From: Ken Arromdee <arromdee@rahul.net>
To: David Johnston <davidwj@telusplanet.net>
CC: "Robert Haynie Jr." <kenjiko2@knology.net>,ffml <ffml@anifics.com>
Subject: [FFML] Re: [Ranma] The Amazon Queen, part one (draft)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2003 15:37:49 -0700 (PDT)


On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, David Johnston wrote:

But here's the big one.  Akane refers to Ranma as a pervert because
she gets the idea in her head that he's a naked intruder in her house.
If she never sees him naked in the bath then she isn't going to call
him a pervert.  She'll call him, I don't know, a freak, a mutant,
a hermaphrodite, or something.  Ranma's right, her response is crazy
because it doesn't match the changed circumstances.  It's like she's
got a script from the main timeline and is following it while everyone
else has the updates.

Not really.

It's a lot less known than you'd think it would be among fans, but when 
Akane
calls Ranma a "hentai", that's a Japanese pun.  "Hentai" also means
"transform".  (This joke is also used at the end of the first chapter of
Futaba-kun Change.  Futaba's father says that his family all transform, and
he uses the word "hentai", so it can also mean "we're all perverts".)

Seeing Ranma transform should be enough for Akane to start calling Ranma 
that.

But how many people know that?  I personally didn't before you mentioned it. 
  Puns are good when they can hit well with your intended audience.  Is 
Kenko's intended audience consistant with people with a workable knowledge 
of Japanese puns?  I'd certainly guess not.  There's very few anime fans I 
can think of with even that basic level of Japanese knowledge.  We know 
sound bites at best usually.  This isn't a problem if such a 
misinterpretation of the pun results in nothing (just a miss), but in this 
case, such missings of the pun are actively disrupting the flow of the 
story.  In which case, it's pretty obvious it's a bad place to use the pun.  
Perhaps he might want to reference that in an author's note if he wants to 
keep it but likely by the time that people would get to it, they'd already 
be turned off from the misinterpretation of the scene (All assuming he meant 
what you did).

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