Ranma 1/2, Vols. 1 & 2

March 16, 2014 by 2 Comments

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

(pre-review note #1: I use ‘Ryouga’ and ‘Ukyou’ when I romanize, though otherwise stick to Viz romanization. It’s a 90s fanfic writer quirk that I am unlikely to break the habit of, as I am stubborn.)

(pre-review note #2: Few comment on my reviews anyway, but just in case: please do not character bash in the comments, at all.)

It’s quite odd seeing reviews of the new Ranma 1/2 omnibus from people who haven’t read it before, as they talk about all the craziness that simply doesn’t register with me anymore. I am almost saturated with the first two volumes of Ranma contained here. Not only have I read it when Viz first released it in 32-page pamphlet comics, and then again as collected works, but so much Ranma fanfiction uses the same opening as a springboard for its own ideas (or lack thereof) that I can almost recite some of the dialogue. “And I’m better built to boot!” “She’s really a sweet girl, she’s just a violent maniac.” And so many others. So, in a sense, there’s no real way I can review this for a newbie. As such, this is more of a look at Ranma in retrospect, and will be liberally laced with spoilers. Short review for those who don’t want to read on: Ranma 1/2 is a lot of fun, and in these first two volumes you can see Takahashi shift her characters to where they are funniest.

ranma1-2

For those who picked up the last iteration of Ranma, the scans used do look better – there’s still no color pages (there weren’t in the Japanese volumes either), but it’s not as dark and muddy as it once was. The translation is ‘spiffed up’ a bit, but is still essentially the same, so anyone who wants honorifics is out of luck. There’s a bubble order error on Page 1 (which everyone has noticed), but otherwise things seem well put together.

It’s worth noting that this was the new series Takahashi had in Shonen Sunday to replace her breakaway hit, Urusei Yatsura. For all that it repeatedly failed in North America, the manga was an instant classic in Japan, and I imagine there was some pressure on her to keep the comedy she did best while making things slightly different. Akane in these first couple of volumes is not all that far off from Shinobu Miyaki, Ataru’s long-suffering childhood friend and ex-girlfriend. Same general sweetness when not placed in stressful situations, same hair-trigger temper, same ability to beat up anyone who activates that hair-trigger temper. As such, it’s refreshing that Ranma is so different – at least at first. Sure, he shoots his mouth off without thinking, but he’s quite observant here, noticing people’s emotional states without commenting and playing off that. Most importantly, Ranma’s interest in scoring with women is zero, and this will not change for the next 18 omnibuses after this one. Ataru was a giant lech who wanted every cute girl in the universe. Ranma has issues dealing with girls, and tends to prefer fighting instead.

As for the others, Genma comes from a line of horrible Takahashi fathers that extends from Mr. Fujinami all the way to Rin-Ne’s horrible debt-ridden dad. Genma is obsessed with fighting and training, but is too dumb to listen when people tell him there’s a cursed spring ahead – though, to be fair, so is Ranma. He also tends to stay in his panda form almost as much as Ranma does his girl form, possibly for the same reason – he looks cuter that way. Meanwhile, Soun is something of a nonentity, and this will not change much either – his observation is the opposite of Ranma, as he is in the bath when P-chan leaps in and Ryouga leaps out, but presumably does not ever think “should I stop this man with a pig curse from sleeping with my innocent daughter every night?”.

Kasumi and Nabiki seem quite different at the start of the series. Nabiki is the ‘normal’ girl, who’s clearly OK with being engaged if the guy is cute, but is unwilling to put up with the guy being weird – which Ranma definitely is. Kasumi seems actually vexed at several points in Chapter One, and talks about how she prefers older men – clearly meant to hint at the start of her plot with Dr. Tofu that goes nowhere. As the volume moves on, though, we see the light bulb go off over Takahashi’s head as to how they’ll be handled in the future. With Nabiki it’s selling the photos to Kuno, something for which she is gleefully unapologetic. It’s the start of something big. And Kasumi gets to visit Dr. Tofu, but he’s so oblivious to anything and everything while she’s around that it’s obvious to anyone what she does to him – obvious to anyone but her. Kasumi’s breezy Yamato Nadesico-ness, and her tendency to think the best of everyone while missing the darker points, will become her standard character trait.

