Character Violence Ratings

I get rather tired of people who put Akane down for being excessively violent in comparison to the other characters from Ranma 1/2. In the first place, the story is a farce in which part of the humor is that many of the characters overreact violently, in a manner all out of proportion to the offense. In the second place, it simply isn't true. While Akane is hardly the least violent of the characters in the series, she is also certainly not the most violent, not even among the female characters.

I decided to go through the entire manga and assign a violence rating to all of the recurring characters from the series, as illustrated in the following chart. These numbers do not include acts of violence which take place during battles, duels, etc. Explanations and conclusions may be found below the chart.

What do the numbers in the table mean?

It would have been highly unfair to simply count the total number of violent acts committed, since Ranma and Akane are present in far more of the manga than any other character, and therefore they naturally have large numbers of such incidents. Instead, I wanted a relatively simple rating system, which took into account how often the character is seen.

The chapters count is the total number of chapters throughout the entire manga series in which the character appears. The character is not required to say anything in the chapter, only to put in an appearance.

The manual count is the total number of incidents of violence which the character performed using his or her body. These primarily consist of punches, kicks and chi attacks. The manual rating is the manual count divided by the chapter count, multiplied by 100. This is similar to a percentage, except that multiple acts occurring within the same chapter are all counted.

The weapon count is the total number of incidents of violence which the character performed using some weapon. This could be a traditional weapon, such as a bokken or mallet, or something less traditional such as a Happo fire burst, a bicycle or a table. The rating is calculated similarly to the manual rating.

The `other' count is the total number of incidents in which the character acts to cause physical suffering of some form for the victim, through some means other than a physical blow. Examples would include giving another character a Jusenkyo curse, purposefully throwing water onto someone who has a Jusenkyo curse in order to trigger the curse, or purposefully tricking someone into something the perpetrator knows will cause pain. Purely mental suffering, such as being insulted, or suffering fear or jealousy, do not count.

The total count is of course the total of the three categories, and the total rating is derived from the total count and chapter count.

What does and does not count?

1. In order to count, the act of violence must be intentionally performed by the perpetrator. Acts performed while asleep or as a consequence of being hypnotized, possessed, etc., do not count. On the other hand, an act which is voluntarily performed while hypnotized or possessed will still count, if the person is not forced to perform it as a result of being in this state.
2. An act of violence still counts when the actual victim is not the intended victim.
3. An act of violence still counts when there is no victim, due to inability on the part of the perpetrator or skill in evasion on the part of the intended victim.
4. An act of violence does not count when it is a result of an indisputable accident (e.g., falling from the sky and landing on someone), or the perpetrator is unaware of the physical consequences (such as throwing water on a person when one does not know the person has a Jusenkyo curse). The word indisputable is important here.
5. Actions which occur during sparring or fights do not count against either party. Actions taken to defend oneself or someone else against physical harm do not count. Actions taken to defend oneself against other threats do count (e.g., one does not need to resort to violence to refuse a gift).
6. Cheap shots which take place after reasonable people would agree that a fight has ended do count against the perpetrator.
7. Actions which start a fight count against the perpetrator if there was no challenge leading up to the fight, and the perpetrator suffered no physical harm to which the action was a response. In particular, actions in response to provocation such as insults do count against the perpetrator.
8. Actions which take place in flashbacks count. Actions which take place in dream sequences do not.

Reliability of the numbers

If anyone else were to go through and count this up themselves, following the same rules, then it is unlikely that they would reach exactly the same numbers. Hopefully, they should come close.

First, the entire manga contains a lot of pages to skim through to come up with these numbers, and it is quite possible that an occasional incident was overlooked or miscounted. Particularly if it was something small, and possibly not even the focus of the frame in which it occurred.

Second, there are some cases where things take place offstage, and one must ask whether to count it, and who was responsible. For example, if we see Happosai come flying through the roof, and both Ranma and Akane were inside, it may not be certain who was responsible for hitting him.

Third, it is not always certain that a character intended to follow through on an attack which he or she started but which was stopped. On the other side, characters sometimes react violently to an action which cannot be conclusively determined to threaten physical harm, so one must ask the question of whether the person is overreacting violently or merely acting in self defense.

... and there are probably more reasons besides these why the numbers would come out slightly different when added up by different people.

Conclusions

Of the four girls Akane, Shampoo, Ukyo and Kodachi, Akane is the least violent! (In total rating that is. She does have the highest manual rating of the four.) Furthermore, Akane is considerably more likely to merely hit or punch than to use some sort of weapon such as a mallet. The other three girls are all more likely to use weapons such as spatulas, ribbons, clubs, chui or bicycles.

Of the twenty-three recurring human characters from the manga, Akane is exactly at the median for the total rating. Half of the characters are more violent, and half are less violent.

Characters who appear in only a few chapters suffer under this rating scheme. For example, Akari, Tofu and the Jusenkyo Guide each have only one incident recorded against them, but end up with violence ratings of 14, 8 and 5 respectively due to the numbers of chapters in which they appear. As another example, Konatsu ends up with a very high rating of 114 which is due almost entirely to the series of attacks he makes in his introductory arc. If he had appeared in more chapters later, his rating would probably have come way down.

The numbers were capable of significant shifts over the course of the series. For example, Akane, Ryoga and Ukyo all started with higher numbers than where they ended up. Akane's rating actually dropped to around 70 at one point before climbing again to 79 near the end. Moving in the other direction, Shampoo actually had a considerably lower rating earlier in the series, but it obviously climbed rapidly at a later point.

In some ways the numbers are a little unfair since they don't take into account provocation other than ignoring acts of self defense against physical attacks. There are plenty of times where a mildly violent reaction would seem quite justified, or where it could barely be counted as an act of violence (e.g., a tap on the head with a tiny mallet). However, trying to take such considerations into account would have driven me crazy upon trying to decide which side of the line each action fell on. So I applied a rigorous standard, however unfair it was at times (the Jusenkyo guide got his one count for grabbing Akane and clapping his hand over her mouth).