Seasons of Ranma: Ranma Fanfiction of the 1990s

Author: Adam Wescott

Editor: Masha Zhdanova

Ranma is a great martial artist and the heir to the Anything-Goes School. Even so, he suffers from a mysterious curse he picked up from China’s Jusenkyo’s hot springs. Splash him with cold water and he becomes a woman. Splash her again with hot water, and she becomes a man. This complicates his engagement to Akane Tendou, his tomboyish fiance who wants nothing to do with him. That’s to say nothing of his relationship to every other fighter within a hundred miles, who might propose to him or punch her in the face based on their gender at any given moment. What’s a teenager like Ranma to do?

Ranma ½ is Rumiko Takahashi's best-selling manga series, with 55 million copies in circulation. Its anime adaptation ran for 161 episodes and spawned several films and OVAs. In the United States, it was one of VIZ Media's earliest successes, in both manga and anime form. Its popularity proved that Japanese media could be popular in the United States without having to disguise it as a local product.

But the series is also undeniably riddled with problems. The anime was canceled after the first eighteen episodes. When it returned as Ranma ½: Nettōhen, it was without the original director Tomomi Mochizuki. Nearly half of the series (says CaribouCoon) avoided Takahashi's original storyline in favor of repetitive original material. But even if the anime did stick to the manga story throughout, it would have eventually crashed into the inconclusive ending of Takahashi’s manga. 

As beloved as Ranma ½ was in its day, it was also the source of countless questions. Does Ranma identify as a boy or a girl? If he and Akane love each other, why don't they just admit it? How do the cursed springs of Jusenkyo really work? Takahashi cared less about answering these questions than she did creating memorable characters and showing the audience a good time. Yet fans couldn't help but think about them, because they were obsessed with the series and needed an outlet. This led to what I believe is Ranma ½’s greatest cultural legacy: its sheer quantity of English language fanfiction.

Where Was Ranma ½ Fanfiction?

The world of fanfiction was a very different place when Viz released Ranma ½ in the United States back in 1993. Fanfiction.net would not exist until 1998. Archive of Our Own would not appear for another decade after that. Instead, fans of the series made use of newsgroups and mailing lists via Usenet, two of the most popular of which were rec.arts.anime.creative (RAAC) and the Fanfiction Mailing List. The former started in 1993, and still exists today (although it is barely used). The latter began in 1995 and closed in 2021.

Ranma was not the only fandom popular on these boards. Bubblegum Crisis, Neon Genesis Evangelion and other series of the time period also saw activity. But Ranma was unique in just how many stories the series inspired at the fandom’s peak, as well as how long and/or ambitious they could be. Not even comparable romantic comedy series like Kimagure Orange Road or Tenchi Muyo! inspired the same level of interest.

Many of the writers of this time period were familiar with each other’s work. The Author’s Encyclopedia is a fan-run site that profiles various contributors to the FFML, lists their signature stories and even includes a page of fanfiction writing advice. Yearly informal awards for Ranma ½ stories and authors included the TASS (Tucson Animation Screening Society) Awards, the Chicken Ball Awards (which included interviews with nominated authors) and Taleswapper’s Ranma Fanfic of the Year posts between 1995 and 1998. 

How Was it Written?

Early Ranma ½ fanfiction was written in script rather than prose format. This might seem strange today, where the majority of fanfiction is written as prose. But Ranma ½ had only ever existed in anime and manga form. There was no prose version of the series for fans to take inspiration from. 

Ranma ½ script fanfiction broke the rules of what many consider to be proper screenwriting. The likely reason for this was that fans at the time did not know those rules. A more generous reading is that script fanfiction was meant to encapsulate the entirety of a Ranma ½ episode, including the music and animation, rather than just the dialogue. Imaginary credits sequences and even theme songs also made appearances.

By 1995, prose fanfiction had replaced script fanfiction. Authors like Joseph Palmer, Jeffrey D. Rusch and Shannon M. Richmeyer created versions of Ranma that their peers could emulate on the page. That’s not to say that script fanfiction vanished completely. Daigakusei no Ranma, a long and incomplete series following the characters in college, stuck to script format through its final published chapter in 2000. (The series began in 1993.) But Daigakusei no Ranma was an exception rather than the rule. The future of Ranma fanfiction would be prose, as it remains today.