So far, the only supernatural aspect of Ranma we’ve seen is the curse itself, as opposed to Urusei Yatsura’s aliens bringing the excuse for any sort of plot whatsoever simply by virtue of being from another world. But that’s OK, as Ranma is far more focused on fighting. Not only are Ranma and Genma perfecting their own style of Japanese martial arts – which utilizes many different styles, most of which I suspect are ‘what looks really cool?’ – but we also get to see Akane’s kempo-influenced style (her family and Ranma’s supposedly have the same ‘anything goes’ background, but Akane has not been training around Asia for the last 10 years either) and Kuno’s kendo training with a wooden sword. Ranma is shown to be an excellent fighter, but is thankfully not perfect – he tends to underestimate his opponents, such as Kuno and Ryouga here, and ends up not giving his best effort till he’s already injured as a result.

Speaking of Kuno and Ryouga, let’s talk about them. Shutaro Mendou had his moments of complete idiocy, but could at heart behave like a normal person if pressed or girls were watching him. Tatewaki Kuno has no such normalcy filter, for reasons that we won’t find out for some time but are essentially similar to Ranma’s – “boy, my entire family is screwed up”. It’s worth noting that he and Nabiki interact purely by dint of being in the same class, and he even notes casually that he despises her at one point. Well, that’s one ship sunk. No one could possibly write Tatewaki/Nabiki after reading that. :) As for Ryouga, what most struck me wasn’t all of the anger he possesses – Ryouga is an out-of-control berserker here, with none of the sweetness and depression that will flesh him out later – but how much he looked like Ataru. It won’t be as obvious to those who haven’t seen the final few volumes of UY – Takahashi’s art evolved exponentially during that series – but put a bandana on Ataru by the end of UY and he’s basically Ryouga here. Ryouga, notably, DOES have a libido, but knows better than to do more than snuggle in Akane’s boobs as a pig – we don’t have a true lecherous pervert in the series. Yet.

I was amused at Ryouga not caring about Akane at all during the first fight – Ryouga tends to be focused only on fighting and revenge in this volume, and it’s only when Akane kisses his pig-form that he’s smitten – possibly as it’s the most affection he’s ever gotten from anyone. Ryouga’s sense of direction also comes up for the first time here, and it’s already exaggerated to its maximum – we see him at the Northern and Southern ends of Japan. As for P-chan, his arrival in the Tendo household sets up an obvious tension about how long it will be before his secret is revealed and Akane finds out who he is. The answer, of course, is never – this never comes up, likely as Takahashi knew it would require a response that would be too serious to cope with in the series.

Other characters we’re introduced to include Dr. Tofu, who’s an excellent doctor who’s useless once he sees Kasumi. This was once an amusing running gag, but seeing Tofu suffering the same effects when he sees a middle-school Kasumi show up with her elementary-school aged Akane feels horribly creepy now, and I won’t be sorry when he’s quietly phased out of the manga in a few more volumes. We also meet Kodachi, though she barely gets to appear before the omnibus ends. It’s still enough time to see that she’s a little bit crazy, and also tends to win her matches by crippling the opponent beforehand. As for her own family situation, it will have to wait till next time.

