asinine akane / attentive azusa

intro: this post is for old-school anime fans who have passing knowledge of ranma 1/2 up until at least the 2nd season (or for manga readers, up until before shampoo came along). to learn more about ranma 1/2, you could check out www.furinkan.com . now back to the post.

i was thinking about this one sunday afternoon while preparing for a trip to greenhills. greenhills used to be the foremost and only good area in megamanila where one could find anime & manga artifacts.

(nowadays, with the overload of anime even in the free channels, i have inevitably reached maturity: i am tired of anime. it's like eating desserts all the time; eventually some get tired of all the sugar, and not because it's the "grown-up thing to do. again i digress.)

back to greenhills musings. i remembered all the ranma episodes i've watched (not all episodes, but a substantial amount, enough to qualify me as an anime analyst). ranma hated ryoga so much because ryoga got to be close to akane all the time as p-chan. (nevermind that p-chan is a pet piglet and that akane only hugs both ryoga & p-chan for wholesome reasons.) at any rate, part of the comedy is that akane never seems to make the connection between ryoga & p-chan; akane's inability to do so has created quite a number of gag stories from rumiko takahashi's pen. it's the secret identity syndrome: superman and clark kent are never together, they almost look alike, but lois and the rest of metropolis can't make the connection. of course, ryoga is a teenage boy while p-chan is a tiny black piglet, but both have fangs, both have that distinctive yellow-black bandanna, and both hate ranma & love akane w/ a passion. plus, all the other cast have discovered his secret, except for akane, despite several close calls.

we go now to azusa shiratori. she was this really ditzy figure skater in the start of the 2nd season who appeared dumber than akane. part of the conflict was she appropriated p-chan to be her "charlotte" (an outgrowth of her penchant for taking cute things and french-naming them). since azusa had taken akane's beloved p-chan, a duel ensues. during the course of the battle, it was mikado & azusa vs ryoga & female-ranma. at one point, azusa had ryoga to herself, then saw the little locket on ryoga that she had put on charlotte, thus she recognizes ryoga as her charlotte! of course, akane is oblivious to these events.

my point is despite azusa's ditziness, she was able to make the connection between ryoga & p-chan. then again, it's so painfully obvious that it's only akane who seems to have that deficiency of unable to make the connection.

again, my not-so-sincerest apologies to the non-anime fans out there. you really had to see it to believe :D