#rgu blogging

[limecar]

In hindsight Mikage had soooo much audacity forcing all those people to delve into their inner psyche while being deeply in denial about being gay

[haru-dipthong]

Gendered pronouns in Japanese vs English

In Revolutionary Girl Utena, the main character Utena is a girl (it says so in the title), but very conspicuously uses the masculine first person pronoun 僕 (boku) and dresses in (a variation of) the boys school uniform. Utena's gender, and gender in general, is a core theme of the work. And yet, I haven’t seen a single translation or analysis post where anyone considers using anything other than she/her for Utena when speaking of her in English. This made me wonder: how does one’s choice of pronouns in Japanese correspond to what one’s preferred pronouns would be in English?

There are 3 main differences between gendered pronouns in Japanese vs English

Japanese pronouns are used to refer to yourself (first-person), while English pronouns are used to refer to others (third-person)

The Japanese pronoun you use will differ based on context

Japanese pronouns signify more than just gender

Let’s look at each of these differences in turn and how these differences might lead to a seeming incongruity between one’s Japanese pronoun choice and one’s English pronoun choice (such as the 僕 (boku) vs she/her discrepancy with Utena).

Part 1: First-person vs third-person

While Japanese does technically have gendered third person pronouns （彼、彼女） they are used infrequently¹ and have much less cultural importance placed on them than English third person pronouns. Therefore, I would argue that the cultural equivalent of the gender-signifying third-person pronoun in English is the Japanese first-person pronoun. Much like English “pronouns in bio”, Japanese first-person pronoun choice is considered an expression of identity.

Japanese pronouns are used exclusively to refer to yourself, and therefore a speaker can change the pronoun they’re using for themself on a whim, sometimes mid-conversation, without it being much of an incident. Meanwhile in English, Marquis Bey argues that “Pronouns are like tiny vessels of verification that others are picking up what you are putting down” (2021). By having others use them and externally verify the internal truth of one’s gender, English pronouns, I believe, are seen as more truthful, less frivolous, than Japanese pronouns. They are seen as signifying an objective truth of the referent’s gender; if not objective then at least socially agreed-upon, while Japanese pronouns only signify how the subject feels at this particular moment — purely subjective.

Part 2: Context dependent pronoun use

Japanese speakers often don’t use just one pronoun. As you can see in the below chart, a young man using 俺 (ore) among friends might use 私 (watashi) or 自分 (jibun) when speaking to a teacher. This complicates the idea that these pronouns are gendered, because their gendering depends heavily on context. A man using 私 (watashi) to a teacher is gender-conforming, a man using 私 (watashi) while drinking with friends is gender-non-conforming. Again, this reinforces the relative instability of Japanese pronoun choice, and distances it from gender.

Part 3: Signifying more than gender

English pronouns signify little besides the gender of the antecedent. Because of this, pronouns in English have come to be a shorthand for expressing one’s own gender experience - they reflect an internal gendered truth. However, Japanese pronoun choice doesn’t reflect an “internal truth” of gender. It can signify multiple aspects of your self - gender, sexuality, personality.

For example, 僕 (boku) is used by gay men to communicate that they are bottoms, contrasted with the use of 俺 (ore) by tops. 僕 (boku) may also be used by softer, academic men and boys (in casual contexts - note that many men use 僕 (boku) in more formal contexts) as a personality signifier - maybe to communicate something as simplistic as “I’m not the kind of guy who’s into sports.” 俺 (ore) could be used by a butch lesbian who still strongly identifies as a woman, in order to signify sexuality and an assertive personality. 私 (watashi) may be used by people of all genders to convey professionalism. The list goes on.

I believe this is what’s happening with Utena - she is signifying her rebellion against traditional feminine gender roles with her use of 僕 (boku), but as part of this rebellion, she necessarily must still be a girl. Rather than saying “girls don’t use boku, so I’m not a girl”, her pronoun choice is saying “your conception of femininity is bullshit, girls can use boku too”.