Much as Ranma characters were constantly falling into springs and becoming something else, fanfiction writers of this time period warped the shape of Ranma ½ to better suit their needs and specific interests. Their stories were rarely faithful to the tone or delivery of canon Ranma ½. Instead they reflect the preferences of the community of English-language readers and writers who came together around the series. Let us discuss three of these “cursed springs” of Ranma ½ fanfiction.

The First Cursed Spring: Character

Rumiko Takahashi attended Gekiga Sonjuku Manga Academy (per Rumic World), a school owned by the influential manga writer Kazuo Koike. Koike believed that character was king. “If you have a strong character,” he once said to writer and editor Carl Gustav Horn, “the story will develop naturally, on its own.” Ranma ½ has many strong characters; put any two of them together and sparks will fly. Takahashi also gave these characters traits to ensure that they would show up and cause trouble. Ryoga’s poor sense of direction, for instance, is a perfect excuse for him to show up any time it might be convenient for Takahashi’s purposes. (The joke, of course, is that it is always inconvenient for Ryoga.)

Since Ranma ½ is a gag comedy, though, the characters don’t have much interiority. Ranma, Akane and friends are designed first and foremost so that they will misunderstand each other and get into fights. Deeper character introspection or psychology is not relevant. That’s not to say that Takahashi could not write characters with depth. Maison Ikkoku and Inuyasha demonstrate that she can do romantic melodrama, fantasy and horror just as well. But Ranma ½ was made to be a perpetual comedic motion machine. 

Many English language Ranma ½ authors of the 1990s, by comparison, sought to write the characters with interiority. This can be seen from the earliest stories in the fandom. Christian Gadeken’s Actor in the Mirror, published in 1992, made Ranma choose between the Akane he knows and an alternate-timeline Akane who loves him without reservation. When he learns that the former Akane will die if he chooses to stay with the latter, he returns to his former timeline even as his heart aches. Actor in the Mirror retains plenty of Takahashi humor, but has the feel of a Twilight Zone episode rather than a gag comic.

The relationship between Ranma and Akane remained a hot topic through the 90s. Seasons, a series of short stories ((beginning with Winter) published by Joseph Palmer from 1994 to 1995, removed nearly all the other characters, battles and supernatural elements to depict quiet moments of intimacy between the couple. Krista Perry’s popular 1996  fantasy story Hearts of Ice (which she finished in 2009, 13 years later) instead plays up the fantasy elements by transporting Akane to the spirit world. As a mysterious curse erases all traces of her from the physical realm, Ranma struggles to hold onto her memory as all his friends and family forget about her.

Also popular were stories taking place after resolving Ranma and Akane’s “will they or won’t they” dynamic. Richard Lawson’s 1996 story Thy Inward Love in particular uses Ranma’s long-delayed confession as a device to reexamine every single character in Nerima. His fiancees and rivals, like Shampoo, Ryoga and Ukyo, all must decide how they will live their lives independent of Ranma and Akane. Stories like Thy Inward Love aren’t just a repudiation of the anime; they’re an attempt to rewrite the manga’s inconclusive ending as a conventionally satisfying (to the author) romantic denouement.

Zen’s 1997 The Bitter End is a repudiation of a different sort. Zen wrote the story as a gift for a friend who wanted a Ranma and Akane pairing. Instead he wrote a tragedy in which Ranma’s pride and Akane’s anger management issues lead to tragedy and death following their wedding. The Bitter End became a fierce topic of debate in the Ranma fandom. Its portrayal of Akane as a woman with mental illness, rather than a tsundere in a romantic comedy, infected fanfiction for years. Yet Zen’s story can also be read as an attempt to give characters interiority, if an unusually cruel one.

Other fanfiction authors chose to flesh out the extended cast of Ranma ½ rather than the central couple. John Biles’s Putting Your Heart in the Right Place, an influential 1993 script fic, picked nerdy Gosunkugi as its protagonist despite (in fact, because) of his irrelevance. A few years later, Mike Loader’s 1996 thriller Smoke and Mirrors staged a time travel thriller with an unlikely protagonist: Akane’s motherly older sister Kasumi, the last person you’d expect to see in a life-or-death situation. These two stories pushed seemingly static Ranma ½ cast members far outside their comfort zones in order to develop new and surprising narratives within its universe. 

