COSMOGRAPHIA APP

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Player Info:
Name: bii
Timezone: PST
Contact: (email, plurk, etc)

Character Info:
Name: Akane Tendo
Age: Seventeen
CANON: Ranma ½

Key Points:

Akane's mother died when she was very young. Her father never remarried. She has two older sisters Kasumi (three years older) and Nabiki (one year older.) Kasumi is motherly and traditional, Nabiki is materialistic and modern.

Akane trained in their family martial art from a young age, intending to inherit the dojo once she came of age. She was very good at fighting. Being a martial artist became a large part of her self-image.

Akane was a huge tomboy when she was little: getting into fights, acting tough, and at times even being mistaken for a little boy (which didn't please her very much.) After getting a crush on the local chiropractor, Dr Tofu, she ends up trying to become more feminine like Kasumi, even going so far as to grow her hair out long while she was in middle school.

Thanks to a speech made by school kendo star, Tatewaki Kuno, by the time Akane is in tenth grade she has to spend every morning fighting past dozens of male schoolmates who want to date with her. This causes her to hate and distrust teenage boys in general. Although she softens on her hatred later, enough to make friends with some boys of the teenage persuasion, Akane remains incredibly suspicious on the motives of teen boys for the rest of her adolescence.

Her dad's old friend Genma Saotome shows up with his son, Ranma, in tow. It turns out that Mr Saotome and Mr Tendo made an agreement to marry their children to each other, in order to make sure their style of martial arts (which they are the only families practicing) gets passed on to the next generation.

This is complicated by the fact that both Saotomes picked up a water-triggered shape-changing curse while in China, so now sometimes Ranma has the body of a woman (while his dad is occasionally a panda.) Both of Akane's older sisters nope out at that point, so she's stuck with the engagement.

Thirty-eight volumes of ridiculous bullshit then ensue, which we will not even attempt to summarize more than a fraction of, but some highlights include:

Ranma's classmate from middle school, Ryoga, showing up to pick a fight with him, at the end of which Akane's carefully grown long hair has been accidentally sliced off. It becomes Symbolic of how she's not going to try to model herself after Kasumi anymore, but attempt to be herself in the future.

Akane adopts a cute little black piglet which she names P-chan after she finds it shivering in the rain. She allows him to sleep in her bed and basically dotes upon him. Unbeknownst to her, said piglet is actually Ryoga of the previous bullet point, who also got cursed in China. He falls in love with Akane after being her pet. She never actually FINDS OUT he's her pet.

Akane and Ranma slowly grow closer together, but all the stupid things in their lives keep them from actually admitting their feelings to each other. There are a lot of stupid things going on in their lives.

Like how Ranma accidentally gets himself two other fiances: Shampoo (a Chinese girl from a matriarchal tribal society whose marriage customs Ranma accidentally fell afoul of) and Ukyo Kuonji (a childhood friend whose father got scammed out of an okonomiyaki cart by a fraudulent marriage promise by Mr Saotome.)

There are lots of weird martial arts battles and people pursuing the romantic affections of Akane, Ranma, both of them, or any number of the other people they associate with. Also copious shenanigans from the local senior citizens, which include Shampoo's wily old grandmother and a perverted jerk named Happosai who is the Grandmaster of Akane and Ranma's Martial Arts style and also basically the Worst Person Ever.

And then about a year after Ranma showed up there's this whole big epic showdown of ultimate destiny at the end of the series with a living god named Saffron, in which Akane gets kidnapped and is presumed dead twice and Ranma admits at least to himself that he does care about her and also wrecks his only chance of being cured to save Akane's life.

After which their parents throw them a wedding, feeling that if they don't make this marriage happen now, it'll never happen. Ranma is knocked out and stuffed in a suit and Akane goes along with everything without needing a concussion because it turns out there's actually a single dose of cure for Ranma's curse and if they get married he'll get to have it. BUT OF COURSE ALL THEIR ASSHOLE FRIENDS/ASSOCIATES CRASH THE WEDDING AND DESTROY EVERYTHING. All weddings are put off until Akane and Ranma can get their lives in order. They run off to school together. Everything's changed and nothing's changed, but they at least understand their own feelings and maybe even each other's? Maybe? End manga.

History:
Since we covered a lot in the bullet points and I only have 500 words for this, we're gonna start with when a guy named Ranma Saotome showed up in town, bringing a shitload of chaos in his wake. Akane's father and Ranma's father had arranged a marriage between the two families and so Akane found herself engaged to a guy she barely knew.

He also (as previously mentioned) had a weird curse that caused him to shapechange into a woman that he picked up in China. That was certainly a thing. More awkwardly, when Akane first meets Ranma he's in his female body and she expresses interest in befriending 'her,' not knowing that 'she' is really a he. That offer is immediately rescinded upon finding out that Ranma is really male as Akane now feels hella betrayed.

Many shenanigans thereby ensue. As I mentioned in the bullet points, there is about thirty-eight volumes jam-packed with martial arts romantic comedy bullshit. So I'm not going to really focus on individual incidents. Instead I'm going to focus on the general pattern of the things Akane goes through.

