GRIT

""It stands for Global Ranma Insanity Thread. Also, grit gets into everything.""

""No really, it's a long and complicated story.""

GRIT (Global Ranma Insanity Thread) is a long-running interactive RPG/fanfic loosely set in the Ranma ½ universe, about six years after the end of the manga. How long-running? It started on USENET.

It's much like a play-by-email RPG or an "improfic"; at its core is the practice of multiple authors posting script-style fragments to make up an entire story.

There are two seperate continuities: GRIT (paused indefinitely) and GRIT Begins, an alternate storyline set in a more general "Rumicverse."

See the group's history for more details.


 * Beware the Nice Ones: In the first GRIT, Kasumi Tendo, the nicest character in Ranma ½ by a hugely long shot, ended up as the Ringbearer, complete with Ringwraiths that answered to her. She didn't really let it get to her and retained her nice and cheerful disposition.
 * Calling Your Attacks: And how. GRIT was originally based on Ranma ½, which had attack calls. Also, many GRITters are anime fans and fighting game fans, and attack calls are very common there as well. The third GRIT also features a Kamen Rider, and he calls his attacks.
 * A notable example is the character Ryuu-ou from the first GRIT, who once had an attack call so long that he was yelling it as he charged up the street, still yelling it as he waited for the doors of the pizza restaurant to open, and finally finished yelling it as he burst in and performed the actual attack.
 * His student, Steve, occasionally did made-up-on-the-spot really long attack calls... nothing quite as long as Ryuu-ou's, though.
 * Catgirl: In the original GRIT there was indeed a catgirl. Far from being typically ditzy and cattish, she was one of the most sensible characters and ran an apartment block.
 * Continuity Snarl: Sort of. Maybe. The original GRIT ran for around ten years and was trying to keep and make sense of most of its continuity. Considering that its continuity included a big bad energy vampire boss in a castle called Turnip Keep, a trench war, Kuno Kodachi being turned into a pillar of salt, lots of dimensional travel, and a quest for the Holy Hairclippers that took years of real-life time to resolve, things became somewhat hard to follow after a while.
 * Empathic Weapon: In the GRIT Liner, the rebellious teenager Aki has what is called a 'leafblade', which is a small telekinetically controlled blade in the shape of a tree leaf that can do all sorts of things, but being only one piddly blade can't do them very well. Aki herself is a bit flighty, flitting from venture to venture, so far largely blown around by circumstance and luck.
 * Nerd and engineer Sam has created some pretty useful robots that he controls remotely, and controls them with videogame controllers. That seems pretty Empathic Weapon-ish to me.
 * First Law of Gender Bending: There were quite a few characters who started off as male, were turned female, and for whatever reason stayed that way. Whether it just for a laugh, for serious psychological reasons, Author Appeal...
 * Mary Sue/Self Insertion: The Original GRIT was basically all about the Mary Sue self-insertions. It got better over time. The second and third incarnations have toned down the self-insertions a lot, and there is only one self-insert in the third.
 * So far.
 * Gender Bender: ...including Ranma ½'s Gender Bender water curses. Then, because Jusenkyo curses were boring and old hat, other characters became Gender Benders via various other means. A common joke was that the main source of female characters was genderbent male characters. Leading to...
 * Jump Physics: Well, yes. There's lots of super-high jumping, with a liberal amount of impossibly long hang-time. Of particular note is Sho in the 3rd GRIT, who as a Kamen Rider has all sorts of impossible Jump Physics.
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: The original Ranma ½ had a fair amount of characters, who were all by default present in the original GRIT. Also, the original GRIT went for ten (or so) years, had many different GRITters writing and introducing new characters, and thus it ended up with a ridiculously huge number of characters.
 * This led to another issue, later on... when the original creator of a character left, or just mysteriously disappeared and was never heard of again, his or her characters were still around in the story, sometimes in important roles. This would lead to someone else adopting the character.
 * Power Creep, Power Seep: the original GRIT brought in references to different continuities left and right, and featured a lot of fighting and one-upmanship, so power inflation was somewhat inevitable.
 * Reset Button: There was a much-vaunted Hiatus of an in-story year. During that year all sorts of things were supposed to be resolved and plotlines tied up and, basically, reset GRIT back to a clean slate that would be much easier to write for. This Reset Button, however, didn't work.
 * Shortly afterwards, groaning under the weight of too many characters and plotlines, the original GRIT was left where it is and the second GRIT started.
 * Shapeshifting: The original GRIT was directly based on Ranma ½ and so many of its characters ended up with that series' shapeshifting water curses...
 * Squick: With all sorts of fetishes, author appeals, and author self-inserts running rampant, there was/is probably all sorts of squick going on. One particular incident of squickiness I particularly remember is all the way from the beginning of the Original GRIT, where the transformation of a cow to a girl (or perhaps the other way around) was described in extreme detail.
 * The Force: In the original GRIT, the Fire of the Dragon was a mysterious energy field surrounding and binding everyone and everything in the world. Only people with the correct genetic makeup were able to use it. Oh, and there was a Chosen One (actually, two, but who's counting?) who had greater power in the Fire than others. It could be used to do all sorts of things, including telekinesis, remote pillars of energy blasting upwards with great force, shapeshifting, magic, and stuff that seemed to be made up on the spot. Does any of this sound familiar? About the only functional difference was that the Fire was all Dark Side.
 * Tournament Arc: Surprisingly for a series so chock-full of superpowered martial artists, I can only remember two tournament arcs. There was one back in the very beginning (the "Eric Pollen Weedwhacker Tournament"... or something) and one right around the time the first GRIT died.
 * Mind you, I could just be forgetting other ones.