#is that mikage sees utena as tokiko returned

[ninashiki]

i feel like almost everything in utena has sort of already been extensively discussed in the last two (almost three) decades of utena's existence (not that there aren't new interpretations to be made, there always are) besides black rose arc (mikage+mamiya+tokiko). which is why they're so much fun to think about. i think the need to read between the lines makes it unfortunately easy to misunderstand or look past obvious stuff if you don't pay attention, but to me it's always been really obvious that mikage's arc is a literal representation of the erasure of queerness in ohtori (society?) by akio/everything he represents. and that's so fucking tragic! nemuro was never able to find a name for his desires. he lived and died as a puppet in the shadows.

[cafeleningrad]

Let's talk about the real Chida Mamiya.

He's the entire reason the Black Rose Arc happens. This arc is revealing to the audience what silent violence is at constant work at Ohtori. All the seemingly stock Shoujo setting characters are revealed to have desires, worries, sorrows, and pain equal to the candy-colour-highlighted duelists, bar of the autonomy of dueling to state their demands. Whereas protagonists Utena gets increasingly discouraged to look deeper into any issues, is withheld information, regard duels- which she previously opposed- as routine. Her final duel with Mikage is even demanded on her own accord, she doesn't hesitate to inflict violence on him.

And yet Mamiya in his true self is barely shown, and so many memories of him entirely rewritten. He wasn't the elegant boy who resembled a mythical figure. He was a regular looking boy with freckles (bar the symbolic eyes of disillusionment).

Nemuro before meeting Tokiko and Mamiya was often feeling excluded from his peers. Even though he's still a student, classmates call him professor. To a point Nemuro believes himself to be unfeeling because everyone else says so. Until he meets Tokiko who organizes a massive project for a single boy. Mamiya's and Nemuro's talks, and contemplation about mortality actually make Nemuro realize that he can care for others. Mamiya in his wisdom, in his struggle for life, in just being can touch upon Nemuro's to touch upon more sympathetic, compassionate feelings. He knew he was about to die soon. Yet everyone around him tried everything to prevent his death. Even though Tokiko loved him, she tried to constrict his finite time to his bed. But Mamiya had accepted that he would die. More than anyone else of the entire cast, he was ready to accept his mortality.

Yet Mamiya's actual will got drastically rewritten: Anthy!Mamiya says he wanted immortality. So Neumro becomes Mikage Souji. All his previous work can continue to be used for Akio's purposes. So, Akio can continue to rope Souji for his purposes.

Even in his life, Mamiya's actual desire got ignored, talked over, and instrumentalized for the desire of others to do good. And finally evenTokiko's and Nemuro's good intentions were exploited for Akio's gains.

The original Black Rose circle actually didn't care at all about the dying boy. All the desperate efforts of Nemuro's hard work were just for their benefit. The didn't care Mamiya died.

He also became Mikage's scapegoat. All the bad things Mikage did, the mass murder out of deep despair that none cared for the one overlooked boy, the manipulation of eventual duelists, using the pain of others for his own gain, he ould blame them on doing them for Mamiya's sake. But Mamiya never asked to be saved.

The real Chida Mamiya didn't look special, but he was deeply loved. His sheer life was what made him stand out of Tokiko, and later Nemuro. The memory of him got rewritten to the point that his personality became unrecognizable. We barely see what he really looked like, and that he refused eternity, actually. In fact, only his grave contains his memory at Ohtori. Otherwise Souji is forced to graduate, Tokiko leaves Ohtori. None else will know how important and detrimental a simple boy was in the history of Ohotori. Mamiya is just like all the over disenfranchised Black Rose duelists: False perceived, misrepresented, overlooked, overheard, actually not looking distinctive.

The only who remembers him correctly, is Tokiko. She remembers her brother so dearly, she returns to the place that brought her so much grief to bring flowers to his grave. The one who could accept his passing and mortality, remembers the actual, real Mamiya. And how important he actually was.

[talesofsymphoniac]

So I may have kinda forgotten to be thinking about the Shadow Girls a little bit. But I'm back on that because MONKEYS and ROBOTS

Okay so. It seems like Mikage is generally thought of as a foil for Utena (the Utena of the previous cycle perhaps?) but I actually think he has more parallels with Anthy.

The Shadow Girls have a couple different plays about a monkey-catching robot, and in one of them the robot is pretty explicitly a Mikage parallel (Tokiko tells the robot it pains her to see him this way*, Mikage being described as a human computer)

(*Tokiko is an Utena parallel and this whole arc Utena has been the one responding to the Shadow Plays)

And in a later Shadow Play, the monkey is described as "hiding behind a girl's face," and the robot captures her and takes her back to the alien spaceship, which returns to Akio's dick tower.

Chu-chu is a monkey, and if you go by the logic that he represents Anthy, that would double down on the idea that Anthy is the monkey that the robot is meant to catch. But the second shadow play happens after Mikage is out of the picture, in a filler episode between the black rose arc and the beginning of the apocalypse arc, so who is the robot kidnapping Anthy to bring her home?

