Phoenix Gets Its First Review

In my previous blog post, I mentioned in an aside that we can't easily predict ourselves. If you'd caught me in October of 2025 and asked me what the odds were of my writing a novel, starting the next month, I would have said “vanishingly small”. And once I'd begun writing Phoenix, if you'd asked me if it would end up as a co-writing project with my spouse, I'd also have expressed deep skepticism. Yet that's exactly what happened.

The signs were there, of course. I've been expressing ideas in story form for some considerable time, often with themes of identity and transformation (somewhat loosely calling the genre I write in “identity horror”). And I've been thinking about how minds of all kinds work for at least as long, connecting with both psychology and philosophy of mind.

We had been watching Netflix's new adaptation of Ranma ½, an anime and manga series that features a character whose physical embodiment changes (switching sex when splashed with cold water; with the character largely rolling with this change successfully and the show exploiting the situations for comedy), and when we got to the episodes making up the Cat's Tongue Arc, where Ranma cannot change back for about three weeks, I felt like the psychological aspects of the scenario were being underexplored.

In the show, Ranma often seems to delight in play-acting as a young woman, even if he also laments his “curse”. Given that background, there seemed to be two possible ways being stuck for an extended period could go: one would be that he would tire of it and want to be back to normal with ever-increasing desperation to the point of severe dysfunction; the other would be that his performance might give way to genuine identification. There is an apropos quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” With those thoughts in my mind, I turned to my spouse and said, “The fan fiction writes itself!”

But of course it doesn't. Even as I could see, in that moment, that there was a pretty compelling story that I could write, it would take work to manifest it. In a slightly different world, I would have just left it there. But something about our current world—including the political discourse on identity issues and the unique population of people I see at Mudd every day—pushed me to actually do it. I could write something that showed the complexity of identity; that challenged simplistic views; that built empathy.

The hook for Phoenix is

Phoenix is a transformative novel inspired by Ranma ½—but it flips the genre from martial-arts comedy to psychological drama.

It treats the series’s gender-switch premise with realism, with themes of identity, gender, family, trauma, and love. There’s still absurd humor and plenty of plot, but it also goes deep. Ultimately it’s hopeful—a love story and a celebration of womanhood in all its messy glory.

Works as a standalone (preface included).

So it wasn't just a story about identity; it was also, like my recent story “Two-Body Problem”, a refutation of the idea that “mere words” are insufficient to convey lived experience—we don't need direct experience of something to meaningfully imagine it and empathize with it. And hopefully it was just a good story, too, with characters you'd grow to care about facing real challenges.

The site for the book went live on Christmas Day, 2025, and all I needed to do was tell people about it. Alas, that did not go nearly in the way I planned.

I had a little-used account on Reddit (/u/ProfONeill) that I used for anything actually associated with my professional identity (mostly things related to the PCG random-number generator and my solutions for Advent of Code), and wrote up brief announcements sharing the work on the /r/lgbt and /r/ranma subreddits, since those seemed most relevant. Alas, a sudden post about linking to a previously unknown website after a long period of inactivity triggered Reddit’s bot-detection systems, and not only did the posts vanish, my entire account was banned, and appeals to restore it failed.

Given my penchant for writing stories about identity (including a number not (yet) on this site that could be described as AI coming-of-age stories), I found the irony of being banned from Reddit because I'd been classified as a robot quite rich, in a ironic sort of way.

But while researching things for the story, I'd stumbled upon a site that curated reviews of Ranma ½ fan fiction that explored identity themes. The site has been online largely unchanged for years, and has very much a Web 1.0 vibe. I wasn't sure if it wasn't a bit of a Mary-Celeste site—a bit of a ghost ship, pickled in time, not updated for years. But the site's creator had an invitation for people who knew of other similar works to reach out and let them know, and so I took a chance and emailed them about Phoenix. It felt like a long shot; probably my email would vanish into a spambox somewhere.

But no, the site's creator was reading their email on Christmas Day, and they replied quickly, expressing interest in reading the novel. And a few days later, a review went up on the site.

I'll reproduce the whole review below, but the short version is that the reviewer, Darkchilde, really liked it. In fact, they put it in the top two Ranma ½ fan fiction works they'd ever read, which is quite an endorsement given how much material is out there.

It may take the story a little longer than I'd hoped to reach a wider audience, but that kind of reception helps me feel like the effort was worthwhile. If I'm lucky, word of mouth will spread, and more people will read it over time, not just in the Ranma ½ fandom, but more broadly. We'll see.

If you want to read it yourself, it's available for free at https://phoenix.team-us.org/. There's an ePub version for easy reading on eReaders, tablets, or phones, and an on-line reading version as well.

The Review

Here's the review, as found on Darkchilde's Ranma ½ Fanfic Reviews. I'll let Darkchilde's words speak for themselves.

Phoenix

There are many, many fanfics about Ranma 1/2. Most of them revolve around the various fights he gets into. There are two fanfics, though, that stand out to me, being incredible works with a lot of originality in them.

One is Genma's Daughter. The other is the new one I read which is called Phoenix.

The first thing the author does which almost nobody else bothers with doing is to describe the purpose of the story. I'm going to quote it below.

'It treats the series' gender-switch premise with realism, with themes of identity, gender, family, trauma and love. There's still absurd humor and plenty of plot, but it also goes deep. Ultimately it's hopeful-a love story and a celebration of womanhood in all its messy glory.'

So, does it manage to do that successfully? Absolutely. It does it and in spades.

There are parts of the story that will hit you and hit you hard. There will be parts of the story that may, as it did to me, lead you to hatred of a few of the characters. "You will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16), emphasizing that a person's true character, faith, or intentions are revealed not by what they say, but by their conduct, behavior, and the results (or "fruits") of their life and ministry.

The story is that moving.

Yet another thing the author does very well is to set out the themes of the story and these include love, identity, belonging and truly knowing yourself.

A thought came to me while I was reading it and that was some of the characters, if they were actually real and did what they did in the fanfic (and the anime series) would end up with some very serious charges against them, charges which would lead to well-deserved jail time. A lot of it.

Anyhow, enough of that. In general what happens is starting off with the 'normal' type of things for Ranma. Cologne does something to Ranma which influences the entire book. The rest of the book is Ranma trying to deal with that.

The result: Ranma is trapped in her female body. There's no changing back. Think about this for a minute. In the past Ranma shifted bodies and managed rather well. She knew that, with some hot water, she would return to her 'manly' self.

In this case, though, there appears to be no changing back. She has to deal with a very sudden shift in her physical form with differences in how she thinks. Every single aspect of her life, including school, is now controlled by what Cologne did to her. Imaging that happening to you. Change of gender with absolutely no warning. Everything you learned growing up in a particular gender suddenly has to be re-evaluated. Many aspects of your life have to be changed, even things like the clothing you wear.

Further, how does someone born male deal with becoming female (fully operational female) and adjust to things like having a period? Being shorter? Being treated differently because you are a female? Knowing that the only way to change back is to face off against a major foe.

In addition, she meets a bunch of the characters from the series and has to deal with them, too.

How do the people you have lived with deal with the change? Will they be supportive or even worse just ignore you.

How do you deal with your father who has basically abused you all your life, taking you away from your own mother and putting you through physical challenge after physical challenge to harden you into being a man among men when now you are a woman?

Further, can all this bring you to the point where you are willing to die?

This is a tremendously thought-provoking story. There are parts where you will be angry and parts where tears might come to your eyes.