ranma 1/2

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz. Translated by Kaori Inoue, Adapted by Gerard Jones.

And so at last we come to the end of the great Ranma 1/2 reissue. Inu Yasha may have had a broader reach, Urusei Yatsura may have had a bigger impact on Japan itself, and Maison Ikkoku may have had more maturity and resolution, but Ranma will still be THE anime gateway for many fans, along with Sailor Moon and Bubblegum Crisis. Having read the series again, I am able to see why it was so wildly popular, as well as why revisiting it can be frustrating. Ranma does not have depth – in fact, it actively leaps out of the way of depth – which makes it perfect for creative fans who want to give it that depth. It’s no coincidence that more than AMVs or fanart, it was fanfiction that was the biggest part of the mid-90s Ranma boom. Still, this does not mean that Takahashi’s manga is not good. It’s very good indeed.

Please do not be fooled by the cover – yes, there is a wedding at the end of the book, but we don’t even get to the ceremony before everything is completely destroyed and we return to the status quo. Well, status quo except that it seems that if there had not been chaos, Ranma and Akane might have gone through with the wedding. But there is always chaos in Ranma, it’s practically the main cast member. This manga ends much the same way that many of the classic UY anime episodes ended – with more and more of the cast showing up, each trying to beat up somebody else, until everything finally turns into a giant pile of destruction. Ranma 1/2 is not a romantic comedy, or a harem manga, or even a martial arts comedy. It’s pure slapstick.

The martial arts gets a good workout in the main part of this volume, though, as we return to China to battle another major villain. You get the sense that Takahashi is trying to figure out a way to top Herb, and she doesn’t manage it, really, but A for effort. The whole main cast is there (poor Ukyou, guess you were supporting after all), and there’s lots of cool fights and dramatic kicks and Akane and Shampoo in distress a lot of the time. That said, even when captured or dehydrated down to the size of a doll, Akane is still thinking hard and trying to get herself out of her predicament. Shampoo, alas, is merely mind-controlled most of the time. (I will note that Akane not noticing Ryouga transforming several times in this beggars belief, but hey.)

And so Ranma ends with our main couple waving goodbye to the readers as they head off to school again. It’s never quite confirmed that they do have mutual feelings for each other, mostly as I think Takahashi hoped people could read between the lines and see that she’d had them show their love without saying their love several times. (UY did this too – Ataru in particular was the poster child for “show, don’t tell”.) It didn’t quite work, and fans who disliked Akane were always quick to point out the open-endedness of the ending meant that they didn’t end up together. Takahashi later did one of those “character relationship charts”, filled with one-sided arrows, except for two – Ranma and Akane, and Ryouga and Akari. So she knew they loved each other.

But we don’t read Ranma for resolution of romantic tension. We read it for genderswapping and bizarre martial arts contests and so many fights and “Ranma no baka!” and in order to flesh out our 800,000 word epic fanfic with smatterings of actual canon. And we read it because we love the characters, flat as they are. Of course, we may not always love the SAME characters, but any Ranma fan is obsessed with at least one of them (except Happosai). Ranma 1/2 was a roadmap to modern anime fandom, and the road may be less traveled these days but it’s worth walking back over.

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz. Translated by Kaori Inoue, Adapted by Gerard Jones.

I was quite excited by this omnibus of Ranma 1/2 when I got it. Not only does it feature not one but TWO appearances by Akari, my favorite minor character, but is also resolves a plot point. That may not seem like much to those of you who are used to plot and characterization in your manga, but this is Ranma 1/2, the title where everything is done for the humor, and everything will always snap back with few if any lessons learned. Taking this manga and these characters seriously is, as we’ve learned, a mug’s game. But yes, we actually get forward progression here (you can see that she had decided to end Ranma soon). No, Ranma and Akane don’t confess. No, no curses are broken. But Ranma’s mother now knows the truth about her son. And he doesn’t have to kill himself.

The whole sequence leading up to Nodoka discovering the truth is without a doubt the highlight of the book. It also, out of necessity, shows Genma at his absolute worst, a desperate, petty ass who would happily destroy his marriage in exchange for a good meal. As for Ranma, he’s trying really hard to shrug off what his father has taught him to believe, and finally decides to give in and face whatever consequences come from his mother discovering he can turn into a girl. (In fact, his happy expression when he resolves to do this may be one of the best panels in Ranma, period.) There’s also a lot of action, as Ranma and Genma constantly fight back and forth to attempt to stop the other, and it all ends in a fall off a giant cliff into the sea. (I also liked Soun, Kasumi and Nabiki’s understated presence throughout – they’re on Ranma’s side, even if awkwardly.) It’s a really good arc.

