Yeah, overall tone goes a really long way for me with stuff like that.
Like Ranma 1/2 is a total mess of やばい stuff on the face of it, but the gender swapping and everyone being (relatively) cool with it feels so freeing compared to the general baseline that I still think it’s fun. And everything’s a ridiculous amped-up martial arts fever dream anyway.
Hibari-kun is like that too - it’s very um, 80s about how it depicts things, but it’s also a story about a trans girl who’s really cool and great at everything, and the story never actually undercuts that, so the positive aspects win the day for me personally.
Or if I just already trust Son Goku and Kiryu Kazuma are good dudes I like watching, it’s easier to stomach any troubling parts of their adventures as exceptions and not the rule.
Art probably plays a lot into that tone too. Akira Toriyama and Rumiko Takahashi are like, all-timer fun action cartoonists, for example, so the “this is fun action” vibe is really powerful.
So I definitely agree! I think Ranma 1/2 just earns more trust overall and deploys the rampant nudity and convoluted gender/consent games at least a bit more thoughtfully than like a hypothetical generic dude-centric manga that’s just randomly lascivious in jarring ways.
One thing that goes a long way is everyone’s pretty much a badass in Ranma, including Akane, both Ranmas, etc. So even when they’re captured or whatever, it never really feels like control is taken away from them in a way that puts them down. It’s all just part of the chaos. And everybody has an edge against everyone else at some point.
A shonen manga with a lewd shot of a captured girlfriend whom the male protagonist saves doesn’t have that benefit. A harem story with bland protagonist dude as center of the universe tends not to either…
(anyway I’ve rambled a lot at this point!)