Relatively Absent
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When Sailor Pluto kills herself with a timestop at Mugen Gakuen, the Gate of Time decides it wants a different guardian, one who will not impose her own agenda on the Gate's ancient mission and on the course of the future. The only candidate it can find, though, is a critically-injured Ranma, locked in female form and buried deep under a landslide in the aftermath of a failed confrontation with Prince Herb over the Chisuiton.
An incredibly well-written fic that was already building up to epic length when its author renounced fan fiction entirely and tried (with surprising success) to purge it from the Web.
2003-June 2009
http://web.archive.org/web/20121014103314/http://www.markshu.com/blog/
Tropes used in Relatively Absent include:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Edges sideway into this trope. The magical A.I.s in the Ginzuishou, the Gate of Time and the Silence Glaive have their own purposes and priorities that didn't align with those of their Silver Millennium owners, which is why they were (mostly) driven into a state of "hibernation". Once they awaken again, the actions they take to pursue those imperatives makes them appear to be going rogue.
- Alternate Universe: One key divergence is that Ranma does not escape the battle with Herb at Mount Horai unscathed, but instead was buried alive in the rockfall it caused.
- Arranged Marriage: The Emperor arranges a marriage between female!Ranma and his cousin Midori on very short notice, as a ploy to keep the Yamada ninja clan active as ninja. Not the purest example of the trope, as both Ranma and Midori are give the opportunity to object and back out -- but the dire political and social consequences of doing so are impressed upon both of them, and neither feels they can decline honorably.
- Creator Backlash: Shurtleff abruptly abandoned writing fanfiction in 2009, and enacted a complete purge of Relatively Absent and all his other works from the Net -- even from the Wayback Machine. In one of his last blog entries he seemed to regard it as an Old Shame that he no longer wanted associated with his name after shifting his focus to other projects, nor did he want anyone continuing this or his other incomplete stories.
- Dead Fic: After a prologue and eleven chapters written over six years, the story was abruptly abandoned by author Shurtleff (along with all his other fan writing).
- Death by Fanfic: Ryoga appears to have died in the collapse of Mount Horai. At least, the Yamada believe -- with good evidence -- that this is the case.
- Emergency Transformation: ((in which Ranma's chosen to replace Setsuna as Sailor Pluto after being buried in a landslide caused by the fight with Herb))
- Happily Adopted: Ranma's cousins, into the Yamada clan.
- In Medias Res: The story starts with the final moments of Ranma's battle with Herb on Mount Horai.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: This story a lost classic—if you can find it (usually as an archive maintained off-line by a fan), consider yourself incredibly lucky.
- Loophole Abuse: The Gate of Time is unable to disobey their guardian, who has for many thousands of years been Sailor Pluto, nor can it choose a different guardian. Unless its current guardian is dead -- which Pluto briefly is in the aftermath of Mugen Gakuen. The Gate takes advantage of its brief moment of opportunity before Pluto comes back from the dead to select and bond with a new guardian of its choice.
- Masquerade: Despite what they might think, the Sailor Senshi are far from the only paranormals active in the world. The Emperor's security staff alone has an entire troop of psionically-active agents.
- Ninja: Nodoka was born into one of the last surviving ninja clans in modern Japan. Ranma's four female cousins are also being trained as kunoichi.
- Signed Language: The Yamada clan ninja. We see them using it from the very first moments of the story, when Midori gives a new assignment to Harukichi with hand signals. And there's at least one scene where Matriarch Aiko has one conversation with one of her granddaughters on a verbal level, and a completely different one in the clan sign language.
- Understatement: The Gate's warning to Ranma that the bonding process might be "uncomfortable".
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Sailor Pluto long ago stopped communicating with the intelligence within the Gate of Time, considering it nothing more than an inanimate object. When Ranma explains to her that the Gate doesn't want her as a Guardian any more, Pluto refuses to believe it at first. It's only when it's obvious that the Gate is prompting Ranma with the instructions on how to finish the Guardian bonding process -- something that Pluto is the only person left alive who knows -- that she even considers the possibility.
- On the other hand, Sailor Moon has no problem accepting that the Ginzuishou has its own controlling intelligence once it starts talking to her and anyone else who'll listen.