eating cucumbers without permission...

This image comes from somewhere in Ranma 1/2; I think it’s from the third volume or thereabouts. It’s the first appearance of Shampoo [Xian Pu], a Chinese Amazon currently out to kill girl-Ranma, but added as the wife of boy-Ranma in the following issue.

According to Ranma fanon, those giant lollipop maces she’s carrying are called “bonbori”. The word appears in hundreds of stories, plus character profiles, dictionaries of anime words etc. It’s widespread. It’s entrenched.

I’d taken it at face value until I ran across this author’s note from grookill:

The melon hammer is often called a “bonbori” in Ranma 1/2 fanfictions. I wasn’t sure of the spelling, so I took to the web and did some searching for “bonbori”, and all that I could find were either fanfictions or references to the Bonbori festival in Japan.

Ah, yet another proud example of the wisdom of crowds. According to this FAQ…

[…] I asked a Ranma specialist. His answer was : “They’re bonbori, aren’t they ?” Hey, they mustn’t. “bonbori” is Japanese ancient candlestick. Who can fight in lamps ? (^_^; And then, he asked a weapon specialist, and we got the correct answer at last.
They are so called sui, a Chinese weapon which was made of wood, metal, or wood coated with metal. Fighters use that sphere for offense and defense. Especially, sticking “sui” in front of enemy’s eyes makes the enemy miss them.

You can buy lamps that look very similar to Shampoo’s weapons (which do look just like ornate melon hammers); my guess is that someone made a sarcastic reference to them — “Why is she hitting Ranma with bonbori?” — and nobody got the joke. I’d be interested in more details if anyone has them.

Most Western anime fans can’t speak Japanese, and those that do can’t be faulted for lacking expertise in Asian weaponry, but it’s still amusing.

What blew my mind when first getting into fan fiction, and still does, was just how long some of it is. Writing a hundred-thousand-word novel is always a substantial endeavour — even a rubbish one can’t be written in a few hours. You can’t help but be impressed by that level of dedication. Unless you prefer to mock the borderline-obsessive freaks, that is, but (if you set aside your prejudice against the object of obsession) a lifetime exploring the nuances of the the Star Trek universe isn’t so far from, say, painting waterlilies for twenty years. People are amazing.

A hundred thousand words, pfft. The longest fic I know of if is Trial By Tenderness by Cevn, at about 1.47 million words. That’s three times as long as The Lord of the Rings, eighteen times Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, thirty times The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

And there’s probably something longer.

Update: something like Post’s These Black Eyes — 2 million words, ongoing.

I’ve released version 1.1 of Multiply. Ooops.

• “Delete” links in comment/moderation notification emails work now! It’s done by replacing the pluggable email functions, so do note that it might interfere with other plugins if they do the same.
• Generating the rewrite rules all at once was a bad idea. A bit more efficient for the server, but far more trouble than it was worth.
• General cleanup.
• My instructions on how to get pingback working were completely wrong for blogs not using mod_rewrite.
• Plugins weren’t loaded properly.

The original release post — which is basically the documentation — has been updated to reflect the changes. It’s shorter and more clear now, I hope.

If you’d been cursing my incompetence before, please give the new version a go.

For more information about the Multiply plugin for WordPress, visit its homepage.