Revolutionary Girl Utena
May. 4th, 2014 07:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhen Utena’s parents passed away, she was rescued by a prince who gave her a rose crest ring. She was so impressed by the prince that she vowed to become a prince herself. Years later, at a boarding school with a lot of secrets, we discover that the student council all have rose crest rings, that they can use them to access a floating garden and dueling tournament, and that they have some kind of plan for world revolution. What happens when the girl who wants to be a dashing prince gets accidentally get caught up in their plans and wins the hand of the Rose Bride?
So, my thoughts on this are rather fragmented, because it took me about six months to get through the series (blame watching most of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the interim, and that I really wasn’t comfortable watching the later episodes with my son in the room.)
On their approach to gender: Utena seems to be going classic feminist tomboy, here. She doesn’t want to be male, she professes interest in boys, she just also wants to take the role of a dashing prince to rescue helpless princesses. I feel like the series loses track of where it wants to go with this—or if it really wants to make a coherent comment on it—as the series goes on.
Anthy isn’t portrayed as totally neurotypical, though I’m not certain what they’re going for. She’s antisocial and apparently prone to face-blindness. There’s also an argument that she presents “the subbiest sub who ever subbed,” changing her personality entirely to fit whoever she’s with, but always with some level of overdone subservience. But again, we never see enough of the “real” Anthy to judge her actions. Is Akio’s representation of her history accurate? Is she a victim? Is she the puppetmaster? Who knows?
The school setting informs the politics—evil plans involve winning popularity and saving face among the other students, and then intense relationship dramas. Adult educators don’t seem to play much of a role—assuming they even exist. We see teachers…once, maybe? The only non-student character with any significant role is Akio, and he only seems interested in teaching “non-traditional” subjects.
I don’t read the characters as 14; I read them as 16-17 from their attitudes and actions. I get the impression this is a cultural thing.
They heavily use classic cartoon cheats and repetitive scenes—the student council’s introduction, the “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse” segment of entering the dueling arena, several of the recurring dueling segments, etc—get used in almost every episode and are exactly the same footage, which eats a few minutes of running time and probably saved the animators a bundle. And there are filler episodes—one at the end of each arc as a “recap”, but with just enough new and shocking information to seem necessary (if not worthwhile). Plus flashback scenes, of course. Really, I suspect that the 39 episodes could have been cut down to 26 with little loss of quality.
The first segment of the show (the first 13 episodes) are the “Student Council Saga,” which has some strange supernatural happenings going on with moderately-light-hearted school rivalry, and the occasional gigantic display of wackiness (mostly when Nanami shows up), though it gradually gets darker. Episode 13 is entirely filler, a recap of the first season and some foreshadowing. The second season, the “Black Rose Saga,” starts out even darker than the first, with more clearly supernatural elements and blatant mind fuckery. (Then more filler.) And the “Akio’s Car Saga” gets…if not blatantly sexual, then at least obviously so. And weirder at the same time. And the last few episodes actually try to resolve the story, but again the style takes a turn for the incomprehensible. What you get starting on the show looks like it’s going to be a semi-feminist Sailor Moon-ish lighthearted adventure, and what you have by the end could never edited enough to make it appropriate for children.
Upon further reflection, I wonder if Nanami is just periodically appearing in a different show from everyone else. Episodes that focus on her but not her brother (#8, #16 and especially #27) are just in a different genre altogether, often lacking the usual repetitive quirks and being generally goofy.
I had an “Ember Island Players moment after Episode 33 (the recap episode at the end of the Akio’s Car arc, which the call-in radio show). I said to myself, “Did Utena and Akio just have sex?” “You know, it was really unclear.”
After I finished the series, Puel and I spent a long lunch going through my theories of the show, and I think I’ve sorted out what I think was going on: This is a purgatory story disguised as a coming-of-age story. The thing about a coming-of-age story is that it has a defined arc that RGU doesn’t follow, a gradual progression that culminates with the protagonist clearly having grown up. But we don’t see Utena change as a person, not significantly, and we’re not given enough of Anthy’s real character to claim that it’s her story, either.
No, the best I can figure is that the show casts adolescence, the no-longer-childhood but not-yet-adulthood period spent in middle school as a sort of purgatory, and for these characters, it’s spent in a fantastic realm called Ohtori Academy, a world of its own overseen by Akio, equal parts Lucifer and Goblin King. (Note that the only time anyone—except for Nanami’s WTF drug-trip to India—is shown outside of the academy is when they get their via Akio’s magic shirt-removing car…which means they aren’t outside his world at all.)