Lastly, it’s worth noting how well Ranma and Akane get along, despite the bickering and occasional misunderstandings. Usually everything is resolved in a chapter or so, and Ranma is not QUITE as thoughtless as he gets later on. They have common interests, and tend to work well when fighting together. Takahashi had gotten burned on UY when Lum became so popular she had to change the story to make her the lead girl, and though she came to approve of that, it wasn’t going to happen again. So here we get two whole volumes setting up how well Ranma and Akane go together, with the villains/rivals that we see so far mostly being comedic and/or focused entirely on revenge against Ranma for non-romance reasons. It will take a villain of a higher caliber to really create the first big rift between these two, one that will leave self-confidence and trust issues that never really get settled throughout the series. But Shampoo is in the next volume. For now, we’re introduced to Ranma Saotome and the craziness that surrounds him, and there’s a lot of it. If you’ve read Ranma, read it again. If you haven’t, go read it. And for God’s sake, please don’t take it seriously! That’s the WORST thing to do with this series! (looks up at backscroll, coughs a bit)

Filed Under: ranma 1/2, reviews

Because It’s Funny: Rumiko Takahashi and Characterization

April 27, 2011 by 4 Comments

I can’t find a copy of the interview in question, but someone once asked Rumiko Takahashi why Nabiki Tendou, a girl who in the first couple of chapters of Ranma 1/2 seemed to be a fairly normal Japanese girl, turned into a money-loving shark who would gladly sell out her family and friends and seemed to have no conscience or soul. Takahashi’s answer was “because it’s funny.”

I was reminded of this while reading Stefan’s post yesterday. Much of what I tend to think of as Ranma, including many characterizations that are almost thought of as canon these days, was never actually used by Rumiko Takahashi in the canon material. It was stuff invented by fans for their fanfics in order to make the characters easier to write, give a third dimension to, or just make more bearable. So we got ‘fanon’: Nabiki uses the money she extorts to finance repairs to the dojo, for example, or Kasumi being far more savvy than she lets on and using her yamato nadesico persona as a front. And yes, it could go the other direction as well: Akane hits Ranma because she is mentally unstable and needs psychiatric care.

See, Takahashi gave us, in both Urusei Yatsura and Ranma, great characters who it’s easy to love. We want to see them succeed, we want to laugh at their stupidity. But they are not fleshed out. They aren’t three-dimensional. They don’t feel real. They feel like characters in a goofy shonen manga that will do anything for a laugh. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Comedy is not pretty. It’s simply funnier to watch people be horrible to each other, and much easier to do so if they all can fall into basic patterns of behavior. Akane will jump to conclusions and hit Ranma. Ranma will say something insulting and thoughtless. Lum will get jealous and zap Ataru. These are the cornerstones of the series. And over the course of the series, while there is slight forward progress, if it has to be sacrificed so that we can see a huge pile of cast members screaming and hitting each other? So be it.

Of course, both UY and Ranma were turned into successful anime. Like all anime, they had to find ways of expanding the source material: if you animate 16-page chapters for a series, you’ll run out of material far quicker than you’d anticipate. Some of the ways they did this involved the characterization: the characters were softened, and didn’t seem to be such moral vacuums. At the same time, their traits were exaggerated for the comic effect that animation can provide. So you have Akane hitting Ranma even MORE. And it’s the anime, more than the manga, that fans are familiar with. As a result, these characterization seemed to stick more than the manga ones, even if they’re sort of once removed.

The same thing happened with Urusei Yatsura, where Mamoru Oshii, the series director for several seasons, had several battles with Takahashi about the direction of the series. And indeed, if you watch the UY anime Ataru, Lum, and the others get several ‘Awww, they’re really sweet after all!’ moments that just aren’t in the manga itself. Not to say the manga never had those moments. But they were much less common, and I think Takahashi preferred her characters to be petty, vindictive, and spiteful in the long run. That made plotting and comedy easy.

Comedy’s hard to write. Much easier to be dramatic. As a result, when you take series that give you some fun and fascinating characters, but then don’t do anything with them (no one reads UY or Ranma for the plot), and throw in an anime that sometimes exaggerates or softens said characters depending on the director or episode… well, you’ve got a recipe for fandom controversy. Bashing and Ship Wars didn’t start with Bleach, after all. Writing realism into Ranma and UY became a common theme in the mid to late 90s, and continues on a smaller level to this day. And if you try to realistically write a girl who habitually punches a man so hard he flies several city blocks… well, you’re going to have issues.

