#ranma½

Well I'll start with saying that my points are relevant to the manga, and the anime has the same flaws but those flaws are mostly because it's imitating the manga, and the manga was a product of its time (1987), its setting, and its audience (young boys; literally and explicitly shonen.)

tl;dr: Ranma is a cheap gag light-fanservice "boy's" manga. There is no meaningful continuity, character growth, or closure intended. The author leans into being a one-trick pony who really shines at making you wish she was trying to be more. ...but she's paying her rent. That's it.

But it could be so much more and it seems like it's going to be if you're starry-eyed and naive.

(The anime had moments of self-aware brilliance that the manga lacked. The manga had moments of beauty that the anime lacked. This is par for the course with adaptations.)

That said, I didn't have the opportunity to watch much of the anime back when I was enthusiastic about Ranma. ...and by the time I could have all of the anime I wanted, I was at least ambivalent.

The manga runs to something like 30 volumes, and I'd wholeheartedly recommend reading the first volume and then stopping right the fuck there. ...but you'd miss out on a lot of the cast, so maybe you'll read a couple more, and a couple more, and eventually... ...you'll either embrace realize you're in a pointless engagement trap. Reading Ranma

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Basic story of Ranma½: There's a martial arts dad (Soun) with three daughters but only the youngest daughter--Akane--is really relevant. Because it turns out that Soun once made a deal with another martial arts friend that they'd marry their dojos together by making their kids get married.

So, when Ranma and his dad show up on day one after going on a years-long martial-arts-training pilgrimage, both older sisters nope right out of that situation and Akane's stuck being told she's marrying the guy. Well, she's the only martial artist in the house besides her dad, and Ranma's a martial artist.

It should be fine. And it's her duty. Her "giri" if you will. ...which same 'giri' is at the core of most or all Japanese tragedy from Utena to Kurosawa's works.

Oh, but if you spill cold water on Ranma he becomes a girl. Hot water changes him back to a guy. So he's both a performatively cocky asshole who can win any fight and also he's shameful because he's not purely masculine.

This is actually a pretty great setup. There are only two characters with any hinted-at depth, but they're both great and we want to know them better and--once the prurient fanservice slows and they have some genuine moments with each other--we want them to get along and become friends.

And then comes the first day of school, and we find out that there's this idea (not sure whose idea) that Akane is popular with guys and they can date her if they can defeat her in a fight, but she goes through them like a bowling ball through a house of cards. Every morning. Because she's a badass.

Her badassedness lasts almost two pages, and then Takahashi starts to Takahashi.

Takahashi-ing: Need to crap out some plot? Invent a new gimmicky character, have them be a big scary threat to the protagonists, then the protagonists win. That big threat character is now a joke forevermore. ...but at least you've added to the cast.

*sigh*

Everyone is subject to worfing but I'm angriest about Akane. Akane was a badass! But women aren't allowed to be stronger than the male lead 9_9

(There's a cute bit in one of the anime OAV/movies where a sister asks Akane why she's packing, and Akane notes that usually when things are quiet like now it's because she's about to be kidnapped so Ranma can come rescue her from some new bozo, so she'd like to make sure she has her stuff along so she can be comfortable.)

(aside: Akane is ALSO described as having muscular legs and arms, a strong punch that can shatter multiple boards with ease, and small breasts. Ranma frequently taunts her (what a catch. ...but he's a young boy and we'll give allowances, right? 9_9) by saying she's uncute, has no boobs, and has thick legs. ...and even in the manga the art doesn't really bear this up but in the anime they flat-out inflate her chest to arbitrary sizes.)

(Dang, but the anime had some really good stuff though. And the music.)

But yeah; every new volume a character would be introduced that might be gonna threaten Ranma's ability to...stay engaged to the girl he doesn't actually show any affection to? But he manages to win at the end and then that character becomes forgotten forever or they become a recurring joke character, or maybe they stay as a character we care about but who will ALSO never get any significant development or closure.

So here's my actual rant.

The first commercially-translated manga in the USA was--ostensibly--Dark Horse's adaptation of Lone Wolf and Cub. Lone Wolf was a big hit in Japan, and the writer for it--Kazuo Koike--went on to teach courses on how to be successful at writing manga.

Reportedly, these courses focused on making characters that the audience would care about. Get the audience invested in the people.

Rumiko Takahashi was one of the students. ...and I think she succeeded in learning exactly that one thing.

...because I STILL care--a little--about the Akane and Ukyou and Ryouga and even Ranma that I once thought I was getting to know. It still frustrates me that when I invested time and actual money (that I didn't have a lot of) into finding out what the middle and ending of their stories would be, it turned out that there was never any intention of having a story it was just a series of unending pointless gags like if I was reading Garfield and I was just misled because it was Japanese.

I dropped the manga after something-teen volumes, with something like a broken heart. (I have MULTIPLE fanfic out there (somewhere; I can't find 'em now) for Ranma; I was absurdly invested.) Later, I bumped into a Japanese-language version of the final volume and skimmed my way through it. As I recall, there was no story. This time the villain-of-the-volume was a dragon and Ranma won by the end and then he and Akane were no closer than they'd been at any point since the start of volume 2.

I still think the closing of volume one was the closest to a moment of sincerity the manga ever had.

...and I mourn the potential that was discarded.

But this is a permanent pattern.

Takahashi's best work was the Mermaid books. Laughing Target and her other horror were okay, but there were no people who mattered in them. Inu Yasha had potential and I started to care about the characters but...it became apparent it wasn't going to allow itself to have depth, IMHO. I gave up at under 20 volumes, anyway. I didn't get heavily into Maison Ikkoku or One Pound Gospel but I hear good things about both. ...but I'm burned out. I haven't even glanced at Rin-Ne or whatever nonsense she's churning out now.

Some attendees at prehistoric conventions when Rumiko Takahashi attended reported that she says she is very embarrassed about sincere romantic moments and she says she can't write them without breaking the tension with a gag that ruins it all.

(...also she got frustrated and prudish when people brought up the idea of Girl-Ranma having sex, but that's to be expected. "I don't think of such things and neither should you!" was the quote.)

An inability to cope with sincerely-expressed love as a plot point might be part of why Rumiko's works are always on the "they won't" side of "will-they-won't-they."

...where the thing they will or won't do includes literally anything that might signify development of romance, characters, or the story.

I met a 50-something woman in Japan once who confided in me that she envied our American culture because she and her husband would never hug in public or even hold hands and that statements of affection just weren't done, as a general rule. It's probably a culture thing. Performative gender roles for men don't include being Gomez Addams, I guess. More fool them.

(I have a close friend who says they're lately avoiding the Japanese light novels/webnovels/comics on the free translation websites almost as hard as the Chinese ones because of a stereotype they perceive that these stories are much more likely to be casually sexist or misogynistic.) (I don't really get it but I need to learn what the "guideverse" is to keep up, apparently.)

All this ranting? But really I only have myself to blame. Her stories about Lum were also gag-of-the-week and yet somehow I didn't expect much more from them. Her Mermaid stories didn't progress toward a solution. ...and I'd read my Manga! Manga! and knew that these works were mostly designed to be disposable distractions to kill time and not to be taken seriously.

Rumiko wrote her stories to "pay the rent." If you write a compact and pithy story with a beginning, a middle, and an end? You eat for a year. If you write a story with a beginning and a middle and a middle and a middle and a middle and a middle... ...perhaps you get to be a worldwide phenomenon and a household term in some circles and also somewhat well off? And it's only at the expense of the art. And of readers like me.

Thanks for reading/skimming. Don't let me yuck your yum. Good luck at you.