No subject

Carefully but eagerly, Ranma left the room with Kentaro at her side.

~*~

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

Believe it or not, I've been trying to rewrite this for over a year.  It's a
peculiar problem:  how do you get Ranma unwittingly pregnant without getting
her stuck in female form?  How could you make someone not take a hot bath
for several weeks?

I was never happy with my first solution of justing having Ranma stay female
out of some latent guilt.  That just didn't make sense.  But then, what does
make sense?  Why would a woman *want* to have a period?  (I'm approaching
this from a male perspective which thinks that not having to deal with all
the mess and discomfort would be a very good thing.  I excuse this by
thinking that Ranma would approach those issues from the same perspective.)
Is there any possible reason why someone would *want* to have a period?

I did a lot of research into menstruation and learned lots about
testosterone, estrogen, and androgens in general.  I began to wonder a lot
about Ranma's blood chemistry and to wonder what an excess of testosterone
would do to a female Ranma.  It turns out, not much, especially given that
Ranma typically wasn't male long enough for significant extra testosterone
to be produced.

After finding just about zero positive benefits to menstruation (at least
from a story-telling perspective), I was at a loss as to how to proceed.
Why would Ranma *want* to remain female long enough to possibly menstruate?

About a month ago I had a breakthrough: what if Ranma believed a myth about
menstruation?  That was highly plausible given that Ranma was male for the
first sixteen years of life.  I looked into myths about menstruation and
found that the most common myth was that it affected appearance - that a
woman looked worn and ugly during her period, and radiant and beautiful when
she was most likely to conceive.  The story was built from there.

While I don't think Ranma would have ever chosen to become a model, I can
see her stumbling into it for a brief time.  In the manga, Ranma was never
one to shun the limelight - regardless of gender.  One could make a good
argument for Ranma being a borderline exhibitionist.  I decided to use that.

Let me know how successful I was.  I struggled with trying to justify
Ranma's avocation and I'm not certain I was successful.

And if you have any better ideas on how to get Ranma pregnant, I'm all ears.
I'm not above rewriting the whole thing again.  =)

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading, and again, please do let me
know what thoughts you have, good or bad.

-Richard