by Wyrd » Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:58 am
In defense of Genma's Daughter, all of that behaviour was not ingrained into his personality, it was an attempt to overcompensate for perceived shortcomings in himself. He didn't like to fight, but was told that he was supposed to, so he took up any challenge no matter how silly because he didn't want to take up any of them and never wanted to seem unmanly. Most of who Ranma becomes could be seen in the existing character, just interpreted in a different fashion.
I agree that Ranma would likely not become a girly girl, or would become too much of a girly girl while female because he doesn't know how to act properly. Look at drag queens. They often act more feminine than actual girls because they are overcompensating and because even the slightest masculine habit can give them away. Cross-dressers who want to pass as the opposite sex have to spend a lot of time practicing to get the right balance of how to act, and I think Ranma would go through a similar period of adaptation if he wanted to explore himself as a she. If his mother thought of him as a girl and wanted him to be more feminine, he would seriously try. The success he has had at acting feminine means that he could probably become a convincing girl with some practice.
His gender identity is a big question that is hard to answer. Since she became he, and he then became both he and she by magic, he might very well feel comfortable in whichever form he happens to be wearing. His insistence on proclaiming that he is a guy while a girl could partly be the fact that it feels just as natural for him to be a girl as it does to be a guy. Sexual orientation is also an issue that needs to be brought up. Given Ranma's in canon behaviour, I suspect that he is either a) attracted more to guys than to girls, though he shows enough attraction to girls to show that he is bi, b)heterosexual in each form, so he is attracted to girls while male and attracted to guys while female, or c) nonsexual. Some people have very little actual sex drive. They can still be interested in the aesthetics of someone being pretty or handsome, and can respond sexually to enough stimulus, but they don't get the reactions downstairs that the average person gets to less direct stimulus.
In this version, does Nodoka know that Ranma was born female and turned male before discovering that Ranma and Ranko are the same person? If she didn't, she would be looking for her daughter Ranma or her daughter Ranko, which would give things away rather early. If Ranma became male out of some sort of mystical accident, then part of the training journey could have been a search for a cure, with Nodoka's approval. For that though, there needs to be an alteration to the seppuku contract, such as, "If I fail to find a cure for my daughter or fail to raise my son as a man among men..." This could lead to Ranma asking about his sister and a lot of hedging from Genma.