TerraEpon wrote:I think part of that is the author wants to keep it a "Ranma story" and thus getting too far away will make it not one. After all, if all you have is a guy in a pigtail who's trained in martial arts for 10 years (and no other...oddities...), then no matter what you call him or have him do, it's really skirting the line of if it's truly much of a fanfic.
I'll agree that some people can take the AU bit a little too far. I think the key offender was a Naruto fic I read the first chapter of which basically took Naruto out of Konoha at a very early age, expunged the Kyubi from him, and raised him as a Wave Nin. With that much divergence you may as well call it an original story.
However, the problem with the whole Ranma moves back to the Tendo Dojo thing is that it really doesn't take much to get Ranma back in the general area. He could be looking for his mom (in those fics where Genma is dead), and her last known whereabouts were in Nerima. If you want him to interact with the Tendos, well, he happens to go for a walk and sees "Tendo Dojo of Anything Goes" and wonders about the odds of an unrelated school having the exact same name as his family style.
The devil here is in the details. A lot of fanfic authors seem to be under the impression that if they shoehorn their main character with Ranma's name into the canon setting, it's a Ranma 1/2 fanfic. Personally, given a choice of extremes, I'd rather see Ranma in a radically different environment.
