#Perpetual Revolution

[specialagentartemis]

I do have Sevika character thoughts though, and I'm really interested in where season 1 leaves her. Sevika is loyal to Silco, but doesn't like Jinx. She's frustrated with Silco giving Jinx such leeway to do What Ever Violence she wants, and compromising his ideals for Jinx, and letting her make trouble for everyone and not doing anything to rein her in. The chem-barons weren't able to convince her to betray Silco for that, but the fact that she's near boiling over with frustration over this state of affairs was obvious to them!

Sevika believes in Silco's goals and grudgingly tolerates Jinx for that. Jinx doesn't seem to believe in much of anything except getting to face the world that hurt her and hurt it back. And now Silco is dead, and Jinx is throwing away any semblance of politics to launch a rocket at the Piltover Council, and I cannot imagine that Sevika will have any loyalty to Jinx at all. I'm hype for a season 2 power struggle between them for the remains of Silco's grip over the Undercity.

[pythiaswine]

thinking about how difficult it must have been for Rachel Fawcette [Hamilton] to leave her firstborn behind in order to safely remove herself from Lavien's house. how much it must have eaten her up inside and how there was nothing she could do because her husband owned her and he owned their son and he owned everything that was hers and if she stayed, there's no telling what could have happened to her. And she lost her firstborn son over it, fuck the rest of everything she lost and how people treated her, she had no claims to her son who clearly grew up to resent her for what she, if we think critically for a moment and look at the context and the subtext and hey, let's face it, the TEXT, likely had to do. how women were constantly pitted in the most volatile of situations in those days and how she did the difficult thing and saved herself.

but yeah sure let's reduce her to Whore because that is so much more impactful through a modern lens, like sure let's give her disgusting husband, and every other fucking man throughout history, the glory of successfully making the women they hurt out to be cheating whores. let's tell her son's story by calling his mother a whore every other fuckin song. let's act like "son of a whore" at the end of all things is more of an insult to him than it is to his mother, the so-called whore who clearly had it so bad at Lavien's that she fucking left. do we not realize that by reducing her to that, we let Johann Michael Lavien fucking WIN? i'm sick. so fucking sick to my stomach I hate it here

[number1villainstan]

sometimes i think about it and i'm genuinely surprised that there isn't more gear symbolism in utena

[maneslion2]

So, everyone is just not gonna talk about how Jojo Siwa and her mother Jessalynn Siwa absolutely exploited child actors and their families during the production of Siwa’s Dance Pop Revolution show?

We're not going to mention how Jojo continues to defend and associate with proven child predators and groomers Colleen Ballinger and James Charles??

We're not going to mention that Jojo defends the abusive coach of Dance Moms, Abby Lee Miller?

No? Just gonna talk about the obviously manipulative and calculated rebrand designed to cover up and drown out the serious accusations of abuse of children and their families?

Okay, yeah, cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool co-

[zeebreezin]

Shaw being a Rook on the chessboard is funny because he’s so goddamn raven coded on accident, however it’s really funny to me because despite being represented by a castle, I would argue that a primary thematic of this man is breaking foundations he has built up over time.

[starlit-mansion]

i liked the fact that hbomb pointed out that in the absence of money, social capital still drove copying and stealing. a lot of times, you get the "(pulls mask of bad thing) it was capitalism the whole time!!!" moment in video essays but it really doesn't cover like. the general human capacity to do these things at small scale for no or negative monetary benefit

[novadreii]

every other man on love is blind: yeah my dad was abusive/never really around/emotionally closed off/didn't bond with me at all. how did it affect me? idk, i mean i guess it sucked but you get over it. so, how much do you weigh?

[thekimspoblog]

Demon trying to feed on my insecurities: "You're a bad driver"

Me: "Of course I am. I hate driving. Going 80 mph surrounded by tons of metal is nerve-wrecking. I try to do it as little as possible. Of course I'm bad at it"

Demon: "You're a bad writer"

Me: "Well that part's simply not true. I never claimed I was the greatest author of my generation, but when I put pen to paper I know what I want to communicate and I usually do it well. If someone isn't impressed with my work, that's unfortunate but they're entitled to their opinion"

Demon: "You're a bad leader"

Me: "Well I don't know about that! I mean there was that one time when... Ok look just because people don't see me as an authority figure doesn't mean... 😠 You know you can be a real asshole, demon!"

