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.

Urusei Yatsura Volume 4

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

This volume of UY was published by Viz in the 2nd Lum collection, The Return of Lum, though the last 2 chapter began the 3rd collection, Lum in the Sun. This is also the last Japanese tankobon that has a ‘missing story’, at least till Viz drops the series. Well, it’s half missing. The first chapter of the volume, ‘Eat Drink Man Alien’, was put out by Viz in Animerica. However, when the collections came out, it wasn’t there.

It’s an interesting chapter, though also the weakest in the book, which may be why Viz dropped it. Ataru has Megane and company (in their final appearance in the manga) over to study, but all the other boys want to do is study Lum. Meanwhile, a drunken alien fox spirit crashes near our heroes, and promptly possesses Ataru, who begins to act like a drunken salaryman. He even kisses Lum full-on several times, leaving her dazed. It’s rather startling to see, given I don’t think they ever kissed in the series while Ataru was not possessed. Things spiral out of control as the fox spirit’s wife shows up and starts possessing various women to yell at her husband – including a 6-year-old girl, leaving the town thinking Ataru is a pedophile. Naturally, it ends in chaos and violence, with Ataru in the hospital being threatened by at least two dozen angry townspeople.

The rest of the volume continues to establish Mendou as Ataru’s comic foil and rival, and begins to see the establishment of the ‘Core Four’, which is to say that when a UY chapter begins and we need four people to begin the action, it will almost always be Ataru, Lum, Shinobu and Mendou. Things are actually quite even-handed here, as for every chapter where Ataru acts like a lecherous idiot and gets what’s coming to him, there’s another chapter with Mendou acting like an egotistical spoiled rich brat and getting what’s coming to him. The chapter where Mendou ends up with an alien baby, right after everyone’s talking about a boy who got expelled for getting a girl from another school pregnant, is hilarious, and shows us that when Ataru’s not in girl-hunt mode he can be quite clever – devious, even.

There are a few chapters here that seem very ‘Japanese culture’, but unlike previous volumes Viz just rolls with it and translates them as best they can. (Cultural endnotes? Are you kidding? These came out back when it was a 32-page pamphlet comic!) One in particular may seem very familiar to fans of the UY movies – Ataru falls asleep and meets Mujaki, along with his tapir who eats nightmares. Naturally he’s trying to get Ataru to have a few more terrifying dreams, while Ataru only wants a harem. (Interestingly, his harem INCLUDES Lum.) Mamoru Oshii would take this chapter and expand it into what is generally considered the best UY movie, Beautiful Dreamer.

In terms of characterization, there is still some, although I note that here, as with Ranma, if characterization stands in the way of a funny gag, the gag wins every time. Lum’s temper is still highly variable – sometimes she’s trusting and snuggly with Ataru, sometimes she’s madly jealous and electrifying him, and sometimes she’s merely exhausted and drained at having to watch him mack on everything that moves. Things really get interesting with three chapters towards the end of the book, all of which help to show us that this is about where Takahashi made up her mind to make the main couple Lum and Ataru – and how the manga is better for it.

In the first, the biology club is raising caterpillars, and one of them is more gluttonous than the others. Naturally, they named it Ataru. They’re going to get rid of it, but Ataru takes it instead, feeling sympathy for the caterpillar being blamed for things out of its control. Unfortunately, the caterpillar then escapes and eats Mendou’s lunch – Mendou, who hates ‘ugly things’. What follows is an epic chase, with Lum helping Ataru to try to escape the rest of the class, all of whom have come to the opinion that the caterpillar has to go. They get up onto the roof, and the caterpillar surprises them all by transforming, not into a butterfly, but a fairy. A gorgeous fairy, because she thrived as Ataru believes that she’d be beautiful. This chapter shows us a softer side of Ataru the lech we really hadn’t seen before, as well as how well he and Lum work together.

The second was made into an anime episode, and the episode was voted the best ever by Japanese fans. The chapter is simpler but just as nice. Ataru is macking away at girls at school as usual, but Lum isn’t jealous, merely sewing a doll of herself to give to Ataru. After he shoos her away (Lum’s not attending classes at this point), she turns and says “bye-bye” sweetly, then takes off. When Ataru gets home, he finds the doll she had sewn on his desk, and no sign of her. When she’s not at school the following day, he panics, at first thinking Mendou made off with her, then admitting glumly that she’s disappeared. After the Mendou servants spend most of the day searching (though their search tactics are fairly questionable) Ataru goes to bed, upset and crying that Lum would simply abandon him like that. Of course Lum has done nothing of the sort, and is merely getting her passport renewed. The doll; holds a microphone so that she can make sure he’s not unfaithful. When instead it shows his despair at her absence, the expression on her face is lovely to see. Naturally, when she returns Ataru tries to remain uncaring, but it’s not fooling her at all.

