Crystal Tokyo Fanon/Canon discussion

[Merc]

I just re-read the manga to look over Chibi-Usa's behavior and in general she behaves a lot more mature and intelligently than the anime. Of course, ALL the characters are more mature in the manga as the anime made them more flawed due to its syndicated nature, but still outside of her early bickering with Usagi, she's unusually mature for a 'kid' in the manga.

Actually, if one were to sum up her major flaws early on, it'd be that she's attention starved and socially awkward...which makes SENSE given what we discussed of her life in the future. Most of her shows of strong emotion are directly related to those flaws or to her guilt (feeling she was responsible for everything that happened with the Dark Moon) and worry over her family in the future.

She actually loosens up -after- the Dark Moon matter gets resolved. Though she's still fairly mature, she tries to have fun and enjoy herself due to not having the concerns of the future hanging over her head anymore. She's there for training as a senshi, sure, but she's clearly seeing it as almost a vacation of sorts.

When she gets enrolled in school, her first day she considers the other kids to be nosy immature brats, and it's not until her and her classmates deal with a vampire attack that she starts opening up to them more as opposed to preferring to hang out with the senshi. By the next time school comes up in the manga, she's fairly popular and has gone on to become both class president and a member of the gardening club. As for schoolwork, it only gets mentioned twice.

One time she sighs about having to do homework, and has a clearly bored or annoyed expression. It could be interpretted as dread, but she's clearly the one to bring it up, not just for her own sake but for Usagi's sake who actually does have a much clearer expression of dread, so she's certainly more responsible whereas her mom is just lazy.

The other time, she does ask for help with her assignment...and yet it's in her strongest/favorite subject (art according to the data pages), and she very clearly does it for other reasons than needing help. Usagi/Mamoru had a fight, and she convinces both of them to help her with her homework, even stopping Usagi from leaving, and then pretends to fall asleep so they can talk things out while they finish the project for her. Stupid she clearly isn't, and there's other scenes that show she's good at manipulating people.

Not saying it's a clear interpretation either way, but there's nothing that really conflicts with her being a 900 year old human either or feels too stretched. And as mentioned, in the anime where she's much more flawed/immature, she actually IS a kid. So in this case, while I can see what Drac was arguing, I'm still willing to suspend my disbelief easily enough.

[Dracos]

I was half ignoring it, but that's not fair.  This deserves a "Well Researched."  Good going, Merc.

[Edward]

Heh, fanon takes on a malevolent sentience of its own..

Fanon may be malevolent, but I question its sentience. Or the sentience of many of its fans, for that matter.

Some fanon is trivial and does not contradict anything, like Mrs. Tendo's personal name.  Other fanon not just contradicts canon, it does it so blatantly that you question whether the person ever read the original series.

Secondly, consider that the fans tend to think things through long after the creator's moved on; these could be throwaway lines that people are making too much out of.

I've seen someone carefully calculate the weight of the huge chunks of ice Ryouga throws in the Martial Arts Ice Skating to "prove' exactly how strong the Lost Boy is.  They treat their assumptions on how far way the ice is as objective fact and ignore times that Ms. Takahashi was wildly inconsistent on perspective.

Or there's the people who try to force their often extreme view of the Amazon culture of Greek mythology onto the Chinese Amazons of Ranma ½, when Ms. Takahashi never actually called them Amazons.

Like "I haven't seen that chart in 100 years!" (Dr. Tofu's 'famous' last line in the Ranma manga before he abruptly vanishes, as Cologne filled the role of Wise Old Mentor more hilariously than a rival for Akane's affection).

Then again, exactly as above, that doesn't mean cool fic can't come from odd idea.

Brian modestly fails to mention his own excellent fic And Lo' The Mighty have Fallen, where Tofu is a lot older than he appears to be.  The line is probably a mistranslation or a comic exaggeration, but there's room for something very interesting if it's taken literally.

Ditto for Tofu's disappearance.  Barring fourth wall shattering fics, none of the cast would know who Rumiko Takahashi is, so there needs to be an in-story explanation for Tofu's death/kidnapping/extended training trip/elopement//time traveling back to the Heian Era/whatever.

Me, I wanna find out if there's a way to do "Ranma is an axis around which the timeline can be changed" without falling into "Ranma is a chaos machine who must be directly opposed by Setsuna".

Nothing is stopping you from writing a Ranma/Haruhi fusion. :3

Heh. Or you can integrate Ranma into the setting as an ally, such as Brian does in another excellent fic, Forging and Temperance. (/ME reminds self to dust off his notes on the Ranma/Sailor Moon/Escaflowne idea.)

I think people just _like_ the uber-shonen aspect of, "Enough punching will killbliterate your 'only love can overcome me' monsters!", many of them not realizing that they are kind of kicking the original shoujo vibe at the same time.

My impression was Sailor Moon had plenty of monsters that were killbliterated by hooping gobs o' magic deathiness.  But you do make point, the tropes of shonen and shojo are different.  A lot of people just mash settings together in a crossover instead of thinking about their differences.

Though, the 'Ranma is an engine of chaos' thing has been way overdone.  I'm pretty sure we've seen manga heroes go through way weirder than him.

Ataru Morobishi is the poster boy for weirdness.  In his first outing he plays tag for the fate of the Earth and acquires a flying alien fiancée when he already has a girlfriend.  He then gets haunted by dozens of bucktoothed demons thanks to a bungling Buddhist monk.  And in his third story he's forced to participate in a silly ritual that accidentally summons an alien taxi that charges the Earth's entire oil reserves, which is later rained back onto the Earth.

In the same page count Ranma had only met the Tendos and Dr Tofu and still hadn't made it to his first day of school at Furinkan High.

Ranma being an 'engine of chaos' is more than overdone, it meshes poorly with the original series.

[Dracos]

Admittingly, almost nobody seems to like ataru as a main protagonist, aside from That Guy.  I admit, I don't go hunting for it, but equally so, his series doesn't get crossed over with him being a winner in any of the places I have gone reading.  So while he might be vastly more suited for it, equally so, fewer people seem to be interested in writing about him at all.