Well, at least when it comes to Ryoga, it doesn't seem to take much water to make him transform. Having a little kid hit him in the face with a squirt gun is enough.

(Note to self: quantity of water is unimportant. Head getting wet is important. Oh, and comedy is important.)

Also, it seems there are a hell of a lot of cursed springs in that one location in China. You have to wonder what the deal is, especially with each springs having a different curse. (Must be something in the water there...)

UPDATE: I'm getting some of the same vibes from this as I got from Ramen Fighter Miki, which of course came out more than ten years later. One of the fun things in that is the stupid guy who keeps challenging Miki and keeps getting creamed, because he is hopelessly behind her in fighting skill and it's obvious he won't ever catch up.

Ryoga is the same way with Ranma. Ep 11, and after training in the mountains Ryoga finally comes home to challenge Ranma again. He gets lost along the way (wasn't there a character in Fruits Basket who was like that? The bull?) and once he gets home he tries to take Ranma on -- and is completely, utterly humiliated. Ranma doesn't even end up breathing hard, nor does he have to put down the fishbowl he's carrying.

Great stuff!

I think one of the reasons this works better for me than Urusei Yatsura is that Ataru is a jerk and a loser. Ranma isn't. He makes mistakes, and sometimes he's awkward, but deep down he's OK. I like him.

Ranma's curse really is a pretty big burden, but he doesn't get angsty about it, or not very much. He's pretty upbeat, and tries to enjoy life. He isn't evil, he's just young. The only times so far that he's genuinely wanted to hurt someone, they definitely had it coming. (Like the ice skating masher that he hit 518 times.)

And he's honorable, too. Akane doesn't know that Ryoga is curse. Ranma obviously isn't sympathetic to Ryoga, and has little reason to wish Ryoga well, but though he has many opportunities to tell Akane about Ryoga's curse, he never does it. For instance, in ep 11 he was in a position to drop Ryoga into cold water while Akane was watching, but he didn't.

Why? Surely not because Ryoga is a friend -- though there may be a certain degree of that hidden beneath all the feigned hostility. I do think there's a level at which Ranma sees Ryoga as a comrade, nakama, partly because of martial arts but more because they are both cursed. They have something in common that I don't think anyone else really, truly understands.

But I don't think that's the reason. It's because revealing that secret to Akane would be petty, and Ranma is not a petty guy. He doesn't hurt others just for the hell of it. If he were bitter about his curse (and his no-good father) and seething inside, a kid that age might turn cruel, become a bully, hurt others to distract himself from his own pain. It's happened before. But Ranma doesn't do that.

There's really no substitute for a likeable protagonist, and that's what we got here.

UPDATE: Ep 13: Mousse is still a moron. And how many people in this series eventually fall into one of those silly cursed springs, anyway?

Anybody want to buy a duck?

UPDATE: It's amazing how many things in this series seem to have created things which, if not outright tropes, are at least industry in-jokes. For instance, there's a ninja in this called "Sasuke". If memory serves, all the male ninjas in Ninja Nonsense were named Sasuke. (Well, at least one of them was, and they all seemed to be interchangeable.)

Also, I think that Li Mei-Lin's "Nihao!" in Card Captor Sakura may have been a deliberate homage to Shampoo.

UPDATE: Mousse is also a bastard. Just beginning ep 14, and if Ranma wins this fight, he ought to cut Mousse's balls off. (I am not smiling right now.)

UPDATE:

It's too complicated to explain. Believe me, there's a logical reason why Ranma is holding that duck.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:52 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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