I've always liked strong women and Ryuu-chan has power to spare. She has a the graceful piston-like moves of a wing-chun kung-fu master combined with the rough demenor of a linebacker. But with all of her tough exterior, she's a down to earth person with a heart of gold (now there's a cliche for ya). There's an appealing cool attitude and confidence about her that most girls lack, yet at the same time she's quite insecure and naive about herself which makes her more human. I also think she's a good looker. I don't care what people say, she looks very female to me, just not very feminine. Most of all she adds a whole new demension to the humor in Urusei Yatsura with the daily troubles her male affliction gives her. The classic battle of the sexes rages on in a single vessel named Ryuunosuke.

She also kicks ass like nobody's business. There's just something about violent, tempermental females that I like. You could argue that all of the UY girls are violent and that's very true. It's just the way that Ryuu-chan goes about it that always cracks me up. I think it's funny that the strongest and most skilled, honourable, charismatic and virtuous man in the entire cast is actually a woman.

Most of my personal favorite manga stories feature Ryuunosuke and her father in some way. While I love the manga rendition of Ryuunosuke, I must say that I've always been disappointed with the animated version of her character. After reading enough stories of the later half of the manga's run, you can tell that Ryuunosuke had become one of Takahashi's most favored characters. This affection for her creation really shone through in the manga and pretty early on after her introduction, Ryuunosuke became the 6th most important character (with Lum, Ataru, Shinobu, Ten and Mendou filling out the other 5). However the anime is quite the opposite. As the animators rewrote many episodes and created new stories, Ryuunosuke was often demoted to the position of a background character. A perfect example is the UY movies. Notice how much of an insignificant character she is in the movies? It was the same with the TV show. The staff of the anime didn't seem to understand how to use her properly so it appears they wouldn't utilise her character as much as Takahashi had intended. When they did use her, her they did a pretty shoddy job of it and instead of being funny, she became annoying. But it's not all bad. Thankfully Mayumi Tanaka's voice talents help to keep Ryuunosuke entertaining despite the poor use of her character.

I've created a few pages with some goodies for other Ryuunosuke fans as well as put up an assortment of scans from the manga. Check out some of the links on the side margin to see them.

If you want to know the whole story about Ryuunosuke, check out her bio featured in my Urusei Yatsura Character Guide. There you'll find the most complete character descriptions of any anime site in existance with extensive analyses of nearly 60 Urusei Yatsura characters.