#I use that to detect typos not to be told that my vocabulary is apparently unpopular enough that it's not even worth recording???

[amplexadversary]

More Utena, ep 29-39

Damn it, I should have made a quip at some point between 30 and 32 about already knowing Touga was a bastard. Oh well.

(What I actually thought when they were going over the blood types was "oopsie, someone's having a non-parental event")

It is kind of darkly funny that the situation of Nanami finding that she's "not" related to Touga (up until the audience gets more information) makes her feel that their relationship is less valid and not more.

Then again she demonstrates that she doesn't want to have sex with Touga, so her brother complex is more emotional/romantic incest. Still kind of fucked up.

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I do applaud this show for its gradual introduction of the horror while still maintaining the trappings of a Shoujo Romance (the rose frames, parts of the soundtrack, you know). Those elements gradually become extremely chilling the further in you get.

(Not to mention a single rose appearing to spin onscreen during some of the disturbing interactions)

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I see what the game is. One of the student council members would not have encouraged Anthy the be more herself, but they would have had a chance to get her away from her abuser. But if Akio gets Utena under his thumb, and she wins the last duel, both Utena and Anthy are stuck with him.

And only after that does Utena see what both Anthy and Nanami couldn't bring themselves to say out loud.

And she doesn't react. Because she's mired in it too I'd guess. Because Akio is abusing her as well.

An idea that's kind of reinforced by a date scene where Akio further pushes Utena towards femininity.

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"In the end, all girls are like the Rose Bride." I think Anthy just dropped Utena's thesis statement here.

In that you're expected to wait until someone else makes every move. In that you don't really get a choice, sometimes even if there's multiple people who proposition you, in some circles you're expected to choose the "best," you could even say the "winner" among the competition, regardless of your feelings. In that you're then expected to go along with the decisions the other person makes, giving them the authority, more or less just tagging along.

In that you're expected to be whatever the situation at hand requires, no less and certainly no more, and failing that invites retaliation (I very specifically am thinking about how that must be the attitude Saionji had when hitting Anthy; it's not enough that she was basically completely submissive to him, he's still going to hit her for not measuring up to some expectation of his.)

I almost wonder if the shadow players kind of align with this, in their purpose being to act out roles thematically specific to the situation the main plot is in. The fact that we don't see them bodily until they need to physically interact with one of the characters - it doesn't matter who they actually are, just the role they play, and shadows are less intrusive. And the main characters don't pay them any mind except for Utena, when she eventually starts responding to them.

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Now I'm wondering if the flying saucer actually represents the weird, unhealthy dynamic of the whole End of the World Rose Bride thing intruding on peoples' regular lives.

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I've noticed a few times that there are deliberate sections on this show where the animation just stops for several seconds, and the music keeps going. I actually rewound the first few times to see if youtube was having an issue, and started hovering my cursor over the video whenever I caught it happening again, so I could see the time move forward normally rather than in the janky way it does when you actually get the error where the sound is playing while the picture isn't.

I'm on e37 and now I'm seeing a few of these choices together (the spinning rose, the "frozen" video, repeated animation and sounds) paired up with some strange dialogue and transitions that resemble what a clumsy edit to film might look like, with abrupt changes, repeats of dialogue, and an unnatural rate of flow to the conversation.

I think the animation pauses are meant to both unnerve the viewer and to prime them to notice when it starts happening really blatantly, to convince the audience to interpret it as "something's fishy in-universe" rather than "who fucked up the shot."

The arrows in the back half of the Black Rose arc might serve a similar purpose. They seem to genuinely point to things that the plot is counting on the audience to pick up on; aside from one animation error I couldn't find anything they might have been distracting from. They're actually a legitimate "Notice This."

I almost wonder if the first person POV in the gondola version of the pre-duel sequence being in first person was a bit of slight-of-camera. As of yet I haven't seen any hint of what that POV might have been hiding, but I *did* miss the POV camera trickery in 33 up until the reveal; in addition to being shown out of chronological order, the camera spends a lot of time exactly where Akio or Utena is in the scene to hide their presence.

The gondola sequence feels like a more "easily caught" trick because the "camera" is moving, so when the same trick was pulled with an unmoving POV I was looking for it, but not in that place; the setup is that the audience is more likely to realize what's happening exactly when the right information is given (Akio's hand in this case).

Now I'm wondering if there's still a POV-related reveal coming about the gondola approach now that my guard is down after the other POV trick was resolved. (post e39 note: nope!)

(Look, I like a LOT of works where the authors are squirrelly little tricksters like this, and Utena has already had some weird surrealness going on. I'm paranoid for a reason, damn it!)

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Well, the opening did in fact tell us exactly what was going to happen.

Utena was not able to rescue Anthy, but her efforts gave Anthy the strength of self-determination to leave.

"Even if the two of us are torn apart, I swear I will change the world."

Utena didn't succeed, but she was able to change things for the Rose Bride. And if "Every girl is like the Rose Bride," the two of them actually do change the world; in Anthy gaining the power to leave the situation she's in, metaphorically "every girl" receives that power.

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I know there's a movie. I'll see if I can find that as well before I go into the main tag.