#In regards to utena apologizing to anthy at the end

[the-cooler-king]

Feeling something over rgu right now...........

[setsujoumayu]

The Child of Eden (yet another himemiya anthy WIP except... wait, i haven't shared any of my utena WIPs here before, have i?)

i forget sometimes that my first return to tumblr was because i wanted to share WIPs XD

unfortunately, i've been in a very dry spell with regards to my writing. the last time i wrote some things were when i was feeling a lot of emotional turmoil. as of late, that turmoil is still there, but the oppressive nihilism/pessimism i'm carrying around suffocates those emotions that are easy to exploit for writing...

here's a snippet of one of those pieces i started just so i could funnel those intense feelings. i have about 2 or 3 anthy-centric WIPs but who knows when my next utena fic comes out. unlike the stuff i write for bnha, my utena pieces aren't just things i can pump out. i have a lot of feelings and thoughts, but they're hard to write about if i want to do utena justice. like, with bnha, i can write with subtlety (i hope) and create layered narratives (sometimes literally and also in the sense that there is plot going on, but paralleling that plot is a character's emotional journey.) with utena, i have a point i want to make, and the metaphors i choose must make that point but also can't be grounded in reality. i must constantly deconstruct reality, or maybe it's RUNNING from reality. but if i'm not careful, the piece mind end up being incomprehensible...

anyway, without further ado, here are random snippets of this piece i started writing, then stopped shortly after in march 22 of 2023. my apologies again for using images as text, i know it's not very accessible, but it's just more convenient to share like that for me.

CW: bodily injury

[palms-upturned]

the thing with ruka apologism that i don’t understand the most is that… like, with touga or saionji it’s like, you end up eventually feeling some sympathy towards them bc of the time the story spends with them & you understanding their motivation/stories/problems more & seeing that they too are tragic characters (not to say this excuses either’s actions at all — just to say that feeling uh. sorry that they’re stuck in All This and are acting Like This while still thinking they’re both acting in horrid ways towards others is possible/understandable imo) BUT RUKA. ruka “appeared in two episodes to be homophobic and leave” tsuchiya does not have any complexity to him at all. he Only exists to be entitled & homophobic. if with other characters you get the feeling that they not only embody something about prince-adjacent entitlement & violence but also are children stuck in hell who are hurt in many ways by this ideal, ruka Just appears to be entitled & homophobic while believing he’s a savior / tragic hero figure and leave. like it’s hard to find a character who’s less of a person by himself than ruka, if you take away the entitlement & violence there’s straight up nothing left.

anyway i uh. this got long and not very coherent. apparently i’m a more passionate ruka hater than i thought.

SKSHSJDJDJDJDJD WE LOVE TO SEE RUKA HATE! but yeah i think you p much nailed it, touga and saionji are at least compelling in the sense that they give u some things to sit with/chew on regarding why they’re less sympathetic than other characters beyond just “because they’re boys,” i feel the show does a decent job of avoiding gender essentialism that way by showing that the girls also are complicit in upholding certain power structures and just as guilty of lashing out violently to maintain what power they have, and that on the flip side, the boys are also victims of the system, and that what specifically makes touga/saionji in particular so terrible is that they have a degree of awareness and understanding of it all that most characters don’t but still actively choose to take advantage of the power dynamic between them and girls like anthy, nanami, and utena 😒 and so u end up genuinely hoping for them to escape akio and ohtori at large but also seeing something super damning in the fact that saionji is capable of being selfless and understanding in order to help touga but only ever heaped more abuse onto anthy, for instance.

with ruka he’s entirely a victim of his own worldview LOL he holds violent beliefs that lead him to inflict intentional violence on others and then he’s like :( too bad i have to make juri hate me in order to help her 💔 the fact that he comes back to school because end of the world called him back says it all, i think.

