[Episode 225685] [Episode 225685]At first, Ranma had sat there, contemplative. And then, the anger had begun to rise. Memories of Akane accusing him of all manner of perversion, usually resulting in her beating on him, had flown into his mind's eye. Memories of her berating him and belittling him for being a "half 'n' half freak". Memories of her flirting with Ryoga to try and make him jealous, of exploding in violent rages when it looked like he might be admiring another girl, of never waiting to hear his side of the story, no matter how often her accusations rang false.
The boy-turned-girl's aura had roared into life, roiling and seething with the flames of rage and the oily mist of heart-sickness, her mind playing back the uglier side of their relationship, dozens of misdeeds and incidents of ill-treatment being pointed out over and over and over again, until she had finally screamed in a fury.
"What was I fucking thinking!?!" She bellowed at the heavens. "She used me! She abused me! She BETRAYED me!!"
A casual observer might have pointed out that this wasn't rational behavior. And this was true. However, anyone who honestly believed Ranma to be rational probably had a few screws loose themselves. He wasn't any worse than the other teen martial artists of Nerima, but that didn't make him a paragon of either stability nor morality. He was quite capable of jealousy, pettiness, vengefulness, deception, manipulation, cruelty and worse- just as he could be the best of his peers when happy, he could also be the worst of them when pushed.
Discovering a close associate was a homosexual would have been a development that could shake even a fairly well-knit relationship... and that was not a category into which Ranma and Akane's "relationship" had fallen beforehand. Even before this it had been full of distrust, disrespect, intolerance and abuse, held together only by stubborness and outside meddling and confused, hard-pressed romantic attraction. It was a very delicate balance, which could have grown strong if tilted the right way- or torn apart in such a way that it would be doubtful if one or either of them would ever be able to trust the other again. Finding out that after Akane had mistreated Ranma so often, and that his romantic attraction, the main element giving him cause to just tolerate it and try to forge something stronger, had been utterly misplaced, had been quite the negative input.
Ranma began roaming aimlessly, lashing out blindly in her fury, too caught up in her own rage to notice or care that she was leaving a trail of destruction that Shampoo or Ryoga would have considered excessive. She roared her pain to the sky, screamed profanities and curses even as tears rolled down her face. At some point, she found a source of hot water -a tea cart, possibly, though s/he was too blind to notice or care- and restored himself, sickened to an unheard of extent by his curse and craving the solace of his birth gender more than ever. He ranted and raved, listing the times that Akane had mocked him for his curse, insulted his manhood, the times he had been forced to sacrifice cures for her sake- which led to him blaming her for his loss of the Nanniichuan cask at the failed wedding, and, from there, the mad rambling theory that she had deliberately caused him to lose not only that cure, but every cure he had found.
Finally, Ranma spent his fury and collapsed onto all fours, too drained of passion to be able to continue his destructive venting. Calmed, somewhat, he looked up to take attention of his surroundings, quite different to where he had been before the rage had swallowed him.
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(Posted Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:26)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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