The State of the Ranmaverse
Issue 1
A Periodical of the Ranma 1/2 Expressway
served with Garlic and Goo...Mission Goo
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Shameless Plug
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Visit my Yahoo! Group to get updates for my reviews:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ranmaexpressway
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http://home.nethere.net/homernet
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End Shameless Plug
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So, here we are, in the seeming twilight of Ranma-dom. (It's a word!
Really!) The manga has been completely translated and posted for a
couple of years, the anime has been completely translated and is now
selling at stupidly high prices in boxed sets with fancy graphics, and
the general public STILL has /never/ heard of our favorite gender
challenged martial artist.
In absence of complete translations, MOUNTAINS of Ranmafics were
written, and the quality varied from "RIP MY EYES OUT WITH A RUSTY
SPOON!" to "Oh, God, I need a cigarette..." (and that's for the
non-lemon fics.) Complete epics have been penned, many rivaling the
quality of summer blockbusters, (not a difficult feat, I know, but you
take my meaning) and faded into memory to be vaguely recalled in, "Hey,
do you remember that one fic...?" Great oneshots, fantastic
divergences, wonderful altiverses, and beautiful fusions and crossovers
have graced our computer screens, one after the other. Masterful genre
changes were achieved, angstfics perfected, and the self-insert
re-invented to the point of blatant parody.
The faction wars have come and gone. The FFML was a charred wasteland
in the wake of The Bet. "Church of..." websites maintained the front
lines of artificial conflicts and propaganda houses for the represented
group. Leaders and authors and pundits have arrived and left. Children
have toed the water at the tender young age of 12, and old men with
nothing better to do than pontificate on fiction have left in bitter
regret. Students went to college writing some of the best work of their
life for a fiction that would never see the light of day. Cherished
authors...no, ARTISTS, have moved on, leaving us begging for more.
And still...
And yet...
Now what?
How much more Ranmafic can we take? Can it continue to hold our eyes
and slices of our time, especially in a world where the
Only-Remaining-Superpower(tm) was brought to it's knees by a handful of
angry guys with box cutters? Where is it going to go from here?
Let me answer that question by turning your head slightly closer to the
second star to the right, but not so far as to enter The Simpson Zone.
A bit over 35 years ago a guy wrote a rough draft for a story idea he
had that he thought would make a good morality play to reflect the
times. He had done some writing for TV before and knew it would be an
incredibly hard sell, given the nature of the work, so he put the pedal
to the metal and never looked back. He lost a marriage, was ripped off
TWICE, and eventually gave the whole thing up in bitter resentment only
two years into it's run. The show was handed off to another producer
and tanked mere weeks into it's third season.
Then something funny happened.
For the first time in television history, a show was more popular in
syndication than in it's original run.
You've probably guessed the show by now, so I'll stop with the
documentary-pretense bit. Star Trek is now a ride in Las Vegas.
A RIDE!
In LAS VEGAS! The place where the straights go to unwind, 'cause, you
know, they have no imagination.
So what is happening with the Ranmaverse?
Three years ago I was volunteering for the first time at ComicCon. I
was doing grunt-work at the admissions tables, handing people their
swagbags and daily newsletters, noticing with tremendous satisfaction
that I was finally with "MY PEOPLE," when I saw something that shocked
me. More accurately, something that shocked me in the way that the
300-lb. woman dressed as Poison Ivy from Batman never could. ("MY
EYES!!! MY BEAUTIFUL EYES!!!") It was a girl, couldn't have been more
than 10 years old, dressed up as Ukyo, complete with BAS. (Big Ass
Spatula, for the less initiated)
Me: Hey! You're dressed as Ukyo, aren't you?
Girl (shyly): Yeah...
Me: <Passed out from shock...just kidding> Hey, I know where you can
get a giant spatula so you don't have to use that piece of cardboard...
Girl's Mother: Hehe...that's nice, let's go dear! <grabs her girl and
runs away from the strange man>
Here's my point. Just as all sci-fi shows (all arguments about what is
and is not sci-fi aside) throughout time will be held up against Star
Trek as "The Show" to beat/be like, Ranma has established itself in it's
own niche just like Star Trek.