i wonder if the sympathy comes from how the manga version of him was played more straight since manga juri is an entirely different character kshsdjjd his side story is kind of just classic shoujo silly melodrama and mostly serves to tie up the loose end of juri’s “crush” on touga, but since anime juri is gay, they took that story and had a v interesting conversation w it and some of the ideas in it… and then after the revolution sort of tries to merge the two versions of ruka and casts him as the drowned boy. but i feel the anime version of the story intentionally divorces itself so much from the manga that u can’t really map any of manga ruka’s sensibilities onto anime ruka sjsbdjcn if anything the anime is v critical of those sensibilities. like u said, once u take away ruka’s entitlement, there’s nothing really left…

ig it’s probably also bc ppl likely agree with ruka about shiori being bratty and cruel djsbdjxb and that juri’s feelings for her were something she genuinely needed to be freed from… but i don’t really see how u can watch either the scene of ruka stealing her locket or the moment that it was shattered and walk away from it thinking it was for the best or that ruka wasn’t entirely motivated by homophobia and entitlement jdbsjsxbxn he wasn’t trying to help juri re-examine her feelings for someone who was hurting her, he just was mad that juri was in love w a girl instead of him 💀 plus the episode even ends with shiori finally working up the courage to approach juri again, and then in the epilogue she’s joined the fencing club, which speaks volumes about shiori’s efforts to change in just like two seconds of footage jdgsjdbx so the anime doesn’t even posit that ruka was right about shiori to begin with, or that she deserved what he did to her… idk there’s just literally nothing admirable in anything he does kdhsjdbxnxcb i just really don’t get it

i do find him complex but more in the sense of like… how he seems to genuinely see himself as a tragic figure, like wow, ppl really do think like that 💀 it’s kind of the hallmark of a certain brand of homophobia, isn’t it? to be so cruel and bigoted that u bring yourself to the point where “you hate me more than you can stand, don’t you?” but still see yourself as the tragic martyr of the situation because you’re right and it’s all for the other person’s own good. and i feel like ikuhara’s episode commentary is very sad in that regard, the incident he describes of projecting a more charitable narrative onto someone in their absence. i think it’s easy to do that, esp with people you were once close to… idk it’s just very sad to me hdshjdhxb

anyway tl;dr ur so right bestie rest in piss ruka 💙

[iztarshi]

Duel Patterns

I’m procrastinating so hard I wrote long, rambly Utena meta.

Miki gets the most straightforward pattern to his duels.

Miki > Kozue with Miki’s sword > Miki and Kozue

Perhaps because of this it feels like he doesn’t really change much, though? His duels start and end with the same problem, and the final duel just plays it out. Miki is easily convinced to duel, but irresolute while duelling because he feels (…fairly enough, I suppose) that the duels make him impure, and doesn’t want to risk his own invincible innocence. Kozue is unable to resist acting out to get Miki’s attention, even when she knows it’s only making things worse. Kozue distracts him by making out with Anthy, Miki can’t keep going in the face of that, and acting at cross-purposes causes them to crash — Miki is hit by the car Kozue was in.

Juri’s duels would follow the same pattern, but the addition of Ruka spreads the final duel out over two, with Ruka and Shiori, and Ruka and Juri. It’s hard to say whether the pattern disruption helps or hinders Juri’s arc. Considering Ruka had to first manipulate and then bargain to get her to duel at all, it seems as if she might simply have made good on bowing out without his interference. Ultimately, she doesn’t wind up so far from where she started either. She wanted to either confess to Shiori or be free of her — by the end she’s still struggling with that, even with the locket gone.

The badminton game takes Juri and Miki into trying to let go and form new relationships (with Utena) instead, which is good. In the post-revolution sequences, though, it seems to be Kozue and Shiori who are finding themselves and changing their behaviour. Although perhaps Miki and Juri letting up helped with that.

Saionji and Touga have a different pattern. Their Black Rose duels are almost irrelevant (Touga’s especially). Saionji might have been sincerely grateful to Wakaba, but she doesn’t have anything like the hold on him Kozue and Shiori have on Miki and Juri. Wakaba and Keiko more bring out the theme of the Black Rose arc itself — people who feel like they’re nobodies reaching for those who are somebodies.

Outside the Black Rose arc Touga and Saionji often echo each other’s duels. In the first arc the first and last duels Utena fights are against Saionji and Touga, and both end with the other with the Sword of Dios and her with a broken sword. Both boys fight her twice, too. There’s also the “the Sword of Dios has no special powers”/“the Sword of Dios has special powers and you didn’t know about them” echo, as Touga reveals what he knew that Saionji didn’t.

