English Dub Review: Ranma ½ “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Stuck as a girl due Shampoo’s Great Grandmother’s technique, Ranma must master a special grabbing technique to retrieve the cure from her.

OUR TAKE

Carrying on from last week, Ranma is dealing with the return of Shampoo, the arrival of her mysterious great grandmother, and the challenge of Shampoo’s presumptive suitor Mousse, all while Ranma also is stuck as a girl through a technique by the grandmother to make it so he cannot come in contact with hot water, and thus is stuck in his female form. All of this is basically used for the sake of having wacky shenanigans and fights that lead to fanservice moments, and it does a fine enough job of accomplishing that. However, maybe this is because I am currently living in a moment where mainstream media is a lot more open about expressing complex views of sex and gender, but I can’t help but kinda wish that this would be an instance where Ranma did take this chance to contemplate his current self perception if he’s stuck in a version of his body that he wasn’t born with. Then again, Ranma ½ is not exactly a very contemplative show when it comes to gender, or really anything beyond providing opportunities for romantic comedy. Plus, based on what we’ve seen so far, it seems that Ranma is pretty secure in his masculinity to the point that, even if he’s physically a girl, he pretty adamantly views himself as a boy regardless.

But then why put Ranma in this situation in the first place? Well, we do at least know it is some sort of test by Shampoo’s great grandmother (who is apparently named Cologne to keep the body wash name motif going) to see if Ranma is worthy of marrying Shampoo…something that Ranma does not want. Either way, in order to obtain the means of reversing this, he must learn a technique called “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”, and I have no idea if this is a translation issue or something, but it really just makes me think of Christmas, which is even weirder because I also currently cover a series specifically about Santa Claus. Anyway, the technique itself is, as the name suggests, about grabbing a tiny object from a dangerous place, and the way to test it is literally grabbing things over an open flame. And it seems thanks to a festival game, Ranma finally has the hang of it, though that still leaves Mousse and his severely bad vision issues there to fight, which I guess we’ll see more of next week!