The Bet (fan work)

The Bet was a cycle of fan fics from the late 1990s, centered on the framing device of a competition between a group of gods, demons, spirits and the occasional mortal to see who can make the biggest change in one of several "standard" timelines (the Canon versions of Ranma ½, Tenchi Muyo!, and Sailor Moon among others) with the smallest initial alteration. It was started, in something of an Ur Example of what in later years would be called a "fic challenge", by Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp in 1998 on what was then called the Anime Fan Fiction Mailing List (FFML). After posting a flurry of mini-fics to the list and elsewhere, most of which simply set up a crossover premise or divergent timeline, then left it hanging with a few notes on where the plot might go, he then challenged the FFML to choose which should be continued, which should be abandoned, and which one should win the titular Bet. At the heart of all these fics was the story Neutral Ground, in which the first Bet (between Toltiir, a god of Mischief, and Takahashi, goddess of bizarre romantic subplots) kicked off the massive celestial competition.

A small community within the FFML membership -- upwards of a dozen writers including the infamous Jared Ornstead -- immediately jumped on the challenge. Some took up several of Sharp's minifics and expanded on them. Others created their own entries. No deadline was ever established, and it seemed for a while like the point of The Bet was just to produce all these "entries" -- along with a series of side-stories spun off from the Bet itself but not taking part in it -- with no end in sight. Ultimately dozens of "Bet" fics were written, ranging anywhere from vignettes to novellas in length, before Sharp and his coterie called a close to the entries in late 2000 and polled the readership to determine the winner.

The winning entry was the timeline created In-Multiverse by Queen Titania, entitled Featherbrite's Tale. A tiny change in Ranma Saotome's childhood results in him acquiring a pixie-like faerie compantion, which inevitably leads to him accidentally gathering a team of ersatz sailor senshi with very real powers around himself to battle the forces of the Unseelie Court. Sharp immediately went to work expanding the original vignette into a fully-plotted story. He got most of the way through an initial version, then stopped and began again, only to stop short even earlier in the plot. He never picked it up again. Today, the two incomplete versions of Featherbrite's Tale still can be found on the web. Both show evidence of concepts being changed in mid-stream, and the longer of the two cuts off abruptly before the climax and resolution of the story. However, enough Chekhov's Guns are hung that a reasonably alert reader can figure out where things were headed.

In addition to Featherbrite's Tale about a dozen other Bet fics were taken up by writers other than Sharp and carried on, although as of the last Wayback copies of the various host pages which can be found, almost all had become Dead Fics, either not yet complete as of the archive date or outright abandoned.

Archives of The Bet can be found in several locations on the web. Many of the stories can be found here. Another list of stories can be found here, but many if not most of the links on that page no longer lead to anything readable.

Sadly far too many of the Bet fics have become lost outright.

The core works involved or invoked the following series:
 * ''Ah! My Goddess
 * Ranma ½
 * Sailor Moon
 * Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki


