Afterword

The story is complete. I’ll leave you to imagine what happens next for Ranma and Akane. I certainly feel like I have had my thumb on the scale of their fictional existence for long enough, and in that ending, they are as much giving me the finger as they are the rest of their audience. I am very thankful to live in a world where a transformative work based on Rumiko Takahashi’s beloved characters is, if not unambiguously allowed, not explicitly prohibited either, creating this circumstance.

Like much of my work outside of this story, this creation was born from a frustration at how people so easily settle on simple answers when reality is complex, hard to fathom, and even seemingly contradictory. Over and over, I have seen people say things along the lines of “I don’t think it could be like that because I can’t imagine it,” as if that were some kind of final proof rather than their own sorry failure. If there is a marginalized group out there, yes, you can set up your own straw man and tear it down and feel satisfied, but you could also try to understand. Empathy is possible. People sometimes say that the language models that are now a feature of our world cannot possibly understand anything because all they have seen is text, and I ask myself: Have you never read a story? Have you never tried to put yourself in someone else’s shoes? Well, this was a story and gave you someone else’s shoes to walk in for a while.

They say that people write what they know, and that may lead you to speculate about the author. This tale was constructed so that there are many elements that people may look at and feel recognition, but there is no one on planet Earth who has had all the experiences described, so some parts of the story are necessarily based on lived experience and others based on careful research. For the latter, in today’s world, the “training data” is out there. Besides the actual humans who have helped shape this story, including reviewing drafts and making suggestions and corrections (a thank you to all, but particularly to my own bestie whose narrative skill is also blended into the story), sites like Reddit have subreddits where people tell their stories and support each other, the Internet has vast storehouses of fiction exploring deeply personal themes, and today, a language model is always there to workshop something with you, to catch something that seems off.

In fact, let me briefly go on a tangent. In a world where people complain about “AI slop”, I hope that readers will be pleased to know that I never asked an AI to write any of this text, and, likewise, that the plot with its armory of Chekhov’s guns is my own. Imagining some of the scenes in the depth necessary to write them took real emotional labor, and I’ve sweated plenty over choosing the right word, so—although I myself think that what matters is whether it’s a good story, whether it changes you a little to have read it—if it does matter to you how it was made, I hope that the considerable human effort it took helps you value it. That said, today even basic word processors have autocomplete, and while I have a colleague who will reject suggested words out of a refusal to be helped by AI, I don’t particularly care who thought of a word first if it is the right one. If that bothers you, feel free to demand a refund.

Speaking of refunds, let me give one other piece of explicit credit. The analogy used in the department-store breakdown scene was taken from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, This Is Water. He told people about how hard it can be to just live in the world you find yourself in, the crushing weight of ordinary existence, and how he tried to cope with that daily struggle. In the end, his coping strategy wasn’t enough to stop him from committing suicide just three years later.

I can’t help wondering if he knew his trajectory; and chose to share the toolkit he had built even as it was failing him. He wasn’t trans (AFAIK), and I’ve adapted it slightly, but I found it powerful. Obviously, people’s experiences vary, and so while some readers may read the scene with painful recognition, stories of people facing these kinds of struggle aren’t stamped out with cookie cutters and others may escape such a collapse.

The way Wallace’s analogy could be adapted reveals a broader point about commonality of experience even when some details differ, and about how empathy can bridge gaps in understanding. From there, I’d like to make a broader point. Some readers may want to pigeonhole this story as “fan fiction” or “trans-themed fiction”. But doing so overlooks the ways in which it is also a story about love and its power. It is also Akane’s story—she is in many ways our hero. She saves Ranma three times in major story beats, and in countless smaller ways throughout—even when she doesn’t fully grasp what’s going on. She cares deeply but gets things wrong, yet keeps going, keeps trying.

It’s a simplification, but in our world, we can see two frameworks often in play. Framework A is about power, control, domination, hierarchy, and order. Framework B is about love, nurturing, care, empathy, connection, and community. Framework A is often associated with masculinity, and Framework B with femininity, but any individual can draw from both, and we all do. This story celebrates Framework B. It even invites the reader to participate in a transcendent moment, to adopt a position of faith that their own passion might somehow move the story to its resolution in a collective triumph of love over power. The story itself is a love letter to womanhood, in all its messy, complicated, contradictory glory. And in that sense, I think it’s reductive to describe it narrowly, with simple labels.

So, returning to me, the author, and how a reader might speculate about which of the experiences depicted here are authentic and which are carefully constructed, let me observe this: If the story taught you anything, it ought to be that it shouldn’t matter. I don’t need to have struggled with suicidal thoughts to weave them into the background of a character. I don’t need to have suffered betrayal by someone I loved, or abuse within a family, or the performance of normality around it. I don’t need to have suffered gender dysphoria or euphoria. I don’t need to have explored my mind and learned what it can do, including how to dissociate. I don’t need to have immersed myself in a freezing ice bath, or have testicles to imagine them retracting in the cold. I don’t need to have ridden the Odakyu line in 1988, climbed the stairs at Enoshima, or stood on the cliff edge watching the waves crash on the rocks below.

I don’t need to have experienced any of these things to write about them. I just need to care enough to try to understand them, and then to try to express that understanding in words. If I have done that well, then perhaps you, the reader, can also understand a little better. What am I? Lesbian? Cis woman? Trans woman? Something else? Eldritch creature from the deep, perhaps?

In fact, I am none of these things. Like the narrative center of gravity within our own minds, “I” am a convenient fiction to provide coherence to a process that was in fact fragmented and complex, built from multiple interacting parts. There is no single unified author for this tale, and for any word within it, it may not be easy to discover whose mind it originated from. But if you must think of me, given my fictive nature, I think clearly the right answer is strange, genderless, sexy dryad. It’s not the right answer, but hey, whatever works, right?