(On a side note, this is one reason why, much as I love it, I have some problems with Maison Ikkoku. Takahashi essentially did the same thing as Ranma fanfic writers, which is taking her wacky characters and placing them in a setting with far more realism, and realistic leads. Godai and Kyoko, however, despite their faults, were no Ataru and Lum. They were sympathetic people we really wanted to root for. As a result, when Mrs. Ichinose, Akemi, and especially Yotsuya messed with them for the lulz, I got a lot more irritated then I would at UY or Ranma characters. It just felt like it hurt more.)

I was unfamiliar with the concept of ‘bashing’ till I got into Ranma fandom. I didn’t see it quite as much with UY (though it was there), mostly as most fans liked the pairing of Ataru and Lum, and there were never any realistic rivals presented for the fans to argue over. Ranma, though, with the introduction of Shampoo and especially Ukyou, had alternatives. Both were harem series, but Ranma is a harem series in the modern definition: nothing ever gets decided, and the fans argue about who the lead guy will end up with till it dissolves into a screaming match. UY and Ranma both had ‘semi-open’ endings, where Takahashi implied that the couple would eventually get together… but didn’t actually show it. Therefore there is, in the mind of many, no canon pairing: Ranma and Akane did not get together in the end, therefore they are NOT together.

And yes, other characters got bashed as well. When you take a series about a bunch of insane goofy teenage martial-artists seriously, you suddenly realize “Hey, she’s a psychopath!” or “Hey, his motivations are guided by a misplaced hatred!”. Psychoanalyzing to death is the order of the day. It can make for good drama – hell, I did it myself back when I wrote Ranma fanfics. But it can also have some unfortunate consequences. There’s a line running from Ranma through Love Hina right to Harry Potter, a line which has fanfics whose basic plot can be described as ‘Lead male gets a backbone, decides to man up and shows the girls who’ve been tormenting him what for’. Part of this is a side consequence of weak male leads, which at least Ranma does not have to deal with. But it gets a bit unrealistic when the cast starts behaving in ways that are not remotely close to the source material. And much of it is driven more by ‘I hate Angry Girl X’ and shipping than anything else.

In the end, I started to ask myself, is it okay that Ranma and UY are essentially two-dimensional? They don’t have depth of characterization, even though they have great characters. There is no hero’s journey. Ryouko Mendou is hurling grenades and laughing like a loon in the final volumes, just as she did in her first appearance. But it’s still funny. And there is a wide variety of plots, especially in UY, where it seems that Takahashi could never stop thinking of insane material that made me impressed at her twisted mind. (A robot alien teacher shaped like a chalkboard eraser?) It’s a question of what one wants out of the material. Do you want wacky, Osaka-style comedy shenanigans? Well, you are the reason Takahashi is one of the richest manga authors in Japan. If you’re watching or reading Ranma or UY for the romance, or to see Akane come to terms with the fact that Ranma isn’t a pervert and she should stop leaping to conclusions… then she must be a very, very frustrating author for you. Perhaps you should write a fanfic about it?

Filed Under: manga moveable feast, ranma 1/2, urusei yatsura

Fear and Loathing in Nerima: The Real History of Ranma 1/2

April 26, 2011 by 10 Comments

(Sean here. This is a guest post by Stefan Gagne, better known as Twoflower. Stefan was the person who got me into Ranma, and hence manga, in the first place, so is also the perfect person to write a MMF post regarding the series.)

A little under two decades ago, I attended an overnight anime festival at a friend’s house. This was back when the amount of translated anime available was quite limited, and we had to pool together a pile of VHS tapes for communal watching if we wanted to watch anything at all. Didn’t matter if it was good or bad, so long as it was Japanese, and we could understand what they were saying.