There’s also the unscheduled trip to the arena, which isn’t really a duel, and definitely not part of Akio’s patterns (he went surprisingly easy on Touga for how near that came to revealing a few key things about the nature of the duelling arena) but in a way it’s the centre of Saionji and Touga’s arc in the first set of duels. For one thing it reveals their connection to Utena and how much her own formative experience was theirs too. Even if the part she remembers of it has become distorted into a fairytale by time and she no longer remembers it clearly enough to see herself in the despairing girl they couldn’t save.

For another it lays bare the worst of them. Saionji may say he loves Anthy, and even acknowledges that fighting to own her is probably not congruent with that, but he’s still going to do it in order to defeat Touga. However much he wants it to be about saving either Anthy or the girl in the coffin, in the end he’s reaching for his lost friendship and tries to grasp eternity rather than helping Anthy when she appears in a coffin.

Touga manipulates the whole thing, willing to get his former friend expelled in order further his own chances of winning Akio’s power. He’s also willing to throw himself in front of a sword for it — never let it be said Touga doesn’t risk himself for his own ambition.

Saionji and Touga’s final duels are even more mirrors, and they wind up mirroring Utena and Anthy in the final arc too.

Saionji’s duel doesn’t fit the new pattern, because it establishes it. He’s the only one of the duelists to go on without a bride. But that’s because this duel is establishing Anthy as Utena’s bride. Until now, Anthy’s been giving the Sword of Dios to Utena as she would to any other duelist, but, when it vanishes, Anthy — acting of her own will in direct opposition to Saionji having just been convinced she doesn’t have one — draws Utena’s. And does so with great tenderness. The shadow play about teamwork seems to be aimed both at Anthy and Utena — who now have to rely on their bond to fight — and the future duelists who will have to try to do the same.

Saionji also learns a few things this episode, but they seem to take a while to sink in. He goes back to duel feeling special because he’s been singled out for attention by End of the World and doesn’t yet know this is the new pattern, but his motives haven’t changed. (I appreciate Utena and Miki both being like “You’ve changed? How exactly?”) It seems to sink in later both that he wasn’t special and has been duped once again, and that Akio saving the girl in the coffin means Touga doesn’t have any special access to eternity either and being equal to him doesn’t require duelling.

Having ended Saionji’s motivation for duelling to catch up with Touga, Touga’s duel episode explains Touga’s motivation for duelling to gain Akio’s power. Intriguingly, Saionji — amazingly the voice of reason by this point — thinks becoming like Akio is a terrible idea. There’s been a chain of toxic masculinity with Saionji imitating Touga who is imitating Akio, but meeting the actual source seems to have soured Saionji on the whole thing. Not that it stops him being a jerk in many ways, but he’s found some chill.

Their duel seems to highlight their relationship as much as Anthy and Utena’s. Especially with a shot of Saionji’s eyes as he draws Touga’s sword that’s very similar to a shot of Anthy’s eyes during the duel with Saionji as she drew Utena’s. They can’t defeat Utena and Anthy —  their relationship is still very new and in attacking from the motorbike they’re still trying to duel from a shoddy copy of Akio’s system. Their motivations are also… not great. Touga thinks he needs to own Utena to protect her — to be fair, a mistake Utena herself has made with regards to Anthy — and Saionji doesn’t have a problem with this logic so much as he believes the duels themselves are a no win game with any motivation at this point.

The juxtaposition where they’re in Akio’s room posing half-naked on his car while Miki and Juri play badminton with Utena is one of the creepier effects in a creepy series. Miki and Juri are finding a certain amount of freedom through Utena. Touga and Saionji, in spite of the fact that they’re rooting for Utena at this point, are stuck with Akio. (In some ways paralleling them with Anthy, who is still very much not free of his influence yet.)

And, while the Student Council splits  in half along those lines, Nanami isn’t quite in either half.  She attends the badminton game but doesn’t join it and, rather than asking Utena what she will do, tries to warn her off as Touga and Saionji do later. She knows more than Miki and Juri, and isn’t as tangled up in it as Touga and Saionji.

Nanami’s duels follow an in-between pattern too. Tsuwabuki’s Black Rose duel doesn’t really add to the pattern, but he’s not as detached from her as Wakaba and Keiko are from Saionji and Touga. The fact that his initial motivation was to be a big brother like Touga makes him, maybe, a bit of a stand in, which is relevant because Touga is central to Nanami’s two actual duels.

Looking at the pattern of Nanami’s own duels what I mostly get is… fuckery. Nanami gets the weirdest and most disturbing push into duelling of anyone, especially the second time. I think there are two reasons for this.

