Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Discuss the Ranma series in this forum.

Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Mon May 30, 2011 9:24 pm

Generally, when asked who the nuttiest character is, you'll likely answer with someone from the Kuno family. I'd like to pose the argument that Akane is the nuttiest character, and by nutty I mean any kind of behavior -- be it insanity or stupidity -- that laughs in the face of logic and common sense. Rather than raise points to support my argument forthright, I'm curious if anyone will agree after considering what they know of Akane themselves, versus who they thought was the nuttiest before doing so (well, unless it was already Akane). (That, and I'm sort of preoccupied and wanted to get this out of my head so it will stop distracting me while I'm writing my story.)
Crescent Pulsar R
User avatar
Crystal Power Senshi
Posts: 4122
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby AdmiralTigerclaw » Mon May 30, 2011 11:30 pm

No, even ather most pig-headed and short tempered, Akane doesn't seem too nutty to me.

The Kunos qualify for 'batshit insane' territory with their total disconnect from reality. Batshit insane is a whole different weight class.

Now, if I purposefully exclude the Kunos from the equation by acknowleging that they are certifiably delusional. (And thus, in their own catagory of sanity.) I can go into the other characters to find one who also fits the insanity bill...

And I come to a rather startling conclusion.

Nodoka Saotome.

I will present MY evidence.

First off, she married Genma. As far as we can tell, Genma was just as decietful and idiotic in his old days as he is today, and looked more or less the same. (Thank you Happosai training flashbacks.)
I don't know what the old man pulled to score a wife like her, but my only conclusion is she's missing a few sanity points to even CONSIDER him a good option. Maybe she found him funny.

Then, this woman allows her husband to take her only child away when he's not even old enough to communicate yet, and make a contract with him to comit seppuku should her so not turn out to be manly. Which is in itself, an extremely vague description to work with.

And then she quietly waits something like ten years patiently waiting for her husband to come back. That's worst than ANY military serviceman's wife EVER had to endure. By an order of magnitude.

And to put icing on the cake, Nodoka goes in search of her Husband (finally) and her son to check up on them, and brings along the family katana, ready to commit suicide at the drop of a hat at the first sign of 'unmanliness' from her boy.


That's like walking around with a loaded pistol ready to blow your brains out the moment someone tells you you might be putting on weight.

The Kunos may be batshit. But suicide is NOT on their list.
Ernest 'Admiral Tigerclaw' Hart
OWNER: Samurai Penguin Studios
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/SamuraiPenguinStudio
AdmiralTigerclaw
User avatar
Chibi Sailor Senshi
Posts: 285
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Mon May 30, 2011 11:50 pm

Akane isn't one of the nuts. She's pig-blind about Ryoga, and jumps to conclusions a lot, but I know people just as bad. Nodoka is a good choice. The Kunos collectively take the prize.

The question then is -- which of the Kunos is worst? Kodachi is the most sane of the bunch: she knows what she wants, and she's done some intelligent things to get it. Pity about her taste in pets.

Tatewaki is journeyman-grade nuts. Even somebody sane might have a hard time believing the Ranma/Ranko duality. But he manages to continue it all through the strip. And his inability to see when he's been beaten is either a case of defective perception, or masochism.

But the master from who Kodachi and Tatewaki learned is undoubtedly their father. The Hawaii clothes, accent, and ukulele are overboard, but acceptable. The office is overdoing it. The haircuts are way overdoing it. The coconut bombs in school push him over the edge. I'm not sure where the roots of that palm tree go, but they've obviously sunk deep into his store of common sense and depleted it.
Visit Big Washuu's Lab of Arcane Knowledge at http://washuu.net
Ellen Kuhfeld
User avatar
Sailor Starlight
Posts: 2228
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Tue May 31, 2011 12:39 am

Much of the Kuno's behavior could arguably be attributed to eccentricity, arrogance, single-mindedness, self-importance (superiority complex) and self-righteousness. (Much of which is stereotypical of rich people.)

Nodoka could be seen as simply being dedicated, not crazy. I don't see the problem in wanting to finally resolve something after more than a decade of waiting. (Honor has a lot more relevance in Japanese culture than it does here, so that should be taken into account.) Besides, Genma can't be rightfully attributed to anything being wrong on her part if he is a deceitful person, and thus capable of wooing her before she knows exactly what kind of person he is. And if she did find out, aren't there cultural reasons that could easily explain why she's still with him? Because it's obvious enough that she doesn't care a whit about him.

