Let’s talk about how Ranma is trans, and not as a metaphor.
Yesterday, I had a quick, joking exchange with a friend, riffing off the general premise that the protagonist of the classic manga series Ranma ½ is a trans girl.Today I woke up to a slew of hateful, low-effort comments (the C-word is always a weird one to throw at a trans woman), largely objecting to this premise, so, I’m going to sit down now and show my work.
I was actually going to do this either way, honestly. Reading Ranma ½ and indignantly shouting “in what sense is this a ‘curse!?’“ is a pretty significant touchstone for damn near every trans girl born after 1970 or so.
Let's talk about how Ranma is trans in the 2024 anime, part 1
Way the hell back in 2018, after a random exchange with a friend, I sat down and wrote a series of four blog posts where I looked at the manga Ranma ½, which ran from 1988 to 1996, explicitly through a lens where I assumed the protagonist is in fact a trans girl. A major component of the series being that Ranma and several other characters fell into various pools in a cursed set of natural springs causing them to magically change into whatever tragically drowned in one when hit with cold water, then back to their original body with hot, and Ranma fell in the girl one, so it was bound to be a series that would crack a lot of eggs regardless, but my memory of reading it years before transitioning was that it worked on a mundane level too, particularly later. I did somehow forget a bit towards the end where Ranma honestly just kinda straight up comes out of the closet, but I'm not going to link to that panel yet again for the sake of preview links not blending together. Anyway, those posts were already the most popular things I ever put on this blog and have never stopped circulating, despite it being a pretty old and largely forgotten series at the time.
I had always had the idea that I really should go back and also watch the anime adaptation(s) of Ranma, which deviates a good bit from the manga, but that is 161 episodes, 3 movies, and 11 OAVs which are terribly terribly paced, and I don't actually get paid for this. But then lo and behold, here's a brand new anime adaptation coming out decades later, looking really nice, and surely that will deviate even more from the source material, so here I am diving in to find all new bits of gender stuff to talk about, under the fold here and-
Oh. Turns out the new anime series is actually an EXTREMELY faithful adaptation of the original manga and the only deviations I've actually noticed are that there's a little bit less nudity and the one scene with Ranma's breasts fully on display goes the route of not drawing nipples. And really that's only significant because the original anime adaptation somehow got away with that one. Speaking of the original anime run, this adaptation brings back the entire surviving voice cast, and continues the tradition of coloring Ranma's hair red in cold-water form as an extra tell for the audience. And speaking of color, one thing this adaptation does now and then that I really appreciate is punctuating certain scenes with the sort of cool pastel palettes (see above) that were used for the cover illustrations of the original manga.
Another thing the 2024 anime does is throw in a quick little vignette before the opening credits of each episode to restate that Ranma and Akane are engaged, and the feminizing water thing, which mostly feels like it's there as just a little extra emphasis that regardless of all the other shenanigans going on, those two are the one actual couple and making it clear that the rest of the tangled web of crushes and obsessions don't really matter. Something I feel like this adapatation is keen to emphasize in general. In fact, being as nearly 1 to 1 an adaptation as it is, the title of every episode is directly lifted from the chapter names of the manga, so we can just slap together a little infographic and see what's getting compressed a bit and what's getting the time it needs to breathe!
We're chewing through the extended fight scenes pretty quick and slowing down any time Akane's having an emotional moment or some time in the spotlight basically. Which makes sense since the action scenes in the manga are like all full page splash images with a word of text and need to be flowing quickly, and because we have the benefit of hindsight knowing that the Kunos become irrelevant real quick. We're also squeezing out a little early identity crisis stuff for Ranma in the process (there's an early dream sequence after first meeting Kuno, coming to grips with the whole "since I'm a girl, dudes want to sleep with me" realization that barely makes it in and a few early moments of internalized misogyny that get dropped), and we really give Shampoo's debut some space (not QUITE as much as the above suggests, most of episode 10 is wrapping up a three parter on the ice skating with her just punching through the wall as a cliffhanger at the end).