First she’s being manipulated in two, not entirely synchronised, ways. If you look at her first duel, it seems doubtful that Touga knew why Anthy gave him a kitten, or that it was part of getting Nanami to duel. I don’t think he knew where the blood type compatibility test was going at first, either. His first reaction is to ignore it until Nanami starts rambling about how it has to be wrong, because she and her parents get along so well, and then snap that he’s not interested. If he’d known where it was going, I think he’d have either encouraged her or discouraged her more thoroughly. Instead, he just doesn’t wanna hear it.

Second, Akio’s also manipulating Touga and it’s in Akio’s interest if he can be pushed to burn his own emotional connections to the ground. I think this ties into the first one, in that Touga may not have known where the blood type compatibility test had gone until Nanami told him she wasn’t coming home because he wasn’t really her brother. And that’s right in front of Akio, who Touga wants to impress with his coldness, meaning that any chance of him comforting her or picking anything but the most cruel and opportunistic response was right out.

The lengths to which Touga goes to make it more awful than it needed to be, including staging that conversation with Keiko, are on his own head though.

Both times Nanami ends up in tears. The first time Touga comforts her, seemingly more for Utena’s benefit than hers, and the second time he just ignores her. Neither time did he expect her to win or want her to.

Nanami’s ending is also the most ambiguous. Miki and Juri have found a way to carry on caring about the people they loved without it being an all consuming obsession. Touga and Saionji have each other, and there’s at least some hope in that for them. Nanami’s a little close and a little distant, making tea for the boys rather than interacting with them. Given that it’s been three months I sort of hope the fact that she’s interacting with Touga at all means there was one hell of an apology somewhere in there…

[some-triangles]

PART 1

What’s this?  A sister and her brother?

What’s this? A woman by herself?

What’s this?  The remains of the cock tower, bobbited, stuffed and mounted just beneath a rose, which has been nailed to a wall and is oozing architectural elements?

It can only mean one thing:

I’m a fountain of blood, in the shape of a girl

Yes, we’re doing this!

I should mention that we are doing this through a very specific lens, courtesy of tumblr user @snarp.   The idea is: after leaving the academy, a jail with walls made of stories, Anthy would have had to come up with a way of reckoning with her own past which did not rely on those same stories for its structure.   The Utena movie is her first attempt at retelling her own narrative in a way which is not completely overshadowed by her older brother.   The more one looks for supporting evidence for this interpretation, the more one can find; so instead of focusing on whether this is a correct way of reading (a boring and ultimately fruitless question), let’s instead ask if this reading allows the movie to be good, which, by any number of more conventional metrics, it isn’t.

It makes sense right from the off, though.  The first two images we see in this movie (beyond the carillon of school’s-out bells) are Anthy and Akio together and Anthy sans Akio, as if to say: we are removing this guy from the narrative, and good riddance.   Then the opening credits consist of a montage of frustratingly tiny paintings:

Paintings which, we learn later, are Anthy’s work.  They appear, they confuse, and they disappear in a flash of fire; so we are led to understand that the coming narrative will be obscure, mercurial, and, most importantly, the product of a single perspective, that of our heroine. Who is in this film definitely Anthy, and not Utena.

Speaking of Utena – who is she in this iteration?

Well, she’s wearing a boy’s uniform, finally.  It’s a striking one, as well – a kind of monochrome fool’s motley, which is a tough look to pull off by anyone’s standards, but she manages it.  The duality of the black and white in her outfit represents her status in re the are you a boy or a girl situation: she is clearly being presented as the Two-Face of gender expression.   She’s also immediately very gay.

An immediate priority of the camera here (which we are going to persist in interpreting as Anthy’s camera, even if it kills us) is the demystification of sex. Utena and Wakaba are allowed to be flirty with each other without scandal or misunderstanding or censor roses or anything.  Hidden desire and the sublimation thereof were the engine that powered the old academy system.  They’re the first things up against the wall, so to speak, now that the revolution’s come.

We still have shadow puppet girls, though.  Can’t shift ‘em.  They’re like roaches.

The camera angle here suggests that we are watching invisibly from a position just to the left of F-ko’s ear.   It’s gonna take a second for Anthy to really get the hang of this artsy framing thing.