And really, a lot of what Akane goes through is being left behind as Ranma and his friends rocket ahead into a world of pure ridiculousness. In the early chapters, we see her as an equal participant in such shenanigans as Martial Figure Skating and Martial Watermelon Smashing, but as time goes on and on and Ranma and Ryoga and the others get all kinds of special training to make themselves Extra Ridiculous, Akane gets more and more regulated to the person who's supposed to sit on the sides and occasionally do an assist. Or, worse, as the prize. (Probably the turning point for this is the Breaking Point Arc from the sixth volume of the manga.) In the Battle Dogi arc from the thirtieth volume, it's hinted that if Akane was given equal training and attention she'd be able to match or outclass the others, but sadly this is mostly just a hypothetical :c

She's also in the shitty space of slowly falling in love with a guy who's kind of an oblivious jerk at the best of times and whose shitty luck means she always runs into him at circumstances where he looks INCREDIBLY DUBIOUS and even though it's almost always not what it seems, it's hard to believe sometimes that it isn't? Because she always stumbles upon this stuff going on. It's pretty wretched.

So yeah, after Ranma shows up, her life (which wasn't great to begin with thanks to Kuno) kind of gets worse in a lot of ways. After a year like that, why NOT send her to Waverly Bay and turn her into a gem?

Personality:
“She's really a sweet girl. She's just a violent maniac.”

Akane is pretty much the original tsundere. She's a very nice, friendly girl with a hair trigger temper and a tendency to assume the worst of people she doesn't like or trust. Included in this category are pretty much all teenage boys everywhere, although she's made great progress with her fear and hatred of teenage boys. Even so, she has a great deal of sympathy for those weak or unable to defend themselves and she will come to the aid of those she'd normal consider her rivals if it seems like they are in trouble.

She's amazingly easy to wind up, has a tendency to jump to conclusions and has a lot of issues involving gender roles, sex and the fear of perversion. A huge part of the fear of perversion probably comes from Kuno's sexual harassment and—although this is just speculation—possibly a fear of being assaulted or raped if one of the boys she fought every morning did manage to win against her. (She definitely does exhibit fears of being overpowered and being raped later on in the manga.)

Akane is deeply insecure, especially when it comes to her femininity. Japan, even today, is a sexist society. Back in 1987 (the year the Ranma ½ manga first began serialization) it was way more so. Given how difficult she finds most traditionally feminine things (her cooking is atrocious, her sewing laughable, her knitting ridiculous, and she's not even very good at first aid) and how much more easily “male” activities like martial arts come to her, it's not really surprising that she worries she's a failure as a woman.

Oddly enough, she's got a lot of very “girly” fears, being afraid of ghosts and reptiles and scary stories. But despite a tendency to get scared easily, Akane is capable of being very brave indeed. Over the course of Ranma ½, she risks life and limb repeatedly to help people, as neatly illustrated by the whole Orochi incident.

She takes a lot of pride in her position as heir to the Tendo Dojo. Fighting is what she's good at. Oh, she's no slouch at school, but her true talents lie in the realm of martial arts. In a way, this preys a little on her insecurities too because while she's very good at what she does, she's surrounded by a lot of overpowered people, the chiefest suspect of which is her fiance.

(Speaking of said fiance, Akane's feelings about him are enough for a whole new bundle of issues. She's in love with Ranma, but she has a hard time admitting it to herself, much less anyone else. And although she loves him, she has trouble trusting him.)

Gem Considerations: Akane's name means 'red madder' in Japanese. I wanted to find a gem that was red because of this. I ended up choosing red jasper, thanks to its associations with strength and vitality, both things that Akane has a lot of already. I'm hoping by having red jasper as her stone, that will allow her to grow stronger physically. As for why I want this...

See, here's the thing: Akane is, in fact, probably one of the strongest of the “normal” martial artists in the series. Unfortunately, most of the martial arts in Ranma ½ tends to the ridiculous and abnormal, so in comparison to the the titular Ranma or to Ryoga, Akane comes off as less than capable. This is absolutely not the case. Akane is amazingly good at fighting. This is a girl who beat up dozens of boys on her way into school every morning for over a month. Perhaps she doesn't have a ki attack and she doesn't routinely leap onto people's roofs all the time. She's not supposed to. She's there to remind us that not everyone in this universe is completely ridiculous.

But that's just it. I want her to get completely ridiculous in Cosmographia. So giving her a stone that will basically function as a power-up is all part of my master plan.

Mwahahaha.

(Conversely, I'm going to put it in an inconvenient place (the small of her back) because I can't let this be too easy for her.)

Power considerations:
List Three Powers You Would Like Your Character To Have:

• Enhanced strength/endurance


• Jumping really high like 30s Superman so as to mimic flight


• Gem Weapon: Giant Mallet

Like I said before, Akane's abilities were all in the upper range of what you could expect from a normal human being. She's just someone who's amazingly good for a normal human stuck in a canon with people who're ridiculously overpowered. So the powercap won't bother her, because she's not going to need to be brought down in terms of power. Actually, I feel that Akane will thoroughly enjoy being in the top tier of fighters again. It's been a long year since she could say that she was.

(P.S. The giant mallet gem weapon power is sort of an in-joke because in the anime she does repeatedly produce mallets out of nowhere to hit Ranma, which is something that she never actually does in the manga. And this is definitely manga-version Akane. But I wanted to make the mallet weapon into a thing anyway.)

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