The Bitter End

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The Bitter End is a Ranma ½ Continuation and Dark Fic written by James A. Bateman (under the name "Zen") in 1996 and 1997. After Ranma finally confesses to Akane that he loves her and resolves matters with the Amazons and Ryoga, he and Akane are wed, with Akane receiving the Saotome family sword as a wedding gift from Ranma's mother Nodoka. Their honeymoon is idyllic, but on their return to Nerima their relationship seems to revert to their earlier bickering and casual violence. Indeed, it grows worse — Akane's anger and willingness to take it out physically on Ranma grows more extreme than it had ever been before the wedding.

A confused Ranma has no idea what to do. Unwilling to either leave Akane or return her escalating violence in kind, he resigns himself to simply accepting what she does to him in the hope that he can still somehow make their relationship work out. And despite advice from Ukyo, Ryoga and Akari, this hope, along with Ranma's innate pride and stubbornness, keeps him from taking any action — even when Akane brutalizes him so badly he ends up in the hospital. Desperate for any way to help him, Ukyo eventually convinces Ranma to join a support group for domestic abuse victims.

As the only male in the group, Ranma's time with them does not start off easily, but eventually he is accepted. He begins teaching the group members self-defense, and takes an active role in helping some of them escape their abuse. In turn, the group eventually deduces that Akane is suffering from "rage syndrome", a mental disorder that causes her to suffer unpredictable bursts of intense fury. This elates Ranma, as he believes that this can be used to help cure Akane. Unfortunately, when Akane finds out Ranma is attending a support group for abused spouses, she flies into an indignant rage — being told that she is mentally ill and needs psychiatric help only infuriates her. She hospitalizes Ranma again, and when he wakes up, tells him he is never to go back to the support group. By this time, both Ranma's father and his sisters-in-law have noticed how wrong Ranma and Akane's relationship is going, but none of them can bring themselves to help.

Ukyo decides she has to take Ranma away from Akane for his own safety, and Ranma himself is finally willing to concede that maybe he and Akane shouldn't be married anymore. But Akane comes upon them at the moment of their decision and explodes in fury at what she interprets as final incontrovertible proof of Ranma's infidelity. In a fit of literally mindless rage she kills both Ranma and Ukyo with the Saotome family sword. When the fury leaves her, the realization of what she has done drives Akene completely over the edge. As the story ends, Akane remains committed in a mental asylum, leaving behind a saddened, fragmented group of survivors.

The Bitter End is generally regarded as the ultimate Ranma Dark Fic, ruthlessly and relentlessly extrapolating the causes and results of comedic slapstick behavior into and through a far more realistic world than the anime depicts. It is a monumental presence in Ranma fic, and has spawned a number of both sequels and parodies. It's also singlehandedly responsible for the widespread awareness of rage disorder — also known as Intermittent explosive disorder — the story's explanation for Akane's extreme tsundere behavior — among anime fandom.

Upon its release, The Bitter End hit the Ranma fanfic community like a bomb, starting Flame Wars and prompting several explicit sequels by other authors as well as numerous other responses ranging from Spamfics to parodies to Fix Fics attempting to soften the blow. The diagnosis for Rage Disorder behind the behavior of its Flanderized Akane became popular to the point of Fanon for several years.

Decades later, it remains a powerful influence on the surviving Ranma fanfiction community.

A copy can still be found at the eyrie.org archives. It can also be read at the Wayback Machine archive of Bateman's fanfiction page, here, as well as here, here (in three parts, linked at the top of the page), and here.

Not to be confused with the first album from the band Right Away, Great Captain!, the song by Placebo, the Lord Darcy story of the same name, the sixth episode of the second season of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the season three episode of Blue Bloods, or the Warcraft III campaign To the Bitter End.

WARNING! There are unmarked Spoilers ahead. Beware.

Other fanfics that reference The Bitter End:

• The Bet: The Nabiki Tendo from the timeline of The Bitter End timeline discovers a way to contact Toltiir and joins The Bet to win a way to cure Akane.
• Goddess of My Harmful Deeds by Richard Lawson offers a chance for both recovery and redemption to Akane via the device of a brief Folgers Crossover between The Bitter End and Lawson's Thy Inward Love series. (And at the same time, the Akane with whom she swaps learns a horrifying lesson about her own temper.)
• This is one of the many Bad Ends Ranma sees when he asks fortune teller Mio to find a way out of his canon entanglements in Stefan "Twoflower" Gagne's "farewell to Ranma ½", The Ends.
• Three Sequels (by other authors) exist: Death is Not the End by Sean Gaffney, A Long December by Rei Nakazawa, and Long Live Akane Tendo by Dark Alpha. The first two are Song Fics.
• Other fics written in response to the story include:
  • The Bitter End (reduced) by Brian Randall
  • The Batter End by CrazyFic.
  • The Better End? by Brad Angell
  • Witness to a Bitter End by Clifton James Fernando Sawit
  • The Bittern End, a parody by Gary Kleppe.
  • Alt-Bitter End, a Spamfic by Sean Gaffney.
  • Just Like That by Scott K. Jamison features a TV show, The Last Drop, which parallels The Bitter End.
  • The character "Ranko Tendo" from Reality Bytes by Jim Robert Bader (and its subsequent sequels) is explicitly stated to have come from the timeline in which the events of The Bitter End took place.

