Ranma and Akane: A Love Story



"Supposing Ranma was a little older when the Cat Fist took place? Supposing he made a deal with his father, to train by himself for as long as his father had been training him - and then they'd duel for the mastery of the Saotome School. And supposing that one of Ranma's last stops on the way to her duel was a few months stay in a quiet suburb of Tokyo called Nerima..."

Ranma and Akane: A Love Story by Eric Hallstrom (also known as "Shadow Lurker") is a classic but incomplete work of Ranma ½ fanfiction. Its first chapter was released in September 1998; five more (and two parts of a seventh) were released before the author stopped writing in January 2001. It was supposed to be "Book One" of a larger saga entitled Chiang Ma Bai Feng Tian Shan Sheng Sho, but it was never completed and no other parts of the greater work were ever released save for brief, tantalizing "introductions" that obscured as much as they revealed. Technically it is a crossover, but the crossover elements are mostly peripheral to the existing story and don't require any familiarity upon the part of the reader.

The basics of the story are as follows: A year later than in canon, a world-weary, scarred and female Ranma shows up alone in Nerima, and almost immediately becomes entwined in the life of a tired, despondent Akane Tendo. A master of swordsmanship and a chi control that verges on (and at times actually becomes) magic, Ranma rescues Akane from a slough of despair and becomes her teacher. Like any version of Ranma, though, chaos follows where (s)he goes—and a far more powerful Ranma brings far more powerful enemies with him/her. In the course of following her new sensei, Akane quickly grows in power and becomes a hero in her own right, while Ranma finds in teaching her a chance to become again the hero he once was.

A literary masterpiece that must be read to be appreciated, Ranma and Akane: A Love Story is quite frankly unlike any other Ranma fanfic written in English since the fandom appeared on the Net in the mid 1990s. Hallstrom set about telling his tale in a manner that is entertaining and engaging while at the same time innovative compared to the works of fanfiction -- Ranma and not -- that had appeared before (and have appeared since). Each chapter concludes with author's notes that explore some of Hallstrom's intentions and goals for the story, and delve into why he made some of the choices he did; reading the story and notes together provides an interesting -- and instructive -- set of insights for the aspiring writer. The author's note at the end of chapter 1 alone turns into an excellent essay on storytelling and constructing a story which is worth reading by itself.

For what it accomplishes, it is surprisingly short -- less than 120,000 words and under 400K in text format, including the authors' notes.

In 2009, Hallstrom resurfaced and announced he was resuming work on the project, but after posting an updated version of the first chapter of RAALS to The Fanfic Federation bulletin board, he disappeared again. He has not been heard from since.

Those wishing to read the whole of the extant parts of Ranma and Akane: A Love Story have a bit of a trip before them. Fanfiction.net has the first six chapters, which are surprisingly satisfying by themselves. Alternately, one may go to the Wayback Machine archive of Hallstrom's long-gone website where the entire story can be found.

If you have chosen to read the story on Fanfiction.net and wish to proceed to chapter 7, here are links to Wayback copies of Chapter 7 Part A and Chapter 7 Part B.

In addition to the seven chapters, there are also two side stories: "Training Sequence" and "Interconnections".

If you want to see the teasers for the other, never-written, parts of Chiang Ma Bai Feng Tian Shan Sheng Sho, you can see them here or here.

(Because Ranma spends almost all of the extant material in female form, and the narration consistently uses female pronouns for her except for those few scenes where he is male, this article follows the same convention.) "The cause of his final, fatal distraction is open to debate. It might have been simple overstrain from exertion. It might have been Akane's sudden burst of power. It might have been Ranma's Thousand Times Blow. It might even have been the spoon."
 * Abnormal Ammo: The rounds for Ranma's Desert Eagle, which include Cold Iron cores and into which she can push her ki to make them do... special things.
 * Acceptable Hobby Targets: Ranma is a Chicago Cubs fan, for which Akane (who is inexplicably well-informed about American baseball for a Japanese schoolgirl), tweaks her good-naturedly, noting that they haven't gotten into the World Series since 1945.
 * The Ace: Ranma seems to excel at everything.  This is deliberate on the part of the author, because Ranma isn't the hero of the story (or at least not the primary one) -- Akane is, and Ranma is her mentor.
 * Achey Scars: While trying to dissuade Akane from becoming her student in the ways of mayhem, Ranma admits that her many scars often ache, particularly in winter.
 * Acid Reflux Nightmare: After he wakes up from his dream flashback, Ranma mutters to himself, "I've got to stop making myself those midnight habanero-and-teriyaki beef snacks."
 * Alchemy Is Magic: The devices (?) in Ranma's apartment that appear to be distilling moonlight and sunshine.
 * Animate Inanimate Object: Ranma briefly animates a nightingale made of carved jade.
 * Animated Tattoo: Teased.  The narration doesn't actually say that the dragon tattoo on Ranma's back is animated when it's first described, but the narrative voice keeps making coy comments about how "alive" and realistic it looks.
 * Another Dimension: Ranma has a pendant holding the Nanban mirror which allows her to switch timelines.  She tells stories to the Tendo sisters that make it clear she has spent considerable time in the universe of Usagi Yojimbo, for instance.
 * Arc Words: "Sometimes it's the small things that count", and variations on it.  They get very noticeable in chapter 5, but that's not the only place they appear, by far.
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
 * Criminal thug "Daken" (initially) holds a grudge against Ranma and Akane for beating the crap out of him and his gang, taking their money and possessions... and for selling his precious Tamagotchi-chan "like a slave".
 * Then there's this passage from chapter 5:

""The master came to a yatai which was selling hot dogs. 'What do you want on your hot dog?' he was asked. 'Nothing,' he replied. Then the hot dog was enlightened.""
 * Artistic License Astronomy: A very early scene mentions a "thin sliver of a gibbous moon".  "Gibbous" is the opposite of "crescent" -- it's everything from just past half-full to almost full.  It's never a "thin sliver".
 * Ascended Extra: Sayuri.  Originally just one of Those Two Girls who hung out with Akane, she surprised the author by being unexpectedly brave when she wasn't planned to be.  He then rewarded her by turning her into a significant character -- who got her soul abducted by a demon, leading to an Orphean Rescue -- and a promotion to a/the secondary hero of the piece.
 * Astral Projection: Ranma sends her soul out into another plane of existence to rescue Sayuri's soul in chapter 5.  Quite against her express instructions, Akane comes along for the ride.
 * Aura Vision: Ranma teaches this to Akane, who finds it overwhelming at first.
 * Ax Crazy: Ranma deliberately (or maybe not) projects this impression of herself to the boys assembled to battle Akane on the first morning she goes to Furinkan.  (It's not entirely a false impression, either -- as she tells Akane several hours later, just six months earlier she would have gone ahead and slaughtered them, laughing all the while.)
 * Baseball Episode: The side story Interconnections is largely about an abbreviated three-inning game between the Furinkan (boys') baseball team and the former Furinkan girls' softball team, recently upgraded (by Ranma) to baseball, intended to prove to the boys' coach that the girls could play on the same level.
 * Big Brother Instinct: Twelve-year-old Ranma gets this way about "Kee-imoutosan" -- who's at least ten years older than her.
 * Big Damn Heroes: Kodachi, of all people, becomes this when she saves Akane from Jei during the battle at Furinkan.
 * British Accents: Inexplicably, all the vendors who show up at Furinkan at the end of Ranma's first day there speak Japanese with exaggerated Cockney accents.  Even Nabiki (who arranged this) goes briefly Cockney.
 * Bullet Time: Kuno experiences his duel with Ranma this way.
 * Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: When Ranma finally defeats Jei at Furinkan, it comes with a butterfly manifestation.
 * Butterfly of Doom: A flower that falls in the beginning of part B of chapter 7 is the instigation of an avalanche that has just barely begun by the end of the part.
 * Casual Interdimensional Travel: Ranma's pendant, which gives her the power to Time Travel, apparently doesn't have a problem with going to alternate dimensions.
 * Cliff Hanger/Left Hanging: The last extant installment, part B of chapter 7, ends with a Single-Stroke Battle between Akane and a Yakuza assassin, in which someone was (fatally?) wounded -- but the narration coyly refuses to say who.  It doesn't help that the narrator was liberally ladling out warnings of dark things to come in both parts A and B of the chapter.
 * Climbing the Cliffs of Insanity: Ranma and Akane scaling the Cliff of Black Stone after they plunge into The Starless Sea. Like many other obstacles they face during their astral journey, it is less a matter of physical effort than mental and spiritual determination.
 * Cold Iron: The bullets for Ranma's gun have cold iron cores.
 * Conspicuous CG: In-universe: the destruction by Ranma of a canyon floor in Hell is described as looking like bad CG animation.
 * Cool Shades: The overall introduction includes a brief image of a confident future Akane in mirrorshades.
 * Cool Teacher: Ranma, to Akane.
 * Covered with Scars: Ranma, to the shock of her classmates when she finally gets into gym clothes.  They're everywhere on her body, including an ugly one across her throat and shoulder, and some subtle ones on her face that are only really noticeable when she smiles.
 * Crossover: The greater work was clearly going to be a Mega Crossover, judging by what little was revealed about it, incorporating not only Ranma ½ but Gunnm, El-Hazard: The Magnificent World, Iczer, Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki and Ah! My Goddess.
 * By itself, RAALS has numerous crossover elements, including:
 * Usagi Yojimbo
 * Gunnm (Gally's running a burger joint in Nerima)
 * Urusei Yatsura (Sakura Sakurambo officiates at a memorial service)
 * Gunsmith Cats (Ranma writes Rally to arrange for Akane's further training should Ranma not survive Sayuri's rescue)
 * When Ranma and Akane meet Death at the start of Sayuri's rescue, it never has the same appearance two paragraphs in a row, and briefly assumes the forms of Charon, Discworld's Death, Death of the Endless and the Angel of Death, among others.
 * Peter Morwood's Books of Days series (Akane comes into possession of the sword Isileth).
 * Ranma accidentally interrupts Ifurita and Makoto from El-Hazard: The Magnificent World making love on a rooftop.
 * See also the Shout-Out entry on the Trivia subpage for several more cameo-scale crossover elements.
 * Death Seeker: Ranma, according to an author's note, has a death-wish.  Nabiki's noticed this as of chapter 6.
 * Disintegrator Ray: Ranma's "Butterfly's Kiss" attack.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: Ranma acknowledges that the amount of damage she did to a boy named Takuichi Daikun, who had "earned" the position of lead for that morning's challenge attack on Akane, was far in excess of what was necessary, and will (rightly) cause her trouble in the future.
 * The Ditz: Strongly implied of Masuda Kee, a young prostitute Ranma met in Hong Kong, whom she describes as having been "badly in need of someone to tell her to come in out of the rain". Ranma also describes her as "enjoying her work too much to pay attention to business".
 * Due to the Dead:
 * In the second opening of the story, someone -- later revealed to be Ranma -- is giving a proper burial to a band of bandits whom he killed.
 * The memorial service for the Furinkan students killed in Jei's attack.
 * Eldritch Location: Everywhere Ranma and Akane end up during the rescue of Sayuri.  Every location they visit is acknowledged to be a metaphysical and even metaphorical plane, and is prone to reacting to their desires as well as mutating to challenge them.  Some have very specific "physical" laws, such as The Starless Sea, where lies and falsehoods are simply not possible.
 * Epiphany: Akane finally realizes and accepts the full depth of her feelings for Ranma only when it seems that they have parted for the very last time.  At the same time Ranma acknowledges her own feelings for Akane.
 * Everyone Can See It: The depth of Ranma and Akane's feelings for each other after just a week or two are so obvious to everyone else that Nabiki not only deduced it before they did, she's convinced that they are lovers (which they aren't yet) and tries to catch them at it.  In fact, just about everyone who's spent any amount of time with them is convinced they're physically intimate, and as of chapter 7 Kuno has put himself in charge of protecting their "secret and forbidden love" from anyone or anything that would threaten it.
 * Everything Fades: Akane performs a kata with Isileth, opening herself up to a vision-like experience of the sword's history, and fights a series of battles with it; every foe she defeats is explicitly described as fading away as they fall.
 * Eye Scream: A demon claws out one of Akane's eyes just after she gets Sayuri across the symbolic/metaphorical wall separating Hell from the mortal world.
 * Extremely Short Timespan: The extant material -- starting with Ranma's arrival in Nerima and including the quantum leap in Akane's skills, the battle of Furinkan and an excursion into Hell -- all takes place in the course of about three weeks.  And the first three chapters cover the first three days Ranma is in Nerima, one chapter to each day.
 * Fanon: An odd mix of mostly accepted (Ranma stuttering when she says "cat", using the term "bonbori" for Shampoo's maces, named-and-numbered cries for Soun Tendo, Nabiki's moneymaking keeps the dojo afloat) and oddly averted ("Kyuumu" instead of the fandom-standard "Kimiko" for the name of the late Mrs. Tendo).
 * Fantastic Fighting Style: Ranma's unnamed Art, which incorporates bare handed techniques, gunplay, sword, war fan and god only knows what other weapons, along with a ki mastery that verges upon (and sometimes actually is) magic.