The whole thing is also paced out to nicely cover the first four volumes of the manga, out of 38. They might up the compression rate a little, but as it stands, it's going to take another 8 or 9 seasons to get through everything at this rate. In comparison, my first blog post got through three times this much of it, but the original anime covered only the first half of this in the same episode count (and then for some reason introduced Shampoo and Mousse early and didn't get through the ice skating until episode 27).
Anyway, like I said, this doesn't really change things up enough to have a lot to say about how clearly Ranma is trans. Jumping back to the start though yet again, it really cannot be emphasized enough though just how clearly, even from the very first episode, she is SO much more comfortable presenting as a girl, not at all nervous meeting Akane's family like that, then suddenly super tense and awkward and closed off when interacting with... really anyone while boy-moding. So I guess it's time to bust out some of these other lenses to look at this...
Let's talk about how Akane is gay, part 1
I mean, we've established she's into Ranma, with extra emphasis in this adaptation, and we've established that Ranma is in fact a girl, but that's just the one data point. What else do we have? Well, she's quite explicitly not a fan of guys, particularly guys who are attracted to her, and we're keeping plenty of a focus on that while not wasting time trying to pretend Kuno matters at all in the grand scheme of things. The closest she ever comes to showing interest in a guy is Dr. Tofu, and the anime here is strongly emphasizing how that's less of a real crush and more just emulating her oldest sister (Nabiki of course is also some flavor of queer, and I don't think anyone has ever questioned that) since that's kinda what you do, right? She also gets intensely jealous of the idea of Shampoo kissing Ranma while assuming Ranma is a girl, talks about how hot she is, and hell, at the start of things when everyone's assuming they've somehow gotten into a situation where one of the three sisters has to marry a cis girl, Nabiki points out how that works out perfectly for her. Because she is extremely gay.
Let's talk about how Ryoga is trans, part 1
OK so this isn't the same absolute slam dunk as Ranma turned out to be, but there is a surprisingly strong case to argue that Ryoga is also a trans girl. What do we know about Ryoga after all? Real real socially awkward. Only has one sorta-friend from childhood, who turned out to be trans later. Can we call Ryoga a furry? I'm not even talking about the pig curse, but there's this whole feral wolf vibe before that's even established. In a series where basically every guy who is ever introduced is a horny creep obsessed with rigid gender roles, Ryoga does not bat an eye at seeing women naked (which comes up oddly often), spends a lot of these early arcs hanging out with the gal pals to help practice gymnastics and skating, deals well enough with the pink heart collar and being called Charlotte, and like so many of us, Ryoga is introduced to the series indignantly sputtering about how Ranma's situation shouldn't really be called a curse and is a situation we'd be happy to be in. You could argue that Ryoga's saying this just relative to the pig curse, I guess, but I do at least get the vibe that Ryoga wouldn't be too super worried about finding hot water with that one.
Speaking of the pig curse, I feel like every time I revisit Ranma I have a different perspective on the whole "P-Chan" situation. With this adaptation, it does feel significantly closer to "it's really just this super awkward situation where I've been looking for a good moment to explain and at this point it's been so long she'll probably kill me" than "I am a loathsome sex offender using a disguise to snuggle up with this girl who thinks I am a small animal" and Ranma is doing an appropriate amount of "I'm not going to blurt it out, but you should seriously come clean already" so, glad to know we're downplaying that.
Also, the emphasis on Ranma and Akane as The Couple in this adaptation really makes it clear that Ryoga isn't so much into Akane as just kinda... incapable of conceiving of any sort of existence that doesn't involve being Ranma's rival/friend/polycule member.
Anyway, I guess that's where I have to leave this until the second season drops? Have a patreon link?
