I love Ranma 1/2. Everyone other anime fan in America as a kid watched either Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z. I obsessed over a show about Japanese teenagers who challenged each other to martial arts bouts and threw cold water on the ones cursed with weird transformations.
It’s awesome.
Someone gave me the idea to do some sort of subjective ranking, and I thought about doing so based on the character’s morality. By the end of this journey, I ended up learning a lot more about the show and why I like it so much. There’s a lot of intention behind its insanity.
For the purposes of simplifying my analyses, I’m using Moral Foundations Theory and assigned a score from 0 to 3 for each category to the most recognizable characters of the show. Below are the foundations.
- Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm
- Fairness: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating
- Loyalty: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal
- Respect: submitting to tradition and authority; opposite of subversion
- Purity: dislike for disgusting things or actions; opposite of degradation
