Homestuck 1/2
Alright, look, I made the banner graphic let’s tear the bandaid off.
I make fun of Homestuck and have no intention to stop doing so, but I do so based on the series and interactions with its fans and the creator’s opinions and – look I’m not doing a good job of setting this up, this is a very meta and tortured introduction that doesn’t get to the point, and therefore, by Homestuck standards, it’s good. But what I am trying to get to is that Homestuck is a space that’s super important to people in a way that to me, an older internet denizen, rings true of the Ranma 1/2 fandom.
You know, it was a space full of romance roleplays and weird sexy exploration, and a bunch of queers used it to work themselves out and in the process learned from one another about what it meant to be queer.
I think the overlap between these spaces is a synthesis of three ideas: Isolation, Play, and Smoochiness.
Continue Reading →Ukyou And Tarou
Ranma 1/2, as may be expected of a gag sex comedy manga that ran for a decade, has a huge cast of characters. There are a host of characters who show up for exactly one story, such as some of my favourites, Herb, Shinnosuke and Ryuu Kumon, even if their appearance stretches across multiple issues. I guess I should mention Rakkyosai at this point because hey, remember Rakkyosai? No? Just me? Anyway. Technically, the near-final arc of the story, the Phoenix Mountain Arc, features a bunch of one-hit-wonder characters too like Kiima and Saffron, and oh, hey Pink and Link are in that basket too. If you haven’t read the manga, you must trust me this is a kind of impressive, like I’m doing some strange kind of wheelie on a type of vehicle you don’t understand.
How To Be: Akane Tendo (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
You know it’s not an intentional thing, but it seems that in the month of February, How To Be returns to the world of Ranma 1/2. Ah, what a wonderful world, the world where we have characters who fight with brooms or teleport or turn into gods and throw lightning bolts. Who are we going to visit here, in this mysterious world of creative martial arts?
Oh wait it’s in the subject you clicked on to go read this.
Sticker: Tama Go-Ju!
This joke is far too niche, but if you (‘ju’) are an egg (‘tamago’) who had a realisation reading Ranma 1/2, then I have made a sticker for you. Just you.
Here’s the design:
And here’s how it looks on a hat:
I don’t think of Smooch Month as ‘Ranma month’ but this is the inspiration that struck and this is the result. Enjoy this eggy joke that I won’t wear myself. I made something for you! And the cheapest way for you to get it is to buy stickers, over on Redbubble!
Shipping Lanes in Ranma 1/2
Oh hey Talen’s talking about Ranma 1/2 everyone is it February is it smooch month oh wait it is and oh yeah he is and you don’t get to control my decisions, Dad. Anyway, what else do you want out of me in smooch month? We’ve talked about how it’s hard, we’ve looked at game mechanics, we’ve even busted out a visual novel (that’s all Mass Effect is and you know it), and now we’re onto me bellyaching about Ranma Fandom Beefs that could now be my adult children if I wasn’t a Millenial who spent too much time buying avocado toast and sexting to ever get a real job and a family.
Anyway, let’s talk about the weird shipping of Ranma 1/2.
How To Be: Ukyou Kuonji (In 4E D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritive but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
Well, we’ve done some odd stuff with this section, some big ideas about maximising specific character quirks and hitting particularly niche interests like a transforming robot dinosaur, but what if your wants are more hey, what can I do with this simple basis? And, it seems that this month is full of references to Ranma 1/2 and twitter voted on it, and so, here we go, a return to Ranma 1/2 as an option: Ukyou Kuonji.
Akane Tendo, Baudrillard’s Tsundere
There’s this idea I’ve talked about before, when I wrote about Ouran High School Hosts Club of The Simulacrum. The simulacrum is an idea covered under the concept of hyperreality. You don’t need to read that, but I want to use it as a place to start as we talk about something of a Smooch Month classic.
Who’s this?
Chances are if you’re a weeb my age, you’ll remember her as Akane Tendo.
And chances are good, you know her, and don’t know her. Not the real her, and there is a real her.
Continue Reading →5 Things That Actually Happen In Ranma 1/2
Ranma 1/2 was a weird anime, and its weirdness was magnified by its own stuttering success. I don’t know what the merchandising was like in the day, but the history of Ranma 1/2 is one of seemingly a sudden and yawning need to create more Ranma content. It’s an infamously filler-prone anime, which means that almost any story it did, it probably did twice. The anime invents characters and has a bunch of plot cul-de-sac stuff and the anime had lots of episodes and the fanfiction community created a lot of fanon that wound up becoming part of what people assumed was canon in the west.
For this reason it can be challenging to underscore just how weird the pre-existing Ranma 1/2 manga really is. It’s funny, because the fanon-framed, anime-infused vision of canon is actually less weird because everything that seems really weird gets filed as ‘filler stuff.’
Here then are five actual, no really, things that happened in the Ranma 1/2 manga.
Continue Reading →How To Be: Ranma Saotome from Ranma 1/2 (In 4E D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines for this kind of project are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritive but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
This time, we’re going to try and capture the feeling of gender-flipping Martial Arts Death Machine Ranma Saotome from Ranma 1/2.
Story Pile: Ranma ½
Ranma ½ is a Japanese manga series in the ‘whacky martial artists doing whacky stuff’ genre starting in 1987 and concluding in 1996. It’s a big work – over those ten years of weekly releases it made almost 38 volumes of stories, which range between classical kung-fu duels, adventure stories, harem anime hijinks, school test drama, pg-rated sex romp and magical-realism short stories. It’s probably one of the most important anime of its time, with an influence that stretched well over two decades, and one of the queerest really straight things in the world.
And if you know me, you had to know that me talking about this series is more of a when than an if.