![[L]](gfx/lemon.gif){kind=small}
![[D]](gfx/dark.gif){kind=small}
![[W]](gfx/waff.gif){kind=small}
![[*]](gfx/crossover.gif){kind=small}
![[C]](gfx/humor.gif){kind=small}
![[*]](gfx/star.gif){kind=small}
On this page, I try to preemptively answer all sorts of questions that people who see my page might have, so that they have to email me only about interesting things.
Tenchi Muyo is the title of an anime (Japanese animated movie) - several of them, actually. It's a mixture of science fiction and comedy about a boy named Tenchi who, through a series of strange events, finds himself living together with a bunch of women from outer space who have nothing better to do than make his life complicated.
Well, it's pretty self-explanatory, ain't it? The word stands for fiction written by fans, and mostly for fans, based on a popular movie, TV series, comic, game, etc... Japanese fans produce doujinshi (comics drawn by fans), but the international fandom seems to be less visually and more literary inclined. It's not written for profit, so it's free and the quality ranges from godawful to excellent, the volume from very short stories to multi-chapter works that could easily fill a book of 300 pages or more.
Fanfictions mostly have topics which, while interesting to fans, could not appear in the "original" material, for diverse reasons. This goes for lemons, darkfics and crossovers as well as for those that elaborate on originally unimportant subplots or which tell the well-known stories from a different point of view. Another frequent motivation, especially in the case of Tenchi Muyo is continuing a story that lacks a satisfying ending.
At the moment everyone can contribute reviews, but originally, I (Michael "Brazil" Borgwardt) wrote all the reviews. The other reviewers are probably a quite diverse lot, and you can learn about them on their profile pages. I'll just tell you a bit about my reasons for doing this; the other reviewers may have different motivations, but probably not all that different.
I wrote these reviews because I like Tenchi Muyo and fanfiction and wanted to give people a bit of navigation help through the by now rather huge mass of Tenchi fanfiction. Another aim is to improve the quality of future stories by pointing out problems in existing ones. And finally, I just like to criticize, and this is a good and relatively harmless way to learn doing it well. I've also found that forcing myself to sit through even the worst fics and reviews of them has tremendously improved my understanding of creative writing: I can now nearly always point out exactly what is wrong with a bad fic.
To add a review yourself, you must be logged in. Then, you will see a link for adding a review at the bottom of each fanfic description page, unless you're the author of that fic. If the fic isn't in the database yet, you can enter it yourself. To do that poperly, you may also have to enter the author(s). But please only add new fics/authors after making really sure that they're not in there yet! Especially in the case of authors, look out for alternative pseudonyms! As a general rule, use the name under which the author is listed in Gansao's archive.
In order to improve the quality of reviews, everyone who is logged in can vote on every review, except those where he or she is the reviewer or author of the reviewed fic. You can vote only once, but you can change your vote as often as you like. Votes are anonymous: nobody except the voter and the site administrator knows who voted and what they voted. Every vote consists of three parts, three aspects of reviews:
In each aspect, an individual vote can be positive (1), neutral (0) or negative (-1). At the moment, votes serve no function except to be displayed as averages on individual reviews' pages. This way, reviewers can learn how their reviews are recieved and what might be improved. In the future, votes might be used to rank reviews and make bad reviews less visible.
That's because they are not here; I don't have the webspace for that, and getting permission from all the authors would be too much work anyway. But that's no problem, nearly all Tenchi fanfics in existence can be found on GenSao's Archive.
When someone decides it's worth the effort. You could ask people, but they'll probably be annoyed because everyone is asking. You could write a review yourself using a different account, but that would be bad for your karma, and it won't help you to become a better author.
Forum postings as well as review text will have all HTML tags revomed because there's too much potential for abuse. Instead, you can use "square brace tags", the same as in many other web discussion boards. There are also a few special tags for easy linking within the site.
| Tag | Result | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
[i]italics[/i] |
italics | Text is set in italics |
[b]bold[/b] |
bold | Text is set in bold |
[u]underline[/u] |
underline | Text is underlined |
old[par]new |
old new |
Begin a new paragraph |
this[br]next |
this next |
Begin a new line |
Blah[quote]Yadda[/quote]Blubb |
BlahYaddaBlubb |
Quote something |
[url]http://www.tmffa.com[/url] |
http://www.tmffa.com | Link to an URL |
[url=http://www.tmffa.com]TMFFA[/url] |
TMFFA | Link some text to an URL |
[url=links.html#tmffa]TMFFA[/url] |
TMFFA | Link within this site |
[fanfic=6]Some fic[/fanfic] |
Some fic | Link to the fanfic page with the given ID number |
[review=34]Some review[/review] |
Some review | Link to the review page with the given ID number |
[person=1]Somebody[/person] |
Somebody | Link to the profile of the person with the given ID number |
ID Numbers:
The database ID numbers of fanfics, reviews and users are listed prominently on their pages
and will not change (except in cases where author or fanfic
entries are duplicated and later merged).