 * Five-Finger Discount: Ranma, among her other skills, is a masterful pickpocket -- so much so that she was able to take Nabiki's money belt, count her take from the day, and put it all back on her, without Nabiki noticing.
 * Flash Step: Ranma, as seen in her duel with Kuno, can move so quickly that she almost seems to teleport, covering tens of feet in what appears to be a single step.
 * Flashback: We get one to Ranma's life in the Usagi Yojimbo world in the form of a dream, which starts as a happy recollection of time with friends, turns into a bloody battle, and turns back into a happy memory.  Serves a double purpose by also Foreshadowing the enemy who has followed Ranma to Nerima.
 * For Want of a Nail: According to Word of God, the key divergence is Genma training Ranma in the Neko-ken one year later than in canon.
 * Foreshadowing: The narrative voice doesn't always indulge in it, but when it does, it makes sure you know.
 * Ranma's description in the side story "Training Sequence" of what the higher levels of skill and focus can allow a martial artist to accomplish not only makes it clear what she's capable of, it was probably also foreshadowing of what Akane was likely to be able to do, had the overall story continued. (Ranma more than once declares in the main story that she expects Akane to eventually exceed her; "Training Sequence" suggests how.)
 * Functional Magic: Ranma's ki/ch'i/shih skills go past martial arts and into genuine magic, touching on a little of every style.
 * Geisha: How Ranma describes Masuda Kee, the strangely innocent streetwalker she befriended and took under her wing in Hong Kong.
 * Geometric Magic: Ranma uses a circle inscribed in wax as a protective device for her body while astrally projecting to rescue Sayuri.
 * God Test: When Nabiki and Kasumi express some concern about how unbelievable Ranma's stories of time and dimensional travel are, Ranma takes the two of them on a jaunt to a much earlier period in Japan's history to do the grocery shopping as a way of proving she's not crazy.
 * Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Gravitational Cognizance is in play when Ranma forces Akane to fight on top of a fence for several minutes, during which Akane easily keeps her balance.  She only falls off when they're done and Ranma actually brings her footing to her attention.
 * Greasy Spoon: "Gally's", a tiny hole-in-the-wall burger joint tucked away inobtrusively in Nerima, run by Gally of Gunnm.  Given the burgers she's described as making, she clearly caters to Big Eaters.
 * Hammerspace: Referred to as "jacket-space" in the story. Ranma has some manner of "hidden weapons"-style storage in which she keeps (at the very least) her sword, a pair of fans, an IMI Desert Eagle, a kursari-gama, a bamboo flute and a guitar.
 * By chapter 5, Akane has her own jacket-space, in which she has started to carry a few favored weapons.
 * In part B of chapter 7, Yuka, Sayuri and Kodachi all pull telephone books out of nowhere to whap Hiroshi with when he makes an off-color comment.
 * Hand Cannon: Among her other weapons, Ranma carries a .50 caliber IMI Desert Eagle, with specialized bullets that she can imbue with her ki as she fires them.
 * Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Masuda Kee, an oddly innocent and ditzy prostitute whom Ranma rescues and adopts during her time in Hong Kong. Ranma saves her from a nasty and brutish life on the street, and she eventually finds a place in "The Dream of Jade", the most expensive and best brothel in Hong Kong.
 * I Fell for Hours: Ranma and Akane when they escape Hell into/through The Starless Sea.  The unconventially formatted narration of their plunge through the darkness suggests that it's not just hours but (subjectively) centuries, millennia or even longer -- the rise and fall of civilizations and the birth of new universes occur as they fall.
 * Iaido Practitioner: Ranma.
 * Ice Cream Koan: Ranma recites one playfully while helping Akane open her higher senses after Akane complains that her instruction sounds like a koan.  It's also a bit of Bait and Switch humor, as it starts out sounding like the classic "make me one with everything" joke, but heads off in an unexpected direction:

"This is the story of a boy who was a girl, and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a girl who acts like a boy, and a boy who acts like a girl, and a woman, and a man, and another couple girls, and a cast of thousands. And a Panda, though not until much later. And butterflies, lots and lots of butterflies."
 * If It's You It's Okay: After a few days of angsting over her attraction to Ranma (whom she's only known as female), Akane has an epiphany during the fight in Hell and basically says, "screw it, I love her!"
 * In a Single Bound: Ranma makes a series of stupendous leaps over hordes of demons as part of the battle in Hell.
 * In Spite of a Nail: Despite the radically different course her life has taken, Ranma still has a Jusenkyo gender curse, but has had it for much longer than in canon.  It's explained that she went to Jusenkyo (identified by Genma as where she'd be "tested" in six years) to scout it out after getting control of the Neko-ken -- while still prepubescent (which no doubt contributed to her apparent gender fluidity).
 * In the Name of the Moon: Kodachi attempts to deliver such a speech in the midst of the fight with Jei, but all it does is allow him an attack of opportunity on her before she's halfway through.
 * Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The low wall between the outskirts of Hell and the mortal world is almost this; it's hinted that despite appearing totally inanimate, it is a Threshold Guardian.
 * Interspecies Romance: Averted between Ranma and Miyamoto Usagi, although not for lack of interest on Ranma's part judging from the account she gives the Tendo sisters.
 * It Always Rains At Funerals: The memorial service for the students killed in Jei's attack on Furinkan is held on a drizzly overcast day.
 * Japanese Delinquents: "Daken" and his gang, who attempt to mug Ranma and Akane and get mugged right back instead. He and his cohorts are implied to be older, possibly past high school age, and are explicitly described as a Japanese Nationalists.
 * Japanese Pronouns: Although (obviously) written in English, it's made clear that Ranma is using masculine forms despite being physically female.
 * Katanas Are Just Better: Averted with Ranma's blade Tenchuu no yasashigena, which is not a katana but a tachi, the precursor to the katana.  It is plain, unadorned and is simply a piece of sharpened steel intended to kill people, that is in no way legendary or magical.
 * Knife Fight: In addition to Ranma and Akane's skills, Sayuri:  skill in the kitchen plus determination plus need turns her into a vicious and skilled knife fighter -- Dual-Wielding, even.
 * Kung Fu Wizard: Ranma, in the absolute simplest terms.
 * Last of Her Kind: Ranma is the very last of a long line of divinely-enhanced warriors called "Invincibles" (who despite the name are not invincible, just very hard to kill and very good at killing supernatural evil).
 * Lemon/Lime: Explicitly invoked in the third introduction, when the narrator promises "just a touch of citrus, for flavor".  Ultimately averted, however, since the extant material doesn't have any such content.
 * Lemony Narrator: The beginning of RAALS is very much the domain of a Lemony Narrator who opens the story by discussing how one should write the opening of a story, then comments on how different the opening of this story is from the usual opening of a Ranma ½ story.  He settles down a bit, but never quite goes away, doing things like referring to the boys at Furinkan High School as "students.Furinkan.male.assembled" and later actively flowcharting how a minor character's thought processes lead up to him giving a bouquet of flowers to a pretty girl in a hospital bed.
 * Like a Badass Out of Hell: When Sayuri's soul is trapped in Hell, Ranma and Akane astrally project themselves there to free her.  Before they even reach her, though, Sayuri manages to free herself from the torture chamber where she was imprisoned, and is in the process of slaughtering every demon she can get her hands on when they find her.  And as Akane leads her back out to the world of the living, Ranma makes an awesome final stand as a distraction.
 * Losing Your Head: When he appears in Nerima to fight Ranma, the humanoid wolf Jei has been empowered by his mysterious patron such that decapitation is useless against him -- it doesn't kill him, and only lasts long enough for him to reassemble himself.
 * Magical Defibrillator: The scenes of Sayuri being defibrillated partake more of this trope than the realistic use of a defibrillator.
 * The Makeover: Suggested for Ranma by Sayuri, Yuka and Kodachi in chapter 7, but averted thoroughly when Ranma demonstrates that she can turn on a veela-like aura at will, and that anything they might offer would be an Unnecessary Makeover.
 * Martial Arts and Crafts:
 * Actively defied by Ranma, who calls it "silliness" after mocking the idea of arts like "martial arts croquet" and "kung-fu break dancing". As far as she's concerned, a martial art is about hurting or killing people.  Anything else, and it's not an art worthy of the consideration of a warrior.  This is another aspect of Reality Ensues as the author imposes it on the setting of Ranma ½.
 * Later, however, Kasumi witnesses Ranma and Akane using advanced ki/magical techniques to clean and repair the dojo after a particularly energetic and destructive training session and is stunned. She ends up imagining a school of "Domesticity Martial Arts" she could learn and use in her day-to-day life.
 * Meaningful Name: The family name in the Nom-de-guerre Ranma is using -- "Bushiko" -- means "warrior child" in Japanese.
 * Mentor Ship: Set up between Ranma and Akane.  Ranma's choice of gender to present as in Nerima causes problems -- but eventually Character Development as well.
