Growing the Beard/Fan Works


 * The Return really hit its stride when the author abandoned the last of Ranma ½ Canon, hit the First Law of Gender Bending and started treating it like original fiction.
 * At first, You Got Haruhi Rolled was just a compilation of short sketches that didn't really parody anything in particular. Chapter 20 gives us its first full-blown Story Arc, and from there the stories got much longer and more effective parodies. Ironically, the end of the first arc was originally where the author intended to end it. It's a good thing he didn't.
 * Although the Tamers Forever Series is an undoubtedly fun and surprisingly well written series, it's still fairly average, until "Forget the Y 2 K, This is Madness!!", whereupon the series adopts a quality of writing that is on par if not better than that of professional authors.
 * Then along comes Silent Sorrow, which takes Emotional Torque Serial Escalation throws in a fantastically deep and complicated plot and wonderfully insightful Character Development and tops it all of by having a ridiculously large Holy Shit Quotient, essentially growing a beard so massive, it could be used as a rope ladder to heaven.