Through translation, gendered assumptions need to be made, sometimes about real people. Remember that he/they, she/her, they/them are purely English linguistic constructs, and don’t correspond directly to one’s gender, just as they don’t correspond directly to the Japanese pronouns one might use. Imagine a scenario where you are translating a news story about a Japanese genderqueer person. The most ethical way to determine what pronouns they would prefer would be to get in contact with them and ask them, right? But what if they don’t speak English? Are you going to have to teach them English, and the nuances of English pronoun choice, before you can translate the piece? That would be ridiculous! It’s simply not a viable option². So you must make a gendered assumption based on all the factors - their Japanese pronoun use (context dependent!), their clothing, the way they present their body, their speech patterns, etc.

If translation is about rewriting the text as if it were originally in the target language, you must also rewrite the gender of those people and characters in the translation. The question you must ask yourself is: How does their gender presentation, which has been tailored to a Japanese-language understanding of gender, correspond to an equivalent English-language understanding of gender? This is an incredibly fraught decision, but nonetheless a necessary one. It’s an unsatisfying dilemma, and one that poignantly exposes the fickle, unstable, culture-dependent nature of gender.

Notes and References

¹ Usually in Japanese, speakers use the person’s name directly to address someone in second or third person

² And has colonialist undertones as a solution if you ask me - “You need to pick English pronouns! You ought to understand your gender through our language!”

Bey, Marquis— 2021 Re: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender

Rose divider taken from this post

[idkhowtopickausername]

I think it’s interesting in rgu how Utena’s aspiration of being a prince is not only hurtful to Anthy but also serves a sort of double purpose in Utena’s life wherein it allows her to express aspects of her gender expression and sexuality without having to really confront them directly, and a lot of the most important moments in her character arc are moments where she has to confront those things without relying on it.

Utena saying at the end that the only times she was really happy was when she was with Anthy is so important because it’s not just her presence that changes Anthy’s life but the reverse is true as well, and the idea that she is acting solely on some sort of heroic noble mission separate from her own feelings at times allows her to kind of sidestep the vulnerability of admitting that. It’s after Dios has urged her to give up, saying that she’s done all she could and giving her a way out and into complacency that would still leave her ego and dream of keeping her promise to Dios partially intact, but it wasn’t ever really her promise to Dios that mattered but her promise to Anthy both as a child and once she knows her that matters.

It’s also really interesting that the first time she says no to Akio she says it’s because she wants to stay true to her prince—it’s an idea that gives her a way to momentarily reject his advances without acknowledging that her own feelings should be reason enough, and shows how she feels that appealing to (even an abstract) patriarchal figure gives validity to her own feelings that they wouldn’t have on their own.

Episodes 12 and 37 are also really interesting in that they both begin when Utena has realized that she does not truly know or understand Anthy and feels betrayed by her, and she temporarily renounces her role of “protecting” her only to realize that her relationship with Anthy is deeply important to her personally even outside of that dynamic, as is her masculinity/gender expression, but in order to express this realization she ultimately returns to that dynamic (trying to protect Anthy via the dueling system) in both cases because she cannot yet imagine another way. It’s not until she fails at being a prince that she succeeds in expressing her true feelings and escaping the academy/the structure it represents (and inspiring Anthy to do the same) because those things were never truly compatible to begin with.

[sepyana]

Shout outs to Wakaba for being the only brown eyed character frfr

[not-too-many-eyes]

I just find Wakaba really fascinating in the terms of how the narrative evolves around her. She stays the same while everything around her changes, she wants to become special and important to the story and then...never gets that. She gets into the car with Akio but we don't see Anything. She's not important enough to be given that spotlight, or to see how that could have affected her. She seems surface level happy and then that's it. We don't get to know because the narrative is completely uninterested in her emotional and personal development and character.

She gets the one episode, goes back to how it was before, and then doesn't appear much in that later half even though she was important in the Student Council Arc for Utena's personal development. And even that you can view that as her acting only in service to the main characters. After that and Black Rose she appears mainly to push Utena further into the sexist nightmare of Othori Academy.

And then she forgets everything.

