On Mon, Sep 27, 1999 at 08:21:56PM -0500, John Boydston wrote:
In one of the later mangas, there are hints that Akane is at least the
equivalent of a "B" student (an 86 on a test). Ranma's test score is never
revealed and as far as I know there is no actual evidence as to his grades.
It is, however, rather strongly implied that his grade is very poor.
The problem with the cliche, as with all cliches, is that the cliche does
not take into account the irregularities in Ranma's training. Several people
like to portray Ranma as unintelligent (witness Lord Archive's page where he
claims Ranma's IQ is about 95). Unfortunately, there is a lot in the manga
to contradict this. Here are some of them:
Learning the Umi-sen-ken after being shown it, once.
Realizing what Rouge's power source was and helping her achieve full power
without it.
Rapidly coming up with countermoves to techniques he has just had used on
him.
These don't contradict the claim of Ranma's IQ being low. Most standardized
IQ tests don't have a section on martial arts. :)
However, IQ is a rather bogus metric of a person's aptitude. IQ tests have
a rather sordid history of being utilized to promote some rather nefarious
social agendas. But, even disregarding that, the fact of the matter is that
they try to take a very complex, multifaceted attribute such as intelligence
and represent it with a single number.
Obviously, a _lot_ of information is going to be lost.
As an illustration, take a computer generated picture in the JPEG format.
JPEG has an option which lets you trade off file size for image quality.
That is, you can make the size of the file smaller and smaller, but, as
you do, the quality of the picture gets lower and lower.
So, imagine what would happen if you reduced the image size to 1 byte?*
This is equivalent to what IQ tests do.
I think it quite reasonable that he might score 95 on an IQ test. He might
even score much lower. However,
* Well, for technical reasons, you _can't_ get a JPEG file that small.
I think this only serves to strengthen my point, however. :)
There are others. My contention is that of several other writers. He is not
unintelligent; he is uneducated.
One can just as easily argue the other way, however. He is notorious for
repeating unsuccessful actions again and again, even in his specialty
field of martial arts. This certainly would seem to indicate a lack of
intelligence.
It is also a mistake to take his aptitude in one field -- martial arts --
and assume that it has anything to do with his aptitude anywhere else.
You will notice that Akane does very well in school, but this doesn't
translate into ability in cooking, sewing, or swimming.
My whole point is: Intelligence is a complex subject. It consists of
many facets which may, or may not, be related. I think that the canonical
evidence can support a dullard Ranma just as well as it can support a
gifted Ranma.