Category Archives: manga moveable feast

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

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(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.

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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.

Aqua Volume 1

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By Kozue Amano. Released in Japan by Enix, serialized in the magazine Stencil. Released in North America by Tokyopop.

As part of my MMF post (and I will eventually review the book), a little history lesson. In the beginning there was Enix, a gaming and manga company that had several manga magazines it published, including Shonen Gangan and GFantasy. Stencil started out as a spinoff of GFantasy, attempting to be a bit more shoujo-oriented. It never quite succeeded, mostly as Enix has ALWAYS had an issue with basic shonen/shoujo demographics, even to this day. In any case, the magazine debuted in the late 1990s, and Kozue Amano’s Aqua debuted there. Life was apparently difficult at Enix, and their merger with another company, Square, had many of the artists and editors nervous. So in 2001, one of the editors left to form Mag Garden, and took a number of the artists with him. They also took their series, and planned to continue them in the new magazines that would debut. Oh, the lawsuits that followed! After litigation, Square Enix agreed to give Mag Garden some cash, but the titles that moved had to be renamed, even if only a little bit. And so Aqua, after two volumes, became Aria. Mag Garden bought the rights to Aqua from Square Enix at the same time, and reprinted the volumes under their own banner and with new covers. This is the version that Tokyopop has licensed.

For those who are perhaps unaware of the plot, Akari is a young woman from Earth (called “Manhome” here) in the year 2301. She is flying to the planet Aqua, formerly Mars, to become an undine – a female gondolier who guides people around in Venetian rowing boats, touring the city. Akari is bubbly and happy, and seems to find almost everything endlessly fascinating. She joins Aria company, which seems to be a company of two. The other person is her sempai Alicia, a beautiful and laid-back onee-san type. The manga continues as Akari learns the ins and outs of gondoliering, makes friends, and watches the amazing scenery.

It has been noted by many that the main reason to love Aqua/Aria is the world that we see, and indeed as the series goes on the backgrounds and settings get increasingly more elaborate, verging on what has become known as “Scenery Porn”. There’s less of that in this first volume, as Amano is still honing her craft, but we do see signs of what’s to come in a chapter where Akari and Aika (her grumpy yet lovable friend) attempt to follow their mascot through a maze of small alleys into the heart of Neo-Venezia, the city where they work. Most manga are character-based, but Aqua, while having fine characters, does manke you look at the whole page to take in everything, not just faces.

Aria was released first over here by ADV back in the day, and thus most people will be coming at Aqua after having read the ‘sequel’ series. It’s not a prequel, however, but a true start to the series, giving us many of the elements we’ll come to find familiar. The scenes with Alicia and Akari at the start will, in fact, be mirrored much later on in future volumes of Aria. I always enjoy when an artist works like that, as it gives the illusion of more planning ahead than was likely actually done. It shows they read their old work. The characters are still mostly sketches here, with Aika and Alicia not yet receiving the development they will get down the road, but we are just starting out. And there’s President Aria. I’ve learned to put up with him, but I don’t have to like him. He’s there for goofy comedy, and inescapable. Oh well.

So since we don’t have much characterization here, and plot is irrelevant to a series like Aqua, what’s left? Well, mood. While the overall effect of the series is relaxing and sunny, we do have our first example of the chapters where the sort of faux sci-fi setting becomes faux-fantastical horror with the introduction of Cait Sith, the giant leader of the cats that only Akari ever interacts with. The interaction barely occurs in this first volume – she just gets a glimpse of the huge convention of cats – but as the series goes on, she sees more and more of the beast, to the point where it almost becomes an arc of the plot. These chapters generally have a different feel from the rest of the series, with the sense of wonder being turned inward to look at darker (though not quite creepy, this is never threatening) things.

In many ways, this is a typical first volume. The art is not as good as it gets, and I note the redrawn cover has the unfortunate effect of making Akari look sad and melancholy, which she isn’t. Likewise, as we flesh out the world we get more shadings to folks like Alicia and Aika, who here are mostly just types. Still, if you haven’t read any of Aria yet, I would definitely start here, as it gives a lot of the background and information that helps you understand things as you read further. And it’s pretty. In all the best ways.

Karakuri Odette Volume 5

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By Julietta Suzuki. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Tokyopop.

