November 23rd, 2024 
AstroNerdBoy Ranma 1/2 08
らんま1/2
Spoiler Summary/Synopsis
Akane ice skates with her friends. While she eats lunch with them, a richly dressed girl named Azusa skates in and takes P-chan, whom she names Charlotte. Akane finds Ranma and the ramen shop to tell him of the theft when Azusa walks in with P-chan. As a result, Azusa challenges Akane to a skating battle over ownership of the piglet.
Meanwhile, Azusa’s skating partner Mikado “comforts” Akane over Azusa’s antics. He goes in to kiss her, causing Ranma to flick a kamaboko slice from his ramen at him. Mikado accepts the challenge. Back at the Tendou estate, Ryouga wants to be Akane’s skating partner. However, neither he nor Ranma know how to skate. Ranma changes to female form to practice with Akane at the rink.
Azusa and Mikado show up, where they are challenged by 100 guys in hockey attire, including masks and sticks. The pair put on a skating routine that easily defeats all the guys. Azusa puts a pink Charlotte collar on P-chan to force Akane’s hand. At the same time, Mikado puts the moves on female Ranma, taking his first kiss. The enraged Ranma goes to the men’s bath to change back to male form to fight Mikado.
Mikado seemingly defeats Ranma, but Akane realizes Mikado is unconscious while standing. After dragging Ranma home, Akane tends to Ranma’s injuries. She teases him about his first kiss. After she calls him a coward for not making a move on her, he starts to. On the second attempt, the other household residents reveal their presence and frustration over Ranma and Akane’s failure to kiss.
Thoughts/Review
Man, I’m almost ashamed to admit that I have zero memory of the skating pair in Ranma 1/2 08. That’s fine cause outside of Crunchyroll’s garbage subtitles, I had some laughs.
Unusual Battles
Last story, the martial arts battle got combined with rhythmic gymnastics. In Ranma 1/2 08, martial arts gets combined with competitive, paired skating. When it comes to the unexpected, Takahashi-sensei certainly had a flair for that. However, that unexpected element is what makes the humor work. It is ridiculous that a pair of figure skaters would defeat 100, burly, hockey players. Yet I laughed at the silliness of it.
Of course the biggest laugh for me came from Ranma’s reaction to his female self getting kissed by Mikado. He has the handicap of not being a skater. So even though it appeared that Mikado defeated Ranma, Akane alone saw the truth. Then seeing the dead-eyed Mikado made me laugh. As Akane hilariously notes, it did take Ranma 518 blows to render Mikado unconscious. That also made me laugh.
There was another unusual battle of sorts. Akane had her fun teasing Ranma over his first kiss and leaving himself open. He then showed her she did the same when he had her in a position to kiss her and almost did. She then challenged him to kiss her. I’m thinking, “Wow. I know it won’t happen, but man, it would be awesome if it did happen.”
However, all we got was the notion that they aren’t opposed to being romantic with each other. And that’s as far as we go, boys. After all, there was a gag to be served with the residence of the Tendou home getting frustrated that Ranma didn’t actually follow through. Well, it was still a nice moment…for now.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
In the end, Ranma 1/2 08 was a funny and sweet episode, only marred by Crunchyroll’s horrible subtitles.
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While I certainly remember the kiss that didn’t happen, I completely forgot about the skating duo. If you think back to my remarks about Kodachi, this is pretty much the very definition of characters you see once then never again because they weren’t memorable.
But yeah, romantic progress stymied because of reasons…. Like the notion is nice, but looking at the series as a whole they never really much closer. Ideally they would’ve just retried while making absolutely sure nobody was watching. Alas…
And the fact that I don’t remember them proves that point. Yet somehow, at least for the moment, I haven’t already forgotten them. Plus, I did get a laugh from the episode, so in theory, one would think that would make them memorable to an extent. However, we’ll see how that pans out by the time this new anime adaptation ends.
As to the romance, once it goes to the “will they or won’t they” pit, the series is over once the decision is made. The only series I’m aware of where things went into a “phase 2” after a decision was made was in My Monster Secret. However, that series was more than just rom-com hijinks.
There’s Kaguya-sama Love is War. From a viewpoint there is also Bakemonogatari since the protagonist settles for one romantic interest pretty soon.
Never read/watched that series, though I’m aware of it.
You can always get a laugh out of a story, but Ranma is definitely filled with a lot of these one-off competition stories that don’t need to be revisited for any reason.
And while I can certainly empathize with the “will they or won’t they” complaints, Ranma is still a product of its time. The formula has been refined and refined and refined yet again over the decades since it debuted. I’d be interested to see if they end up introducing Ukyo sooner since she’s the last “serious” love interest of the story, and really the only true threat to Akane. But knowing how that goes it’s definitely difficult to get invested in the romance parts of the story since it’s clear from the get go that nobody is going to get between Ranma and Akane.
Besides Ukyo the arc I actually really want to see is the Nabiki arc. Of course Nabiki was never going to seriously steal Ranma away from Akane but it does at least force the latter to confront her feelings. Snail speed development of course, but at least it’s development.
I went back and read my review of the OG Ranma 1/2 on the C.A.R. site. It looks like I really liked the first two seasons, but after that, things started falling apart for me. Ukyo was someone I singled out as liking the most after Akane.
Ukyo was always my favourite, and in the anime she never undergoes her “jerk” descension that she does in the manga. It’s sad that Ranma never sees her as more than a friend but we wouldn’t want to upset the status quo now would we.
But, are they not memorable because they never could be, or because they never were given more to do?
I feel like there’s a lot of arcs in Ranma featuring some sort of competition. There’s no reason for Ranma to want to do any of these again, ergo no real reason to bring back these characters.