Akio is clearly a Lucifer analogue (which apparently even figures into the derivation of his name), and he figures into the idea of a just God’s purgatory: It is overseen by a fallen angel seeking redemption, whose blindness to reality prevents that redemption from ever occurring, but whose machinations can, in turn, lead to the redemption of the charges under his care. Akio is trying to open a door that can never be opened because it doesn’t exist, seeking the return to his angelic self when that’s never possible. But his drive to run the dueling arena leads the supporting cast to work through their issues and overcome their pasts.
(Lucifer’s defining sin is Pride, which drives his rebellion, his failure, his inability to find true redemption, and his blindness to truth. Very fitting for Akio.)
The key to Utena and Anthy’s story is in the mantra recited by the student council: They need to crack the world’s shell, lest they die without being born. The world is Ohtori, where they are trapped as incomplete humans. They need to break out of that world and into the real world. Utena goes one step further, as she gets the power to revolutionize that world: She breaks the existing cycle and patterns by freeing Anthy. Note that in the ending, Akio is ready to restart the dueling cycle as before, but Anthy leaving forces him to change.
The planetarium project is revealed to be the source of the illusions of the floating castle and the dueling arena…but those same illusions are shown to be solid moments later. Hence the idea that Ohtori is its own world and Akio is a Goblin King: Everything is a trick, but being a trick doesn’t mean it’s not real or can’t hurt you. The problems of middle-schoolers are “real” to adults, but they’re deathly so to middle-schoolers.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if Akio being Dios and saving princesses, and then Anthy sacrificing to seal away his power / “save” him was an accurate telling of events. What matters is that Akio believes it to be true, and tells it as if it was, and treats Anthy as if it was. (Indeed, any theory that Anthy is secretly a puppetmaster relies on Akio being wrong about the sequence and purpose of events. But I don’t believe those theories.) Akio sees and creates the reality he wants to see, but that doesn’t stop others—particularly Utena—from overcoming that reality at critical moments. Whether the rose gate was actually a coffin holding Anthy or that was just an image Utena imagined / created, again, really doesn’t matter. What matters was that Utena believed what she was doing, and that belief drove an actual effect.
Is Utena dead? From inside Ohtori Academy, it doesn’t matter. She might as well be, as she’s gone and never coming back regardless. She has “cracked the world’s shell” and left this phase of her life behind. The charitable explanation is that she’s escaped back to our “real world” and out of Akio’s, where she’ll go to a real school and have adult interactions and a proper life. Which would be the goal of Akio’s true puppetmaster (God, Fate, whatever) for all of the students, in a proper Purgatory story: Everyone finds redemption, eventually even Akio, and Purgatory is left empty when all can be in Paradise.
Overall: A series with a heaping helping of WTF that I probably (again) watched at a less-than-optimal point in my life. Though I suspect I understand a lot more about friends who saw it at a more formative time, now.
So, my thoughts on this are rather fragmented, because it took me about six months to get through the series (blame watching most of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the interim, and that I really wasn’t comfortable watching the later episodes with my son in the room.)
On their approach to gender: Utena seems to be going classic feminist tomboy, here. She doesn’t want to be male, she professes interest in boys, she just also wants to take the role of a dashing prince to rescue helpless princesses. I feel like the series loses track of where it wants to go with this—or if it really wants to make a coherent comment on it—as the series goes on.
Anthy isn’t portrayed as totally neurotypical, though I’m not certain what they’re going for. She’s antisocial and apparently prone to face-blindness. There’s also an argument that she presents “the subbiest sub who ever subbed,” changing her personality entirely to fit whoever she’s with, but always with some level of overdone subservience. But again, we never see enough of the “real” Anthy to judge her actions. Is Akio’s representation of her history accurate? Is she a victim? Is she the puppetmaster? Who knows?
The school setting informs the politics—evil plans involve winning popularity and saving face among the other students, and then intense relationship dramas. Adult educators don’t seem to play much of a role—assuming they even exist. We see teachers…once, maybe? The only non-student character with any significant role is Akio, and he only seems interested in teaching “non-traditional” subjects.
I don’t read the characters as 14; I read them as 16-17 from their attitudes and actions. I get the impression this is a cultural thing.
They heavily use classic cartoon cheats and repetitive scenes—the student council’s introduction, the “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse” segment of entering the dueling arena, several of the recurring dueling segments, etc—get used in almost every episode and are exactly the same footage, which eats a few minutes of running time and probably saved the animators a bundle. And there are filler episodes—one at the end of each arc as a “recap”, but with just enough new and shocking information to seem necessary (if not worthwhile). Plus flashback scenes, of course. Really, I suspect that the 39 episodes could have been cut down to 26 with little loss of quality.
