Ranma 1/2: One Page Per Volume, Part 23

[rainsometimes]

Art reads left to right as it’s a flipped edition

Truth being told, although the "Fishing Rod of Love" story in volume 23 has many interesting and entertaining moments, I don't enjoy it as much as I could have - see, Ryoga’s normally one of my favourite characters, but in this arc he's just such a scumbag. There's no getting around it.

Now, it's bad enough that he fell for a superstitious impulse and used a magical fishing rod hoping it would make Akane fall in love with him. That's certainly reprehensible - though I will point out, as I've seen many fans claim this as something uniquely terrible that nobody else comes close to, that it's very much the kind of reprehensible thing that the characters in the Ranmaverse tend to do. Ranma himself has resorted to similar tricks, maybe with slightly less selfish motivations but still trampling all over other people’s boundaries and free will. Akane has done her share of deceitful manipulation for petty reasons. There are no saints in this manga.

But even worse than that attempt is what follows later. Okay, so Ryoga fails and hooks Ranma instead by mistake, and is not just extremely embarrassed to suddenly have his rival devotedly in love with him and loudly proclaiming it to all and sundry; but Akane sees all this and completely misunderstands the situation, first thinking that Ranma's mocking Ryoga, then she learns of the fishing rod but still thinks Ryoga hooked Ranma by design, and Ryoga's too scared to tell her the not particularly nice truth. What more is, Ryoga swiftly learns that having a super-powered martial artist in passionate, jealous love with you is pretty scary. As you can see above. So he's pretty freaked out by it all - this is comprehensible, even if it's all his fault to start with.

But then he puts a sleeping pill in Ranma’s drink and instead of running away from there and try to find out how to reverse it, he decides his only way out is to kill Ranma. Going so far as to drag him into the forest, start digging a deep hole, and even has the gall to imagine him embracing Akane happily by the headstone of Ranma’s grave. And all for a situation that's caused by him and nobody else.

Arrgh, it's so frustrating!

At least it turns out that he can't bring himself to go through with it because he just can't kill someone who's helpless. (This moment is definitely played for serious, too.) But it's still really scummy to go that far in the attempt. I might be taking it too seriously, but reading it through in context of the whole series, I got a sense of Ryoga regressing instead of progressing in his personal development, as I compared his behaviour here to those of previous arcs. In the Musk Dynasty saga in volume 25 I had a similar sense of regression.

Ranma also behaved more unsympathetically than normal in the Reversal Jewel story at the end of volume 22 - I wonder if Takahashi felt she needed to make Ryoga a bit meaner than usual too, in order for the narrative balance to not tip too much between them? Or if she was just on a particularly strong Comedic Sociopathy trip when she did these volumes? Oh, well...

At least Akane comes off pretty well in this story! She shows a lot less homophobia than she has done in some other stories, like the Tsubasa one for instance. Whether this is because she's touchier about f/f than m/m or because she's genuinely grown more broadminded in the interim is probably up to the reader to decide. A third in-universe reason might simply be her ridiculously strong tendency to give Ryoga the benefit of the doubt, admittedly.