Kick the Night Off Ranma ½ Fanzine

Download a copy of the zine here.

Toward the end of summer in 2020, a friend that I had worked alongside of in the Stay Home With Sonic zine alerted me to another project that seemed similarly up my alley: Another zine, but this one focusing on the cast of Ranma ½. I had thoroughly enjoyed participating in SHWS and was eager for another opportunity like it, but I’ll admit, this one made me hesitate. Although I love Ranma ½, it’d probably been at least a decade since I’d actually read or watched it, let alone interacted with it.

But then, maybe that could be part of the challenge. This was an opportunity to test my ability to hit the ground running in less familiar territory, with a side bonus of prompting me to reignite an old flame. I decided to audition, and wouldn’t ya know I it, I made it in!

Like my previous zine experience, this collection operated on a three month timeline; however, I found myself less in control over the pace at which I worked, because I was surprised to find that every writer in this zine would be paired with an illustrator. I not only had to worry about giving myself enough time to finish, but I needed to ensure that my partner had enough time to complete her work as well!

First and foremost, I needed to refresh myself on the source material. My first task was to dust off my DVDs and binge the series from the beginning to identify which characters I felt I could believably write at all. Considering that the theme of the zine was “boys/girls night out,” I kept in mind that most of these characters have a lot of tension in their dynamics with others of the same gender (which is itself a huge rabbit hole with regard to Ranma ½). It’s not enough to feel comfortable writing individual characters; I needed to feel confident writing these characters as an ensemble, as well as the conflict that would undoubtedly arise as a result.

Something else I kept in the front of my mind was the fact that Ranma ½ stories have a certain flare for escalating absurdity. It’s not enough for the characters to find themselves in a ridiculous situation to deal with; that situation will necessarily continue ramping up its outrageous circumstances until the story is so over-the-top that it can’t help but end with a bang. If I wanted to be true to the source material, I needed to pick a scenario which could start innocently enough, but had the potential to gain momentum and spiral out of control. Luckily, this project came with a 3,000 word limit, a full 50% more than I got while working on SHWS. Based on how much story I was able to fit into the previous zine, I was confident I’d have enough room to tell a coherent (if ludicrous) story in Kick the Night Off.

I eventually settled on a poker game for the base situation. It’s something that could feasibly happen on a “Guys’ Night,” it would foster (if not reinforce) the innate tensions between the characters, and it could easily unravel at the seams. I immediately chose Ranma, Ryoga, Mousse, and Genma for my core cast; in my opinion, there was never another choice. The three boys are fiercely competitive and constantly aim to one-up each other, and Genma is well known for deceitful and underhanded tactics to get what he wants. Pitting the four of them against each other promised plenty of opportunities to work in the signature Ranma ½ escalation. Once I tossed in two more central Ranma themes — namely, curses and strong-arming anything and everything into a form of martial arts — I knew I was on the right track.

The next step was to share my ideas with my assigned illustrator, an artist known as Kaze. I didn’t have any prose written out at this point, but I’d made a list of the sort of situations I definitely wanted to include in my story one way or another. This included moments such as Ryoga, as P-Chan, struggling to continue with the game due to his lack of hands; Mousse, in his duck form, lacing cards in between his feathers a la the way he holds weapons in canon; and Genma, in whatever form, likely attempting to make off with all the money while the boys are distracted. I was also still entertaining the notion of Akane coming across the commotion and escalating things further, given that she tends to blame all things on Ranma and isn’t aware that her pet pig is actually Ryoga. Based on our discussion, Kaze drew up a group of sketches to ensure we were on the same page.

I finally found my footing and got some forward motion with building the actual prose after that. I’m still wondering to this day if this was a result of the discussion about my ideas, or having seen a visual representation of those ideas brought to life. Either way, I built the scenario of Ranma challenging the group to a game of “Cursed Poker,” wherein each character would get cursed if they dropped below 50% of their starting money, and could only get back to normal by either winning the money back or forfeiting it and leaving the game. This premise served as a vehicle for a lot of things: First and foremost, it made for a perfect demonstration of Ranma’s propensity toward watching his peers get themselves into trouble without stepping in to help them. Ranma proposes this game already aware that he has an edge over the other players, as his cursed form is the only one that’s still human, meaning he can still communicate and handle the cards as easily as he does as his normal self. It also establishes a clear pecking order among the players in terms of how much more difficult the game becomes upon being cursed, with Ryoga (the character who often gets the short end of the stick) squarely on the bottom.