Anyway, so far a lot about Akane was left out of the argument thus far. I'll bring the rest to light sometime later today, if I have to, but I'm still hoping to see if anyone will try to find out if she's worse than the Kuno's as if they aren't a foregone conclusion.
Crescent Pulsar R
User avatar
Crystal Power Senshi
Posts: 4122
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby three headed dog » Tue May 31, 2011 1:02 am

The haircuts are way overdoing it.


Japanese schools have a lot of rather strange rules. The hair cutting part is based on real life school rules dictating hair style, hair color, etc. Some schools would even take a ruler and measure the hair if longer than allowed they would cut it. The hair cutting really isn't overdoing it since it is something that was done in Japanese schools in the past.

And then she quietly waits something like ten years patiently waiting for her husband to come back. That's worst than ANY military serviceman's wife EVER had to endure. By an order of magnitude.


He did send her postcards and letters up until they were cursed so she did at least know something. Also that is not worse than any soldiers wife had to endure considering different cultures and time periods, those captured in combat and returned decades later, and people who fought in wars for decades like Hiroo Onoda who didn't know World War 2 ended and kept fighting if for 29 years or the samurai who fought wars while their wives stayed at home waiting for them.
three headed dog
User avatar
Chibi Sailor Senshi
Posts: 478
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Pale Wolf » Tue May 31, 2011 6:26 pm

The Kunos really aren't as crazy as fanon tries to paint them. Poorly-socialized, sure, and Tatewaki doesn't exactly have an accurate mark on his own attractiveness, but you can hardly call them delusional when they don't believe a character has a magical curse... because nobody ever told them said character had a magical curse. Nabiki's words were 'her body and soul belong to him'.

Their other behaviour is not the grandest, but you can't call them delusional for not understanding the phlebotinum of the series when nobody actually told them. Frankly, you see a girl disappear and a guy appear? 'Magic' is obvious. And that's exactly what they theorized. But it's not obvious what kind of magic. Is it substitution? Transportation? Transformation? They were never provided the information to assume it was a curse, so they assume it's the one they don't get along with casting a freaky-ass spell of some sort.

Even if the information is provided, it'd have to be from Akane, or the Ranma version they're interested in - Tatewaki won't trust male Ranma, invert Kodachi's opinion, and they'd have to actually be delusional to trust Nabiki.

Though yes, Nodoka is not high on the sanity bar.
There is no problem that cannot be solved through the proper application of immense levels of firepower.

- Finally promoted to Spammaster Indeterminate Rank as of June 18, by Stratagemini

<Stratagemini> My Titanium Anus Armour will repel all challengers!

Would you believe this is one of the more tame bits of dirt I've got for him?
Pale Wolf
User avatar
Fukufics Staffer
Posts: 1315
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:38 am

Whoops. I ended up sleeping/laying in bed for fourteen hours. Anyway...

Since I don't want to spend too much time away from writing my story (I get distracted enough as it is), I'll just put one thing about Akane onto the block and see if anyone can point out anything from another character that can meet or beat it.

Akane and swimming. It's one thing to not have the skill to swim, but even then a small child or an idiot would know how to use a life preserver. It floats, so you hold on to it, whether on the outside or inside of it. Akane was shown to be incapable of doing something so ridiculously simple. In the same way, small children and idiots know to hold their breath under water... Akane thought that she had to swallow water in order to swim. And when she's told that it's wrong, and that she should hold her breath, she thinks that she can float by blowing out air while under water. And all this despite the fact that she's no doubt seen plenty of examples of people swimming successfully. This is a WTF level of nuttiness.
Crescent Pulsar R
User avatar
Crystal Power Senshi
Posts: 4122
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Cheb » Wed Jun 01, 2011 7:05 am

Well, it could be a panic attack that completely scrambles her thought process when she gets into water.
Proud owner of 1.5 kilograms of Germanium transistors
Cheb
User avatar
Moon Senshi
Posts: 1549
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Wed Jun 01, 2011 7:34 am

Nah. She's been shown to be fine in the water. She's only panicking when she knows she's sinking or has sunk, during or after whatever attempt had been made at swimming.
Crescent Pulsar R
User avatar
Crystal Power Senshi
Posts: 4122
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby SpaceKnight of Chaos » Wed Jun 01, 2011 12:56 pm

Aside from the inexplicable inability to swim, Akane honestly comes off as more short-tempered and with something of a self-entitlement problem then nutty, to me. She sometimes feels a little spoiled, usually when she acts as though her simply wanting to be good at something (cooking or martial arts, usually) means that she should be a master at it. Even the deal with P-chan can be explained as her simply not wanting to believe Ryoga, the boy she makes clear she considers a very good friend and trusts implicitly (mainly because he's always sucking up to her, yes), could do something so terrible as to betray her trust so intimately.