Another unexpectedly popular focus character was the wealthy gymnast Kodachi Kudo. Her familial wealth and reliance on poisons makes her one of the more villainous characters in the Ranma universe. But through the second half of the 1990s, fanfiction authors took turns reimagining her as a tortured soul rather than a spoiled princess type. Examples include Stefan Gagne’s 1995 story Wicked Garden, Shazorn’s Black Roses: A Love Story and Richard Lawson’s 1997 tale Roses of Shadow. Just as Zen warped Akane into a monster in The Bitter End, Kodachi evolved through fandom telephone into somebody far removed from how Takahashi first imagined her.  

The Second Cursed Spring: Structure

Every Ranma story follows a certain format. Step one: a martial artist has a problem. Step two: they cross paths with Ranma or Akane, who are connected to them in some way. Step three: other martial artists are caught up in the crossfire. Then, everybody fights! At the end, nobody learns their lesson, and the cycle repeats again. Once you’ve caught on to Takahashi’s scheme, Ranma ½ can be a repetitive and even frustrating watch. Yet its formulaic nature is also key to its success. Formulas can be tweaked to tell all kinds of fun stories.

Director Mamoru Oshii and his crew of artists took advantage of this when adapting Takahashi’s earlier success, Urusei Yatsura. The latter episodes of Oshii’s run on the series made sweeping changes to Takahashi’s original vision. Sometimes they altered the source material beyond recognition. But Takahashi’s characters are so iconic that they were able to survive this kind of tampering. Urusei Yatsura’s anime adaptation remains a classic today because of, rather than despite, the staff’s idiosyncrasies.

The fanfiction authors of the 90s were, in a sense, a few dozen Oshiis dying Ranma ½ in their colors. There were many different ways to do this. One was to change the setting. Ranma and his friends were spliced into future dystopias (Gagne’s 1995 Ministry of Confusion), epic fantasy (Alan Harnum’s long-running Waters Under Earth) and the second highest mountain on earth, K-2 (Red Tower, Black Tower, Grey Slabs.)

Crossovers were even more popular. English-speaking fans of Ranma ½ at the time liked many other things too, like Star Wars. So of course they created Star Wars: A Faint Hope (Lara Bartram and Mike Loader, 1998) which recast everybody from Ranma ½ as Star Wars characters. Just as goofy was Bridget E. Wilde’s 1998 Muppet Show Tribute to Anime, which let Ryoga loose in the world of The Muppets (only to reveal that he had an excellent singing voice.) The crossover of choice, though, was Sailor Moon. Ranma ½’s focus on transformation made its protagonist an excellent foil (or even replacement) for Usagi and company.  

Some writers brought unexpected influences to their Ranma stories. Alan Harnum admitted in his author notes for Waters Under Earth that he borrowed heavily from the novels of Guy Gavriel Kay. The series, which was one of the most ambitious fan works of the 90s, had (for better or worse) much denser prose than was typical of Ranma fiction at that time. Similarly, Luca Signorelli wrote in the afterword of his 1997 tale Red Tower, Black Tower, Grey Slabs that he was inspired by the author J.G. Ballard, particularly his short story “The Terminal Beach.” “I believe,” he wrote, that Ballard “ invented the only narrative technique worth using in this end of century.”

 Aside from these, I’m a personal fan of Bridget Ellen Engman’s Flambe! Engman ends each chapter with real-life recipes, which themselves are loaded with jokes. “Throw chocolate chips into the air and attempt to swat every single one into the batter,” reads the recipe for Black-Bottom Banana Bread. “If you can do this, you can master the Kachuu Tenshin Amaguriken.”

Others took a metafictional approach to Ranma ½. Stefan Gagne’s 1997 The Ends, which he called “ my farewell to Ranma ½, and my condemnation of it,” has Ranma realize to his horror that the world in which he lives will never allow a happy,  satisfying resolution to his problems or to those of his friends. Many years before that, though, Richard Ueyama experimented with metafiction in Kanketsuhen ‘93: a script to an imaginary Ranma film, including “translation notes” and other commentary on the movie. It’s the kind of self-indulgent joke you’d expect from Mamoru Oshii himself–and in fact, Ueyama references the Urusei Yatsura anime in Kanketsuhen ‘93 alongside Ranma ½.

