Character · Ranma 1/2
Akane Tendo
She is engaged to a boy she never met, hates the arrangement, and would rather break bricks with her fist about it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Unwilling fiancee who hates boys and cannot cook
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Ranma 1/2
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Akane Tendo is the youngest of three sisters, and when a family friend arrives to marry one of them off, the older two nominate her before she can object. She trains in karate, breaks bricks in the yard, and has spent years fending off male classmates who fight each other for the right to date her. Her opinion of boys was already low. Ranma does not improve it.
The cooking is the other running gag, and it is merciless. Akane approaches recipes with confidence, improvises, and produces food the cast treats as a weapon. Rumiko Takahashi keeps both jokes running for years without letting either define her, because the actual story is that Akane and Ranma like each other and would each rather lose a fight than admit it.
Her fighting is real but outclassed. In a series where half the cast has trained on cursed mountains since infancy, Akane is a competent school-level martial artist surrounded by monsters, and the plot regularly makes that painful. She keeps swinging anyway. Ranma 1/2 began in Weekly Shonen Sunday in 1987, ran for nine years and thirty-eight volumes, and sold in the tens of millions.
Spelling AKANE
AKANE is five letters and every vowel is pronounced, including the last one. It is a-ka-ne, three beats, ending on a spoken E rather than a silent one, which is the mistake English speakers make with Japanese names that end in E. The word 茜 means madder red, the dye plant, and it is a common girl's name. AKANE alternates vowel and consonant the whole way.