The rest of the book is not quite as good. Leaving aside yet another arc devoted to Ranma and Akane mistaking “I am embarrassed by my feelings” for “I hate you”, we have the introduction of Konatsu, a ninja with a poor family situation who somehow ends up at Ucchan’s. Given that fandom has paired Akari and Konatsu together by the function they fill (late-period characters introduced to ‘resolve’ parts of the love septangle), you’d think I’d be more accepting of him, but I’m not really. First of all, unlike Ryouga and Akari, any love seen here is clearly one-sided – Ukyou is literally paying Kanatsu the equivalent of 5 cents to work for her, and barely seems to acknowledge him as a human being. More to the point, though, Konatsu is just a rehash of Tsubasa Kurenai from earlier volumes, and reminds the reader that Rumiko Takahashi is simply not very good at writing trans characters, even giving her a pass of “this is the 1990s”.

And so, despite one piece of forward progression, this volume ends as it begins. In fact, thanks to the destruction of the Saotome home, we now have Nodoka living at the Tendos in addition to Ranma and Genma. Is there anything that can possibly resolve this manga and give it a happy ending>? Well. yes there is, though it depends on how broadly you define “resolve” and “ending”. Stay tuned next time for the final gripping installment of Ranma 1/2!

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

There’s a lot I could discuss with this omnibus of Ranma 1/2, which is a strong one. There’s Nabiki’s 2nd and final focus story, where she meets her match in a man dedicated to making others spend money on him. It’s nice to see Nabiki actually tricked once or twice during this arc, and Ranma and Akane watching the debt rack up are hilarious. There’s also the story with Pink and Link, where Shampoo once again doesn’t seem to realize that the whole thing could be solved by her not being a violent jerk (to be fair to her, this applies to most of the cast as well). There’s also an amusing story that quickly turns bittersweet, as Ranma tries to turn a cold that temporarily stops his curse into an excuse to finally meet his mother at last. It’s a strong book.

But a lot of these reviews have been about my own experience with Ranma back in the 1990s (this is why I still use the old-fashioned romanization), and therefore it would feel wrong if I didn’t talk the rest of this review about Akari Unryuu. I was never a big watcher of the Ranma 1/2 anime, preferring the manga and fanfiction. And in any case, the Ranma anime had ground to a halt right about Vol. 26’s material, meaning that the last 12 or so volumes weren’t animated. And I never really got the popularity of the Ryouga/Ukyou pairing in fandom either, because I hadn’t seen the anime do a much bigger job of putting them together. And, given I liked Ryouga and wanted him to be happy, I always hoped something would come along.

Now it has, as we meet a young girl and her farm of sumo wrestling pigs. Make no mistake about it, Akari’s introductory story is as ridiculous as all the other Ranma stories, and I admit if she’d never showed up again it wouldn’t be all that different from, say, the story earlier in the book with Pink and Link (who indeed never show up again). Akari is looking for a husband strong enough to defeat her champion sumo pig, and has been massacring the males of Nerima as a result. Ryouga, naturally, flips the pig into the air with his umbrella. It’s love at first sight… if only Akari wasn’t so devoted to pigs. Every time she mentions them Ryouga twitches, to Akane’s confusion (a reminder that she never, ever does figure out Ryouga is P-chan) and Ranma’s frustration.

Ranma asks here, and the fandom asked constantly, whether Akari would simply fall in love with anyone who beat her pig. But Akari really does seem to have fallen for Ryouga himself, to the point where, when she mistakenly thinks he hates pigs, she has her sumo pig beat her up till she can hate them herself and solve the problem. (This does not solve the problem. But then, if you’ve been reading Ranma 1/2, you’d have guessed this.) And tellingly, at the end of this short arc Ranma decides to solve the problem by exposing Akari to Ryouga’s curse – something that, as I’ve said above, never happens with Akane. So now Akari has the best of both worlds – she loves Ryouga, AND he turns into a pig.

I won’t deny, 20 years on, that Akari as a love interest is a bit flat. but then again, most Ranma characters are more two-dimensional than Fandom makes them out to be. She’s also introduced towards the end of the series, clearly as a love interest – go see ‘Pair the Spares’ on TV Tropes to see how this upsets people. But I still don’t really care, and Takahashi clearly didn’t either. Akari was popular enough that she gets a cameo at the end of this book, writing Ryouga a letter (which promptly gets destroyed, because that’s the kind of series this is, but hey). And she’ll show up again next time. In any case, this volume of Ranma 1/2 is excellent, and even if you don’t like Akari as much as I do (few do), you should still pick it up.