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does she know?

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Saionji and Anthy are the only characters who have each other's colors in opposite way. Green hair- purple eyes and purple hair- green eyes.

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So while this post is still going strong can I just also say we GOTTA talk about this.

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The first recap episode, episode 13: Tracing a Path, somewhat explains the point of the duels. The swords that Anthy pulls from the duelists are the swords of their souls / hearts. The duels are meant to test and refine the strength of these swords. The winner is whoever has the most pure / princelike sword.

It is implied Akio and Anthy have been following this cycle for centuries. The cycle goes:

1. Anthy entrances potential princes with the promise of eternity, miracles, revolution, etc.

2. The duelists compete in a series of duels until one comes out on top.

3. Akio either seduces that duelist into giving him their sword OR he straight up steals it in a duel.

4. Akio attempts to access Dios.

As far as what it is that Akio desired: on the surface, he believes he deserves to reclaim the prince's power that Anthy has locked away. Truthfully though, Akio doesn't want anything to change. He only wants the cycle to continue with him at the top. This is made clear with the imagery of the carousel in the final episodes, the ferris wheel in episode 33, and Anthy's final comment about Akio staying cozy where he is without her.

The plottwist of the story is that there is no power. It is truly an illusion maintained by Anthy in service of her brother. All that's hidden is Anthy's eternal pain and the coffin where she hides to cope with it. This is also why Utena's sword breaks. She has never wanted or sharpened her soul to access some eternal power, and her whole reason for even being there is to save Anthy. It's explained by the Black Rose Arc that the wielder of the sword must also be capable of using the heart of the person, but Utena has shut her heart to Akio. He never had a shot.

The door to eternity opens, not because of any powerful sword, but simply because Utena basically asks Anthy to open up to her and Anthy is finally convinced to trust Utena when Utena promises that "Someday, together, we'll shine."

At the end of the story, Akio notes that nothing has changed. Utena is gone and people are already forgetting her. Anthy gently corrects him and states that Utena is only gone from his world. Additionally, the series shows that even though they don't remember Utena, she has left her mark on everyone and they are primed to also leave behind Akio's world eventually.

The revolution that Utena caused was the revolution of convincing Anthy to reach out her hand to Utena. She gave Anthy a future to believe in outside of Akio's abusive world, and this gave Anthy the courage to walk away from her abuser.

In an interview, the director Ikuhara says something that has always stuck with me:

"I think my generation, as well as the younger generation, lacks imagination. You know that a great many students commit suicide. I think they're unable to imagine a happy future. To put it more bluntly, they look at their mothers and fathers, who should be motivating them for their future, and they can't imagine they will grow up to be happy. The grownups they communicate with are their parents, their teachers and the like. But looking at them, they can never be convinced that their future will be happy. I don't think that's because of their parents, but because of their lack of imagination."

The revolution Utena achieves is the revolution of helping Anthy and, by extension the rest of the cast, to imagine a future where they are happy.

I finished my RGU rewatch a couple of days ago and uhh can anyone explain to me what it was that Akio hoped to find behind that door exactly

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utena sketches!!!!

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Utena car <3

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Maybe the Prince was the lesbian love that bloomed between us along the way?

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No matter where you are, I'll find you for sure!

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Throwback to when she polished that guy's sword everyday but then it turned out to be Juri's like come on, girl

shiori is the funniest character to me because the fandom make her out to be this evil mastermind hurting Juri except that everything Shiori ever does backfires on HER so really all she ever does is screw herself over while Juri is in the background crying in showers instead of getting her shit together

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Shiori and Touga as ghosts and the absence of Nanami in Adolescence of Utena

Some questions I had when I first watched AoU were:

"What's up with Shiori and Touga?" "Why is Nanami absent?" and also "What the hell is That*?"

(*This thing. Alt text: small red crocodile like creature with a string coming from its belly)

In another post, I established that Touga is a ghost, and he's specifically been brought to Anthy's world by Utena who is mistakenly using him as the face of the trauma she's experienced failing to be a Prince and losing Anthy. There are lot of nods to this: the textual fact that he's a ghost, how he's dressed in black, and how he and Shiori exist in this strange space outside of Anthy's influence having conversations with Akio, another dead person. Through this line, we can pretty easily deduce that Shiori is a ghost as well: Juri's ghost.

Textually, in the movie, Shiori is strongly implied to be the girl Touga drowned saving.

This is an important callback to a story from the original series. In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Juri discusses how a boy drowned saving her sister but Juri forgot his name. Soon after Utena disappears from the world, everyone but Anthy forgets her as well even though the mark of how Utena has changed each of them remains.

Like Touga, Shiori is a ghost who has changed our protagonists but has not been called into the world.

This brings us to the questions: Why are Touga and Shiori dead? Why couldn't Anthy bring them into the perfect world she made for Utena?

Two possibilities: like Utena, they escaped or, we can take the movie at face value, they are dead.

I believe that Nanami escaped and that's why even her ghost isn't in the narrative. Anthy goes so far as to get one last silly jab in, but, Nanami is allowed to be free. Based off of that wild assumption I am making, I also believe Touga and Shiori did not escape and instead died.

