Bryce Reviews Fanfiction

Out of Rangers: a review of Gerard Andrews' Out of Range

Abandon all hope, ye who read fanfic here

For my second review, I'll be taking a critical look at Gerard Andrews' 1996 fanfic, Out of Range. At just over 100,000 words, it's substantial but not overlong, and it's illustrated (not especially well - but still, there's an effort.) Promising, right? Don't worry, that bothersome hopefulness you may be experiencing will be probably be brief, and you won't see it again for several chapters if ever.

Since Out of Range starts out solidly in the territory of Gadget angst fic, it invites comparisons to the later work Gadget in Chains, by Loneheart, which holds the dubious distinction of being the pièce de résistance of the category. (Reviewed here.) The two works, though, are truly a study in contrasts despite both being dark stories in which terrible, violent things happen to Gadget and her friends. Poor Gadget. I guess no one would want to read a novel-length fanfic wherein Gadget frolicks happily about in an Edenic paradise and eats giant strawberries, but some authors just seem to like torturing her. One thing that definitely sets the two stories apart, though, is the mood. Objectively, Out of Range is a lot more dismal for Gadget, yet the overall mood of the work is considerably lighter. In a way, Out of Range and Gadget in Chains are oddly complementary, as shown in this table:

	Gadget in Chains	Out of Range
Prose	Consistently competent, if purple.	Amateurish (but improves slightly in later chapters), Often amusing for the wrong reasons.
Pacing	Repetitive, drags on forever, perfunctory ending.	Reasonable pace, strong conclusion.
Romantic Pairings	Gadget and Chip, Gadget and a big ugly rat.	Gadget and Dale*, Gadget and handsome, brilliant, supportive physician who saves her life.
Objective Horribleness	Really Bad.	Even worse.
Canonical Characters becoming suicide bombers	0	1**
Subjective Horribleness	Variably extreme.	Extremely variable.
Chapters until Sexual Assault	21	8
Happy Gadget	Simply not allowed.	Sometimes.
Crossovers	The Great Mouse Detective	The Rescuers, The Rats of NIMH
Gadget's Dad	Very dead.	Not as dead.
Ending	"Happy."	"Happy." Chip and Dale are still dead!

*This nascent relationship is compromised by Dale's difficult existential problems, but the inclusion is nonetheless justified since the author explicitly tells us that Gadget would have married him.

**I'm not making this up, really.

It Could Be Worse

You may object to my claim that Out of Range is objectively worse that Gadget in Chains. "How could anything possibly be worse for Gadget than what happened in Gadget in Chains?"
This is a fair question. Here's the straight answer: before the proper start of the story, all of the Rangers, except for Gadget, are killed in a poison gas attack. Gadget, nearly broken herself, must haul an unconscious squirrel out of a cave by herself, and takes quite a further beating doing so. She gets back home and discovers that she's apparently been raped and is pregnant as a result. It continues downhill for the next couple chapters. There's no build up to any of this; it has all the subtlety of a random stranger walking up to you and punching you in the face. Oh, and like Loneheart, Andrews can't resist cutting Gadget open with improvised surgical equipment. (Why don't they ever use normal instruments, like, say, Toffee hammers?)

Still, Out of Range is not nearly as angsty as it could have been. Gadget is usually kept too busy to spend much time feeling sorry for herself, and the author even lets her be happy from time to time. She gets a supportive and competent love interest, and most of the characters treat her politely or better. Overall, it has the feel of an action-adventure story rather than a brooding tragedy.

The Characters and Plot

For obvious reasons, Out of Range makes little use of canonical Rescue Rangers characters other than Gadget. Indeed, while Gadget has the best claim to being the protagonist, she shares the spotlight with a large cast of original and crossover characters. Some of them are memorable, some not. Among them we've got a couple of differently-able rodents who are sort of interesting, a stuttering squirrel kid whose speech impediment is mercilessly mocked, and various characters from The Rats of NIMH and from The Rescuers. These canonical characters are usually characterized adequately, although they get their share of out-of-character moments and bad dramatic dialogue. (Of course, poorly written dialogue doesn't doom a work, as proven by George Lucas.)

Foremost among the original characters is Devin Packard, DVM, Gadget's savior-cum-boyfriend in this tale. He's smart, resourceful, and sensitive - perfect, really; his only major issue (his criminal family) is manifestly not his fault. That said, as a fairly classical hero, Devin isn't actually unlikable or annoying, he's just a rather bland character. He does get a little bit of real development when he decides to dispense with all that bothersome professional ethics nonsense and shack up with Gadget. Regardless, Devin is more something out of the fanciful imaginations of one of those obnoxious pre-med students than the well-developed and complex character that the main character's love interest should ideally be. The other major original character is a mysterious rat of mystery, Turner, who is somewhat more complex, but in a way that comes across more as schizophrenic than deep. On the other hand, given what has happened to him, this may be justified.