The last sweet chapter involves Lum once again pestering Ataru for a date, and he actually agrees – provided she dress up as a normal human girl, and not use her powers. He certainly knows Lum well, as while she manages the first part, the second is much harder, given her powers are a natural part of her. So she tries diving from the high board at the pool, only to chicken out and fly away – Ataru has to drag her into the water and pretend it’s ‘stunt diving’. She gets hit on by several teens at the pool – so she electrifies the entire thing, knocking them all unconscious. (Ataru is “used to it”.) They even hook up with Ataru’s friend Kosuke and his girlfriend for lunch, only to find Kosuke’s girlfriend eats like a horse and terrifies all three of them with her voracious appetite. Finally, Ataru takes Lum through a haunted house, hoping to impress her with his bravery, only to end up terrified himself. Lum is great here – I love her fake “eek!” pose when she realizes Ataru wants her to be scared and snuggle – and it’s just nice seeing them on a date, even if Ataru spends most of it on edge. He and Lum are getting closer and closer, and the audience is now clearly meant to root for them.

A good solid volume of UY here. Some stories weren’t quite as good as others (though they did provide us with things like the Devil riding a Vespa with a cart of chow-chows behind him watching television, something that makes you wonder how Takahashi’s brain works exactly), but overall things have settled down and we’ve started to do what UY does best – take the core cast, have some weird situation happen, and watch them react. And in three of the stories, we almost get, dare I say it, heartwarming. Folks who want to see what early Takahashi was like, and who don’t mind the art (still finding its feet) should really find Viz’s Return of Lum graphic novel, which despite being the second in the series is probably the best starting place for a casual fan.

Excel Saga Volume 22

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By Rikdo Koshi. Released in Japan by Shonen Gahosha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Young King OURS. Released in North America by Viz.

Yes, at last, we are CAUGHT UP with Viz’s serialization of Excel Saga! Do you know what this means? It means you won’t get to see me talk about it till April 2012, as Excel Saga is down to a yearly release. Ah well. In the meantime, we have the action-packed Volume 22! And I’m not joking, after the seeming stasis of the Teriha arc and its aftermath, things all seem to be coming together here, and everyone clashes against each other.

First off, to resolve the minor cliffhanger from last volume, Il Palazzo appears on Excel’s homebrew computer to tell her and Elgala to keep doing what they’re doing and do not attempt contact. Excel finds this suspicious, but sends Hyatt (who is not ‘on individual assignment’ back to him while she and Elgala reconnoiter. Excel is really dealing with a lot here – she’s slowly getting her Teriha memories back, she’s realizing that Il Palazzo has been compromised and can’t necessarily be trusted, and she knows that telling Elgala this would be a mistake. So she puts a straw dummy of herself at the riverbank, and goes off on her own to sneak into Professor Shiouji’s home base. Honestly, throughout this volume Excel shows impressive ability to think and plan. After everything she’s been through, it’s nice to see her get focused.

Of course, that’s not to say she’s suddenly competent. She does get into the base, through a combination of luck and her repressed memories. Once there she runs into Iwata, who is somewhat taken aback to find that Teriha is now attacking him. The two of them get into a fight as Misaki, Watanabe and Sumiyoshi also appear. Sadly, Iwata then recalls fighting Excel’s doppelganger last volume and tries to use robot strength to knock Excel out. It works all too well, and now they have to deal with a captured fugitive.

Excel being Excel, she goes back and forth between berating her captors and demanding food. Well, she has been living as a fugitive for a while. They bring her food, and she eats about 12 bento boxes worth. Misaki even notes that she’s not worried that it’s poisoned, which Excel responds to with “You couldn’t put enough in here to kill me.” Probably true, but it’s rare for Excel to be aware of her own superhuman attributes. She then gets into a long discussion with Misaki about their respective organizations, which ends up telling us more about Misaki than it does Excel. Excel is in her ‘for the greater glory of ACROSS’ mode, while Misaki is at her cynical best, noting she doesn’t care who rules the world as long as she is left alone. Her image on Page 53 is actually rather scary in its combination of threat and disinterest.

They would like Excel to just go home, but the trouble is they aren’t sure how she got in – and neither is she, since she did it mostly on instinct. She does decide to escape from the bed they currently have her handcuffed to, and gets out of her room by simply ripping out the computer lock with her bare hands. Sadly, this also sets off the big alarms all over the base, and gets Dr. Kabapu down there – who most certainly is NOT for letting her go. As all this is happening, Il Palazzo (or more likely Miwa) sends RopponExcel (called Isshiki throughout, aka ‘First’) to capture our Excel. Everyone converges in a hallway, and the two Excels, now that there isn’t a bomb about to go off, have the big confrontation Elgala expected in Volume 20. Excel has mad kung-fu skills. Isshiki has a hand laser that can sedate into unconsciousness. Round 1 goes to Isshiki.