On the other hand, given that (in the anime at least) she was initially portrayed as sleeping calmly and peacefully (Ranma was the one shown tossing and turning all the time in the early episodes/volumes), but by the time of the "Happosai pretends to be P-chan" story Ryoga claims that Akane is a really violent sleeper, it makes me wonder if Akane actually might be aware of Ryoga's curse. She just feigns ignorance for the same reason that Soun & Genma do; Ryoga is clearly harmless (other then being allowed to cuddle up against Akane's breasts, the most he gets from her is being fed by hand and allowed to sleep on her pillow/the sheets when she goes to bed) and it equally clearly drives Ranma nuts. In other words, she's trying to goad Ranma into finally professing that he loves her - and it's hardly the first time, either. Throughout canon, Akane wants Ranma to be the one to tell her "I love you", to the extent that, at the failed wedding, she focuses on demanding he admit he confessed to saying that at Jusenkyo as opposed to admitting that she loves him.

As others have noted, in canon, the Kuno siblings are more egotistic, self-entitled, arrogant and ignorant then delusional. I can go into depth about that, but it's not the point of this topic.
Water, water, everywhere, and all was cursed and black!
Drowned ones cast bad spell and out come pig, girl, duck, panda!
Swirl, swirl, slithery pond, and join with magic spring!
Swirl, swirl, dirty pond, and rid the cursed sting!
Here my prayer, I beg you please!
Now turn these curses BACK!

http://www.issendai.com/rpgs/japanese-boys-names.shtml
http://www.issendai.com/rpgs/japanese-girls-names.shtml
SpaceKnight of Chaos
Prism Power Senshi
Posts: 2561
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Sun Jun 05, 2011 9:01 am

The thing with Ryoga also makes her out to be an absolute idiot. There's nothing in her later interactions with Ryoga or P-chan that remotely suggest that she has any clue; even denial can't be used because it's not in Akane's character to ignore something perverted being done to her. She honestly can't put two and two (or is that one and one?) together. Which is pretty bad, since she's been given more evidence as to the connection between Ryoga and P-chan than Kuno has for Ranma and his pigtailed goddess.

Well, since I managed to get back around to this, I might as well bring up some of the other nutty things she does.

Cooking: yeah, this one should be a no-brainer. What makes this nutty is that she knows her cooking is bad. She knows, because she's tasted her own food (most of the time after others have tried it) plenty of times. (I can think of at least three times: during the breaking point training, the sakura mochi, and when she was with Shinnosuke.) Yet she usually insists that others eat her food without trying it herself first (and the only time she does try it first is the only time she makes something edible (without the aid of the water of life, of course)). Being experimental doesn't even begin to explain how she can cook food so badly, because anyone with at least a little common sense will: one, follow a tried and true recipe; two, read the labels of the ingredients being used, or at least recognize what's what visually (wine will be in a different bottle compared to cooking oil and vinegar); three, have a decent idea of what not to put together. (Salt instead of sugar for cookies, anyone? And in the anime I believe she added jalapeno to one of her batches of cookies.) And while it would be one thing to be confident about her abilities, at least in one case she asserts that she had "gotten it right" and that she had made her best (cookies) yet without first checking how it tastes (because she wouldn't have said that had she eaten them), which is just stupid-crazy. (Then there are the two times she's ever shown to use a microwave, and in each case it blows up. Both of the things she put into it had eggs, and the first time should have been enough to teach her to not do it again. If she were of below average intelligence, at the very least.)

Sewing: other than the poor quality, what I find somewhat nutty is her insistence of what something looks like (which happened with her cookies, too) when it doesn't look anything like she says it is every time.

Bandaging a wound: seriously. She may have been using pantyhose, but it was bigger than Taro's head. That's more than a little excessive, I think; especially since I'm sure she's had plenty of examples (her own injuries, if nothing else) to know what the finished product should look like. (Unfortunately, I can't recall if she's bandaged someone at any other time, that didn't involve simply placing band-aids on someone.)

Nailing boards: now, while I don't expect someone to do this perfectly, her degree of failure (fixing the hole in the ceiling, that Rouge had made in the living/family room) is simply mind-bogglingly nutty. Not only is the ceiling far from flat or even (bulging with boards sticking out and arranged as if on a whim), she even used tape to hold the boards together, among the many nails that were sticking out and/or bent instead of properly embedded into the wood. It looked absolutely nothing like the ceiling had before, yet she has no problem claiming that she had been the one responsible for the "fix."

