Titles:  Genma's Daughter and the sequel Equal Halves
Fandom:  Ranma 1/2
Pairings:  Ranko/Ryouga, Ranma/Akane in the canon world
Categories: AU, amnesia, drama, genderswitch, romance - and of course, family
Length:  Epic [~230,000 for the two stories]
Warnings: n/a - wait, no.  Canon child abuse, ratcheted up a notch


Author on LJ:  n/a
Website:  Fiction by Deborah Goldsmith

Summaries:  When Ranma meets his mother for the first time, he learns a shocking truth about himself.  Namely, that he was born a "she".  Can Ranma accept this truth, and succeed at living as a woman?  In the sequel, Ranko drops into the canon world, and the two Saotomes have a lot to learn from each other about their diverged fates.

Review:  This series isn't for everyone - namely, fans who read Ranma 1/2 fic just for the awesome action and martial arts techniques will not be satisfied - but for the rest of us, this is a lovely take on what seems at first to be an implausible scenario.  In the world of Genma's Daughter, Ranma was actually born "Ranko", and was transformed into a boy at a young age due to yet another stupid idea of Genma.  Genma tries to do his best by his daughter-turned son, but his view on what's best is shaky: he chooses to rename Ranko, take "him" on the Training Trip as in canon, and encourage Ranko to forget life before the trip.  Of course, contact with Ranko's mother Nodoka would blow the scheme wide open, so - as in canon - "Ranma" never sees his mother until post-Jusenkyo.  The story begins with Nodoka meeting Ranma, as she did about a quarter of the way through Ranma 1/2 canon; instead of her canonical delight at seeing her manly son, she is confused by her daughter's transformation, and does her best to remind Ranko of her past.

I love how Deborah handled the entire scenario, and in particular the thorny issue of characterization.  Characters shift and change based on the one, relatively small (all things considered)difference between the canon world and Ranko's world.  For example, Nodoka is fairly traditional in the canon, and causes her fair share of problems for Ranma by insisting that he act in a manly fashion.  In contrast, Nodoka in Ranko's world is a woman who was deserted without explanation by her husband, who also took her daughter away from her; the faith she had in the traditional Japanese system is all but destroyed, and she is as a consequence no longer so interested in following her prescribed path in life... and she naturally doesn't care about the manliness of her daughter.  A lesser author would have flubbed this sort of complicated characterization shift, but Deborah pulls it off flawlessly, in my opinion.  There are some critics of the universe Deborah created, of course.  These people tend to disagree mostly with Ranko's characterization, arguing that no version of Saotome R. would ever make the decisions about her future (career and romance, mostly) that Ranko does.  I think that these issues are aptly addressed in the sequel, in which both canon-Ranma and Ranko meet and have the chance to explain their decisions to each other and to the reader.  In my view, the characters' dichotomy is just an example of how nature and nuture are affected by, and affect in turn, gender identity and personal preferences.        

These stories are primarily about Ranko's adjustment to her new life, and how she builds a real, not-dysfunctional system of family and friends out of the wreckage of her past.  Every character gets a fair shake, even Genma.  Even if the eventual romance isn't to your taste, I think that all the relationships, platonic or otherwise, are slowly and carefully built, and are as a result very believable.  I find the world that Ranko lives in to be so well-balanced in comparison to canon, that I come back to Genma's Daughter and Equal Halves whenever I find myself disillusioned with Ranma 1/2.

Genma's Daughter
Equal Halves