The most change happening to her afterwards is her repeating Utena's role. She does not get a role of her own because she's the understudy to Utena's role. The narrative is a leering man that has no interest in her as a person but also doesn't want her to leave it's sight. Horrifying. 10/10. Wakaba I love you.

[caligarish]

The Choice by Nikolay Gumilev (transl. by Evgenia Sarkisyants) // The Terror, 2018

[fireyfobbitmedicine]

The Girl That Drowned

The Boy That Tried To Save Her

The Prince's Disappearance

[threecheersforinking]

I think I have a greater appreciation for the silly Nanami episodes after several full rewatches of RGU

On my first watch, I was so hooked on the mystery and intrigue of the main plot that all I wanted was to find out what was going on, so every time a Nanami episode came on I’d be like oh great this means I have to go another full episode without finding out more about this story!

But now that I know everything that happens, the Nanami episodes provide a much needed respite from the darkness of the main storyline. Plus I am able to interpret/appreciate their value and symbolism outside of comic relief as well

[inbarfink]

Okay, so I accidentally thought about Stage Productions of Dr. Horrible Where There’s Not Enough Male Actors So Billy is Played By a Woman too hard again. And the thing is, well,  I say ‘Stage Productions of Dr. Horrible Where There’s Not Enough Male Actors So Billy is Played By a Woman’ and not, like, ‘Female!Billy Productions’ because in all of the ones I’ve seen the script is unchanged and so the character is still textually a man. Super-minor characters like the Mayor and the two Newscasters or even Bad Horse can sometimes get genderswapped, but usually the kind of people dedicated enough to DHSAB to want to create their own recreation of it don’t want to change the script too much. So Billy remains gendered the same way he is in the original.

But also… Dr. Horrible isn’t gendered that much in the text of the script. Like, he gets talked about in third-person way less often than the other two leads (so there’s less places where he would be called he/him/himself), he’s not referred to using gendered terms as often as the two other leads, ‘Billy’ can work as a gender-neutral name and ‘Dr. Horrible’ is 100% gender-neutral. As such, the only textual references to Dr. Horrible being a dude are:

Refers to himself as a guy in ‘My Freeze Ray’: ‘I’m the guy who makes it real/the feelings you don’t dare to feel’

Refers to himself as a man in the title line of ‘A Man’s Gotta Do’

Moist calls him a man in the line ‘look at me, Man, I’m Moist!’

Refers to himself as a guy in ‘Brand New Day’, ‘Go ahead and laugh/Yeah I’m a funny guy!’

The one time Dr. Horrible is called by a third person pronoun is during ‘So They Say’, when Moist notes that ‘he’s still not picking up’

During ‘Everything You Ever’, he sings ‘My victory’s complete/so hail to the king’. Implicitly calling himself a ‘king’.

So, like, what that means is that if a production did just want to genderswap Billy… it’ll be considerably easier than doing it with either of the other two leads. There’s basically just a few lines you have to change and basically nothing else.  

Like, ‘I’m the gal who makes it real’ is really a no-brainer. ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ is an Idiom and I could see a woman quoting it without it meaning anything. (And in a pinch you can replace it with the gender-neutral ‘one’s gotta do what one’s gotta do' or maybe 'I've gotta do what I've gotta do').

“He’s still not picking up” often gets cut from stage reworks of ‘So They Say’ anyways or swapped for something like ‘Doc’s still not picking up’ to make it clear who’s Moist talking to without the Magic the Kuleshov Effect Really. The only line that offers any meaningful challenge is in ‘Brand New Day’ and 'Everything You Ever' cause that use of ‘guy’ and 'king' is part of a rhyme, but I still feel like it’s not the toughest one to solve. 

… of course, I keep saying the three main characters because Moist isn’t actually gendered once in the entire script. So basically every time a production gets a girl to play Moist that Moist has a Gender Quantum Position. 