Well. Robots don't age. Robots don't make mistakes. Robots have no feelings. Etc etc. Who else in the show is like that? (Or at least, who thinks of themselves like that-- a living corpse. A doll with no emotions of her own?)

Anthy's been ordered to capture herself, y'know?

Actually Anthy's role in the whole Mikage-Tokiko-Mamiya triangle is weird. She's like Mamiya in that she's sort of an object of other people's desires, this representation of forcing something to be eternal even if it suffers for it. And Mamiya is the one she impersonates, rather than Tokiko which might have been a little more straightforward. But I've also just explained why I think she's like Mikage too.

To be honest I don't think there's a one to one parallel going on here, but if there was, I think it's more useful to look at Mikage and Mamiya as representative of two aspects of Anthy. Mamiya is the Princess-- objectified, possessed, worried about. Mikage is the Witch-- manipulating and manipulated by Akio, wants to claim power over eternity, a phantom, robotic and emotionless.

And it kinda makes sense, as Mikage and Mamiya are kind of a unit in the black rose arc, with Mikage being manipulated by the idea of Mamiya (who is actually Anthy the whole time, to really get the metaphor tangled up)

And of course Tokiko-- the Utena analogue-- is the only one of the three who actually gets out.

[aptericia]

TIME CHILD: RGU FANART & ANALYSIS

OMG I’m finally done with this! I hope you guys enjoy this duelist-style Tokiko, I had a lot of fun drawing her :)))

Below the cut is my attempt at an essay that explores her character through the characters and ideas she represents. I’ve never done one of these analysis thingies before (it’s been hard to convince myself that it’s neither 100% obvious boring stuff nor completely incomprehensible ramblings with no foundation) so it might not be great, but I feel really satisfied being able to put all my vague thoughts down on paper, and I hope someone finds it interesting :)

MAJOR SPOILERS for the entirety of Revolutionary Girl Utena!!

In the Black Rose Saga, the parallels between Utena & Anthy’s relationship and Mikage & Mamiya’s are quite obvious. But both of them have another, equally important figure in their relationship—the bride’s older sibling. If Mikage represents Utena, and Mamiya represents Anthy, then Tokiko logically represents Akio. She was also the one who pulled Nemuro out of his purgatory of apathy and loneliness, and gave him something to care about: Mamiya’s unpleasant fate. And just like the two of them, she has a relationship with her counterpart: where Mikage and Utena are rivals, and Anthy impersonates Mamiya, Tokiko is Akio’s lover and a (likely unknowing) perpetrator in his plans.

(This is a bit of a tangent, but Akio’s manipulation of Nemuro in episode 22 is strikingly similar to Touga’s manipulation of Miki back in episode 5. Just like Miki, Nemuro has largely given up on his task by Akio (in his case it’s research, rather than dueling) because he realizes it’s not truly what his bride wants or needs. But Nemuro is in love with Tokiko. He probably doesn’t even realize this, given his lack of social skills, but when he sees her with Akio he suddenly becomes scared of what he has to lose (just like when Miki sees Kozue with Touga). Combine this with Mamiya stating out of the blue that he does, in fact, want “eternity” (just as Anthy suggests that her engagement to Utena could end her piano playing), and Nemuro is now willing to take the offer he’d been so repulsed by earlier.)

Anyway, if Tokiko is a counterpart to Akio, why does Mikage see her in Utena of all people? It’s because the Tokiko he remembers is the version of her that’s still naïve, idealistic, and fundamentally childish—that is, the Tokiko from Nemuro’s time is Mikage’s Dios. Notably, when Mikage comes across present-day Tokiko in the hall, he ignores her—he doesn’t recognize the person, the adult, she has become. His entire reality is built on his memories, therefore, he can’t imagine that Tokiko couldn’t have changed from the young prince she was to him. Instead, he finds those “innocent” qualities in Utena and decides she must be the woman herself, desperate for an outlet for all his unresolved love and hatred towards her.

Tokiko, of course, did change—and her “fall from grace” that turned her from Dios to Akio was the fire at Nemuro Memorial Hall. Her brother is dead, which is bad enough, but something she might have been able to accept. However, Nemuro—possibly her only other friend at the academy—can’t accept it. He deludes himself and denies reality until he ends up taking the lives of a hundred students. At this point, Tokiko has failed to save anyone, and her innocence has been shattered. Therefore, she does the only thing she can: give up, abandon Nemuro at Ohtori, and become an adult.

There’s not enough information to say if she becomes “evil” exactly (indeed, the line is very fuzzy in Utena anyway), but when she returns as an adult she seems to have no interest in helping the people trapped in Akio’s garden, apart from a vague understanding that “there’s something wrong” about what he’s doing. Good or bad, she chose to save herself, and she’s no longer the prince she once was.