 * Mismatched Eyes: After her astral body's left eye is damaged/destroyed during the battle in Hell in chapter 5, Akane Tendo's actual left eye becomes solid black with swirling clouds of red and gold -- and sometimes flashes entirely metallic gold.
 * Mistaken for Gay: Just about everyone who's realized that Ranma and Akane are in love with each other assume that they are also sexually involved.  As of where the story cuts off, they haven't gotten anywhere close to that ("it's not time for this story to go lemon yet", the Lemony Narrator says at one point).
 * Mob War: Part of Ranma's Backstory is her involvement in a war between different factions of the Hong Kong underworld when he was twelve, which due to the way the sides fell out, forced him to face a man he thought of as an older brother in deadly combat.
 * Mugging the Monster: Ranma all but provokes a case of this so she can mug the muggers right back and fund a shopping trip for Akane.
 * Mundane Utility: As a way of proving the truth of her stories, Ranma uses Time Travel to take Nabiki and Kasumi grocery shopping in what is implied to have been medieval Japan.
 * The Musical/Jukebox Musical: RAALS gets about as close as you can come and still remain an entirely text-based work.  The chapters are punctuated with songs sung by Ranma and Akane, and there are musical cues provided for other scenes.
 * No Escape but Down: To get away from The First of the Fallen after the battle in Hell, Ranma breaks through to something "underneath" Hell, and dives into it with Akane.
 * Nom-de-guerre: Ranma uses this very phrase: the day she meets her, she admits to Akane that the name she's using, "Bushiko Ranma", is a Nom-de-guerre and not her real name.
 * Off with His Head:
 * Ranma ends her "duel" with Kuno early in the story by demonstrating that she can easily take his head, but has the control to turn the killing blow into the barest touch against his neck.
 * Only two days later, Ranma manages to decapitate Jei in the battle at Furinkan, but it doesn't "stick" -- Jei's head and body somehow reassemble themselves and he keeps fighting.
 * Akane relieves more than a few demons of their heads in the process of getting Sayuri back to the mortal world.
 * Older Than They Look: Strongly implied of Ranma.  She is too accomplished and world-weary, too well-spoken and educated, with far too much history, to be the seventeen years old the calendar insists she is.  Not when she has the means to Time Travel and dimension travel.  (An author's note confirms that Ranma's experienced ten subjective years of life and adventures in the five calendar years during which she had been traveling after getting the Neko-ken under control.)
 * Ominous Latin Chanting: Invoked -- for the reader.  The author's notes -- both introductory and inline -- in chapter five recommend that the reader put O Fortuna on replay during most of the chapter.
 * Orphean Rescue: When Sayuri's soul is trapped in the wake of an encounter with a demonic enemy of Ranma's, Ranma and Akane storm the hell dimension where it's held in chapter 5. Played with slightly in that Sayuri manages her own immediate escape from captivity within the demonic fortress where she's held, but the entire process -- and indeed her final return to the mortal/living world -- follows the outline of the classic Orphean Rescue.
 * Ranma and Akane must effect an Orphean Rescue of themselves, after they get Sayuri out and are forced to escape the forces of Hell and the First of the Fallen by breaking through to The Starless Sea. Several times Ranma has to stop Akane from turning back, or even just pausing.
 * Overly Long Name/Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: The full name of "The Dream of Jade" in Hong Kong is "The Dream of the Jade Pagoda of the Golden Door of Infinite Bliss".
 * Painting the Medium/Unconventional Formatting: During Ranma and Akane's fall into/through The Starless Sea, the formatting of the narrative changes from conventional paragraphs to short phrases arranged in vertical stacks to give the sense of downward motion, and continues it over several pages to emphasize their seemingly interminable fall.
 * Pinky Swear: After they survive Jei's attack on Furinkan, Ranma and Akane make a pinky promise to be friends forever.
 * Playing with Fire: At the end of the side story "Training Sequence", Akane is able to conjure a flame into her hand (much to her own surprise) as a result of a training exercise. Sadly, this story takes place far too close to the end of extant main story material for us to see any developments based on it in the main plot.
 * Point of View: The story, told in third-person narration, hops from viewpoint character to viewpoint character like a frog on a hotplate, and is perfectly willing to give as much time to J. Random Schoolmate as it does to Ranma or Akane.
 * Poor Communication Kills: Thanks to the careful circumlocutions employed by the Yakuza "manager" who dispatches him (both to ensure Plausible Deniability and because of the nature of the Japanese language), a professional assassin thinks he's being told to kill Ranma instead of simply hurt her for humiliating "Daken".  He also draws the false conclusion that there are two red-headed martial artists in Nerima that he has to deal with.
 * Power Tattoo: Strongly implied of the dragon tattoo on Ranma's back.
 * Precision-Guided Boomerang: During the fight in Hell, Ranma is able to throw knives with amazing accuracy and draw them back to her hand with a thread of shih.
 * Pretty Butterflies: Butterflies and butterfly imagery abound in this story. The author promises them right from the start:

