Shoujo Kakumei Utena

There wasn't a thread for Utena, so I made one.

Okay, here's a question I have for all of you: was the Dios that Utena met 'real', or was he just a spirit? I couldn't really tell.

*shrug* Once you get into discussions of deities and the like, I don't think such distinctions really matter.

Can someone explain to me why people think Nanami is funny? She turned me off the anime permanently by her very presence.

Aside from her being a Butt-Monkey that happens to be The Libby at the same time, I got nothing.

It kind of bothers me how little of the show tries to make events that actually matter to the overall plot, unless i'm somehow not seeing how those black rose'd people were necessary in getting to the last part with Akio. I think that guy with the glasses on who liked to support that guy who looked way more like the prince of the past than Akio until we were shown a younger version of him at least suggested to Utena what may come ahead though.

Also the repeated footage of the elevators and stairs(and whatever else that took long and didn't actually include anything new like the conversations in Akio's car) bothers me, mainly because they could have just skipped it altogether instead of using it again and again...

It also bothers me how Utena doesn't seem to care about how cars are coming out of the ground (and it's not that she can't see them/ignores them considering what she said to Akio about his car) or how tables are somehow shifting by themselves. (were they tables or chairs? don't remember.)

I kind of wanna see what the show would have been like if it led up to that Utena and Anthy in armor on flying horses scene in the OP.

edited 26th Apr '11 1:31:53 PM by Edmania

Nanami is funny because of the increasingly weird situations she gets in.

I assume you're referring to Mamiya?

I had the identity of Utena's prince spoiled for me by the Characters page, and the Black Rose Arc was confusing as all hell anyway. Were the deaths of the 100 duelists really necessary, and did it really happen? Was Souji ever actually at the school? Which of the events that occurred during that arc happened, and which were in the characters' imaginations? I think either it was mostly a dream, with the events that affected later arcs happening in Broad Strokes, or it was all real, and only the characters' memories were changed.

edited 26th Apr '11 3:40:40 PM by ElderAtropos

I like Nanami because she takes the absurd, bizarre and let's face it, stupid aspects of the show and just runs wild with them Up To Eleven. Plus, the tight yellow clothes don't hurt.

If an episode has Nanami in the focus, it is filler. With two exceptions.

The evils of filler are overrated.

That one episode about Tsuwabuki's (I think that was his name) plans to get close to Nanami was hilarious.

It was definitely a breather after the previous two.

Nanami has the same dress sense as The Bride. This amuses me.

I can't believe we didn't have a Utena thread before now.

I find Nanami hilarious because she's The Libby who basically completely fails at being a Libby. And given how some of the main series arcs are, I like the breather-ness of her episodes.

As for the Black Rose arc, I think it's purpose was mostly to explore some of the particular issues that the characters had (and start to really push on the idea that what's going on in Ohtori is creepy and wrong). It's a character/thematic focused arc, rather than directly plot focused.

IIRC, the reason there was so much stock-footage in Utena is because the show actually had a really small budget. So they reused those scenes a lot so they could save money for later stuff when they needed to do a lot of new animation. They didn't want "We've run out of money for they grand finale" syndrome.

My personal theory on all the bizarre stuff that happens to Nanami is that it's because Anthy is using her witch-powers to get even with her in a roundabout way.

It's probably best not take the series too literally but I'd have to say that Dios was just a spirit.

Interestingly enough, Nanami is the character with the healthiest heterosexual relationship in the series (Nanami/Tsuwabuki).

There's a Utena thread! Rejoice, my soul *angels start singing hallelujah* Anyway, maybe Akio is the shadow/dark side of Dios made manifest or Dios had a literal Split-Personality Takeover. Did you know that Melody Of Oblivion was made by the 'same' director as SKU? I find Narami really annoying and I rolled on the floor when she turned into a cow

edited 27th Apr '11 4:06:08 AM by sabrina_diamond

I'm actually kind of convinced that the aesop of Utena is "Love kind of suck, friendship is a much more better an reliable and less painful kind of relationship."

That's in the TV series of course, not the movie.

I still think Touga is my favourite character though. He manages to be both completely despicable and very sympatethic at the same time.

Not using it at all (as in, just skipping to the scene where they're at the arena or whatever) could have probably knocked off two episodes worth of time or so. At least at some point the elevator scene got shorter.

I felt something more like "Blind love won't get you anywhere good, and friendship isn't as painful or unpredictable."