That's about all I have the energy for. I wanted to get Akane's nutty relationship with Ryoga in here, too, but... Eh.
Crescent Pulsar R
User avatar
Crystal Power Senshi
Posts: 4122
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby FriendlyEL » Thu Jul 14, 2011 3:48 pm

I'm not sure I'd view Akane or the Kuno's as any more crazy than the rest of the cast, just that both are probably more spoiled and seem to have some level of a sense of entitlement, also possibly having some level of poor socialisation outside of seeming to be "popular" from outer opinion.
FriendlyEL
User avatar
Asteroid Senshi
Posts: 870
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Cheb » Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:29 am

Looks to me like she's craving for compliments for doing things. Maybe Souun never complimented her for anything, which made her more and more desperate, to the point of unhealthy obsession. She attacks any task with a blind, rabid zeal -- which is the reason of her failures.
After accumulating these failures and associated trauma, her mind started building filters to cope, which made her delusional (or, more precisely, selectively perceptive) on top of her problems.
Add spoiled and childish to the mix... And here we are.

Now, where's a fic that unravels this then goes for making her a better person by curing all these ailments?

P.S. That's why Rebecca Heineman's depiction of her cooking worsening jars me. She got a confidence boost in the Sailor Ranko timeline. That shoul have alleviated her quirks at least some degree,
Proud owner of 1.5 kilograms of Germanium transistors
Cheb
User avatar
Moon Senshi
Posts: 1549
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Uldihaa » Fri Jul 15, 2011 1:34 pm

Crescent Pulsar R wrote:Cooking: yeah, this one should be a no-brainer. What makes this nutty is that she knows her cooking is bad. She knows, because she's tasted her own food (most of the time after others have tried it) plenty of times. (I can think of at least three times: during the breaking point training, the sakura mochi, and when she was with Shinnosuke.) Yet she usually insists that others eat her food without trying it herself first (and the only time she does try it first is the only time she makes something edible (without the aid of the water of life, of course)). Being experimental doesn't even begin to explain how she can cook food so badly, because anyone with at least a little common sense will: one, follow a tried and true recipe; two, read the labels of the ingredients being used, or at least recognize what's what visually (wine will be in a different bottle compared to cooking oil and vinegar); three, have a decent idea of what not to put together. (Salt instead of sugar for cookies, anyone? And in the anime I believe she added jalapeno to one of her batches of cookies.) And while it would be one thing to be confident about her abilities, at least in one case she asserts that she had "gotten it right" and that she had made her best (cookies) yet without first checking how it tastes (because she wouldn't have said that had she eaten them), which is just stupid-crazy. (Then there are the two times she's ever shown to use a microwave, and in each case it blows up. Both of the things she put into it had eggs, and the first time should have been enough to teach her to not do it again. If she were of below average intelligence, at the very least.)


This seems more "Not paying attention to what one is doing" and massive overconfidence rather than nuttiness. She seems to believe that because she's a girl, she has a natural affinity for cooking/sewing. But I'll admit the overconfidence can be seen as rather nutty. :lol:

I'll give a RL example of the "not paying attention" thing. My oldest nephew, at 19, still forgets to wash the silverware and dishes he uses even though that's been the rule his entire life; it doesn't happen all the time, but far more often than it should.

I was baffled as to how he could keep doing it, so I watched what he did. I noticed it happened the most when he had things he wanted/needed to do. For example, he'd do it more often than not when he was getting ready for school. He'd make a sandwich, put the knife in the sink and then he'd finish packing the lunch. He would then take his lunch to his book-bag, put on his shoes, and then leave for school; the knife would still be in the sink, still unwashed. I finally realized that he was so focused on what he would be doing he wasn't paying much attention to what he was doing.

For me, I see it as Akane is so focused on what will happen after she cooks a wonderful meal she doesn't pay enough attention to actually getting to that point. It's also a bit of not paying attention to the layout of the kitchen. She doesn't know where the ingredients are and doesn't actually pay attention to labels. Again, she's too focused on the results and not enough on the process.

Meta-reason for the way Akane acts: Takahashi thinks it makes girls "cute". :wink:
Uldihaa
User avatar
Senshi Cadet
Posts: 187
 

Re: Akane: nuttiest of the nuts?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Thu Jul 28, 2011 1:17 am

I highly doubt it's a focus issue. At least for the most part. I mean, the amount of absent-mindedness required for making the kind of mistakes that she makes should make one wonder how she manages to function just fine when she does other things.

Plus, jalapenos. In cookies. Conscious choice, that one.

Also, Akane keeps doing the same things and methods and expects good results, or for her cooking to improve, despite the continuous failures that such things and methods had gained her in the past. That's a/the definition of insanity, if I'm not mistaken.
Crescent Pulsar R
User avatar
Crystal Power Senshi
Posts: 4122
 

Next

Return to Specific Series: Ranma

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users

cron