Gonna' toss this into the blender here for some conversational fun.
But I had an interesting thought about the Neko Ken.
We all know that the Neko Ken was supposedly just a stupid joke thrown in the middle of some dumb martial arts manuscript/book that Genma was messing with. Yet somehow, despite it being a joke, it worked. It didn't work as one would expect it, but you have to admit, it worked.
It strikes me as interesting that we have a lame-O martial arts technique, that actually kind of works if the stars are right.
What interests me here, is the fact that this technique is lame, or supposedly lame. But not simply that, but that we have another instance of a lame joke involving cats. And I don't mean Shampoo.
I mean Mao Mo Lin. Our X thousand year old, whiny cat spirit looking for a bride.
What if the premise behind Neko-Ken was actually Mao Mo Lin trying to develope a martial arts style to impress some girl at some point? After all. He's an X-thousand year old cat spirit. He's had a LOT of time on his hands...
Of course, it totally fell flat, so he's too embarassed to speak of it, and probably even forgot completely that he'd tried to do such a thing. It would fit with his character to do such a thing, and have such horrible results that it got tossed in a book as one of those: 'yeah don't try this.' And it carried on as a joke, until the day that fool Genma took it seriously, and through some Genma nature fluke, or some mistaken tweak, it ended up working.
Working like a nightmare of course, but working.
MML: "Well, I DID try to make that style. I don't really like to talk about it. I figured... If you just did to a person what I had to go through when I was alive, and a kitten, they'd pick up the same instincts. Never seemed to work though. Just left people traumatized. When I saw Ranma do it, I didn't think it was my little style at first. Because it never worked. And ranma was obviously doing it right. So how could it be mine? But now I know it works. Maybe I should look into it and find out what went wrong the first time, how Genma made it work, and see if I can't fix it."
RANMA: "I sense bad things are about to happen."