Let's talk about how Ranma is trans in the 2024 anime, part 2
Hello once again. It's me, the woman who wrote a series of blog posts back in 2018 or so about the title character from the 1988 manga series Ranma ½ is actually pretty clearly a trans girl who kinda lucked into a "curse" letting her bypass the whole HRT thing if jumping her into the deep end before she's really willing to out herself, and for real, looking at it through that lens it was a shockingly easy argument to make. So of course last year when it got a new anime adaptation, I sat down to compare and contrast that with the original manga. And... OK turns out that this new adaptation is incredibly 1:1 faithful so I don't really have more to add, but I didn't let that stop me! Anyway, season 2 is fully out there now so let's talk more.
The first season of the new anime here was covering between two and four chapters worth of manga per episode, nicely getting through the first four collected volumes out of 38. This season they do seem to have realized it's going to be a decade to get through it all at that rate, they sped things up a bit, skipping over a few minor arcs that don't really go anywhere in the long term, and get just about up to the end of volume 10. Funnily enough, the stuff the show skips over is more or less exactly all the stuff I skipped over in my initial manga analysis. I'm reasonably certain this isn't because the people behind this adaptation read this blog and decided to cater directly to me and my trans readings and dark forbidden Ryoga takes, so it's probably just a side effect of being focused on the relationship drama. If nobody's obsessing over Akane or Ranma, we can lose it. So while it's still very much a show focusing on the proper couple, this kind of ends up being The Shampoo Season, starting off with her showing back up with her grandmother, and ending with Mousse's second big arc. This also means they stopped a little short of finishing out volume 10, buying themselves another year to consider how or if they're going to taint this nice wholesome big-trans-vibes adaptation with Tsubasa. This also means we're kicking things off with the big stuck-as-a-girl-for-several-months arc.
First though we've got an opening episode introducing Gosunkugi, a creepy little weirdo into the occult. The old anime cut him out completely, so it warms my Junji Ito loving heart to see the spooky little creep get a moment. It also helps serve as a reminder that this is set in the late 80s. Back when I first read it, between the arranged marriage(s), the traveling martial artist bit, the exoticized China stuff, the small town setting, and my lack of feet on the ground familiarity with Japan at the time, I originally thought Ranma was a period piece at the time. It wasn't then, but it is now. Funny how that works. Anyway, Gosunkugi is mainly just here to set up Ranma's weird relationship to cats, having an extreme phobia that translates into just kinda entering a fugue state and acting like a cat when pushed to far. Which comes up here and there since while Shampoo was off in China all so briefly between seasons here, she went and joined the curse club and turns into a cat. Anyway, the important thing is that our trans girl protagonist is kind of also a cat girl sometimes, further proving the trans/furry Venn diagram has near total overlap.
Anyway, Shampoo shows up again, with new firsthand understanding of how these curses work bringing her to the same mistaken assumption as most people that since it's what happens with hot water, Ranma is "really" a guy. She also brings along her somewhat witch-adjacent grandmother Cologne and is kind of stalked by her would-be boyfriend Mousse. There's a whole weird dynamic here where Shampoo is really down bad for Ranma (she has an unfortunate habit of physically throwing herself onto her while nude), so Mousse sees Ranma as the obstacle to him hooking up with her, and Cologne is kind of a wildcard, both trying to manipulate Ranma into dating Shampoo, but also wanting her to kick Mousse's teeth in enough for him to quit being this clingy creep. This leads to a whole thing where she uses some pressure point thing to make Ranma extremely heat-sensitive and thus essentially stuck as a girl for a shockingly long stretch. A good volume and a half in the original manga, and a run of three episodes here, which given the sort of break neck speed this adaptation is generally going with feels like it really just slows to a crawl to savor this arc.