Isshiki, before this, also managed to break Iwata (yes, again) in two. This does not, however, prevent Kabapu from using his body as a puppet to attack Teriha. Given that Iwata is unconscious and therefore can’t actually be stupid, this fight is far more even than many other fights involving Isshiki. Kabapu destroys her hand laser; Isshiki then destroys his control (and it is revealed that yes, it’s Miwa rahter than Il Palazzo who’s calling the shots for Isshiki). Intriguingly, Kabapu notes that Isshiki is EQUAL to Iwata in power, not surpassing him. Then the fight is promptly finished by Excel herself, who is still groggy but is awake, kung-fu fighting, fast as lightning, and REALLY REALLY ANGRY. She kicks Iwata (controlled by Kabapu) into a pile, grabs Isshiki, and screams into her face, demanding to know where Il Palazzo is. There’s a short crackle, and just like in Volume 9 (remember Volume 9?), Isshiki shorts out in contact with Excel and folds like a ton of bricks. Excel, while noting that she’s still really heavy, then PICKS HER UP OVER ONE SHOULDER and asks Misaki where the exit is. And then exits, as security’s basically completely shot anyway. I merely note once more that when Excel is not paying attention to her limitations, she is astounding, given Isshiki weighs about one ton.

So now Excel is back on the riverbank, with Elgala. But as a bonus, she also has Isshiki, who is following Excel’s orders, although Excel still can’t get any information out of her. Elgala is hopelessly lost when having to deal with two Excels, and one of my favorite lines has her asking Isshiki to say “I am an imposter” after everything she says. Excel, though, is not just standing there having Isshiki catch fish and cook for them because she’s good at it (though she is). She’s trying to draw the enemy out. And when this happens, she sends Elgala out to deal with them. Sadly, it’s only Professor Shiouji, who is totally unimpressed with Elgala’s supposed stick-fighting skills. He asks Elgala to tell Excel that he, like Misaki, is not her enemy, but not her ally either – and that Umi is totally innocent in all of this.

As this is going on, Hyatt’s corpse floats down the river, leaving a red tide in its wake. Upon revival, she notes that the ACROSS base was deserted. So our heroines are all back together again. (We also have the funniest part of the volume here, when Elgala is overexcited and Excel hands her what she thinks is water – only to find it’s a cup of Hyatt’s blood. She promptly hallucinates the Sanzu River, with her dead form crossing it in a small boat to get to the afterlife. Upon returning to reality, she notes “Senior Hyatt, yours is a dark eucharist.”) (Oh, Happy Easter, by the way!)

Now Excel is positive that Miwa is their enemy, but needs more information. So after ‘pretending’ to have a fight to throw off their observers (which just causes Hyatt to collapse in a bloody heap in confusion), she and Elgala proceed to ambush Misaki, hogtie her, and toss her into their wheelbarrow (wow, it’s REALLY been a while since we’ve seen the wheelbarrow). Misaki is very angry about this, for several reasons: 1) She would have talked to them anyway, no need for kidnapping; 2) not knowing what was going on, she set off her alarm so that Iwata and the others are coming for her, and 3) she doesn’t have much to tell them anyway. She says Miwa’s a free-agent, and more self-centered than evil. Iwata then comes to get her… in the body of Nishiki, as he’s now body-hopped again. While Excel and Elgala escape, Misaki deals with this new crisis. Shiouji has no idea how he jumps bodies, his own body is slowly dying without his consciousness in it, and he doesn’t know how to fix it. Last time Misaki punched him – this time, she tries kissing him (in Nishiki’s body – Ropponmatsu 2, for those playing at home), a full page-and-a-half kiss of awesome. It works, though Misaki is starting to fray at the edges a bit with everything going on.

As is Watanabe, as the cliffhanger has him power up his suit when he sees Hyatt, his one true love, lying dead in the arms of “Excel”, aka Isshiki. Watanabe’s been ‘dissolutely evil’ for some time now, but it appears his feeling for “Miss Ayasugi” have not dimmed. Cliffhanger!

This volume was fantastic, showcasing Excel at her finest, giving Misaki and company lots to do, and having Elgala carry the bulk of the humor at her expense. All this and liner notes by Carl Horn! Do yourself a favor and buy Excel Saga. It’ll make many folks very happy.