Finally there were those who wrote “darkfic,” transporting the bright world of Ranma ½ into murky waters. Susan Doenime’s hard-hitting 1997 story Poison reimagined Akane as a racist; Jeffery Paul Hosmer’s 1997 story Gisei (set in the Ranma 2096 continuity) invents an impressively grim ending to Shampoo’s story. Works like these (along with the aforementioned The Bitter End, and my sentimental favorite Ill Met By Starlight) were far removed from what Takahashi originally intended. Yet I would reckon that the majority of English language Ranma ½ fanfiction of this time, which continuously reinterpreted Takahashi’s work, had more in common with darkfic than the source material itself.

The Third Cursed Spring: Gender

Transformation is a defining aspect of Ranma ½, but not in the way you might think. Takahashi leverages it to complicate character relationships, so that Ranma relates differently to each character whether he presents as a girl or a boy. Yet Ranma only ever thinks of himself as a boy, not a girl. Takahashi is similarly uninterested in asking, “how is Ranma’s father Genma affected by spending time as a panda,” or “should Ryoga really be taking advantage of Akane’s trust by sleeping with her as a pig?” Ranma’s world operates by gag manga rules where these questions have no place.

This didn’t stop fans from working through their own feelings regarding Ranma and gender. If anything, the pressures of fandom demanded it. Fans already were busy exploring the characters and their personalities. They sought to push the series outside of typical sitcom rhythms to explore other topics. So writing about Ranma’s sexual or gender identity was the natural next step.

There are a few different types of stories in this vein. One posits that while Ranma identifies as male, his “curse” is a part of him. Actor in the Mirror and Putting Your Heart in the Right Place, both published in 1993, have Ranma flirt with dispelling the curse only for him to realize that he cannot dispel his female half so easily. In the first story, this is a sacrifice that Ranma makes for Akane’s sake. In the second, the reader learns that by “curing” his curse, Ranma is repressing a part of himself: and that will only hurt him in the long run.

Another asks what might happen if Ranma was stuck as a girl full-time. Robert Haynie Jr.’s incomplete Girl Days (which ran from 1999 to 2002) has his mother Nodoka insist that, now that Ranma has lived as a “man among men,” he must learn to be a “girl among girls!” Girl Days became a fan favorite because it rejected the self-seriousness of Ranma ½ fanfiction at the time in favor of Takahashi-style gags. As Robert wrote in the rather silly transcript of the 1999 Chicken Ball Awards: “DAMMIT! RANMA IS A COMEDY!”

Most stories in this vein, though, did not follow Haynie’s lead. Richard Lawson’s 1997 story Thy Outward Part and Michael Noakes’s 1997 Reflective Snapshot are two representative examples. Thy Outward Part invents a scenario in which a college age Ranma is trapped in his female form. After breaking off his engagement to Akane, he meets college student and narrator Kentarou, and must decide if he’s ready to identify as a woman full-time. Reflective Snapshot  keeps Ranma and Akane together, but profiles a specific moment of dysphoria where an older Ranma grapples with the fact that he is no longer a teenage martial artist but a comfortable adult woman with children.

Lawson’s story is typically sincere and Noakes’s well-written. Yet both cannot help but reflect the problems inherent in Ranma ½. The source material positions womanhood as a curse, and gender as an essential quality that determines how you act and who you like. Thy Inward Part supposes, from that point, that if Ranma chooses to live as a woman he must therefore be attracted to men. Not just that, but Kentarou–a man–is the one who pressures Ranma to make that choice. As a result, the story is no more respectful of Ranma’s agency than Takahashi herself. Similarly, Reflective Snapshot presupposes that you cannot be a mother and a martial artist. We know from history that this is simply not true.

At first glance, classicalgal’s 1999 story Genma’s Daughter falls into this same trap. Its twist on the traditional Ranma ½ narrative is that Ranma was first born as a girl rather than a boy. Once he discovers the truth, Ranma decides she is a woman, changes her name to Ranko and gives up martial arts for the violin. In the process she becomes an entirely different person. It’s easy from that position to criticize the story for subscribing to the source material’s gender essentialism.