Initially, having accepted a big formal challenge from Mousse and not wanting to get into the whole situation, Ranma shows up boy-moding, in the traditional trans girl sense. You know, when you wear your baggiest clothes, try to deepen your voice, and hope a bunch of people you aren't out to just kinda fail to notice how you grew a set of breasts and your waist thinned out since they last saw you. Then after a bit of smack talking and doing some stage magic, she tosses off the baggy clothes leaving her in a sleazy magician's assistant leotard, loudly proclaiming to the very large crowd that she magically turned into a girl. This is of course true, but also... there is no cis explanation for this behavior. We are establishing in this very scene that if she didn't want to be seen as a girl, she is, at all times, fully capable of presenting in a convincing-enough masculine fashion. She's just sick of doing so, and she's way more comfortable just sporting a really high femme look, and wants to announce this to the entire town. That sticks by the way, and there's scenes later on where random guys recognize her as "that martial artist with the girl costume," at which point she's quick to correct them that it's not a costume. Of course, presumably to avoid any harassment, this is followed by Ranma working as a waitress with another high femme outfit, and an extended beach vacation where she goes around wearing this one-piece bathing suit with "BOY" emblazoned across it, and yeah, this too is a very out trans girl wanting to cut to the chase with probing bigots sorta move.
This is during a whole bit where a bunch of guys are in a competition where the winner gets a kiss from Shampoo that Ranma wants as a chance to swipe this temperature sensitivity cure, and Akane also ends up joining because, well...
Let's talk about how Akane is gay, part 2
I'm kinda cheating with this segue. It's more that Akane's jealous of the idea of her girlfriend kissing this other girl in this big public scene than being into Shampoo personally, but in all seriousness if there is one big theme this season of this show seems absolutely dedicated to hammering home that while Ranma and Akane are The Couple, we are quite explicitly talking about Ranma-in-girl-mode. Just constant scene after scene after scene of Akane being all prickly and uncomfortable in the rare moments Ranma is presenting in a masculine fashion, then being all happy and sappy once a splash of cold water gets added, or the other way around. Plus there's lots of scenes with her being particularly upset at the notion of having to kiss a guy (even in the context of a play, or when said "guy" is Ranma, or both) and being totally oblivious to the very concept that a guy might actually ask her on a date, to the point of not realizing she went on one when it's over. And frankly speaking the whole final scene of this whole season involves this uncharacteristically sappy and emotionally honest scene where long story short Ranma was pretty convinced that she had failed to prevent Akane being magically turned into a duck, and she was, consequently, about to do the honorable thing and marry the random duck in question, explaining the lack of hesitation in a hey I'm here for you no matter what you look like sort of speech... at which point we get a convenient water splash and a suddenly visibly WAY more into it Akane repeats the same, gives her a hug, and then we freeze frame as they leap into battle against the standard morning horde of guys hoping to date both of them at school. That's not subtext. That's just TEXT. This girl's gay as hell.
Let's talk about how Ranma is bi, part whatever
While I'm skipping ahead, let's real quick talk about how this season reorders a couple of plot arcs. After the very prolonged stuck as a girl/beach trip arc arc, you'd figure, if she wasn't so clearly trans anyway, that Ranma would have had enough being super girly and spend some time in guy form, but hell no. First we have a quick episode where our three girls of note end up in this fast food delivery contest where again, Ranma just shows up in a cute waitress getup, and when there's a tie-breaker in a caveat that the random person they're delivering this to (Kuno, the kendo idiot from the first couple episodes) has to eat it, she's not above basically seducing him to get the win... and then later kissing him during the aforementioned play. It's a school production of Romeo & Juliet that goes off the rails immediately with four Romeos just kinda brawling over a chance to kiss either of the two Juliets. With the former being three minor male antagonists (Kuno, Gosunkugi, Ranma, and a very briefly appearing Happosai), and Juliet being played by Akane, and also Ranma. Oh and as I saw someone point out on bluesky, Ranma borrows a move form fellow trans girl Bridget from Guilty Gear in there at one point.