[badolmen]

I really feel like some of you genuinely think that if all billionaires died tomorrow the world would magically be a better place. Their wealth doesn’t come with a will ensuring it’s redistributed fairly across the planet - it goes to their kin or organizations of their choice. The systems that allowed such vile people to maintain their status will still exist. 4 dead billionaires isn’t this victory you think it is - there’s 4 new billionaires inheriting their wealth and status. Killing every billionaire would just shuffle the pieces and players, it wouldn’t change the game.

[strixhaven]

truly nothing irritates me more than the mythologizing of the french revolution. the legacy of the guillotine and terror but zero awareness about the actual realities of what that entailed and Why it occurred. do you even know about the war in the vendee that killed hundreds of thousands of people and was a huge factor in fueling the terror. the september massacres and the killing of prisoners that preceded the terror. the wars france was fighting externally at the time. this occurred for very specific sociopolitical reasons guys please try to get a bit of context for everything that went down instead of just having a perpetual hard-on for you political killing fantasies.

[paopuofhearts]

So I keep seeing this going around and I'm like.

Look. I get it.

We all get it.

And yet many people very clearly don't.

I've had students and adults sit here and tell me to my face that Jews never originated in the Middle East because Palestinians have been there since time immemorial as the only people of that land. I've had students and adults tell me that Israel is a name that was specifically created in the 40s to push the idea that Israel had always existed when it never existed as a concept before the 40s. I've had students and adults tell me all Jews are White Europeans that are only seeking to exploit and control the Middle East. I've had students and adults tell me that the Middle East belongs to the Muslims and they were pushed out by White Europeans and Jews are the ones who have caused American military policies of interventionism. I've had students and adults tell me thus Jews control all media around the world in return for financial resources from major Western countries.

These are from a wide spectrum of people who are indigenous to the US, people who have lived here all their lives, people who have moved or immigrated or sought refuge or sought asylum from other countries, people who have lived in Israel and Palestine, people who are still learning basic media literacy skills, people with PhDs, people who have spent decades doing activist work - all of them repeating this kind of White Supremacist rhetoric because they want to prove they're on the Right Side of Free Palestine.

And you see those exact same posts cropping up all over social media, of people perpetuating ahistorical information and falsifying facts because they think a more dramaticized and extreme story of Israel and Palestine is necessary to bring more attention to the genocide currently happening.

It's not really about "unless you know things shut up".

It's really about "you don't need to be spreading lies that get people killed to bring awareness and demand change".

Because doing that is antisemitic - and antisemitism isn't something people make up just so they don't 'feel guilty' or 'redirect' or 'erase' the opportunity for conversation or whatever else people justify that as in their minds.

And antisemitism is a proponent of genocide.

[transmascutena]

the idea of eternity in utena is so interesting. initially "there is no such thing as something eternal" is the thought that sends utena spiraling into suicidality, which is understandable, since the idea that everything will end someday is terrifying. especially to a child. especially to a child who just encountered one of the most traumatizing and violent "endings" possible, the deaths of her parents. but then she's shown that apparently something can be eternal. and that something is pain, which is even worse, but at least gives her something to live for. and then by the end of the show it's like. no, pain isn't eternal either. "there is no such thing as something eternal" is reframed as a positive. eternity is Not Good. eternity is everything staying the same forever, never changing for the better. it's the opposite of revolution. it's what akio wants, perpetuating the system that benefits him at the cost of everyone else forever and ever. and no matter what utena might have thought, it is not what she wants.

[girl-debord]

on the topic of trains and the role of technology in ongoing atrocities, i think something to consider if this is shocking to you is that the development of all technology since the start of the industrial revolution (and a lot of it before that tbh) has been dictated by the needs of capital. trains wouldn't exist without the reign of an economic system that demands mass circulation of commodities. the world has not been shaped by what's best for everyone but what's best for perpetuating that economic system. as Debord says about media technology, "it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics" (The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 24).

[addithevampire]

Every time this topic comes up I’m reminded of a discussion I had in a Latin American history course.

