There is no single authoritative or original Ramayana; there are only many tellings in different languages and regions, each complete in itself. Calling these 'versions' or 'variants' falsely presupposes a lost original they deviate from, so 'tellings' is the more honest term.
Transmission of a story across cultures can be sorted by its relation to a source text: iconic (closely mirroring, like a reflected form), indexical (embedded in and pointing to its specific local context), and symbolic (using the source merely as a set of signifiers to say entirely new things). Each type signals a different degree of fidelity and local reinvention.
A widely retold story functions less like a fixed text and more like a common pool of names, relationships, incidents and motifs that each teller dips into and recombines. Knowing one telling means you are never reading a story but reading it against the whole crowd of other tellings you carry.
Divergent tellings do not merely alter plot details; they can reverse the moral and emotional weight of characters, as when Jain, Buddhist or Thai tellings recast Ravana as noble or make Sita Ravana's own abandoned daughter. The 'same' story thereby carries opposed ideologies depending on who tells it and to what tradition it belongs.