Yet there is a significant difference between Genma’s Daughter and its predecessors: it gives Ranko agency. Not entirely, of course. The crux of the story is, “surprise! You were a girl all along!” Ranko’s choices are made according to that discovery. Yet Ranko does not make this decision grudgingly. Instead she chooses to live as a girl because she learns that she is much happier as a girl than as a guy. “I was a puzzle put together the wrong way,” she says, “and now I’m slowly being put together the right way.”

classicalgal borrowed the idea for Genma’s Daughter from another author who started but then abandoned the story in the middle of its first chapter. As she writes in the comments on Archive of Our Own, “I felt the concept was a good foundation for an allegory about the internal struggle of coming to terms with being trans, but without the aspect of disapproval from a society that was considerably more transphobic at the time.” Antiquated as it may be, Genma’s Daughter was a stepping stone between early stories in which queer and/or trans identities were invisible or portrayed as a burden, and modern Ranma fiction where queerness can be the default.

The Past and Future of Ranma ½ Fanfiction

The internet that birthed 1990s Ranma fanfiction is long gone. Web portals and social media sites take preference over newsgroups. The Fanfiction Mailing List is dead, and rec.arts.anime.creative hasn’t seen a proper post since 2012. Authors like John Biles, Stefan Gagne and classicalgal have long since moved on to other fandoms and even (in the case of Gagne) original fiction and video games.

That’s not to say that the community is gone for good. Authors from this time period can still be found haunting online nerd hangouts like TV Tropes, rpg.net and SpaceBattles Forums. Fanfiction.net hosts new Ranma stories (including claymade’s Dark Lords of Nerima trilogy) as well as older ones like Hearts of Ice. My personal favorite fanfiction repository is archives.eyrie.org, which mirrors rec.arts.anime.creative. Nearly every story mentioned in this piece so far is available to read there. 

But some author homepages and personal sites that once hosted Ranma fanfiction have long succumbed to link rot. These pages are how I first discovered Ranma fanfiction as a teenager. Many of them are now only available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Trawling the Ranma ½ Fanfiction wiki reveals countless half-dead links and missing image files associated with Ranma communities of the early 2000s.

You might ask why this matters. Surely the stories themselves are what is most important? Well, webpages and usenet groups are also a form of culture. By digging through these portals we can see how people at this time expressed themselves and communicated with each other. Should the Internet Archive ever shut down, though, it’s possible that all fandom activities from this period might disappear for good. Even if there are folks out there who might not want their “embarrassing” writing to survive, I would prefer that they be given the power to determine whether to remove their work from the old internet or to keep it up.

A remake of Ranma ½ aired this year, courtesy of director Konosuke Uda and the animation studio MAPPA. By all accounts, it is a faithful adaptation that sticks to the source material while throwing in some of its own flair. All the same contradictions that drove ‘90s fans mad remain intact. Yet while animated Ranma ½ stubbornly remains the same, its audience has changed. They have spent the past several years putting their own spin on Takahashi’s comics. 

In general, Ranma fanfiction today is much more open about gender and sexuality than the ‘90s classics. Genma’s Daughter was once the exception for starring a version of Ranma that identified as a girl. Now we have stories featuring genderfluid Ranma (Beedok’s Stop!! Ranma-kun!), trans woman Ryoga (Chumpersonable’s Girls Before Swine) and trans man Akane (uragaaru’s Ghost at a Funeral). Some even touch on polyamory, like ayellowbirds’s The Luckiest Girl in the World. Many of these stories are written by authors who openly identify as gay, trans or queer themselves.

These authors do not try to excuse Ranma ½ for its various problems.But their work demonstrates real affection for the source material. Authors like Beedok and ayellowbirds keep the silly gags and characters that Ranma ½ is famous for, even as they lean into themes and interpretations of canon that Takahashi may never have considered. They also utilize an entirely different toolbox of devices and cliches than the fanfic writers of the 1990s. If the future of Ranma ½ fandom belongs to anyone, it belongs to this new generation of writers.