An Introduction.

Hey all, trying my luck at an old concept that's been done to death here. Every time I see a Ran-chan story like this, where she's trans or otherwise is actually a girl in whatever way, often times the tone of the story and the characters themselves stray pretty far from the source material's light-hearted and friendly nature. My goal with the project here is to have one little change cascade and change things throughout the story while trying to keep everyone more or less in character.

But, since this is a re-telling, I also have to start from ground zero. As any other Ranma fans out there know, the series started off fairly shoujo and turned more into episodic situational comedy as it went on. In the beginning, Ranma was shy, rarely acted on ego, and was pretty indifferent to the curse (even going so far as to say she didn't care if her first day at school was as a girl), a far cry from how Ranma was at the end of the series.

So I've been toying with the idea of Ranma being transgender. Obviously she and everyone else around her have no idea that that's even a thing, so it plays out naturally within this fun world, with one thing becoming alarmingly clear the day she's cursed in Jusenkyo: the new body feels more comfortable and natural to her. As such, she doesn't hate it but rather hates how her dad and everyone around her keeps telling her she should, in their not so subtly sexist ways. Genma, in particular.

If Ranma is content being a girl, and would rather be a girl as much as possible despite her never admitting it aloud, how would that first day at school go? How would she react during the big fight with Ryoga where he learns of her curse? How would the full-body cat's tongue story play out? That's what I've been thinking about with this, keeping character personalities fairly consistent with how they were at the start of the series. It's given me some great ideas and I'd like to share them.

Old hat, I know, but its seems like few of the stories like this stick to the characters in the way I think they would behave, so I want to try. My original content is basically going to be dialogue, feelings, and certain interpersonal relationships that will be pretty different from the source material, but the personalities should all be there in the end, and the stories will be the actual stories done with those new set-ups along with the occasional original scene or chapter.

I may bleed story elements or arcs from the anime and manga together (Sasuke, an anime-only character, might show up one day), but I'm hoping to stick closer to the manga. Especially the early years of it. As such, girl-type Ranma has black hair, she's slightly more friendly to Akane at the start (we'll see how that evolves with her new personality traits), her bust is realistically and naturally proportioned (like at the start of the manga, probably a c-cup at best with her age and frame), and the school will know about the curse early on.

I'll try to gloss over parts that stay the same with the source so that nobody has to read them for the billionth time, but since the first few chapters are all set-up with character introduction and setting introductions, please bear with it. Once we get into the more episodic stories, it'll evolve naturally like the manga did to incorporate more comedy with the new perspective, and less word for word repetition from the source.

Thanks for sticking with me through this long-winded introduction to the premise of this fic (I suck at writing synopses), and if you're interested, the first chapter's just around the corner. It's the first story/episode, so most of it's stuff everyone already knows, but with some unique twists on Ranma's inner personality that set up the rest of the story. Boring, done a billion times, but necessary. Please bear with it until we're past all that.

And thanks for reading!