Setting up the game to involve cursing and uncursing (if that can be considered a word) further allowed me to make use of several visual tropes, most notably the kettle (shorthand for hot water) and pail (shorthand for cold water). I also wove in a moment wherein Ranma, as his normal self, is knocked into the pond just outside the family room, which is another common occurrence in the series. Making use of these key elements went a long way in helping the piece “feel” like a Ranma ½ story. I wanted readers to hit these beats and think to themselves, “Yep, that’s Ranma!”

This is where things got complicated even on my end. By ensuring that each of the core characters would end up cursed at some point, I felt I necessarily had to involve Akane, as I mentioned earlier. Ryoga’s balancing act of being Akane’s friend (and secret admirer) as a human and her pet piglet while cursed is one of the central subplots of his character, and further plays into the inherent tension between Ryoga and Ranma. The fact that Ranma is fully aware that Akane’s pet is also his longtime rival frequently becomes a sticking point between himself and Akane, who thinks he’s picking on her piglet simply because he’s a jerk. I felt as though the story itself was pressuring me to involve Akane, given that the situation all but guarantees that the boys would be fighting. But how would I incorporate her into a story that’s supposed to be focused on “Boys’ Night?”

The solution, it turns out, was to have it running parallel to a “Girls’ Night.” I adjusted the beginning of the story to plant the notion that the girls are having their own get together upstairs, which in turn is the catalyst for the boys having one, too. By positioning these two gatherings side-by-side in the same house, there was now ample opportunity for Akane to overhear a scuffle between Ranma and P-Chan. This adjustment came with a downside, however: If Akane is having a “Girls’ Night,” then there are undoubtedly other girls around, and I consider it poor storytelling to involve a character that doesn’t make an impact on the narrative in some way. This meant that I was probably adding two or three more characters to the mix, not just one. With only 3,000 words to work with, I’ll admit that part of me was worried.

As it turned out, though, caving to the urge to incorporate Akane was a blessing in disguise, because this allowed me to make use of another prevailing characteristic of the Ranma ½ series: Fiancés. This series is so littered with love triangles that simply placing certain characters in a shared space is enough for chaos to erupt. I immediately descended upon Shampoo as one of Akane’s guests; she believes herself to be Ranma’s true fiancé (which causes friction with Akane), she’s the target of Mousse’s affections (which causes friction between himself and Ranma), and her cursed form — a cat — just happens to be the one thing in the world that Ranma is violently afraid of. I threw in Ukyo as Akane’s second guest, not only because she too believes she has the most legitimate betrothal to Ranma, but because it would allow me to dial up the madness even more by making use of what had previously been a stupid joke in the zine’s discord:

Throwing Tsubasa into the mix to clash with Ukyo felt like the final ingredient to make this story as explosive as the source material… But again, 3,000 word limit. This was going to be incredibly tight.

Suffice it to say, it took every skill in my bag o’ writing tricks to come in at my required word count. As with any project I made several editing passes once I felt my piece was complete, but even skimping on detail I came in a few hundred words too high. Luckily, there are a few gimmes that can be had right out of the gate, such as making sure to use all available contractions (i.e. changing “was not” to “wasn’t”) and all verbs are active (i.e. changing “he was running” to “he ran”). The next editing pass is usually for rewording descriptions into simpler language, or even eliminating lines all together because they’re redundant or don’t add anything important. If I’ve done all those things and am still over word count, that simply means I’ve indulged too much, and I need to attack my writing on a structural level.

Thankfully, though, my submission for this zine didn’t require I completely take it apart and put it back together again. I did have to shave off quite a bit of embellishment, but what I lost in flavor text I believe was definitely made up for in the chaos that would ensue by the end. I managed to keep all of my desired plot beats in tact, and more importantly, I kept them coherent. I even went so far as to bring in a test reader with no previous experience of Ranma ½ to see if they could follow the the story. They informed me that, even with no prior knowledge of the characters, the personalities were displayed well enough to inform them of the characters’ histories, which allowed the reader to make sense of the sheer chaos that unfolded.

With that in mind, I whole-heartedly invite you to download a copy for yourself! The zine is completely free, so you have nothing to lose!

 

Obligatory Legal Crap

Ranma ½ and all related settings and characters are the property of Rumiko Takahashi, and probably Viz Media too since they’re the ones that brought it to the US. The fanzine is non-profit, so don’t sue us. All art and writing in the zine is the property of the respective creator that contributed it. Special thanks to my artist Kaze, who drew some fantastic art to accompany my store! If you’d like to see more of her work, check out her Instagram!

Also, just as a yardstick for anyone that read this far, this post is just over 2,000 words, aka about two thirds of the limit I was given for this project. If you’re not impressed by how much I was able to jam into this thing with so little space, I don’t know what else to tell you my dude.