#fun fact yellow roses represent jealousy iirc

[limoncats]

my mum grew this yellow rose

...Mary?

[palms-upturned]

Tell us about the rgu flower language stuff!! If u have the time

OH BOY DO I!!! THANK YOU ANON I WOULD LOVE TO ;_;

well there’s a whole lot of wonderful stuff in the show but i guess a great place to start would be the duelist colors!!

green roses don’t occur naturally (not the kind of roses you would picture, anyway) so they don’t have a strong association in floriography or hanakotoba as far as i know, but green is certainly a fitting color for saionji lol, mr green with envy…

miki’s blue rose doesn’t occur naturally either, but it’s taken on some pretty strong symbolic connotations due to attempts to breed them!! blue roses stand for love at first sight sometimes, but more importantly they stand for unattainable things, like the standards that miki holds women like anthy and (especially) kozue to. and interestingly, kozue’s hair is a much more purple shade than miki’s bright blue, and i think that’s because attempts to breed blue roses resulted often in new shades of purple. so kozue is the failed attempt to raise a prodigy and miki is the success 😔

juri’s orange rose represents an ambiguous love somewhere between a red rose (romance/passion) and a yellow rose (friendship). pretty self explanatory when it comes to this lesbian icon and what happened between her and shiori 😔 also makes it pretty hilarious that anthy keeps trying to offer juri an orange rose in episode seven sjsgsjdhdh [anthy voice] I know your gay

nanami’s yellow rose can represent friendship as mentioned, but also jealousy 😔 another one that’s pretty self explanatory, nanami is a very jealous person when it comes to touga and what he represents to her, without touga she’s “just another fly in the swarm,” so she challenges any threat that would make her question her place in the world with a yellow rose 😔😔😔

and then there’s touga and his red rose, which ofc stands for passion and romantic love. another one that’s pretty self explanatory for mr playboy, but becomes a bit sad and ironic by the end of the show when he starts to realize that the way he lives his life fucking sucks lol and that akio intentionally groomed him into such a pos that when he started to realize that he was actually being victimized, he had already burned all of his bridges and had no one else to turn to (except saionji, which is pretty dire 💀). in saionji’s words, mr red rose has never actually loved anyone and doesn’t realize it until he’s most in need of someone to love him enough in spite of everything to help him escape akio and this hell school

anthy and akio both have purple hair, and purple roses are associated w royalty, mystery, and magic, v fitting for them both. akio also duels with a purple rose in episode 38 iirc

utena duels with a white rose because white roses stand for ideals and devotion! and the ideal that she’s so devoted to is dios as her image of a prince. it’s really dios’s duel color and not hers, because…

in episode 12, when dueling touga to reclaim herself, utena wears a rose of her true color: pink! pink roses stand for trust… happiness… gratitude… you see pink roses often throughout the show, one of my fav examples being that anthy is framed by pink roses the first time utena sees her in episode one 🥺 and in episode two, there’s a vase of them in their shared room!! and ofc, in the finale, the door to eternity is overgrown with pink roses… and when anthy leaves in the final scene of the show, she’s wearing a pink outfit 🥺🥺🥺

anyway this all makes it p fun to rewatch the show and take note of what color the spinning rose frames are during certain scenes and what they’re telegraphing! the red rose during the cantarella scene when utena says “what a coincidence, i poisoned your tea” makes me lose my mind. she really said “oh yeah well im in love with you so there.”

also… this isn’t related to roses but an additional little flower language rant. but the fact that the series never uses forget me nots makes me lose it. they get their name from a german folk tale about a couple walking beside a river when the woman sees some pretty blue flowers on the bank and asks her lover to fetch them for her, but he ends up falling into the river and gets swept away, but tosses the flowers back to his lover and cries, “forget me not!” and with all the different iterations of the tale of the drowning boy in the river and the idea of memories/truths being warped by the narratives that society tells us, i CANNOT BELIEVE that the movie especially never used forget me nots 😭😭😭 it seriously makes me more frustrated than it should LMAO i gotta draw lots and lots of art of rgu characters with forget me nots just to make myself less mad

ANYWAY THANK YOU ANON FOR ENGAGING IN MY SPECIAL INTERESTS W ME IT HELPED ME PASS THE TIME WHILE WAITING FOR A RIDE HOME AND ALSO MADE ME HAPPY :] if you ever have questions abt flowers or other imagery in an utena scene… i got u