of fun and I enjoy writing the silly characters.

Plus, there's a lot of bad fanfic out there. I need to write better ones to make sure the fandom actually has stories that are based off a silly martial arts themed romantic comedy. Fortunately, I've helped devise a simple method to tell whether or not a Ranma fanfic is worth your time and not actually a piece of garbage.

Step One: Look at the summary.

Check to make sure the summary does not contain words like "Ranma's tired of his life", "Ranma leaves" Or "After one too many mallets" or any stuff like that. If something like that's in the summary, don't even bother clicking it. It's bad!

If it's a crossover with that summary, then just run away. It's beyond hope.

Step Two: Look at how Akane is portrayed

Another Red Flag for garbage Ranma 1/2 fanfic. By and large you can easily tell a story is garbage by looking at Akane's portrayal in the fanfic. If she's portrayed as an over violant harpy, who hits Ranma with little to no provocation, then congrats. You have again found another story not worth reading. If she's only mentioned in a paragraph or two as Ranma flashes back to stuff before he leaves to go to a new crossover or other group of characters, then you clearly failed Step One.

Step Three: Watch for Fanon

Does the story contain any of the following elements?

These are just some examples of Fanon. Fanon is what happens when somebody writes a plot element in a fanfic, and then someone else uses the idea in a fanfic, and then someone reads that fanfic and decides to use the element and gosh darn it before you know it people are including it not because they think it's an element to use in a fanfic, but because they think it's canon. Because it's appeared in so many fanfics after all, why wouldn't it be canon?

Fanon is a major problem in the Ranma 1/2 fanfic community. Due to the nature of the fandom, having been built up in an era where canon was hard to get yet it became stupidly popular to write fanfic for. There's a lot of fanon in the Ranma fandom. So much that collecting it and refuting it would be a massive project well beyond my little bio post. As such, for this step it's best take this step after you've gotten some experience with Ranma fanfic. Read over the manga once in a while, and compare it to fanfics you've seen. Is there some element that isn't supported by canon, or worse actively contradicts it, yet is constantly appearing in fanfics? Then you've found a bit of fanon. Unlike the other two steps, this one isn't an instant failure. However as the fanon piles up it eventually reaches a critical mass and at that point you're not even really reading Ranma 1/2 fanfic anymore.

Step Four: Check the author?

Did I write it? It's good. :P