Ookla The Mok <ooklathemok@mac.com> wrote:

It seems better to me to pick one color for Ranma's hair as a girl to be 
than to go by the manga, which has Ranma's hair all sorts of different 
colors at different times. Red, pink, green, blue, black...was Takahashi 
just not caring what color she used, or was she, as Thrythlind jokingly 
has suggested, indicating that the curse turns Ranma's hair a different 
color every splash? Makes for good humor but doesn't really explain why 
Shampoo's hair also changes color in the manga...well...perhaps she just 
dyed her hair.... Dialogue never talks about hair color though.

The occasional color pictures from the magazine publication of Ranma 1/2 
all got turned to black and white with midtones for the volumes, so it's 
hard to know what color Ranma's hair was for what chapter. Her head 
appears on the spine of every book, though, with her hair color varying 

>from volume to volume.

I don't want to get into a big spam thread on this, but....

The relevant question is, it seems to me, not which source one uses, but
rather how much of that source's graphic style one takes at face value.
Both manga *and* anime draw Ranma with abnormally huge eyeballs, for
example. Yet no fanfic (that I've ever read, at least) has described
Ranma's eyeballs that way. Everyone understands that the eyeballs are an
artifact of manga art style, whose significance in the "reality" of the
story universe (to the extent the story is consistent enough to think of
such a thing at all) is at most symbolic. The same goes for the volcano
that's exploded in Kuno's head a couple of times.

Given the many times Ranma has gotten away with disguises when a
distinctive hair color would have given him away, even passing for his
male self at one point (the first fight against Mousse, which Tofu ended
by giving him the heat-resistance pressure point), it seems pretty
obvious to me that the hair colors are in this category as well.
Fanfics, of course, are free to assume differently, but then they either
have to (1) come up with a plausible reason why these colors aren't
instantly recognizable (and a plausible reason why the characters *have*
them in the first place would be nice too), (2) alter the history so
that the colors were *always* recognized and deal with the consequent
changes in the backstory, or (3) face the fact that you're introducing
an inconsistency that, while certainly not major, is going to adversely
affect at least some readers' suspension of disbelief.



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