"Seen it before, yes? In your sleep, behind your back, with your eyes closed, in the rain, right?""
 * Professional Killer: Ranma practically calls herself one the first time she advises Akane on her martial arts skills, contrasting people like Kuno -- whose Art might be about art, philosophy or sport -- and people like herself -- whose art is about killing people.
 * When "Daken" calls on the Yakuza for revenge against Ranma, they dispatch their assassin, Kuga Akihito.
 * Reality Ensues: One of the things that distinguishes RAALS from many other Ranma fics is its frankly unusual application of realistic consequences to the setting's Slapstick levels of violence.  A few examples:
 * Takuichi Daikun, the boy whom Ranma attacks in her first minutes on the Furinkan campus, does not bounce back as one might expect, but is acknowledged to have been seriously injured.
 * In her fight with Kuno, Ranma makes it clear she could have easily decapitated him.
 * When Ranma's enemy Jei attacks her at Furinkan, it results in considerable collateral damage, including the deaths of nearly twenty students.
 * And when Kodachi involves herself in the fight with Jei, her attempt to deliver an In the Name of the Moon speech only gives the creature an opportunity to attack her, resulting in a broken leg, a disfiguring injury and an extended hospital stay.
 * Samurai: Even though he was Hong Kong Yakuza, Ranma acknowledges that Kai was a samurai and respects his honor even while regretting that it set them against each other.
 * Satan: "The First of the Fallen" shows up at the end of the battle in Hell.  Ranma was half-expecting it during the fight and was hoping to go out in a blaze of glory attempting to take The First down with her.  However, The First doesn't show until Akane's rescued Ranma from the battle, and she's no longer close enough to strike at him -- although the two of them are certainly within range of The First.  They run.
 * Seen It a Million Times: Invoked by the Lemony Narrator, who applies it to the standard opening of a Ranma ½ fanfic, which it then manages to summarize in fourteen words ("Rain. Postcard. Kitchen. Bed. Dojo. Bricks. 'FIANCE'?!' Girl. Panda. Fight. CLONG! GROWF! Knock. Ranma.") which cover most of the first episode.