The first segment of the show (the first 13 episodes) are the “Student Council Saga,” which has some strange supernatural happenings going on with moderately-light-hearted school rivalry, and the occasional gigantic display of wackiness (mostly when Nanami shows up), though it gradually gets darker. Episode 13 is entirely filler, a recap of the first season and some foreshadowing. The second season, the “Black Rose Saga,” starts out even darker than the first, with more clearly supernatural elements and blatant mind fuckery. (Then more filler.) And the “Akio’s Car Saga” gets…if not blatantly sexual, then at least obviously so. And weirder at the same time. And the last few episodes actually try to resolve the story, but again the style takes a turn for the incomprehensible. What you get starting on the show looks like it’s going to be a semi-feminist Sailor Moon-ish lighthearted adventure, and what you have by the end could never edited enough to make it appropriate for children.
Upon further reflection, I wonder if Nanami is just periodically appearing in a different show from everyone else. Episodes that focus on her but not her brother (#8, #16 and especially #27) are just in a different genre altogether, often lacking the usual repetitive quirks and being generally goofy.
I had an “Ember Island Players moment after Episode 33 (the recap episode at the end of the Akio’s Car arc, which the call-in radio show). I said to myself, “Did Utena and Akio just have sex?” “You know, it was really unclear.”
After I finished the series, Puel and I spent a long lunch going through my theories of the show, and I think I’ve sorted out what I think was going on: This is a purgatory story disguised as a coming-of-age story. The thing about a coming-of-age story is that it has a defined arc that RGU doesn’t follow, a gradual progression that culminates with the protagonist clearly having grown up. But we don’t see Utena change as a person, not significantly, and we’re not given enough of Anthy’s real character to claim that it’s her story, either.
No, the best I can figure is that the show casts adolescence, the no-longer-childhood but not-yet-adulthood period spent in middle school as a sort of purgatory, and for these characters, it’s spent in a fantastic realm called Ohtori Academy, a world of its own overseen by Akio, equal parts Lucifer and Goblin King. (Note that the only time anyone—except for Nanami’s WTF drug-trip to India—is shown outside of the academy is when they get their via Akio’s magic shirt-removing car…which means they aren’t outside his world at all.)
Akio is clearly a Lucifer analogue (which apparently even figures into the derivation of his name), and he figures into the idea of a just God’s purgatory: It is overseen by a fallen angel seeking redemption, whose blindness to reality prevents that redemption from ever occurring, but whose machinations can, in turn, lead to the redemption of the charges under his care. Akio is trying to open a door that can never be opened because it doesn’t exist, seeking the return to his angelic self when that’s never possible. But his drive to run the dueling arena leads the supporting cast to work through their issues and overcome their pasts.
(Lucifer’s defining sin is Pride, which drives his rebellion, his failure, his inability to find true redemption, and his blindness to truth. Very fitting for Akio.)
The key to Utena and Anthy’s story is in the mantra recited by the student council: They need to crack the world’s shell, lest they die without being born. The world is Ohtori, where they are trapped as incomplete humans. They need to break out of that world and into the real world. Utena goes one step further, as she gets the power to revolutionize that world: She breaks the existing cycle and patterns by freeing Anthy. Note that in the ending, Akio is ready to restart the dueling cycle as before, but Anthy leaving forces him to change.
The planetarium project is revealed to be the source of the illusions of the floating castle and the dueling arena…but those same illusions are shown to be solid moments later. Hence the idea that Ohtori is its own world and Akio is a Goblin King: Everything is a trick, but being a trick doesn’t mean it’s not real or can’t hurt you. The problems of middle-schoolers are “real” to adults, but they’re deathly so to middle-schoolers.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if Akio being Dios and saving princesses, and then Anthy sacrificing to seal away his power / “save” him was an accurate telling of events. What matters is that Akio believes it to be true, and tells it as if it was, and treats Anthy as if it was. (Indeed, any theory that Anthy is secretly a puppetmaster relies on Akio being wrong about the sequence and purpose of events. But I don’t believe those theories.) Akio sees and creates the reality he wants to see, but that doesn’t stop others—particularly Utena—from overcoming that reality at critical moments. Whether the rose gate was actually a coffin holding Anthy or that was just an image Utena imagined / created, again, really doesn’t matter. What matters was that Utena believed what she was doing, and that belief drove an actual effect.
Is Utena dead? From inside Ohtori Academy, it doesn’t matter. She might as well be, as she’s gone and never coming back regardless. She has “cracked the world’s shell” and left this phase of her life behind. The charitable explanation is that she’s escaped back to our “real world” and out of Akio’s, where she’ll go to a real school and have adult interactions and a proper life. Which would be the goal of Akio’s true puppetmaster (God, Fate, whatever) for all of the students, in a proper Purgatory story: Everyone finds redemption, eventually even Akio, and Purgatory is left empty when all can be in Paradise.
Overall: A series with a heaping helping of WTF that I probably (again) watched at a less-than-optimal point in my life. Though I suspect I understand a lot more about friends who saw it at a more formative time, now.
