Ranma ½

Episodes 23-24

Is it weird that this season of Ranma ½ didn't end with an announcement for a third? Should I be concerned? Leaving aside the drum I've been banging for half this season, we barely got to spend any time with Ukyo! I'm not ready yet! Are we really going to end on a Mousse arc?

If this were the end of nu-Ranma, some of the pacing would make more sense. All the major players are here now, with their circumstances settled. It all begins on the night of the festival, with Akane winning a stuffed pig at the raffle. Moments later, a masked would-be abductor takes the pig, believing it to be Akane herself. He leaves them with a ticket to a Chinese acrobatic show and a message to Ranma that if he wants to save Akane, he must attend the show. Who could this be, and how are they incompetent enough to make this mistake? He'd have to be blind, stupid, or both.

Wait, who do we know who is both blind and stupid? Could it be…

As Ranma and Akane make their way to the show, Ranma continues the bit of pretending that the stuffed pig was Akane even as she's right next to him, which is unusually clever for Ranma and very funny. Wouldn't you know it, Shampoo also got a ticket!

At the show, Akane throws Ranma on stage after getting sick of him continuing to pretend the stuffed pig is her, and he finds himself shackled to a target with a duck throwing knives at him. The duck is highly skilled, but when it throws one right at Ranma's face, he realizes that this isn't just a duck that happens to be very good at throwing knives–it's a human in the form of a duck who has a deep grudge against Ranma.

Yep, Mousse is back with a vengeance and a brand-new curse.

It makes sense to end the season on this arc. All the major pieces are in place, and all that's left now is to keep throwing them together and introducing one-off weirdos to keep the sitcom format going. There won't be any new recurring characters or curses until much further in the story, farther than the old anime ever got. For the most part, the story will remain in stasis for a long time, and that's fine.

But back to this arc. Mousse has decided the best way to defeat Ranma is to curse him to become a duck as well, and brought with him buckets of the Spring of the Drowned Duck with him to achieve that goal. It doesn't actually make that much sense, since the worst it'll do is put them on an even playing field, and Ranma has proven that he's capable of defeating Mousse when neither has a major advantage or disadvantage. But then, Mousse has never been the brightest, and Ranma ½ tends to operate on the logic of whatever's funniest, not whatever makes the most sense.

It's not a bluff, either; a high-speed chase through the festival that results in a tank of goldfish turning into a tank of ducks proves that he really is using cursed spring water. That's why, after Ranma sees Akane get hit by a high-pressure hose of water and knocked away, he believes the adorable little duck he finds really is Akane. He takes her home, trying not to get caught, but when he puts her in the bath, he finds, to his shock and horror, that she doesn't turn back into a girl. And of course, Soun was snorkeling in the bath. As one does.

We've barely gotten any Nabiki this season, and her brief appearance here highlights just what we're missing. Soun orders Ranma to “take responsibility” and marry Duck-Akane on the spot. Nabiki delights in the chaos of it all, snapping photographs of Ranma and the duck in wedding kimonos as her father tries to force the duck to drink from the ceremonial sake. Akane comes in just in time to stop things, and Nabiki is disappointed that things stopped before they got “really interesting,” in her words.

But it's Akane's turn to use the brain cell, and she has a plan: convince Shampoo to date Mousse if he defeats Ranma in a fight that Ranma will lose on purpose. The problem is, Ranma is much too prideful to lose on purpose, and he's sure that Mousse is too proud to let an opponent throw the fight. Still, Shampoo agrees to the plan, and Ranma and Mousse meet to punch it out. She even gives Mousse a special custom-made weapon!

This fight scene, though brief, is one of the animation highlights of a season that has been surprisingly short of impactful martial arts. There's a sense that the duck-topped staff Mousse is wielding is actually quite heavy as he swings it about, and taking a hit would actually do some serious damage. Ranma is at his acrobatic best, throwing his body about as he leaps and dodges Mousse's blows, but retaining the sense that he's doing so with a body made of bone and muscle, instead of the weightlessness that you often get with this sort of fight.

Ranma asks Mousse if he would be okay if Ranma lost on purpose, assuming it would damage his pride, but it turns out that manly pride is a little obstacle if it means he gets to date Shampoo. Shampoo, however, seems to have snuck a turn with the brain cell, and the duck staff she gave Mousse was booby-trapped, lobbing exploding eggs at him even as he's emboldened by it. Eventually, it gets to be too much, and he passes out, crushed by a refrigerator.

And hey, if we're so worried about Mousse's pride as a man, what about Shampoo's consent to being passed around as an object? Ranma ½ never challenges the idea that women can be won and lost as prizes in a battle. After all, Ranma always wins, maintaining the multi-engagement status quo. Arguably, Shampoo is just following her cultural norms and is lucky that she ended up with a stud muffin whom she's attracted to, but what if Mousse did win? I mean, she does care about him to an extent, despite her protestations. But there's also all the times Akane has been treated as a prize in battle. Rumiko Takahashi, as much as she enjoys playing around with concepts and norms around gender, doesn't seem particularly interested in exploring this idea, perhaps because it's actually pretty dark.

The episode and thus the season ends with an anime-original scene: Akane and Ranma are running to school, late as usual, and Ranma gets splashed. He sighs that it's fine for him to go to school in his female body for the day, and Akane assures him that she likes him whether he's a girl or a boy. The obvious intent is that Akane accepts him as he is, but there are some very interesting implications. Ranma's gender identity has been interpreted in several ways over the years in a way that's borderline Rorschachian: that he's a cis boy who turns into a trans boy, that girl-Ranma is effectively a separate but similar person to boy-Ranma, or that he's been a trans girl the whole time. This line supports my personal reading: that over time, his consternation about his transformation ebbs away and his identity shifts more gender-fluid. Akane's comment, as well, seems to indicate that she's not purely heterosexual; she may be pansexual, or simply attracted to Ranma himself, regardless of what his body looks like.

Whatever the intention behind the line, it echoes the meaning that Ranma ½ has had to the queer community for decades: that gender does not have to be fixed. Even if the transformation was unwilling, it indulged the fantasy of moving between male and female, especially as Ranma grew more in touch with his literal feminine side.

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Ranma ½ is currently streaming on Netflix.