#trans!ranma

Did I go overboard with the textures on this piece? Yes

It that how shadows work? No

Am I calling this done anyway? Yes, yes I am

This is the FINALLY FINISHED version of the RanAka exchange piece that I did a year and a half ago for my bff @nabikitendos based on their coffee shop au. I think this piece needs a ficlet written for it if you know what I’m saying 

Anyway, all I did was clean up the lineart, added some values and shading to make it less flat and slapped on a very simple bg. Below the cut is the original sketch and a 50% look because the original file was too big for a 100% lol

Herb: The gender bus is leaving

Ranma:

Y’all, I don’t often do this, especially not with fandoms that I haven’t interacted with before, but please, I need y’all to read and give love to this fic and the lovely gal who wrote it: “Life is Not Built with Dreams (But Dreams are Upon which Life is Built)” by NobleHeroine.

It’s a fic set in the Ranma 1/2 universe, and if you’re not familiar with Ranma, don’t worry, neither was I until a week ago when I first found this author’s work. You get the gist of things very quickly but tldr: Ranma is a karate boy cursed to turn into a redheaded woman whenever he touches cold water, but it turns out he kinda likes it, and also his deadbeat dad wants to marry him off to a bunch of ladies.

I love all of Heroine’s fics because of the different and deeply compelling ways she explores Ranma’s ever-evolving relationship with gender, but this one deals less with that and more with one of Ranma’s betrothed, Akane, who receives a vision of the future in which she has found the polycule of her dreams and is reveling in all the ways in which she is satisfied -romantically and pruriently- with this unique arrangement...

...only to have it snatched away as a result of magical realism shenanigans, brought back to a reality in which all of her future lovers currently hate each other, leaving only the memory of bliss and some of the years leading up to it.

Now finding herself starting all over again as a teenager, Akane has to figure out if she wants to pursue this beautiful dream, and how she might go about doing that.

What I love about this fic is that it plays with fic tropes in a really neat way: All fics take characters that we know and love and put them in new situations, knowing that the gravity of their personalities will inevitably draw them together time and again. This cheekily plays into that meta-narrative by giving Akane a glimpse of such a fic, but not giving her the instructions on how to accomplish it. She only learns that such a thing is possible, and on rare occasion, when certain events happen much as they did in the fictitious time line, she gets a pang of deja-vu to let her know that she’s on the right path.