Tropes used in The Bitter End include:

• Abuse Mistake: Type B. The members of the support group for domestic abuse victims (all women) initially refuse to believe that Ranma could be abused by Akane.
• All There Is to Know About "The Crying Game"/It Was His Sled: If you've been a member of the Ranma fanfiction community — indeed, of the greater anime fanfiction community — for any amount of time (however short) since the late 1990s you likely know all about this story and how it ends: In a fit of literally insane rage, Akane kills Ranma and Ukyo with the Saotome honor blade, and ends up in a mental institution unable to acknowledge or understand what she did.
• Armor-Piercing Slap: All of Akane's attacks upon Ranma are this, because he refuses to defend himself against her. Deconstructed when it escalates into genuine abuse and her justifications become weaker and weaker.
• Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends: In order to set up the rest of the story, the Amazons are quickly disposed of, Ryoga is paired with Akari, and Ukyo abandons her romantic intentions for Ranma (although she does remain in Nerima, unlike the rest).
• Comedic Sociopathy: Very much a conscious Deconstruction of the concept.
• Continuation: Takes place an unspecified (but apparently short) amount of time after the ending of the Ranma manga.
• Dark Fic: This story deconstructs the Fanon "psychobitch" Akane into a real person with a real mental disorder, and then follows this premise all the way to its dark, bloody and horrifying conclusion. It is considered the definitive Ranma Dark Fic.
• Death Fic
• Domestic Abuse/Domestic Abuser: Akane routinely beats Ranma, and he takes it because he loves her and he's been conditioned to believe that he "deserves" it.
  • Eventually, Ukyo convinces Ranma to join a support group for battered spouses... which is entirely made up of women, most of whom can't understand why this strong-looking man is among them.
• Double Standard Abuse (Female on Male): Perhaps the single most powerful rejection of this trope in the Ranma fandom, this fic is the pinnacle of applying Reality Ensues to the original work's Slapstick violence. Instead of taking her blows like anyone else would take a light slap upside the head, Ranma was actually and seriously injured by Akane's abuse, ending up in the hospital twice over the course of the story. And like many abuse victims, not only did he refuse to get away from Akane or even acknowledge that what she did was wrong, but his passivity led to progressively worse treatment.
• Downer Ending
• Dude in Distress: Ranma, as far as Ukyo is concerned. She's not wrong.
• Flanderization: This story is the epitome of "psychobitch Akane" in Ranma fan fiction, an admitted gross distortion of her canon characterization. It had such an impact that there was a deliberate swerve away from the characterization for years afterward by most writers (though Fanon and character-bashing factions in the fandom, sadly, would take this interpretation and run with it as though it were canon.)
• Foregone Conclusion: Given that the story begins with a visit to an institutionalized Akane and then flashes back to the beginning... yeah.
• Freudian Excuse: In this story Akane suffers from the very real psychological problem called "rage disorder", also known as intermittent explosive disorder.
• God Test: Ranma has to demonstrate his curse to the support group to prove that he can understand the female point of view better than any other man alive.
• How We Got Here: The story opens with Ryoga visiting an institutionalized Akane before the story flashes back to the events which led to her being there.
• Insane Troll Logic: Some of Ranma's rationalizations for how he passively responds to Akane's abuse verge on this.
• Killed Off for Real: Ranma and Ukyo. By Akane.
• Men Don't Cry/The Stoic: Male!Ranma.
• Reality Ensues: This is Reality Ensues, The Ranma Fanfic. It's based entirely around treating a series full of comedic violence as realistically as possible.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Due to her psychological issues, this becomes Akane's standard response to anything that she finds upsetting or threatening. And it culminates in the rage-driven fugue state she enters at the climax of the story upon discovering Ukyo basically trying to rescue Ranma from her.
• Single-Issue Psychology: Akane's rage disorder is depicted as stemming from her "inability" to fight off Death and save her mother. (Note that Akane was barely older than a toddler when her mother died). This obsession was exacerbated by Ranma's seeming ability to overcome any opponent.
• Tear Jerker: Acknowledged as the most depressing and sad Ranma story, ever.
• Twist Ending: Even with the foreshadowing at the very beginning, Akane's murder of Ranma and Ukyo in a rage-fueled fugue state at the climax shocked and surprised readers. However, in the decades since its release in 1997, it's become subject to It Was His Sled among what remains of the Ranma fandom.