 * Alternate Timeline: Save for a few "simulations", every story in The Bet involved making permanent changes to an existing timeline, often with the deliberate side effect of fixing something which made that timeline unpleasing or unacceptable to the being who changed it.
 * Alternate Universe Fic: Each entry in The Bet is a small Alternate Universe Fic. The Bet inspired many contributors and imitators, and turned Alternate Universe Fics into sort of a cottage industry for Sharp.
 * Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Skysaber, the Author Avatar of writer Jared Ornstead, became a god at some point in the cycle.  Unlike most examples of this trope, he wasn't Put on a Bus but just hung around, more powerful than before.
 * Author Avatar: Several.  In addition to Greylle and Skysaber, authors Celeste and Edema inserted themselves as celestial entities.  Christopher Angel's existing avatar Paradox (from the well-received Ah! My Goddess self-insert Oh! My Brother) also took part.
 * In a different sense, Ranma ½ mangaka Rumiko Takahashi was inserted into the very first Bet story as Takahashi, goddess of bizarre romantic subplots, third class, limited.
 * Bad End: At least in the earlier stories, many of the timelines altered into a Bet entry are described as universes where things went wrong, or at least badly
 * Bait and Switch: Rune With a View has a twofer:  First, it leads the reader to believe that the amnesiac intelligence inhabiting Ranma's magical gauntlet is Greylle, Sharp's Author Avatar, only to reveal after 150 kilobytes of story that it's actually a version of Nabiki Tendo from a parallel universe.  Second, Rune (as she came to be known before she remembered who she was) had a mission to train up a Hero -- who turns out to be Kasumi Tendo.
 * The Bet: The titular bet is made between a crowd of gods, spirits, fae, and other metaphysical beings, to see who can make the biggest difference in one of several "stock" timelines with the smallest initial change.
 * Bonus Material: Many, if not most, of the entries had some manner of Omake appended to them, either supplemental material or completely unrelated stories or vignettes.
 * Crossover: Almost every Bet fic involved some degree of crossover, outside of that inherent in the framing device.
 * Crossover Cosmology: The crowd of gods lounging around the Well of Urd and tossing pebbles in includes figures from just about every pantheon ever worshiped by humanity, as well as a few non-human gods.
 * Dead Fic: Technically every story which merely set up a premise with the intention of completion if/when it won the titular Bet.  However, Featherbrite's Tale, the winner of the Bet, became a dead fic twice over:  Two incomplete versions exist of this story, and the reasonably alert reader can extrapolate the most likely climax and ending it would have had.  But that's not nearly as satisfying as seeing it completed would have been.
 * De-Power: One story revolves around most of the Sailor Senshi losing their powers -- and recruiting a bevy of crossover characters to take their places.
 * The Dreaded: In The Bet: Study in Scarlet, Akane Tendo is thrown into the far distant future after an ill-worded wish.  The story is about what happens when she finally finds a way back -- but in the several centuries she spent finding a way to do so she became known as "Scarlet", a legendary and universally-feared villain in that era, whose very name struck terror into the hearts of even other villains.
 * Drunken Boxing: In at least one story, Ranma Saotome teaches Usagi Tsukino drunken-style kung fu in order to take advantage of her Dojikko tendencies.
 * The Fair Folk: Titania, Oberon and even Puck participated.  Titania's entry ultimately won.  Naturally it involves both the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.
 * Fandom-Specific Plot:
 * The Bet prompted a spate of "what if someone else raised Ranma" stories, with everyone from Elminster of the Forgotten Realms to Bugs Bunny taking Ranma off Genma's hands as a youngster and arriving with him, somewhat... differently trained, on the Tendos' doorstep years later.
 * The infamous Ranma ½ "Passion Spice" plot gets at least referenced in a few stories. By this time it was already viewed as an overused cliche so its presence is almost certainly for humorous purposes only.
 * Fanon: These stories and ones related to them are in part responsible for creating (or at least promulgating) some of the most egregious examples of early anime fanon.
 * For Want of a Nail: The point of The Bet:  The various supernatural beings are competing to see how big a cascade of changes they can make with the smallest "nail".  Interestingly, their changes frequently "rescue" timelines where there has already been something that went terribly wrong later, by changing them at some earlier point where they are identical to the "base" timeline.
 * Fuku Fic: More than a few variations on the theme appeared as challengers.  The winner of The Bet was, in fact, a Fuku Fic set in a world where Sailor Moon is totally fictional.
 * Gay Paree: In A Fistful of Omake: What If Bugs Bunny Raised Ranma?, Ranma briefly invokes Pepe Le Pew to mess with Akane, incidentally turning the Tendo sitting room into a 1920s-vintage French bistro and putting both Nabiki and Kasumi into berets, striped shirts, and suspenders. Nabiki also briefly gains a French accent.
 * Go-Karting with Bowser: Even a few evil beings joined in on the Bet, not to cause chaos, but simply to take part in the fun.
 * Mega Crossover: In addition to the overarching context of the Bet itself, some of the individual entries and related stories -- such as Rune With a View -- are set in Mega Crossover worlds. Other fanfics, such as Oh! My Brother and The Bitter End are also incorporated into the setting by explicit reference or implication.
 * Multiverse: Inherent in the premise, with the gods able to change existing universes and spawn new ones using the Well of Urd.
 * Parody: At least half a dozen outright parodies of The Bet were written during its lifetime.
 * Peggy Sue: Toyed with in The Bet: A Study in Scarlet, where Akane found a way back to the day Ranma arrived after an ill-worded wish dropped her in a far, far-future era after Ranma's bloodline died out, and she spent several centuries getting back (in the process becoming a legendary and universally-feared villain in that era). Problem is she seems to have forgotten a lot about human society (one does not use pain-inflicting pressure points to impress a prospective mate, even if putting them through a wall would somehow slide).
 * Retired Monster: Toltiir, who originated in early-1990s-vintage stories written by Sharp about his Dungeons & Dragons campaign but became a pivotal figure in his later anime fanfiction and was prominent in, even central to, The Bet. Toltiir used to be an Elder God of Chaos aeons ago, but in more recent eras has been satisfied to be a much more relaxed god of Mischief instead.
 * Self-Insert Fic: Both Sharp and Ornstead propagated their Author Avatars from other fics into The Bet.  Sharp often employed his avatar Greylle, a hapless Butt Monkey stuck in a dead-end job in a third-rate Celestial intervention agency; Ornstead's infamous Skysaber was actually apotheosized into a literal god during the course of The Bet.  Several other authors created or imported Author Avatars as well.
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Sometimes an explicit goal of a particular entry in The Bet, sometimes a side effect when a "darkline" (an Alternate Timeline where a major character or characters died or something else went terribly wrong) is used for the entry.