SAOTOME SADISM #1

 I'm playing around with the idea that RANMA 1/2, first published in 1987, may be a trendsetter, if not THE trendsetter, for all Japanese manga that centered on what I may call the "Pay-in-Pain" Trope, to wit: "guy gains a harem of cute girls flocking around him but pays for it by suffering their constant abuse." LOVE HINA, first published in 1998, has probably eclipsed RANMA in the execution of the trope. But how greatly did RANMA pave the way?

As I did with HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY, I'm going to look at all or most of the moments in which Ranma, the male lead of the series and the character with the greatest proficiency in martial arts, suffers pain and/or humiliation at the hands of the girls in the harem. Said girls are usually capable of dishing out tremendous amounts of slapstick violence, for all that none of them are Ranma's martial superiors (in contrast to many later exemplars of "Pay-in-Pain," not least NISEKOI). I won't be exploring the "justified/unjustified" dichotomy as I did with HEAVEN'S, as RANMA's stories are usually less clear-cut.

In the beginning, the only member of Ranma's "harem" is Akane, like him a high-schooler, and one to whom he's informally engaged thanks to a marital agreement between their respective fathers. In the first couple of stories, Akane finds out that Ranma suffers the curse of transformation into a female version of himself when he's splashed with cold water. The two teens also see each other naked in the bathroom, setting the fractious tone for their relationship-- and leading to Ranma's first insult of Akane's looks.

The slapstick routine is swiftly repeated in the intro piece.

Though Ranma claims not to be attracted to Akane, their first day of school together attests to the fact that many, many boys besiege her every day, hoping that she'll date them if they can beat her in a bout. Of course both teens are already attracted to one another but refuse to admit it, though this incident makes it harder for the young man to claim that his "bride" isn't attractive to the male of the species.

Nevertheless, Ranma needles the over-sensitive girl again, and again she clobbers him. The scripts occasionally specify that Ranma's too much of a gentleman to lower himself to fighting a female, which explains why he never hits back. Still, his superior skill seems to conveniently vanish when Ranma's creator wants it to, so that it's rather revealing that he somehow can't avoid her pouncing on him on him and twisting him like a pretzel. 

And just to beef up the slapstick, there's the old "innocent sadism" trope, where the girl just can't seem to avoid causing the boy injury, in the same way he keeps accidentally intruding on her when she's naked or semi-clothed.