terajk

gemais asked about this one! It's also my very first DVD commentary ever.

Title: 少女 (Shoujo)
Fandom: Ranma 1/2
Characters: Ranma, Ryoga
Wordcount: ~1100 (84 words of fic)
Summary: In which Ryoga wastes precious caffeine.
Note: Lines from the fic are in bold.

Ranma comes into the kitchen and gets splashed with hot tea.

It's easier for me to write in present tense a lot of the time.

“What was that for?” she asks in a voice she doesn’t want today.

When I first read Ranma 1/2 (uh, last year?) I read Ranma’s gender identity as “boy” because that’s what he said it was--but I loved how, even as he said he was a guy, he did lots of things in a very feminine way. I explored this a bit with a picspam. But even there, I focused more on how Ranma appears in the covers/chapter openers, since he always said he was a guy.

Then I read

melannen’s post Let’s Keep It Friends, which talks about Ranma’s relationship with gender:

and Ranma is so very genderqueer in canon, the way he's so awkward with boy-ness and revels so in the girl form, and the way she's so... comfortable with Akane when she's being herself.

And right then I wanted ALL THE FIC about genderqueer Ranma FOREVER.

“If we’re doing this,” Ryoga says, “we’re doing it as men.”

I love Ryoga dearly; one of the reasons is because we share a navigational impairment, which I’ve never seen portrayed in fiction before. And Rumiko Takahashi portrays my experience of this impairment with really scary accuracy on a bunch of levels, from perceptual things to having strangers respond to you in horror when you’re in public ~~without your handler.~~ But, because I’m female, that horror takes a different form: people ask if I’m sick, offer me glasses of water, and offer to take me home.

So, Ryoga’s feelings about gender are REALLY fun for me to poke at. And I think his navigational impairment influences his ideas about masculinity and weakness. He’s quick to accuse Ranma of running away when what actually happened is Ryoga got epically lost. He once punched Ranma AWAY SOMEWHERE and spent a month looking for him, then accused Ranma of “running away like a coward.” Which knocked into Ranma’s insecurities about his masculinity and everything went downhill from there.

The most-interesting-to-me interpretation of this behavior is that on some level Ryoga KNOWS he got epically lost, but if he blames Ranma he can somehow make it not have happened, or just project his feelings of inadequacy ONTO Ranma, or simply wrest some control over who knows his business. EVERYONE knows Ryoga's like this, whether he wants them to or not.. Complete strangers argue over how bad his sense of direction is. In front of him. Also, his sense of direction is involved in how Ranma finally remembers who he is.

But, as with anyone you love, Ryoga does things that annoy me--like have weird feelings about women. (For instance, he’s always going on about the besmirching of Akane’s honor. Akane can avenge her own honor just fine.)

This fic follows from Stars, where two things happen. One, Ranma asks Ryoga to live at the Tendo dojo. Two, Ryoga asks him to teach him how to find a place, and explicitly says that Ranma should do this, and not Akane.

Canonically, Ryoga would’ve asked Akane to walk him home, but taking him somewhere is different than teaching him where it is. Taking him home could’ve just been part of their date; there could’ve even been handholding! But actually learning how to get somewhere would take a lot of effort and make him feel/look stupid, and he really doesn’t want to look stupid in front of Akane. All of this plays into Ryoga’s ideas about sticking up for people who are weak and defenseless, which his weird feelings about women are a part of. (He once beat up all Ranma’s other rivals when Ranma was weak and defenseless).

“In other words,” says Ranma, “you don’t want no girl showing you where someplace is.”

Why has “I don’t want Akane to see me look stupid” extended to this crap? Ranma will see Ryoga look stupid no matter what sex sie is. But sie has also invited Ryoga to live at the dojo, so now Ryoga has a safe place to be. A place where you feel safe is important to everyone, but takes on a certain kind of importance when the outside world is chaos. He also has a family: in the manga, his entire family has no sense of direction, so his parents have accidentally abandoned him, and he’s really isolated and lonely. Even Akane knows this, and she’s not exactly an expert at reading Ryoga’s feelings.

Ryoga has ALL THE FEELINGS about all of this, and he doesn’t deal with having ALL THE FEELINGS very well at all. When he started to have Feelings for Akane but knew she didn’t have them back, he thought about being a pig forever so that she’d love him, but before his heart of glass could break he ~~ran away like a coward~~ went on a journey instead.

So Ryoga’s feeling very vulnerable, because safety is really new to him, and doesn’t know what to do--especially because what he would do is leave, and he doesn’t want/is trying not to do that. And the vulnerability has triggered his ideas about gender, and his weird feelings about women. I don’t know if he’s trying to process the vulnerability through his ideas about men and women or what.

And that is why Ryoga doesn’t want no girl showing him where someplace is.

Then she says, “Fine, you pig. I’ll be a guy. But I’m changin’ my shirt.”

Ryoga has reasons for being an asshole, but he doesn’t have an excuse.

When she comes into the kitchen again, she’s wearing a pink Hello Kitty shirt

Although sie is terrified of cats, genderqueer Ranma is very fond of Hello Kitty--and only Hello Kitty. Unfortunately for Ryoga, a sense of direction comes in handy for telling her and her twin sister Mimi apart. They also wear different-colored bows, but Ryoga doesn't know anything about girly nonsense and don’t girls have more than one outfit anyway? (He adds the last bit rather quickly, as if to keep Ranma from reminding him of girly nonsense he knows about):

with 少女 written in sparkles.

My knowledge of Japanese is dubious as hell. I wasn’t sure whether to go with shoujo or josei, but decided on the former partly because of Ranma’s onepiece bathing suit, which says “Boy.” Considering that I’ve only read Ranma 1/2 in English, that was probably a silly way to decide this.