Utena and Wakaba stroll among the exploded architecture (a literal deconstruction of the old academy, ha ha ha) and meet the cast. Miki and Juri are largely as before, although Juri’s looking slightly more cheerful about things as she holds court from her throne, framed by busted Mondrians in stained glass. 

This may be because she’s absorbed a fair piece of Utena’s archetype, so Utena can be less initially invested in the whole cockamamie prince system. Wakaba suggests that Juri might be Utena’s rival – implicitly, as the other Big Gay On Campus.  This is about as important as Wakaba gets.  Rivals for Utena’s attention tend to get short shrift in this particular narrative - why would that be, one wonders?  Speaking of which:

Sweet mary crackers, it’s Movie Touga.

Utena chases him and catches up at the rose garden (no longer a birdcage, no longer under glass). They’ve apparently known each other for some time. Utena warns him that she didn’t come to the academy to pursue him – she’s not the same person she used to be (i.e., kinda into girls now.)

The camera pans back to reveal another of Anthy’s works, this one depicting a boat sinking while a distant prince looks on in horror.   Anthy is manipulating the master narrative that Juri told the student council during the final duel, back in the real world; the one about the boy who drowned trying to save a girl and was forgotten.  In the real world, the drowned boy turned out to be Utena.  To get our happy ending, we’re going to have to shift things around a little.

Notably, Utena doesn’t recognize the ring he’s wearing.  She has a prince thing – she decided, after she and Touga “broke up”, to live her life by higher ideals – but it’s not a Prince Thing.   She has no connection to Akio.   Nobody gave her a rose seal – until now, that is.

Touga vanishes.  The rain stops.  The walls retreat in a rush.

Dream logic brings Utena’s attention to a single white rose, which unfurls before her eyes petal by petal and deposits a glowing pearl in her hand, which turns out to be one of these.

Regarding this sequence: it is important to point out that while the TV series liked to dabble in phallic imagery, we are going to have to dust off the word “yonic” for the movie.  Funny that my spellchecker recognizes one and not the other.

We’re not done yet. As the ring nestles in her palm, a breeze picks up, carrying with it both the sound of bongos and a thick shower of crimson petals, which are swirling down from a suspended platform above. The platform makes the following shape in the sky:

Yonic.

Utena goes up to investigate.  It turns out the highest place in this academy isn’t a tower, it’s a rose garden [YONIC]; the architecturally dubious remains of the entrance gate tell us that it’s also the dueling arena, and thus the perfect place to meet our heroine.

 Movie Anthy wears her hair long.  Movie Anthy never wore glasses.   Movie Anthy makes the first move. Movie Anthy flirts.  Also, perhaps most crucially, Movie Anthy does not withhold information.  

Movie Anthy is immediately all up in Utena’s business, and summons an anime breeze so that they can flap their hair at each other in a shower of rose petals. Then she sees the ring, and bang, no more breeze.  Just like it was raining for the exact duration of Utena's conversation with Touga earlier on.   Oh, is Anthy not the central figure of this story, the lens through which all of this is being observed?  It’s not like her moods control the weather or anything

Appalled at the idea that this ultra-hot bab might be on the verge of dueling inveiglement, Anthy grabs Utena’s wrist and tries to wrestle the ring away from her.  Utena flips the coin on her gender expression and it comes up dudes.

Then a cruel parody of Saionji shows up.

Woof.

The old academy and the new academy pretty much agree about this part of the story, except whatever lingering elements of dignity or relatability Saionji may once have had are now gone.  He’s just a maniac with a sword, which makes sense, if Anthy’s telling the story. 

Everything proceeds as expected til

Whoops, the bride has agency! 

Woah, the bride has…agency

Full transformation ensues. The bride kisses Utena square on the lips, explodes into full regalia and produces her sword.  Utena draws it, which tips her gender expression slightly further into true equilibrium, reuniting her with her fabled hot pants and epaulets combo and, most significantly, causing her to bust out in an all-time classic Princely Goop Mullet.

There is no excuse for this.

Saionji gets wrecked, immediately, and we’re out. 

(Apologies for the lack of a borgesian dyad for this duel – the files I have don’t sub the chorale lyrics.   Folks who have the full release should feel free to send in screenshots of worthy candidates.)

The first duel ends about twenty minutes into the movie’s runtime, which is handy.  The rhythms of the old pattern are not so easily shaken.   Maybe we’ll get a more thorough departure...

next time