Basically Ranma figures Akane shouldn't have to kiss Kuno and steps in to take that bullet for her, which ends up upsetting her since the last time she had a chance to be in this play her grade school class recognized her inherent butch lesbian nature and cast her as Romeo. Anyway, this whole episode was pushed back towards the end of the season when it should have fallen in the middle. Presumably because it's a big notable "these two are the official couple" bit, and they wanted to delay it until they'd introduced the last major recurring member of the giant love polyhedron, Ranma's old best friend from when they were like 5, Ukyo. And then we push it back a little more, because shortly after Ukyo arrives on the scene, her big plan is to maybe resolve this convoluted relationship web by setting Akane up on a date with Ryoga (this is the one she's too gay to even realize is a date, either because she's not used to guys actually being interested in her and assumes it's a challenge to a fight that's taking a while, or if we wanna continue with the thought exercise that Ryoga may also be a trans girl... lesbians are just really bad at picking up on these things).
Anyway, being the jealous type, when Ranma catches wind of this she does the only logical thing. That's right, she dresses up in a wig, hat, glasses, and big floral print dress and crashes the date claiming to be Ryoga's forgotten and abandoned fiancee, attempting at first to subtly tip him off that it's her and threaten to expose the honestly still really messed up bit where he uses his curse to pretend to be Akane's pet pig and cuddle up with her in bed, but it sort of backfires because he actually just fully buys the premise that he's somehow been oblivious of this random girl who's super into him and doesn't care about his weird curse situation, and then backfires even more when his resulting appreciation/consideration of this new relationship out of nowhere blindsides her and she kinda realizes that she is, in fact, actually into Ryoga to a non-zero degree, at least enough to realize this was a very bad (and bi) plan. Akane meanwhile sees through the disguise immediately and is just kinda not-mad-just-disappointed that her girlfriend is interrupting this prolonged invitation to a duel to hit on her old childhood friend here. So, yeah I can see the logic in moving the True Couple Re-Up episode to be after this one.
Also can I just take a moment to say how baffled I am just how many people show up to read these points with so little media literacy that they look at these two and go "oh yeah that's two completely straight cis men right there." That is some serious denial.
Do we even need to talk about how Ukyo is trans, part 1?
So rolling back a bit now because I got way ahead here, the first part of this giant bi disaster was due to Ukyo showing up and trying to untangle this big knot that just ended up way worse as a result. Ukyo, while definitely a second or maybe third stringer, is an interesting character for a lot of reasons. She doesn't actually have any weird long term rivalry obsession she can't work out, she isn't dealing with any sort of magical malarkey or weird familial obligations, and she's the only character in the series who didn't forget to pack her emotional intelligence before leaving the house. Also it is GENUINELY difficult for me to see her as anything but a shockingly well-handled out and comfortable with herself trans girl.
She's an old childhood friend of Ranma's who thought at the time she was a boy. Before transferring to show up as a character in the present day of the show, she attended an all-boys school. A character who should be introduced right at the start of next season if they don't shuffle things around is someone who also went to that school, and is either unambiguously a trans girl, or is a cis guy who's really into cross-dressing for maybe-chaser-y reasons. She shows up at this school boy-moding. It's kinda 50/50 on whether people meeting her for the first time mistake her for a guy or are deeply confused as to why anyone would think this cute girl wasn't a girl. She totally isn't used to the idea that anyone might consider her cute. And while she does show up looking for a fight at first.
The backstory is her dead told Ranma's dad his 'son' was actually a girl and since the kids got along so well and Ranma's dad is a deadbeat who owed him a ton of money, they worked out a deal where he'd sort of adopt her and then these two maybe get married later (notable because back in the '80s in a lot of places trans girls could not access HRT or any surgeries unless there was a promise in place that some guy would marry us, which was pretty messed up). Anyway, her dad offered to sweeten the pot by throwing in his food cart as a dowry, and because he just sucks like that, Ranma's dad just took that and ran, abandoning Ukyo on the street. But again, she's weirdly chill about these things, and when Ranma just kinda goes "oh damn I had no idea about my dad sucking like that or that you were a girl, me too by the way, and hey you're cute but I'm engaged to this girl here," she just kinda gives them a "yeah that all checks out" look and accepts it.
