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Ranma ½ (2024) is a remake of a 1989 anime based on a 1986 manga that currently has one season. Featuring a martial arts boy in an arranged marriage with a martial arts girl, the twist is that when the boy gets splashed with cold water, he turns into a girl. I don’t think it’s very good.

I watched the Ranma remake because as a trans girl it’s just one of those shows it seems every other trans girl has seen, and I was hoping to get into some of the trans fanfiction of which there is an abundant amount unsurprisingly.

I didn’t have high expectations for the show based on what I had heard and what I expected from a manga and anime created in the 80s. I got what I expected largely; an anime with “whacky genderbending hijinks”, kinda pervy humour, and a lack to ever actually engage with its own premise.

One place it could use its premise is to engage with sexism, however not only does it never do this, you also just have to put up with constant teenage-boy-level sexism that just gets grating. I know it’s meant to be “in character”, but being annoying in character is still annoying. Avatar: The Last Airbender is a great example of a show that can intergrate sexism well while targetted at a younger audience, and Ranma falls flat on its face in comparison.

The show is also weirdly anti-queer. Like there’s standard not including queerness for an 80s show (though that isn’t exactly an excuse either, Sailor Moon originally aired 3 years after the original Ranma anime and they could also change things in the remake), and then there’s how much they have to go out of their way to avoid being queer due to the show’s premise.

Ranma has plenty of romantic interactions, however they are completely restricted to the opposite gender of whatever he currently is. He isn’t allowed to have tender moments with Akane in his girl form, and when he reveals the form changing to Shampoo she just leaves. This is to say nothing of Kodachi, who while being one of the most lesbian-coded characters I’ve ever seen is somehow apparently completely straight and only interested in Ranma’s guy form.

I was also warned prior to watching that the depiction of Chinese characters is not great and yeah… Outside of Shampoo (who is kind of painted as dumb but so are a lot of other characters), every other Chinese character such as the tour guide and the rest of the women in Shampoo’s village are depicted with caricatures.

There’s also a big idiot ball that gets passed around a lot in this show. As mentioned, Shampoo holds it for a substantial bit towards the end, but other characters get a turn such as Akane towards Ryoga/P-Chan’s liar-revealed plot. In general it just makes the show a great deal more frustrating to watch, and paints the involved characters as stupid.

My most petty complaint is that throughout the show, Ranma didn’t get a magical girl transformation sequence once. That would have at least been fun but we can’t even have that.

What makes all these worse and so much more conflicting for me is that sometimes Ranma does decide to be good and show how much potential it has. It has great animation, especially for fights, sometimes it is genuinely funny with a joke beyond just “haha, boobs”, and the characterisation is really strong and furthered by good dialogue, providing some character moments that really stand out.

One of these moments is in episode 8, after Ranma gets kissed by Mikado, and actually opens up his vulnerabilities to Akane. Not only is this moment tender, meaningful and just really fucking good, but overall whenever the romance between Ranma and Akane comes up it’s surprisingly good (when it’s not dumb). The show’s handling of consent is also well done, especially considering the kind of humour it usually employs.

I didn’t expect to write my thoughts on shows on this blog (as you can probably guess by the categories), but Ranma somehow gave me enough notes to make one with how much potential it constantly squanders and how sometimes it’s just really good out of nowhere.

The only people I’ve talked to so far who like the show are either guys who watched it when they were teenage boys, or girls who watched it when they were teenage boys.

Overall I don’t think it’s really worth watching unless;

1. You’re a teenager who has its sense of humour,
2. An egg (there isn’t really any gender enjoyment other than the “wow I wish I could turn into a girl”, and when you’ve already turned into a girl that tends to fall flat), or
3. Wanting to get into the fanfiction (it’s actually really good and picks up all the potential, gender and otherwise, the show dropped).