Ranma Saotome (早乙女 乱馬, Saotome Ranma), is the series' main protagonist. A 16-year-old proficient martial artist, he spent most of his youth on training trips with his father. The last of these trips led them to Jusenkyo, China, where he fell into the Spring of Drowned Girl and changed into a well-built girl with red hair (in the anime; it remains black in the manga). Since then, he changes to this girl form any time he is doused with cold water, while hot water returns him to a boy. Thanks to an agreement between his father and Soun Tendo, he is engaged to Soun's daughter Akane. Due to a series of other involuntary entanglements, he has several additional love interests, most notably the Chinese Amazon Shampoo, okonomiyaki chef and childhood friend Ukyo Kuonji and Kodachi Kuno, the younger sister of rival Tatewaki Kuno. He is very much in love with Akane, but does not want to admit it. When another man shows general interest in her, he can't help but grow jealous leading him to becoming depressed, scheming something to separate them, or growing worried.
Martial arts is the 16-year-old hero's life. Whenever his pride is damaged, Ranma will go to great lengths to rectify the situation. He can come across as petty, arrogant and disrespectful, as he is prone to bragging and tossing insults. Despite these flaws, he retains a moral center throughout the series and has little to no problems helping those in need. Ranma also has an extreme fear of cats resulting from when his father trained him in the misconcepted 'Cat Fu' (猫拳, Neko Ken) technique. If he is isolated with a cat in a very small space, or when he can no longer cope with his fear of cats, he begins behaving like a cat himself and becomes a master of the 'Cat Fu' and only Akane can calm him down. He and Akane drift closer throughout the series, each going to great lengths to save the other when in trouble. The reason why Ranma tolerates his big number of suitors is not only because he is generally very friendly and caring towards them (going through great lengths to make sure Shampoo doesn't hate him, for example), but mainly because he considers himself a hunk. In spite of this, Ranma is the butt of most of the violence that happens in the story.
Rumiko Takahashi herself has described Ranma's personality as a mixture of nice, clean-cut, frank, energetic, indecisive, stubborn, picky, stingy and sly,[3] and has stated that she finds flawless characters rather boring.[4] She addressed the origins of the character as: "With Ranma ½, I had thought a lot of doing a series with a male/female like protagonist, and since in the greater part of my previous stories the main character had been a woman, I planned to use a man this time. I was worried about writing a male main character because of the hundreds and hundreds of male readers, therefore I decided on the character being half man and half woman."[5] At the 1994 San Diego Comic-Con, in response to the question of what would happen if Ranma became impregnated, Takahashi answered, "I don't want to think about that, and you shouldn't either."[6]