"The canonical sound-effect for this type of action is: * Krakata-THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*"
 * Shock and Awe: Ranma employs a number of electrical/storm/lightning effects as part of her art.  Some of them are massive.
 * Signature Song: Garnet Rogers' "Summer Lightning" -- according to the narration, Akane would eventually "come to regard it as the song closest to her understanding of Ranma's true heart".  Ranma's performance of it in music class closes out part B of chapter 1, and both she and Akane sing it together and separately several times in the course of the extant material.
 * Standard Hero Reward: High School version:  Although it happens entirely off-screen, Sayuri's bravery in the face of Daken's first attempt to ambush Ranma and Akane at Furinkan earns her a very nice date with a very nice boy.  Sadly, it coincidentally puts her in the wrong place to be the victim of a Trojan Horse gambit by one of Ranma's old enemies.
 * The Stations of the Canon: Utterly averted, as the narrator notes at the beginning.  Nothing in this story follows the usual conventions of a Ranma fic.
 * The Storyteller: Ranma, and she's very good at it.  Combined with her tendency to sing at the drop of a hat (not to mention her skill with a guitar), she approaches being a bard.
 * Stunned Silence: Gally spins and stares at Ranma with a look of utter shock when Ranma informs her she's taken Akane as a student.
 * Suicide Mission: Ranma intends for her big battle in Hell to be this as well as a distraction to let Akane and Sayuri get back to the mortal world.  After she gets Sayuri safely out, though, Akane has different plans.
 * Sword Fight:
 * Ranma gets into one with Kuno in the first chapter, but it's an entirely one-sided Curb Stomp Battle that ends with Kuno defeated, bleeding and apparently shorn of his Samurai delusions. It's also a prelude to Ranma explaining to Akane the difference between a Martial Artist like Kuno, and a Warrior Who Kills People, like Ranma.
 * Akane gets one against several demons right on the edge of Hell, using a sword that just happened to be where she reached in desperation for anything to use against then.
 * Threshold Guardians: The low wall between the outskirts of Hell and the mortal world seems to act as one despite being completely inanimate.
 * Thunderbolt Iron: Akane's sword Isileth is made from meteoric iron, according to the inscription on its tang.
 * The Time of Myths: Invoked when the narration explains the backstory of the Invincibles. They ended the age of myth and legend, and ushered in the age of humanity.
 * Time Travel: When her time in Hong Kong came to a tragic end, Ranma was given the Nanban Mirror (a canon time travel device from Ranma ½). She's used it quite a bit over the past six and a half years, and has lived almost twice that, subjectively, thanks to both time travel and dimensional travel with it.
 * Torture Always Works/Break the Cutie: Absolutely averted with Sayuri's torment at the hands of demons in Hell (a fact complained about at one point by their superior).  Sayuri reaches a point where she is bored by her torture and is able to more or less ignore it while she plans what she'll do when she gets loose.
 * Transgender: Ranma appears to be thoroughly genderfluid, treating her physical sex much like a choice of clothing.  She's so unconcerned about it that she actually flips a coin to determine whether to use a male or female identity when settling down in Nerima.  This is probably due (at least in part) to receiving her Jusenkyo curse before puberty and going through sexual maturation in both bodies at once.
 * That said, it's also strongly hinted that she's pansexual, between an admitted attraction to a male humanoid rabbit and casually mentioning that she learned all about sex in a Hong Kong brothel.
 * Translation Convention: Run backward from the usual with the songs Ranma and later Akane sing -- all of them were written originally in English, but Ranma notes that she's translated them to Japanese.  Despite this we see them in their original English forms.
 * Trojan Horse: The wolf cub puppy Sayuri finds after her date.
 * The Undead: The vampire shock troops employed by Master Po in the Hong Kong gang war -- and possibly Master Po himself.
 * Underestimating Badassery: In way, Ranma does this to herself.  Although she is amazingly skilled and powerful far in excess of anything Genma ever accomplished, she is still concerned that she may not yet meet his standards and will have failed at having trained herself for the last six years.
 * Unproblematic Prostitution: Ranma makes "Kee-imoutosan"'s time at The Dream of Jade sound like this.
 * Virtual Soundtrack: Chapter five begins with the explicit note, "By popular demand, the majority of this episode should be read to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana" and offers a (long-defunct) link to an MP3 of the piece. When the great battle in Hell begins, the narration pauses to specifically inform the reader to start playing it, and much later bookends the action with the note "You can turn it off now."
 * RAALS verges on this trope elsewhere, as well, with a large number of songs, often from British/Irish/Scottish folk music tradition, that are sung throughout the story by the various characters. MP3 links were provided for these as well. This only edges up to the trope because the song lyrics are provided whole within the story, and are part of the story rather than supplemental atmosphere. In this regard, RAALS is much like a musical rendered in text.
 * If you visit the Wayback Machine archive linked above in the main text, you'll find that every chapter has at least a couple pieces of music associated with it (with now-dead links to MP3s).
 * The Watson: Akane plays this role in the side story "Training Sequence", as Ranma spends most of the story explaining deeper and more complex elements of martial arts and its related disciplines than Akane was ever exposed to, as a necessary first step before expanding her training.
 * Well, This Is Not That Trope:
 * After summarizing the usual start of a Ranma fic in fourteen words, and noting that you've no doubt Seen It a Million Times, the narrator then flatly announces, "This story doesn't start like that."
 * After the first scene of Sayuri's torture in Hell, which starts with "A demon was raping her", another scene shortly afterward begins "A demon was torturing her ... no, wait; it was only her physical therapist." It turns out to be a passage about Kodachi in the hospital.
 * Written Sound Effect: The sound of Ranma's last strike in the canyon battle in Hell:


 * Yakuza:
 * During her time in Hong Kong Ranma befriends Kai, a ranking member of a group of Yakuza, and basically becomes part of his family. Unfortunately, a gang war breaks out, they find themselves on opposite sides due to their respective senses of honor, and she is forced to kill him.
 * In chapter 7, "Daken", defeated by Ranma several times, uses his extremely minimal Yakuza connections to make another try at revenge on her. We get a brief scene of a Yakuza "middle manager" deciding how to handle things.
 * Year Inside, Hour Outside: Pretty much chapter five in its entirely runs on this trope:
 * Sayuri's time in Hell is subjectively long enough for her to lose track of how long it's been and how many times she's been tortured.
 * Ranma and Akane spend much more time on their astral quest than the few hours that pass for everyone else in the mortal world. They don't even reach Ranma's 48-hour "time limit" there -- but if the narration is to be taken literally, they spent billions of years just falling through The Starless Sea.