It’s time for the Manga Movable Feast! Which means I finally get to talk about Odette. I read this 3 weeks ago but have been patiently waiting for the time to arrive so that I can review it and tell you all what a fun series this is. (For those interested, my prior reviews are here: http://suitablefortreatment.blogspot.com/search/label/karakuri%20odette)

One thing I found highly interesting about this volume is the way that it handled Chris. He was introduced to us in the second story as one of a series of killer assassin robots, but after Odette and Dr. Yoshizawa subdued him, he hasn’t really developed quite as well as the other cast members. We see that he has a certain jealousy at Asao’s easy interaction with Odette, but it comes to the point where he’s actually sidelined for the better part of two volumes because his battery life is lowering (which the author has implied – for both he and Odette – is due to stress). I’d often thought that his story would be very similar to Odette’s, and that she was simply more advanced and a bit ahead of him.

As we see in this volume, however, Chris’s problems are uniquely his own. We get a side-story dealing with one of the other Chris-Assassin-Bombs, who is sent to Italy to kill a professor. Unfortunately, he finds that the Professor is already dead, leaving him without a purpose. He then finds one as he not only bonds with the Professor’s cute daughter, but discovers that her uncle, the professor’s brother, is far more knowledgeable about the “accidental” death than is really allowable. The Chris shown here, his clone, may also lack outward emotions, but is shown to be caring and kind, even to the point where he sacrifices his own life for that of little Nicoletta’s. (And by the way, the expression on his face right as he explodes is fantastic, a sort of “You lose” grin.)

Meanwhile, we run into another advanced robot, this one named Travis. The comparison between Travis and Odette is striking – both are advanced robots who have a bit more ’emotion’, and have an extended family featuring their creator as well as another robot who is more deadpan and less advanced/emotive. Like attracts like, and it’s no surprise that he and Odette bond fairly quickly. Of course, he is a bit ahead of Odette in one area – he’s searching for a bride, and becomes convinced that Odette is the right one for him. Odette still hasn’t quite worked out the whole love thing yet.

And then there’s Odette’s wonderful younger sister-older brother relationship with Asao, once again the highlight of the volume. For all that he seems to hate having to be her mentor, his advice remains fantastic. The first chapter sees Odette once again upset at her robot strength, in a call-back to Volume 1. She’s not about to have the Professor alter it again, but she is depressed that she’s never going to be seen as ‘cute’ like her fragile friend Yoko. Asao, despite being stressed out as Odette is clearly feeling bad but not opening up, notes that being cute is not NEARLY as important as being cool – which Odette certainly is.

All of this ties in to the final two chapters of this volume, where all of this comes together. Chris has returned to Odette and school, but is as undemonstrative as ever, and Odette finds it frustrating, especially given that she’s had the occasion to meet Travis. She even bluntly notes that she wants Chris to be more like Travis. Of course, this also leads to one of Odette’s faults – she can get so carried away with discovering her own emotions and feelings that she doesn’t take in what other people are feeling. It’s up to Asao to set her straight, and it’s typical of him that it’s with a verbal gut punch. He notes she didn’t bother to think how CHRIS felt about things at all, only what she felt. Asao is especially irritated as Chris has been hit by a car, and Odette is off flirting with Travis (even though she’s likely unaware it’s flirting). “You playing around like that… is not something I care to see.” And just like that, she’s devastated. (She’s also still crying out of one eye, a nice bit of continuity.)

I still don’t see Odette and Asao as a romantic couple. But he’s clearly become the most important man in her life right now – more important than Chris and Travis, and perhaps even more than the Professor. (The Professor gets a moment of utter awesome mid-volume here, which I apologize for not getting into. Odette’s terror when she imagines his response is very telling.) The preview for the final volume shows Asao’s graduation, and may be leading to a final crisis of sorts – though I also doubt Travis is going away anytime soon. But really, once again I find this review doesn’t say enough because there’s SO MUCH I want to talk about. Every volume of Odette leads me to want to babble on and on about its plot, its characters, its art, what it says about humanity, what it says about robots. Much as this is supposedly about a robot trying to be human, much of what Odette goes through strikes me as a teenager trying to grow up. It’s a fantastic pickup for Tokyopop (so much so that I’ll forgive them the tacky back cover motto), and I am very happy it got to be in a Manga Movable Feast.