The question is, of course, what niche is that?
Beats me.
No, really. I've been puzzling over this one for a while. There is
/no/ present mainstream genre that Ranma conveniently fits into. Is it
a romantic comedy? Is it a show about martial arts? Is it A Good
Anime(r)? Is it A Really Long Manga(c)? Is it Yet Another Thing I Can
Title Font And Give A Silly (mark) Symbol To(:p)?
Part of the problem with Ranma 1/2, the big reason, I think, it hasn't
been accepted by the mainstream public, is it's nature is as fluid as
the main character's gender. That, and it deals with a guy turning into
a girl, which is surely perverted, somehow.
(cough)
So, we must wait and see. And Ranma is a uniquely qualified story to
wait and see with. The basic story is so huge that even with five
seasons the animated show only covered the first half of the manga.
Then, of course, there's the open ended nature of the "ending." The
Ranmaverse lends itself to a nearly limitless variety of possible
pick-ups to the final chapter that it spawned one of the largest
fan-fiction communities EVER. Need proof? Go to The Penultimate Ranma
Fanfic Index. At 3,220 entries, the Index has the single largest title
specific collection of links and archived fiction on the Internet.
(FanFiction.net is multi-title, so it doesn't count.) The Ranma section
of FanFiction.net has 6,090 entries, being beaten only by a small
handful of Anime catagories, one of which is another Takahashi work.
(Inu-yasha)
So imagine what would happen if Ranma could go mainstream?
The Ranma series tells allot of stories, but at it's heart it's the
story of a boy and a girl and growing up when you really don't wanna and
all the stuff that happens in the meantime. Everyone remembers the Hell
of Hormones, the awkwardness of dealing with the opposite sex, and the
serious and often disturbing questions about who and what we are when
our bodies are going through massive changes. Like Star Trek, Ranma 1/2
takes these questions and issues and reflects them in a funhouse mirror
so we can take a close, but safe, look at the answers we find in ourselves.
So Takahashi has a new Popular Work, just as Gene Roddenberry has
posthumously produced a new Popular Work. Andromeda, for those of you
who've had your head in the sand. (No, it's not "Just like Star
Trek.") Andromeda will always live in the shadow of it's older cousin,
and will always be measured by it. It will probably never be as
popular, never have a fanbase of 'Rommies' or 'Rommers' to nitpick over
what the fanbase is called, and it will probably never have a major
motion picture series that has The Odd Number Curse and "Andromeda:
There Is No Andromeda V," and you will never see it parodied on SNL or
MST3K. That's because there's already a show /there./ In /that/ spot,
right where I'm pointing, between "The Simpsons" and "Dragnet."
Similarly, Inu-Yasha, about a girl and her dog, will never be able to
outshine a story about a girl and her aquatransexual. This is because
at their center they're both the same story about a boy and a girl et
al. There's already a story between "Wayne's World" and "Gone with the
Wind" on the shelf of The Paragons of Entertainment in the spot where
you're trying to put Inu-yasha.
It took Star Trek 20 years and countless parodies and knock-offs to
become the center of the sci-fi universe after the geeks had already
figured it out. Will it take 20 years to resurrect Ranma 1/2? That's
something to discuss at a later date. For now, I've yammered on too much.
One more thing; has anyone else noticed that Takahashi has this weird
thing for dogs?
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Must Read Fics (2004):
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Ranma/Sailor Moon crossover/fusion:
The Sailor Ranko Saga
http://www.burgerbill.com/sailorranko.html
Ranma 1/2 Continuation:
Girl Days
http://www.knology.net/~kenjiko2/
Best Epic
Hearts of Ice
http://www.akane.org/heartsofice/
Obscure but good
Rendezvous with Fate
http://ice.esmartdesign.com/rend_main.htm
Obscure but utterly fantastic
Comes the Cold Dragon
http://www.iamnota.net/fanfics/
Best Hero Cycle
Ranma and Akane: A Love Story
http://www.kawaiikunee.com/slp/R&A-ALS.html
More to come, I sleepy...