Fandom-Specific Plot examples from Ranma.
For a long, long time, Ranma fanfics have made up a sizable chunk of Internet fanfiction in their entirety. Even general fanfic newsgroups had more than half their posts consist of Ranma fanfics, so, naturally, a couple of preferences started to build up.
A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until one month after release, to avoid any knee-jerk reactions and allow time for fanfic to be written.
- See also the Fanon subpage.
- Ranma ½ fanfic is heavy on the Gender Bender (other than of course Ranma himself) fanfics, as there's a canon way to do it. And while girl-Ranma getting pregnant isn't exactly Mister Seahorse, some fics will have him discover that yes, the pregnancy doesn't go away when he's male. (Most Pregnant!Ranma fanfics have him being trapped in female form instead, and is a way to enforce a final Mode Lock.) And there's also a canon source for plenty of Animorphism fics.
- Plenty of fanfic authors like to make Nodoka out as some kind of saintly mother with awesome skills, who generally takes Ranma off of Genma's hands after exacting some sort of Revenge on the heavily Flanderized Genma.
- A common plot is Ranma discovering that he is (or is becoming) gender dysphoric, his self-image shifting to that of a girl instead of a guy, or at least a "both/neither" state. Ranma getting stuck as a girl is the usual plot device to reach this conclusion.
- Ranma suffering Mode Lock which permanently keeps him as a girl is pretty common. To a lesser extent, this applies to anyone who suffers from a Jusenkyo curse. Most of the Mode Lock stories involving Ranma eventually pair HER with Ryoga, although one fic
has her paired up with Mousse after being mode-locked and raped by Ryoga. - Ranma loses the curse altogether.
- Ranma ½ fanfics where Ranma turns out to be a sailor senshi, possibly crossing over with Sailor Moon in the process are so prevalent that they have their own genre.
- "Split-Ranma" fics, wherein Ranma's male and female halves are separated into distinct individuals, but both with the same mind as the original and both locked permanently into their respective genders, were a dime a dozen in the late '90s. Some would explore the female Ranma's psychological anxieties; others would happily assume that she would gladly accept this situation and go off from there.
- For a while during the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a spate of "What If? someone else raised Ranma" stories, with everyone from Elminster of the Forgotten Realms to Bugs Bunny taking Ranma off Genma's hands as a youngster and arriving with him, somewhat... differently trained, on the Tendos' doorstep years later. Many of these were loosely connected to the greater continuity of The Bet-verse, and came from the minicommunity of fic writers around Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp. (Common way for joining universes for Common Crossover.)
- Then there were the "Passion Spice" fics. Based on an influential early fic, these all adhered to the fanon that among Cologne's assorted magical doodads was a collection of magical spices and herbs with various psychoactive properties — and the king of them all was the aphrodisiac "Passion Spice". Depending on the author these could range from simple farce to Porn Without Plot Lemons.
- One perennial favorite, usually showing up as a subplot in other fics, is a conflict between the Chinese Amazons and the Chinese Government in Beijing. Typically, it turns out that the Amazons have either been hiding from or holding off the government, which has been trying to conquer and integrate them into the nation properly, ever since the Revolution.
- We have other characters falling into the cursed pools, usually at the Spring of Drowned Girl. Victims don't necessarily have to be human males; Ponies One Half has the Mane Six (and then the Cutie Mark Crusaders and Princess Luna) get cursed by the pool and Humanity Ensues.
- "Spring Of Drowned (Crossover Element)" or "Spring Of Drowned (Anything Else)", into which one of the canon cursed characters falls into (Ranma himself won't fall into one that is too disruptive to his abilities (like one that turns him into an animal) unless the author is going for something very funny or dramatic). It's not really that unusual for the "crossover element" curse to give Ranma some kind of superpowers (that Ranma may not want because he feels it is "cheating"... or abuses regularly to screw with his enemies... or he decides to use as is his duty as a martial artist to protect the weak).
- The many artifacts that appear on the canon appearing again (sometimes having gotten fixed) to disrupt Ranma's life again. The Nanban Mirror (from "Back To The Happosai") sees a lot of mileage on Time Travel plots, for example.
- Happosai deciding to perform revenge on Ranma because of him doing something like preventing him from feeling up a girl or just because he took the last cracker. While this is not an unusual plot in the canon series, fanfiction loves to escalate his retribution as far as attempted murder, rape, or even selling out to whoever is the Big Bad of the story (or pointing him at Ranma), not giving a damn if his revenge on Ranma may possibly end up creating something like mass murder or even The End of the World as We Know It.
- Alternate Universe Fics where Ranma is secretly transgender and likes the "curse".
- Ranma deciding to hook up with another girl than Akane, often prompted by him either being turned off by Akane's abusive ways towards him or by him deciding that she really doesn't like him based on her words and actions—assuming Akane doesn't break it off first. This is often used to pair Ranma with either another Nerima girl that the author prefers, or with an Original Character/Crossover Character if the author points out that the other girls in Nerima are just as bad as Akane.
- Weirdly, despite how obvious it might seem, Ranma being engaged to either Kasumi or Nabiki from the very start of the series isn't a very common plot. Despite the fact that especially in the latter's case, there is some degree of precedence note . This is likely because of how extensive a rewrite of canonical events such a story would entail. It's much more common for Ranma to switch over to one of the elder Tendo daughters as a result of continued problems with Akane.
- An Original/Crossover female character being introduced as yet another Arranged Marriage that Genma made for profit and then ran out on. Sometimes the joke is that the female character is not in an arranged marriage to Ranma, but the moment the door to the Tendo Dojo is opened and whoever did it sees the person knocking is a girl, a Sustained Misunderstanding immediately kicks in.
- Happosai going on a Panty Thief rampage through crossover settings, usually with Nerima being the "weird town on the boondocks" of said crossover setting. Often he also is very hard for the crossover characters to stop, even when, say, Superman should have a very easy time punting him to Jupiter's orbit. Sometimes the explanation why he is such an astonishingly awful (and powerful) pervert is that he is a villain of the crossover element, such as a Youma or a Chaos Daemon.
- Fanfics are very often a mishmash of the manga and anime continuities, the most noticeable result of which is the inclusion of Sasuke, a ninja servant of Kuno, who was invented for the anime.