What’s really sneaky about Nemuro’s storyline really is that is doesn’t actually use the term “prince”, or any other fairytale themes. It has a much more “mundane” or “modern” feel to it, with science & medicine replacing the swordfights and castles. But ultimately, it’s still the same story, and it’s a warning to Utena (and the viewer) of what would happen should she fail to break out of her coffin. Nemuro stayed too long—after the failed revolution, after his bride was dead—and continued to cling to his memories, becoming a cruel manipulator in his own right, still convinced he was doing it for someone else. In their own ways, Tokiko and Mikage both foreshadow how easy it is for the noble prince to become selfish and cold-hearted. Although it’s hard to imagine Utena ever becoming as bad as Akio (plus she’s mortal, so she probably doesn’t physically have enough time), she has a real risk of becoming Tokiko or Mikage. If she allows herself to realize she can’t save Anthy, she’ll close herself off and leave Ohtori on her own, taking with her only a mountain of regret and a lingering sense that she can only ever look out for herself. If she convinces herself she can still save Anthy, she’ll go to increasingly far (and immoral) lengths to do so and drift further away from reality, and the one she loves. There’s no way out…except, maybe, to convince Anthy to save herself instead.

(There’s one more small, largely unrelated point I’d like to make about Tokiko. Perhaps, instead of Dios or Akio, her true counterpart is actually Touga. There are some cosmetic similarities—her violet eyes, her dark pink hair color that is really closer to Touga’s than Akio’s—and her name sounds almost like a combination of the two (this could absolutely be a coincidence, but we have Mamiya and Himemiya after all). Also, her relationship with Mikage is telling. Where Utena sees Dios/Akio as an inspiration, and idol, and a duty, Mikage sees Tokiko as an actual friend (possibly a lover) that he lost but imagines to come back to him. Does that sound like Utena & Touga’s relationship from the movie? Anywayyy I’m probably seeing things, but if not, this may support my pet theory about Touga…)

[charmtale]

re-watched episode 22 (and 23) of rgu a few weeks ago and one particular moment in 22 won’t get out of my head ever since. tokiko returns to the school to put flowers on mamiya’s grave and while she’s walking through the hallway she encounters mikage. mikage, who has been obsessed with her for decades since they stopped being in contact, who thinks about her constantly, who multiple times looks directly at utena and sees tokiko instead because he’s that desperate to interact with her again... doesn’t even react to her. zero acknowledgement.

(she stops, he keeps right on walking)

and that’s... i don’t know, there’s something about it that gets me. because of course he doesn’t recognize her. the tokiko in his mind is as frozen as he and ‘mamiya’ are. he’s so trapped in the past that even when he finally encounters what he seems to be looking for after all this time, it’s not even a blip on his radar because he’s so focused on the past- not even just the past, but his version of the past, where mamiya never died, where he never flambéed one hundred boys, etc. and that past continues into the present, or really, it never ended so it never had to continue, so of course tokiko doesn’t look like that. that woman is a stranger. now this random pink-haired child with a sword? that’s tokiko

i wish i could put into words better how it makes me feel but like... i miss my childhood friends every day, and yes, i could conceivably walk right past them and not even recognize their faces anymore. i don’t know. this is incomprehensible. anyway <3

[applepi00]

Emi Liveblogs: Revolutionary Girl Utena Ep23, The Terms of a Duelist, Part II

We’re still at 22 stopwatches, 19 slaps, 9 Egg speeches, 6 Mikage speeches, and 1 punch.

Yeah I mentioned Mikage had a picture of baby Utena in the wall? Here it is, it gained colour as we zoomed in to focus on the memory Utena is holding on to. This visibly shakes Utena and leads to the punch.

On the topic, I think Mikage is like a warning, this is what Utena could become if she continues this path to find her prince and make that memory reality again, she’ll trap herself in a fantasy/past and never grow up and progress.

Mikage doesn’t say a word in the elevator, and interestingly enough the frame is already set to a cocoon and doesn’t change. He’s in his cocoon/coffin, he hasn’t blossomed into a butterfly, but he’s still trapped enough he can’t go back to the truth/root.

Man gets punched and decides the teen girl he freaked out must be his crush/girlfriend returned to him. Oh dear.

Every shot of Mamiya in the elevator scene is like this, old footage, because Makiya is long dead, and this is all entirely in Mikage’s mind.

For lightheartedness, this is still dangerous. But also I love that Wakaba is there for Utena, even when we neglect her for the rest of the story to happen in the foreground she’s still there to be supportive, I hope Wakaba gets her own chance to leave Ohtori and shine someday.

Now Wakaba can interact! This play is one of the more straightforward ones. Man brags he was once the class rep, but he’s so caught up in that that he messes up his present (messing up paperwork at work, leaving socks around and irritating his wife). His daughter heads off to school and he gets up to follow her. Everyone is cherishing a memory, Mikage so much so he stopped time for himself, and nobody can move forward.

Even the duel theme echoes this theme about the past! Where am I? When am I? Mikage is displaced.

Before he was walking past the coffins which were wheeled by someone in white, now we see it was Mikage himself depositing the bodies in the basement.

I just love when they do this, it’s so beautiful.

Mikage’s memory item is a photo of Mamiya and Tokiko, as they really were. The real Mamiya looks like his sister whereas the Mamiya we knew was Mikage projecting on Anthy. Or: a visual representation for Akio preying on obsession and warped memories.