If Ranma were to become a Sin-Eater...

[SpaceKnight of Chaos]

Yet another "Ranma 1/2 and World of Darkness" crossover question. Like the title and the poll ask, if Ranma was to somehow die and return as a Sin-Eater, which of the five Thresholds do you think he would most likely fall under?

To give a brief explanation of the whole concept, a Sin-Eater is created when a person with spiritual awareness (that is, the ability to sense spirits, ghosts and similar monsters) dies, but their head is intact. On the other side, this person is approached by a Geist, a spectral entity that is one half ancient human ghost to one half death spirit - that is, an animistic embodiment of death by a particular fashion (hence the five Thresholds - how you died determined which Threshold your spirit approached, and so which Geists can approach you in turn). This Geist offers the person a bargain; to allow the Geist to bond to their soul, which will bring them back to life. The drawback, besides the fact the Geist is now stuck with them until they die of old age (if they perish by violence or whatever, it can suck the life from another person and restore them), is that they can now fully see ghosts, ghosts are aware they can be seen, and so they come to the Sin-Eater asking for help moving on to the afterlife.

I can elaborate on the details of the five Thresholds if people want, but I think they're fairly obvious. In my own opinions, Ranma is most likely to end up a Sin-Eater of the Torn, Prey or Forgotten Thresholds, in roughly that order.

The Torn is because... well, Ranma 1/2 is full of violence. Ranma is repeatedly assaulted by various people, at least one of which actively proclaims he wants to kill Ranma. His fiancees all beat the hell out of him at the slightest provocation; Akane wouldn't mean to actually hurt Ranma, but, well, one good brick to the back of the head and Ranma would find himself in the Underworld before he or Akane realised what was going to happen.

The Prey is because Ranma spends a fair amount of time in the wilderness, and so exposes himself to danger through that method. Ranma's too tough and wilderness savvy to make it likely he could get bitten by a snake, mauled by a bear, or have ants burrow into his heart and chew it up from the inside out, but he could still get lost in a blizzard and freeze to death, drown, fall off a mountain and die or be crushed by an avalanche, or any of a variety of fatal mishaps while training on his own in the wild.

As for the Forgotten... to put it bluntly, Ranma has ridiculous luck. Look at all the sheer bizarro coincidences and accidents and mishaps that occur in the series, manga or anime, and can you tell me with a straight face that it would seriously be impossible for Ranma to run into the equivalent of buying a new car with its brakeline chewed through by a squirrel, digging up the only unexploded landmine in Britain, or being hit by a freak gust of wind and pushed to his death while having sex atop a fifty story building?

[Wyrd]

I'm going to go with death by deprivation, actually. Ranma knows how to handle violence. He has been conditioned to be so tough that he is unlikely to die this way. He is so experienced at travelling that he has a really high chance of surviving any environmental conditions, though even the most skilled of wilderness experts can fall eventually. Death by random chance is a definite possibility, but fortune seems to favor the idiotic.. er, the brave in Ranma. Death by fiancee is a definite possibility since he doesn't seem to defend himself as assiduously against their attacks.

Deprivation, though, especially if it happened before the start of the show... Ranma has been shown repeatedly to have nearly starved to death. It was part of his training in many respects. His father's greed and willingness to let Ranma suffer to toughen him up could lead to Genma miscalculating(I was going to let him have some food in the morning, honest!) and Ranma dropping dead. Deprivation of emotional support is also one of the biggest causes for the problems he gets into. there are quite a few fics that have him contemplating or even attempting suicide because of how tired he gets of nobody around him ever seeming to care for him instead of for what he can get them or seeing him as a prize. I realize that there are other interpretations of these events, I'm merely putting forth the one that supports this story. If Ranma had too much and just let himself be killed any of the other ways because of deprivation of emotional support, he could wind up meeting that sin-eater instead of the one that an outside observer would expect.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

I'm going to go with 'death by chance'. There are far too many erratic catastrophes, human and otherwise, in his life. Sooner or later, one is going to bite a bit too hard. (I can see this also being 'death by violence'. Who says it only gets to fit in one category?)

[SpaceKnight of Chaos]

Oh, I know Ranma could actually become any of the five Thresholds due to the canon suffering (for example; if that hornet's nest that Genma had thrown at Ranma in the Breaking Point arc had been of Japanese Giant Hornets, Ranma would have died and then come back as one of the Stricken*), I was merely noting that my opinion was that the Torn, Prey and Forgotten seemed most likely. You make a very good argument for the Silent Threshold.

*Yes, the Stricken can arise from poison as well as disease; being killed by radiation exposure or toxin-laced food or drug overdose is just as valid a death as is suffocating because you were gagged while having a bronchial infection or catching Ebola. All of the Thresholds are very broad by their nature - suicide can produce Silent, Torn and Stricken, easily, depending on the precise methods and motives.

Oh, and just to clarify; Sin-Eater refers strictly to the human/geist fusion that results when a person dies and comes back. It's a reference to various personages throughout historical culture whose task was to "cleanse" a dead person's soul of sin so they could freely move on to the afterlife - I believe the directly referenced practice came from mideval Europe. Geister are the spirits that bring a human back from the dead.