But, with all due respect to Moist and their Quantum Gender, that’s just not a change I find as interesting as the possibility of a Female Billy. Like, hey! We’ve got a second female character who is not primarily defined through her romantic relationships and survives through the end of the narrative and has a kind of a Gross Power you don’t really see for a female super-character, that’s… kinda neat. But I don’t really think there’s anything in here that really shakes the basic thematic undercurrents of the movie the way Female Billy does. Female Billy has a really the highest rate of Implied Changes to the Meaning of the Text Caused by the Change Vs. Actual Changes Required to the Text

Because, okay, look… Would making Dr. Horrible a woman fix every single thematic problem people have with the DHSAB Narrative forever and ever and make it the Politically Perfect-est Musical Ever? Nah. Does it arguably create its own set of problems with the whole Tragic Toxic Lesbian Trope? Yeah… 

But that’s why I’m advocating for it not as some sort of Remake that’s gonna be the New Definitive Version That Fixes Everything, but as a stage production. A new version that exists in the Kaleidoscopic Multiverse of takes that the stage inherently creates. Not Ultimate, not Definitive, not ‘The’ version. Just A Version I think should exist. Because even if it’s not a change that’ll Fix Everything, it’s still gonna change things in a way I, personally, find very Compelling.

And I was thinking, as part of this train of thought, that if I were to do Lesbian Billy, that for Penny’s role, I would try and cast a girl with a very butch and/or nonconformist haircut. Cause, like, at the start, the one line Billy wants to tell Penny is

And that way you can connect it with how nonconformist hairstyles are used as a way to communicate queerness to other queer people with some plausible deniability from Mainstream Society. So it’s not just that it helps explain ‘oh, that’s why Billy even assumes her attraction could be mutual’, wanting to tell Penny that she loves her hair is a whole thing of

Or rather, because it’s Billy, more like

So that’s another layer of Added Thematic Meaning just via casting choices, without changing anything about the exact text of the script!

And, you know, charity, compassion and kindness are not Exclusively Feminine Traits. Penny could be kinda gender-nonconformist while also being innocent and maybe a bit naive. And, y’know, she’s a damsel in distress when compared to the characters who have super-strength and super-science at their disposal.

And then I thought, well, maybe we can also show Penny dressing more feminine during her time dating Captain Hammer, so there’s kind of an unspoken implication to the audience that maybe CH is pressuring her into being more gender-conformiming. Which isn’t just a New Way in Which Captain Hammer is terrible,  it also connects with how he, as a superhero, functions as an upholder of the status que that Billy is trying to upends (and again, it makes ‘love your hair!’ an actually Really Important Line! It’s Billy showing that, even if her attraction right now is kinda shallow. She is appreciating something about Penny that is her choice and CH is probably trying to take away from her.)

And, like, even in readings of the DHSAB narrative that try and make it as critical of Billy as possible, you always kind hit a snug that there is also an unspoken but present assumption, that while Billy does kinda suck, he could’ve been a good romantic partner to Penny if he just Got Over His Shit and is still always better than Captain Hammer despite… not really doing a good job establishing why. 

So this thread does give at least one clear reason for why Captain Hammer is absolutely worse for Penny than Billy is, without necessarily letting Billy off the hook for all the way she does still kinda Suck.

You know, since we’re talking about changing as little of the actual dialogue as possible, the audience might not be able to tell if Penny is an out-and-proud Bi woman and Captain Hammer is pressuring her to be less Obviously Queer or if she still hasn’t fully processed that her affinity towards gender-nonconformity is also somewhat connected to her sexuality and the whole debacle is her shoving herself deeper into the closet… but I think that if the audience notice Penny suddenly changing into girlier clothing after she starts getting close to Captain Hammer that’ll be enough to create a visceral “Oh, this guy is BAD” reaction of sort.

Plus, like, the way the narrative kinda treats Penny slowly sobering up to Captain Hammer’s bullshit and realizing she’s not actually in love with him

is treated as interchangeable with the process of her gradually falling in love with Billy

that would hit as less Weird, at least thematically, if we have that thread of Captain Hammer representing, like, Heteronormativity and the Patriarchy Billy and Penny both being girls....

And that’s when I came to realization

of what I was actually doing.