So how did they die?

There are a few clues. Touga spends much of the movie speaking through the phone to Akio who we also know is dead. Meanwhile, at the very end of the movie, Shiori herself surprises everyone by becoming a car to stop Anthy from leaving her traumatic world behind. Finally, Shiori draws that weird little creature with the string coming from its belly on Touga's shoulder.

"If it cannot break its egg's shell, a chick will die without being born."

The string coming from the belly of the creature is an umbilical cord. It replaces Chu Chu who represented Anthy's true intention. Chu Chu is no longer necessary because we know Anthy's true intention: to live happily with Utena. However, tbis new creature represents a new unknown: the consequence of Anthy's desires. Looming over Utena and Anthy throughout the film is the threat of choosing not to break out into the real world and grow up and, as a result, dying before you're even born.

Utena struggles with suicidal thoughts and Touga manifests these in her. Her pursuit of him throughout the movie can be read as her pursuit of death in the scene where he invites her to join him as he drowns in the elevator.

Meanwhile, Anthy struggles with returning to the security of her trauma. Shiori is her foil in that Shiori has embraced it and, like Anthy once did in the series, is trapping others in this world due to her own pain.

This also explains what happened to Touga and Shiori. They have both embraced the system put into place by Akio and, as a result, have died without achieving revolution long before the events occurred in this movie. When she becomes a car, Shiori in particular demonstrates that she is capable of leaving behind this world, but instead chooses to drag others down with her, something very in line with how she was depicted in the series.

Touga and Shiori died before they could break the world's shell, but Wakaba, Juri, Miki, and Saionji are on their way out after Utena and Anthy.

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Now that I'm rewatching Utena, one thing I love about Anthy is that despite the submissive behavior she's forced to adopt she's really passive aggressive at times. I'm talking about when she looked at Saionji in the eyes smiling after he lost the duel and went "Cheer up, *classmate* 😊" to highlight he didn't own her anymore but I'm also talking about when she fed him magic curry that made him blow up

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I find the mention of Ganymede in Utena really interesting. I have a particular interest in Ganymede so it did really strike me when Akio not only compared Utena to him but almost victim blamed him in the process.

(These screenshots are sourced from aniwatchto.tv, so do lemme know if there's a better translation!)

This comes from Thorns of Death, wherein Utena is talking to Akio about how she'd tried to convince Juri to become friends with Shiori again. Without the context of Ganymede, that Utena presumably does not have, the comment seems innocuous enough, if an adult telling her off.

However, the myth of Ganymede makes this much more sinister. Ganymede is famously kidnapped and sexually abused by Zeus as his cupbearer for being a beautiful, young boy. In some tellings, Ganymede is made eternally young, and in some this is so Zeus can sexually abuse him forever.

It's very in character for Akio to pick on Ganymede's prized "innocence" as a comparison for Utena, and then to make it into an insult. In my head, aside from the immediate context of it, this is possibly in reference to her desire to become a prince. Her pretend princehood is "innocent" to him, childish, and "can hurt other people" in how it affects at least Anthy, or maybe how it damages the system he set up. In reference to Juri, this probably just means Utena's optimism and/or belief in friendship and forgiveness are naive.

It also sticks out to me that he doesn't just call her innocent, but chooses to compare her to Ganymede. It's a very good piece of foreshadowing for what he's planning to do for anyone familiar with the myth, but it also gives the impression that he's planned it. Like Ganymede, Utena is going to be whisked away to a high up place and abused by the patriarch within, and it seems that Akio already knows he's going to do that. It could be that he's done this before, or maybe he's just decided to do it to Utena.

I think this is a very well chosen comparison for him to make. He gets to put down Utena's innocence and optimism as a danger to others while laying his plans out in the open to a girl who would have no idea. It's just another example of his evil, and a really good and insidious one.

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By the end of the series, it becomes difficult to read when Anthy is acting as the Witch / Rose Bride to manipulate Utena and others, and when she is acting fully as herself with no thought given to manipulating others.

I personally read her suicide attempt as completely sincere and my main reasons for this are:

1. Anthy's hair is loose and down in this scene. Something which only occurs when she is her most vulnerable truest self.

2. Chu Chu is completely absent.

Regarding 1, @t4t-utenanthy has a brilliant analysis on hair colors + loose hair that I really enjoyed reading. The gist of it is that characters like Anthy and Akio are acting most truly to themselves / their perception of themselves when their hair is down. This can be observed in Adolescence of Utena as well when you pay attention to when Utena's hair is up or down.

Regarding 2, Chu Chu is something of Anthy's emotional support animal. He often reflects her moods and whimsies, and provides key insight into her true desires in a scene. Early in the Black Rose Arc, when Anthy is revealed to be regularly visiting her brother, it is emphasized multiple times that she leaves Chu Chu behind for these visits. I personally read this as Anthy's way of dissociating through these experiences. She even acknowledges in her confession that she tries to convince herself that the pain her body experiences won't affect her internally.

I really believe Anthy meant every word she said, and that she intended to kill herself that night due to the guilt and pain she felt over being the Rose Bride.

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That tiktok apple trend with utenanthy

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things are shaping up to be pretty odd :p