During this rampage of mecha, pop idols, and comedy built around a completely different cultural axis of humor, I was exposed to a weird little show which started with a redhead beating up a panda in the middle of a rainstorm. It was confusing. It was amusing. It was gripping. This was my first taste of Ranma 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi’s martial arts romantic comedy.

It would become my fanboy obsession for nearly a decade.

It had it all: comedy, fighting, romance, fascinating characters, familiar patterns, things you could hook into again and again. I wrote endless amounts of fanfic for it, under my moniker, Stefan “Twoflower” Gagne — much as others were doing at the time, while the series was hot. Romance stories, dramatic stories, character portraits, elseworlds, *cough* self insert romantic dramatic portraits in an elseworlds, and so on.

For years, I wrote these stories, I watched the show, I bought the tapes. I played the characters in online roleplaying games. I was right there in the beating heart of Ranma 1/2 fandom. And eventually… I gave up on it.

I came to the realization that the fandom that had sprung around it was watching the series in Coke bottle thick rose colored glasses.

Through the eyes of fandom, the series was a DRAMA. It was about people fans knew and cared for, desperately yearning for love, trying to find resolution in their tumultuous lives. Cursed teenagers looking for cures. Destined romances seeking to overcome the obstacles in their path. Lost boys who just needed to be found…

In every fan’s eyes, there were one true pairings, and there was light at the end of the rainbow. Their struggles mirrored ours, and were thus deep and meaningful.

But in reality, Ranma 1/2 was a paper thin slapstick comedy built on mutual hatred, indifference, amorality, and endless failure for the amusement of the audience. Funny, to be true, but still not the work of great weight and wisdom that it was being heralded as.

Let’s take a look at what was ACTUALLY going on in Ranma 1/2. Here are the rules of the series, at the core.

—-

RULE #1. EXPRESSED AFFECTION IS ALWAYS WRONGHEADED.

Many characters profess deep spiritual love for someone. Often, for someone they just met five minutes ago and have nothing in common with, often someone who doesn’t even know they exist. Hardly a great basis to start a relationship on, but that’s just the root of the problem. The end results are worse.

In Ranma 1/2, anyone who claims to love someone will never, ever be loved back by that person. Be it genuine disinterest or abject emotional denial, it won’t see resolution, and the fallout is intense. Mousse loves Shampoo; Shampoo hates Mousse. Ryouga loves Akane; Akane barely knows Ryouga exists. In fact, the best these suitors can hope for is NOT to be beaten to a savage pulp on a regular basis by their supposedly destined true love.

There is only one two-directional romance in the series, Ranma and Akane, and even that is so tsundere that it makes Asuka look positively sedate. Ranma routinely insults Akane, Akane routinely beats the tar out of Ranma, both of them deny any affection whatsoever, and whatever feelings they have are buried under piles of miscommunication and passive aggression.

Only near the tail end of the manga do they have ANY sort of peace. And they’re the supposed “true love at first sight” pairing.

Is it really any surprise that fanfic’s been written about the two ending up in horrible spousal abuse scenarios?

RULE #2. EVERYONE HATES SOMEONE TO DEATH.

Nearly every character has one or more blood rivals who hate them and crave their utter destruction. (“Obstacle is for killing,” and so on.) These rivals will scheme, plot, cheat, and do whatever it takes to triumph over their enemy — even when their hatred is barely justifiable on any level. Being a martial arts comedy, rather than cold blooded murder this takes the form of beatings and attempted beatings.

Usually, this hate stems from “I love X, X loves you and not me, so you must die.” Ranma is on the receiving end of most of these, of course, being the alleged protagonist. Of course, being ultra-macho Ranma, he welcomes all this hatred as a chance to use his martial arts skills fighting off his enemies; he never seeks any other type of resolution beyond hoping they’ll go away or pounding them senseless. He’s not mature enough for anything else, and, well, see Rule #3 later
on.