[smengart]

I cannot believe I have to write a post about this in regards to my Utena art, but an account on here called @/familyromantic just reblogged fanart I made of Miki and Kozue as ship art, and they are specifically a blog dedicated to incestuous ships and proshipping.

Of ALL of the art you could reblog of this topic, you choose to reblog non-ship art I made of two CHILDREN who have a deeply troubled and traumatizing relationship with incest in the context of their story, and tag my art as a ship on your blog.

Just to say this explicitly - any proshippers/incest shippers/sexual assault romanticizers/whatever: DO NOT REBLOG MY ART. Especially do not reblog my Utena art. I have already blocked this account so hopefully they won't be able to reblog any more of my Utena pieces, but I felt the need to make this post to establish firmly how I feel about this subject matter. Utena is a very triggering show that includes these topics, and that is unavoidable - what I won't tolerate is anyone who romanticizes and sexualizes these topics to engage with my fanart of the series.

[puptactularpawsome]

Anthy himemiya banner gif~♡☆

[haru-dipthong]

hejhej, thank you for the post about the use of pronouns in SKU. Insights about the Japanese context in the show are something deeply interesting to me as I feel I sometimes lack a lot of context in this department. The following question is more related to socio-linguistics:

Until their very last appearances on screen Utena refers to Anthy by her last name but no honourifics but Anthy is on first name but (in lack of a better description of mine) high rank honourific. In terms of personal intimacy is there a meaning/implication in their relationship in the way they address each other?

I am so glad you asked me this because I was already thinking of writing a whole post about that moment! It’s one of my favourite moments in the whole show, and maybe the most rich in terms of analysis.

I think Utena’s way of addressing Anthy is much less interesting, but it does still carry some meaning. It’s common for boys to use last names with no honorifics among friends, and I think this is just a part of Utena’s masculine image. But let’s talk about Anthy’s final line!

In general, honorifics are usually used to put a bit of social distance between you and the other person. Sometimes that distance is horizontal, such that you’re not imposing a possibly unwanted intimacy on a peer, and sometimes that distance is vertical, as with 様 (sama). Romantic partners and close friends usually address each other by first name with no honorific, so to use their first name only would be a bit presumptuous.

様 (sama) is used to show extreme deference. Outside of customer-employee interactions, it’s not used much in modern day Japanese. But it is the honorific you would use to address your husband if you were a princess bound by duty to wed a prince from another royal family. The fact that she doesn’t use the honorific in the final line carries SO much meaning.

Superficially and plot-wise, it means she is free from her curse. More importantly, it means she considers herself and Utena equals, where before she was forced to place herself far beneath Utena, socially. This has implications about how Anthy sees gender as well. I believe one aspect of Anthy’s toxic hyperfemininity is that she feels that in order to be feminine, she needs to place herself under people. She sees femininity as weakness and timidity. The more people she positions herself under, the more feminine she sees herself — which ironically allows herself to feel superior. It’s a contradiction. But by shedding the honorific and implying that she and Utena are equals, it makes a powerful implication about how her view of femininity has matured, much like how Utena’s final acts and words show how much her view of masculinity has matured. It’s a huge payoff for a 39-episode long setup.

Lastly, it represents that Anthy’s relationship with Utena has taken its final step. They have been growing closer and further apart in many ways over the whole series and this is the culmination of everything. I see Anthy's use of 様 (sama) to be the final and most important barrier she places between Utena and herself, and by not using it, she is showing us that their relationship is complete - she has allowed Utena fully into her life. I believe that omitting the honorific, on top of everything, represents that Anthy and Utena are now intimate, in every sense of the word.

[ninashiki]

i feel like this literally says it all about the parallels between Mikage/Mamiya/Tokiko and Utena/Anthy/Akio

[daily-orange-character]

Daily Orange Character #108:

Juri Arisugawa from Revolutionary Girl Utena!

[kakahaori]

I like utena but just 1 eps and scene, gif :(

Indonesia look so mystery utena...

[hotmonkeelove]

I can't spot the difference!