Just after the French Revolution came the French enlightenment era, where French people were churning out new treatises on how all men are equal and none deserve to be subjugated, how they shouldn’t be ruled by a tyrant-king.

Haiti was a French colony with particularly brutal slave treatment, going through slaves quicker than anywhere else, and a population of free, educated black people who were reading these treatises.

These free black people read these works by French enlightenment authors and said “Hey, if you really believe in these principles, set us free and let us be our own country. We, too, are suffering under a tyranny we didn’t choose and want to be free.”

The French laughed and said no.

Because it wasn’t really the principles they believed in. It’s not that they believed oppressive rule was innately wrong. It’s not that they believed all men deserved freedom. It’s that they were against tyranny when it was them under its thumb. They couldn’t have given less of a fuck about doing it to others. They didn’t want the abolishment of oppression. They wanted to go from being oppressed to the ones doing the oppressing.

Obviously this is not on the same scale as this discussion, but the principle of the matter is something I think is the same. A lot of people don’t view these thing as something that’s inherently bad. They just want the bad to be directed at someone who isn’t them.

honestly if you only have compassion for oppressed people's suffering because they are in a sufficiently oppressed class, thats a problem. anti-oppressive activism is useless if it ends up as "these people deserve compassion because they are in the Right Group" instead of "everyone deserves compassion and injustice and cruelty is never okay for anyone". anything else is doomed to repeat the very systems it wants to destroy.

[lordcryosrealmoftrash]

Just gotta say, I think some of us don't realize that Tim Drake, as Tim Drake, would not be popular with Gen Z gothamites. He's a rich orphan who got adopted by another rich orphan. He's 17 and a ceo. With the context of knowing he's Robin, of course, we all like him and think of him as creature, but Gotham kids don't know that. They just see this perpetually tired rich asshole who somehow stumbled away from being destitute and into being even more rich. Tim is absolutely the Wayne that the Gotham kids will eat first when the revolution comes.

Cassandra, on the other hand. She is genuinely a cryptid even outside of heroics. She's Bruce Wayne's only daughter, she can barely read, she is covered in scars, she does ballet, she can barely talk, when she looks at you it feels like she is reading your mind, she's the second oldest, she was adopted most recently. In my head, Jason explained, being dead as faking his death to step away from the fame, and people bought it because rich people are crazy. So while Jason is definitely strange in the eyes of Gotham, Cassandra is the only Wayne who outside of costume can live up to levels of cryptid of the batfam in general.

[allaboardthechuchutrain]

obsessed with how Utena uses both definitions of revolution: a change, a spark but also rotation, circular movement that repeats and repeats (a perpetual motion machine). change vs staying the same (not growing up)

thinking about how Akio is associated with rotation (the carousel, maybe even the Ferris wheel?) how when the road he drives on appears curved, circular

how he takes the students in his car on this road after they give up on the duels, not allowing them to escape/stop participating in the system, trapping them in this cycle

if the road is circular, it doesn't go anywhere. It eventually comes back to where it started (how the characters regress sometimes). It also means Akio isn't taking them anywhere, he's just tricking them (bc he's a manipulative piece of shit + shows how he's giving them a false sense/idea of adulthood since none of them actually graduate aka grow up)

thinking about how he claims that Utena didn't bring revolution while he's preparing for the next set of duels (he completed a revolution, now it's time to start over)

Yet while Akio tries trapping them in this eternal cycle, he fails. The ending (will get to that later) but also the students grow and develop. They are not the same people they were at the start of the show. You know who doesn't change though? Akio. On to the ending: I love the ending of Utena so much. The students are talking about growing up, about changing!! The student council, Tsuwabuki, Kozue, Shiori, Wakaba have all clearly changed. They are no longer partaking in the same behaviours they kept repeating throughout the show (all their relationships are noticeably healthier, no one is obsessing over anyone anymore, hanging out w/out animosity between them). Utena and Anthy escape and leave!!!!! Anthy is no longer trapped in the cycle of abuse Akio put her through. Anthy is no longer going to keep playing the role of the rose bride, Akio is free to continue playing prince (revolving), but she has to go now (revolution).