Other stuff I skipped over.
So... jumping back again, we had the cat girl thing, the beach trip thing, there's some minor stuff we just drop (Cologne training Ryoga, Ranma getting roped into a competitive tea ceremony), then the competitive food delivery (which TOTALLY inspired a whole other series in 2006 btw, check out Muteki Kanban Musume/Ramen Fighter Miki if you just want more of that one), this adaptation pulls off a band-aid real quick. There's this character, Happosai, who is just this awful little tick-looking gremlin old man. He's introduced as the guy who trained Ranma and Akane's fathers in how to fight, and they realized he was Just The Worst so they tried to kill him and seal him in a cave, but it didn't take. And specifically he is Just The Worst in terms of being this gross pervert who runs around stealing girls' underwear and groping them and such. He's a recurring villain in the manga, showing up for a few big arcs, but the 90s anime adaptation just loved him, giving him a really expanded role especially in all the random original filler, and genuinely I know a ton of people afraid to watch this season because they know it's when he shows up. Good news! The creators of this show also clearly do not care for him as a character, so his entire string of initial appearances (save a quick cameo in the Romeo & Juliet bit) gets ultra-condensed into one single episode where he just kinda shows up, gets beaten and humiliated, and literally tossed the hell out of the show. Hooray!
This is followed by an episode I'm surprised I missed on my big read through. Shampoo allegedly has some "instant powdered drowned boy spring water" that would remove Ranma's "curse" and also there's an inexplicable giant weirdo challenging dojos that has to be a reference I'm missing (because Kamen Rider Den-O also riffs on this). Long story short, Akane's concerned that Ranma cares so much about this that she's willing to treat her like garbage, and Ranma makes a big show of just shredding it to prove she cares way more about Akane than boy-moding. It's basically the same story as this one from towards the end of the series (really, it's 38 volumes, pretty much every plot beat happens at least twice by the end), which was kind of my big mic drop moment and all:
So it's cool that that's already established this early on, but while I'm on the subject, lately I've been getting a lot of "well actually" comments on that third panel in particular (the "... I understand that my girl side-" bit, we're reading right to left here). People keep showing me the version of that from the official Viz translation and claiming I'm being disingenuous, going with this alternate "wrong" translation. To these people I have two things to say. 1- OK so I know you just found those posts, but you need to realize that those are actually from a decade ago, and at the time there was no official licensed English version of like... the back two thirds or so of the manga (I think the newer Viz run that went all the way through was starting up around then, but all that was actually out was the flipped partial translation from the 90s). 2- OK you clearly don't know how localization works. It is basically never the case that you can read a word or a sentence in one language, and have there be a single specific correct direct translation of it in another. There's synonyms and phrases with no direct equivalent, and hell with Japanese to English you've got totally different sentence structures. And hell, particularly relevant to anything with gender shenanigans, you do know I hope that Japanese doesn't actually do gendered third person pronouns right? And it DOES kinda do gendered first person pronouns, but not really, because there's 16 of them for different levels of formality, and that's before you get into how girls will often use the relatively masculine ones because they're trying to sound tough/advertise they're butches, etc.?
If you aren't zoomed in on just the one panel, and actually compare the whole pages between the above and what's in the official localization (which, again, did not exist when I first went over this), the general gist of the whole page says the same thing in both, just phrased and ordered differently, particularly avoiding how some fan translator crammed 25 words into that tiny bubble here. I would of course be curious about the exact original wording of everything, if you know, anyone is ever inclined to find a way to mail me literally an entire bookcase worth of 35 year old tankobon and hook me up with a proper tutor for any kanji I don't know, but until then people need to cut it with the "gotcha" cards claiming one person's localization of something they haven't actually read is better than another's because they got one in a bookstore and the other off some old scanlation site, particularly when they're close enough for jazz.