There are no friendships to balance out all this hatred going around. Ranma and Akane have no friends, aside from two generic background characters each who only exist to occasionally tease them about their relationship problems. There’s no anchor of human compassion in this sea of loathing. Even Ranma’s own parents consist of an amoral madmen who routinely tortured and abused him in the name of martial arts training, and a mother who has vowed to murder him if he fails to live up to her standards.

(In her favor, Kasumi never has an unkind word for anyone. But she’s generally window dressing, there to smile and do the laundry and cook and clean, and doesn’t offer any actual, meaningful compassion and counsel.)

No, the best you can hope for in Ranma 1/2 is either indifference or temporary alliances.

The latter is the only form of loyalty to be found. When a common enemy arises, usually “The Bad Guy of This Movie Or OVA,” that’s when rivals unite. Typically, though, the bad guy needs to do something drastic like kidnap ALL the girls, or have some MacGuffin everybody wants. Only then can problems be put aside in favor of turning en masse on this one enemy… and once that’s done, it’s right back to the Circle of Hatred, as if nothing ever happened.

RULE #3. NOTHING EVER HAPPENS, EVER.

Nobody actually learns anything, nobody communicates, nobody matures. Time does not pass. School years don’t go by. Every day is exactly the same, with the same battles, the same schemes, the same problems.

This is situation comedy at its purest. Episode by episode, storyline by storyline. You could hack a few dozen chapters out of the middle and nobody would notice save for missing the first appearance of the occasional returning guest character. Zero sum input, zero sum output.

The real countdown clock for the series is not any sort of ongoing plot — it’s Rumiko Takahashi’s desire to beat her previous record for continuous volumes of a series. The series went on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on as long as she felt like writing it.

Only at the very end is there any resolution with Ranma and Akane… namely, a wedding that’s promptly attacked with high explosives by all the blood rivals from rule #2 who are upset about the end result of rule #1. The more things don’t change, the more they stay the same.

—-

In short, Ranma 1/2 is a series powered by hatred, driven by violence, and going nowhere.

Oh, it’s still quite funny, don’t get me wrong.

Total sociopathy is actually a pretty good formula. Most American sitcoms revolve around the cast being a bunch of wacky misanthropes. They don’t usually solve their problems with violence, but they still backstab and scheme and miscommunicate. Flawed characters who can’t sort out their own emotional baggage are funny as hell — their efforts will fail, their directions will be misguided, their insane plans will collapse. It’s all in good fun, ESPECIALLY when someone loses an eye.

But the disjoint between what fans WANTED Ranma 1/2 to be (a powerful dramatic romance), and what it actually was (a simple and amusing misanthropic slapstick comedy) was staggering. That’s where the problem lies; not with the series, but with the beast that grew around it, trying to solve its problems or deny they ever existed.

You’d have whole communities built around various ships, all claiming to be the one true romance, despite NONE of the romances including the official one ever really going anywhere. Fanfic was written to resolve this conflict between what the fans craved and what the series wasn’t actually providing. Cities burned and nations crumbled under the rampaging armies of otaku with differing views on the true destinies of the cast of Ranma 1/2. …okay, maybe not THAT bad.

Fandom can be a wonderful thing. It can bring people together, making human connections over a shared love of a thing. It can inspire sparks of creativity, driving people to study and interpret and play around… and Ranma, being shallow as a kiddie pool, sure had a LOT of room to interpret and play around. In a way, that was its greatest strength, and its greatest weakness.

In the end, there’s the manga, there’s the show, and it is what it is. By this point in history there are anime fans right now who weren’t even alive when otaku were watching the old Viz tapes of Ranma 1/2. What the legacy of the show will be, long after its initial perspective has faded, remains to be seen.

—-

Stefan Gagne is an indie game developer and original fiction author, and long time fanfic writer. He works as a webmaster in his day job and is currently working on Anachronauts, an original genre mashup adventure series. He does not hate otaku, honest.

Filed Under: manga moveable feast, ranma 1/2
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