There's a number of items; they should be self-explanatory. You can change your profile after you log in, just click on the link that says "Log in" on the profile page. If you don't have a login yet, you can make new one. Of course, if you've had fics reviewed by me, these will not be attributed to your new login - the system has no way of recognizing you. In such cases, write me. If you've already created a new login, tell me its ID number or the login name.
You probably made a new login, and the system has no way of recognizing or verifying that you're the same person than the author of the fics. Write me and tell me the ID number or the login name of the login you've created.
| Icon | Category |
|
Lemon |
|
Darkfic |
|
WAFF |
|
Crossover |
|
Comedy |
|
Rating |
Note: see next question and the one about ratings for detailed explanations.
"Lemon" refers to fanfiction with more or less explicit sexual content. The motivation for writing lemons is either the thrill of doing something "forbidden", or the Author, while writing a "normal" fanfiction just refuses to disregard this side of the characters. Or they are simply horny teenagers.
"Darkfics" are stories that are unusually violent or depressing. Some fans, while they do enjoy the lighthearted settings of shows like "Tenchi Muyo" where nothing really harmful or sad can ever happen, are a bit annoyed with this fact. Some of them decide to change it and write fanfictions where it is different. Some of these just get a lot more serious than the original writers would ever dare and show characters actually dying and the others having to cope with the loss, while others simply revel in excessive blood-and-gore fests and others yet start out like any other story and then (either slowly or suddenly) destroy your peace of mind completely and change your perception of the characters you thought you knew so well forever.
"WAFF" is the opposte of darkfics, it stands for the "Warm And Fuzzy Feelings" such fics generate, usually by romance, family bonding and other mushy stuff. Diabetics be careful!
"Crossover" is a fanfiction genre where characters from conpletely different anime or even from non-anime meet. Crossovers serve to answer such important questions as:
"Who's the better matial artist, Ryo or Ranma?"
"Is a Valkyrie better that a Tie-fighter?"
"Would Alielle succeed in finally driving Ranma insane?"
I think there has to be some form of rating, to give the reader a quick overview as to what are the real gems. However, this is purely subjective! Since I don't want to anger the authors by imposing subjective preferences on everyone else, the ratings are deliberately broad:
):
A really good story. Read it, if you have the time. Roughly, these are the best 20%):
An outstanding story. Extremely well-written, funny, though-provoking or heart-rending.
Everyone should read this! These represent the top 5%Again, the stories that get stars are basically the reviewers' personal favorites, If your tastes differ a lot from the reviewer's, the rating might be worthless to you.
"Can of worms". You see, there is not just one Tenchi Muyo anime: there are two OAV series, two TV series, three movies, a manga series, various radio dramas and computer games, and even two spinoff anime (Pretty Sammy OAV and TV). The problem is, most of these are incompatible, although they use more or less the same characters: some of the characters exist only in one series but not in the others, or they are there and look the same, but act completely differently and have a different past and different relationships to the other characters. These different storylines are called "continuities", and they should not be mixed. Why have many different versions of the same thing? Marketing, basically.
These are the major differing Tenchi Muyo continuities which are referred to in the reviews:
Take a look at the Technical Notes for an explanation (and a look at the source code) of the underlying software.
Hell, yes! It would be stupid to deny that - Reviewers are only human and can never be really objective. But now that there are many reviewers, a broader picture should slowly form, and people can vote on reviews to mark bad ones.
If you're the author of a fic you think was reviewed unfairly or where the review left out important points, you can add an Author's Comment to the review: basically you write your side of things. To do so, you must be logged in and registered as the author of that fic. Then you will see an entry form on the review page. You can also add comments to the fic page. In the case of collaborations, all authors can add and change these comments.
Please link to the top of the frame set (http://tmffr.brazils-animeland/) and not to any subpages, unless you're really only referring to that specific part (e.g. a review or an author page). If you need a banner, use the logo image at the top of the navigation frame.