And while I'm on this soapbox, most of the comments I get on these posts are trans people just kinda delighted at how this near 40 year old series from a so-far-as-I-know cis and possibly even straight woman managed to maybe-accidentally deliver some top notch trans girl rep and it either helped them realize they were trans and/or provided some wholesome comfort. That's great. And if more people keep coming across this series in any given form, or even just my analysis, and it helps crack more eggs and help people realize they can actually just be a girl (or not be a girl as the case may be) and be happy, that's wonderful, it's kinda why I'm doing this. But holy crap do I ever still also get a pretty regular flow of comments all "um, actually, you're WRONG. Ranma is a boy who just has a curse making him look like a girl! And he's not happier that way, he just looks happy sometimes because he's scamming people for free food!"
And like, OK first of all, you know you're being freaking rude, right? Normal people don't go up to strangers and shout about how they disagree with things they wrote. Who the hell raised you?
But also, you're just wrong? Like, I see how you'd maybe think that if you're going off some back of box summary or wiki blurb or something, but if you read or watch it, this is fact quite objectively a series about someone assigned male at birth and loaded down with a ton of macho baggage who ends up presenting super femme and at least temporarily unburdened from that baggage, very clearly being a hell of a lot more comfortable, relaxed, happy, flirty, and willing to play around with self-expression like that. That is just literally what is constantly happening on the page/screen. Sit down and binge it all to see for yourself.
Also if me pointing this out feels like a personal affront, or like, you're sitting there thinking "well that isn't trans behavior! I'd do the same things in that situation!" you should maybe really sit down and think about that, and why you're even reading some trans woman's blog. Because look, pal, sis, believe me. NONE OF THIS is how any guy would act in that situation. A guy wouldn't even think being a cute girl with big boobs would just be kinda neat at least now and then, if you can believe it. You better start reconsidering some prior assumptions there, sorry.
to b tbh w yall i actually can get behind ran ryo as a ship and actively ship it but only in VERY specific conditions. first ryoga CANNOT be aggressive calm confident dom. and ranma cant be a cautious dainty sub. like thats just the concept of A Man and A Woman atp and unrecognizable as the characters. Like if Ranma is weaponizing his sexuality to tease/bully Ryoga and not thinking about any implications while Ryoga is embarrassed af and awkward and into it but would never admit it verbally although everyone kinda knows. then like. maybe. basically what im saying is if their dynamic paints ryoga AT ALL as the dominant partner or one who is actively pursuing ranma I am instantly put off. i DO think the canon characters have an interesting dynamic and don't mind thinking about how it would translate to shipping, but they gotta stay IN CHARACTER for me to be interested in it. like I should be able to read it like a ryoga-and-akanes-first-date/any of the visits to ryogas house/fishing rod of love type story. but with tension that is acknowledged by the narrative. bc lord knows takahashi loves her "men kissing" gags but shell never admit to uncomfortable tension even if they deadass go on dates together
Something I don't really see anyone bring up in the "authors don't necessarily always know what their work is about" debate is queer themes in a work by someone who didn't figure themselves out until long after the fact
Looking online, it's pretty damn common to find queer creatives who have looked back on their earlier stuff and went "how the fuck did I not figure this shit out sooner?" cause even if they didn't necessarily intend the work to have queer themes, they end up being added into the story because the author simply does not perceive it as being anything unusual, then gets confused when everyone declares the work is peak That Gay Shit (tm)
insanity that they trained us to dislike body hair. body hair. that's just fuzz. that is just FUZZINESS!!! humans being fuzzy, it's one of our most adorable traits????
LOVE that the only "negative" comments are autistic people talking about the autistic reasons that they, autistically, are picky about their own body hair (sensory/texture reasons, with no judgement toward other people's bodies).
that i, an autistic blogger on the autistic blogging website, have managed to build such an overwhelmingly autistic following, is not just a privilege,