The plot itself is reasonably engaging. However, it has its share of logical and scientific problems. (No doubt Ilya Ivanov would be thrilled by the possibilities presented.) The author tries his hand at foreshadowing a few times, but it is usually only a chapter or so in advance of the foreshadowed event. Also, some things played for mystery are in fact laughably predictable; I guessed the identity of the mysterious inventor in the involuntary employ of the bad guys within two sentences of his introduction. Andrews does manage a successful use of Chekov's Gun, though, near the dénouement.

One subplot includes Gadget taking the entrance examinations for medical school. Now, I know Gadget is smart - this is not in question; she built a successful orbital spacecraft from junk, in a dump in less than a day. I'll even grant that she can be empathetic... sometimes. However, there is more to being a physician than being intelligent. Regardless of how badly some people in the fandom would like to play doctor with Gadget, I can think of a lot of reasons why it would be a bad idea for someone such as her to become one. Gadget might just have some issues to work out before she's entrusted with that kind of responsibility. Zipper will back me up on this.

An area to which Andrews appears to devote meticulous attention is using terms like "paws" and "headfur" in reference to the characters' hands and hair. While this is initially refreshing in light of the tendency for Rescue Rangers fanfic (and sometimes even the TV show, for that matter) to forget that the characters are small rodents, Out of Range goes too far in the other direction. Chip and Dale may have "headfur," but no reasonable person would call what Gadget has anything but hair! The care given to using the "correct" words and minding size considerations also makes it freakishly jarring when a very pregnant Gadget is described as having swallowed a watermelon, a mental image that recalls the terrible fates inflicted on the poor creature by exceptionally deviant artists.

Speaking of "art," Out of Range is illustrated by Keith Elder. Most of the canonical characters in the illustrations are extremely off-model; I suspect that rather than using the modelsheets, the artist was using photographs of one of those Rescue Rangers cereal premiums, taken by the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

On the whole the illustrations have decent composition and complement the story, but I can't get past the low technical quality. A surprising number of people have also contributed illustrations, a few of which are decent or nearly so. Andrews uses the gallery page to take a shot at a rude user on something called "Portal of Evil." Now, until I read this, I had never heard of that site, so I put the name into Google and found this discusison of Out of Range. What the commentators there lack in wit, they make up for in... well, nothing really, but some of them also seem to have found the story overly angsty and troubled with cheesy dramatic writing, at least when they had finished making pop culture references and confusing the National Institute of Mental Health with a kind of battery.

Last Words

The best part of Out of Range is definitely the ending. It's rather bizarre, though - a major Rescue Rangers character conducts a suicide bombing of the United Nations (no, it doesn't really make sense even in context, it's dropped out of the sky... literally); Gadget is shot for dramatic purposes; there is the big reveal about the parentage of Gadget's baby, and the bad guy is properly dealt with.

I'm not sure what motivates people to write long, angsty fanfics about the Rangers suffering, but I've noticed that Gadget is definitely the most likely to be selected by a fanfic writer as the victim in these things. Perhaps this troubling disparity in angst fic is due to a lack of ideas, so here are some suggestions for future writers — just pick one or more and run with it:

A Digression: Suggestions for Original, non-Gadget Angst Fics
Victim	Possible Plots
Monty	Has heart attack, struggles to give up cheese	Confronts dark past as a mercenary, war criminal	Must reveal that he is Gadget's biological father
Zipper	Vicitm of anti-fly hate crime	Must complete life cycle by breeding, then dying	Attempts suicide because of underappreciation
Chip	Goes to prison for stealing Donald Duck's boats	Delusionally interprets Sparky as arch-nemesis	Forcibly cured of "deviant" mouse fetish by controversial therapist
Dale	Overcomes hitherto unmentioned addiction to narcotics (Note: hallucinogens have already been addressed)	Plays Dungeons and Dragons with Foxglove, lured into occultism and must be rescued from Satanic cult	Deals with complicated issues of gender identity
Lahwhinie	Exiled from village, resorts to prostitution to survive Nevermind, this has been done.	Mistaken for Gadget by the Ranger's enemies, to terrible consequences	Realizes she is, in fact, in love with Monty, to great mutual confusion
Sparky	To be used for LD-50 testing, must escape lab	Realizes that going to MIT has ruined his chances with Gadget, a Caltech alumna	Develops time machine, stranded in past, romances Olivia Flaversham
Flash the Wonder Dog	TV show canceled, replaced by insipid bobcat	Bitten by rabid wolf, faces certain death	Savages Fat Cat in brutal revenge killing
Foxglove	Gets White Nose syndrome	Accidentally eats Zipper, attempts to conceal mistake	Involved in bat-bird gang war
Tammy	Moves to Iran, Co-stars in in-joke laden sprite comic	Sustains mortal injury in duel to the death with Clarice for affections of Chip	Learns her father was Squirrel King referred to by Nietzsche

In conclusion, if you can get past the dismal opening and the fact that Gadget is the only Rescue Rangers character among the protagonists, and if you have a very facile suspension of disbelief, then Out of Range is at least a passable story. It has its enjoyable and dramatic moments, but overall, it's a mediocre hurt-comfort fic, saved from forgetability mainly by the shock value of its opening.