I thought it was, "Be who you are. Don't fall into the traps set by the prevailing social order of the day, and don't let anyone try to sell you a false dichotomy. You'll hurt yourself and others if you do. Don't be afraid to live."

I only saw those.

I might have missed something though since I was pretty much skipping every single...uh...girls behind the curtain thingy.

I assume you're referring to the last episode, when he appears riding the carousel? Well, what is real exactly? No, serious question. Is the duelling arena real? That impossible platform rising toward heaven on the spiral staircase, beneath the castle in the sky? Akio derides it as an illusion projected by his planetarium in the previous episode, but he's quite willing to walk out into the air to batter open a mystical door to power with a sword he pulled out of a thirteen-year-old girl. I think it's fair to say he might not have been entirely honest, with Utena or himself.

The entire show is a metaphor, an allegory, and it runs on dream logic. If you're going to try and seperate everything into nice, clean levels of reality you're going to be disappointed. Ditto, if you're looking for the plot rather than the characters or the themes. Narrative here is collateral damage.

Dios is there to be perfectly patronising and useless, so Utena can reject playing the prince in favour of saving her friend, and which side of the extremely fuzzy tangible/intangible line is pretty meaningless. But, for the sake of argument: Dios is there as firmly as he ever was. Dios-the-person is there in the form of Akio, and Dios-the-Prince is there in Utena's desire to be a prince (as he is whenever she enters the duelling arena)

Akio is Dios, with a few extra years and fallen from grace. The personality changes are a result of time and bitterness more than anything else, I think. See his first meeting with Utena, when he gives her the ring (latter half of ep. 34); he's already Akio by that point, but he's not yet acquired his patented smug, self-satisfied cynicism and manipulativeness. If I was inclined to treat them as seperate people, I'd say that rather than Akio being a darker part of Dios that took control of him, Dios was a higher part of Akio that was broken off and was lost. Akio is presented as a person, whereas Dios always feels more like a spirit or a principle.

Of course, I prefer to think of Dios as the personification of transcendance and Akio as his negation (or, The Prince and The End of the World) .

Dios is that which is eternal, that which shines; his power is the power of miracles- the power to revolutionise the world. He is that which is higher; in a word, transcendance.

Akio, on the other hand... allow me to quote Nietzsche:

Akio calls himself The End of the World- the end as in the limit of it. He believes he has reached the end of the world, and there is no higher place for him to ascend to. ("However, there is no place higher than this room. This room is the summit of Ohtori Academy. The summit of the world itself.") He no longer believes in transcendance, so he is left trying to reclaim his former glory.

It's similar to a cargo cult; he's attempting to trap the substance of the thing by aping the shape and the trappings of it, but he has no true understanding.

& &

In light of the above, I interpreted the message as, "You have three choices: grow, stagnate or decay- and two of those are bad choices.". A bildungsroman.

Well yes, but they had to fill the timeslot. Besides, the stock footage gave everything a very ritualistic feel, which helped to build up the tone of the thing. I don't think the symbolism would have had the as much of a sense of... heft to it if it hadn't been framed like that.

If you're forced to cut corners, I suppose it's clever to make it work for you.

is by far and away my favourite arc. It's got the best duel themes, the best little character studies, and the elevator ride with the backwards chrysalis and the thing on tables are two of the best (cleanest, most effective) tools the series used.

The Black Rose arc is my favorite part of the series, too.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the new DVD release, considering how expensive the old one is...

I'm talking about the Dios that gave her the ring. Considering that he referred to 'End of the World' as a separate person, I don't think it was the actual Akio. Akio may consider Dios a part of himself, so he considers any actions Dios takes as one taken by him.

As for the moral of the show, I interpreted it as 'holding on to your past will bring you suffering'. Akio was obsessed with regaining his lost power, Utena kept holding on to her youthful ideal of becoming a prince, and Mikage wanted everything to stay the same and be safe from loss. It works well with the idea that the series is an allegory for Mahayana Buddhism.

edited 27th Apr '11 12:09:38 PM by ElderAtropos

In the manga Anthy calls Dios and Akio separate people, and Akio's the one who corrects that impression by saying she's deluded and they're the same person. Frankly, I'm not inclined to listen to either of them; one of them's mad and the other's... well, actually, both of 'em are nuts.

Well, that's what WMG is for.

I'm off the same mind as the person above: Dios is Akio earlier on. Or a part of him. Before he... Lost his innocence? Grew up? Was traumatized? Hard to describe exactly what happened without making it sound either positive or negative. Dios is a part/identity of Akio that is no longer dominant.