#honestly? call me a guy who has only seen rgu BUT

[heartslobbf]

mattson being like i want to fuck your wife so i wont make her us ceo. but i will make you us ceo because you put the baby in the baby lady (and also because tom is a shit-gobbling dick-sucking empty suit). likeeeeeeee. there's so much here and im not normal about any of it

[alullinchaos]

a rant essay on mamiya/anthy/akio

mandatory spoiler warning for the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena, at the very least up through Episode 23, but honestly for the entire series

anyways. this is not a premeditated rant but it's something I haven't really seen anyone comment on before (and as an avid consumer of analyses/essays on RGU, that's saying something). throughout the black rose arc, we see anthy-as-mamiya several times. what I find interesting is, funnily enough, the hair color. hair color is something very important in utena, because no two characters really have the same color. shiori's purple and anthy's purple and akio's purple are all distinctly different shades. same as how miki and kozue, twins, have different shades of blue (i would even personally call kozue's hair indigo, not blue). even within the black rose arc, mikage and utena are different shades of pink. the only two important characters to share an exact hair color are akio and anthy's mamiya. one could claim that it's because akio and anthy are related, but their hair colors differ much more in reality, and anthy's mamiya is supposed to be a disguise. so, what gives?

my personal interpretation is that it's meant to be demeaning. anthy is pretending to be a boy, but in comparison to akio, she's small. a child. if you compare anthy's mamiya to dios, the hair is remarkably similar. dios was a weak child who overexpended himself trying to do what he couldn't- in this situation, because mamiya was terminally ill, that thing is live. anthy can't do that either, so of course she can play the role of someone in constant pain! she's being stabbed by swords!

it's not just a way of portraying akio seeing anthy as inferior to himself, though (hello, misogynists saying for years that women are just Missing what men have). it also reveals something about akio that isn't often talked about, I think. if anthy!mamiya's hair is meant to portray a connection to akio/dios, and mamiya is an illusion, then what does that say about akio?

let me put it another way: I did mention that "the hair is remarkably similar between anthy's mamiya and dios" but I meant the style. the thing I left out in my hair color match up is that if anthy!mamiya's hair matches akio's, it must also match dios. i know that's a "no shit, sherlock" moment because dios and akio are the same person but if anthy's mamiya and dios are incredibly similar, then they must also share that with akio. akio is portrayed as the opposite of dios; dios was the perfect prince, and akio is merely playing at it. akio is a horrible person, there's no doubt about that. but if dios was an illusion- something unreal, unsustainable, something fake- and mamiya was the same- then akio must be too. akio himself is an illusion. the planetarium projects the castle into the sky, and whatever the adult dios actually looks like, that's who's projecting akio. anthy did successfully save him, that's how he could continue to have so much power. but he's locked away in his coffin, and we don't even know what he looks like. tl;dr anthy pretending to be mamiya can be interpreted to mean that akio isn't real in a sense either i mean, seriously, who names themselves after Lucifer casually? it kind of has the same energy as Nick from Zootopia- "If I can't be the good guy, I'll be the worst guy you've ever seen. I'll be what you're telling me I am." naturally, Nick from Zootopia has some moral fiber, and it's questionable whether Dios ever had any, but that's a question for another day. what I mean is to say that Akio being like That is just his centuries-long maladaptive coping mechanism. unfortunately for him, he's not in a position where anyone would want to save him and brush off the heap of shit to find what would amount to, at best, a shitty mall "gemstone" underneath. could we have known/assumed some of this from the rest of the show? yes, we could have. i mostly find this so interesting because the distinction between the real person (character) in the coffin and the shell walking around the academy aren't often differentiated. i think the difference matters, and that it applies to everyone, even akio. I emphasize that I don't think Akio is a good person. I don't even know if I'd consider him redeemable, because Anthy's salvation comes in that he was tugging her strings to make her do awful things and put victims in his path. Then again, no character in Utena is really innocent. 🤷‍♀️ also I apologize if this is completely nonsensical! if anyone else has talked about the parallels between mamiya & dios, or this entire subject, I'd love to know

[empty-movement]

Hey give us money plz

Okay SKU fans, here’s the deal--

Gio and I desperately want to spend $300 - $400 on the Japanese blu-ray release. Why? 

BECAUSE WE WILL THEN BE ABLE TO RIP THE MUSICAL.

THERE’S SOME SORT OF HOUR LONG THING WITH THE MUSICAL AND MAYBE THE SECOND AND THIRD? WE DON’T KNOW???

Unfortunately, because this is the year of sweet merch, we already flattened our wallets getting other stuff, so we don’t have the cash to do this. So I’m proposing a deal here-- help chip in, and we will make sure that the musical and anything else exclusive to the Japanese release that’s never going to show up on this side of the ocean gets mysteriously scanned, ripped, etc ad nauseam and just happens to get passed around the net here to literally anyone who wants it. As of right now, that means the musical plus that sweet copy of the back view of Utena and Anthy’s faceless red and black pics (you know, the one where they are holding hands?? <3 ). There are also images of the series characters drawn by Saito in the box art, and apparently some new exclusive art; there’s a gigantic book coming with it. There might be more. We don’t know. We won’t know until we get our damn hands on it, is the problem!

So what we are proposing is this-- donate cash to us at emptymovement@gmail.com, and we will buy the thing. You know we aren’t going anywhere, plenty of you know us in person and even have our phone numbers and address, you know you can trust us, and... well 

hell, you’ve seen what we’ve done with all the art books we got, right?

We ripped them up for you, so you could have good copies to look at and edit and do whatever you want with.

Now, we realize that this is enough incentive for some of you, and that’s really freakin awesome. You know who you are, and I love you for it. But honestly... we have some unwrecked stuff just lying around here too. We don’t look at this stuff or use it at all, it just sits in our cupboard. So we figure, hell, why not give some stuff away too?

So basically, we will send one of these pieces to the first person who requests it (email: yasha@ohtori.nu) and donates (paypal at emptymovement@gmail.com) at or above the specified price (which is roughly average market price plus about tenbux for shipping, keeping in mind we’re in Canada). Oh yeah and all of this stuff is in pretty good condition but not much of it is in perfect condition-- we’ll be happy to provide pics to anyone interested, I just want to get this up where people will see it. Miki UFO Catcher doll - $60

RGU Software Sculptors release t-shirt - we don’t know what size it is, it’s never been opened. We can open it if there’s demand but the price won’t change. It’s got the Touga/Little Utena/Saionji art on it - $60

Shitajiki/Pencil Board with movie promo art - $30 - Dibs has been called and money has been sent, I will take this off the list as soon as I have all the info I need.

This is Animation Artbook - $50 - Someone’s called dibs, but nothing is final yet.

Japanese Manga (Series) - $45 - Someone’s called dibs on this, but nothing is final yet.

Japanese Movie Manga - $15

SPG chibi keychain - $12 - Dibs has been called and money has been sent, this will be taken off the list as soon as we’ve got all the info we need

Mikage chibi Keychain - $12

Chu-Chu chibi keychain - $12

File folder from the 15th (??) anniversary art exhibition, drawn by Akemi Hayashi - $25 -  Dibs has been called and money has been sent, I will take this off the list as soon as I have all the info I need.

Doujinshi (all of these are already scanned and in the gallery, these are the duplicates we had and they are in good condition):

Rose Garden - $25

Kakumei Kettou - $35

Pluie de meteores - $10

That one with snotty-nosed weirdface Chu-Chu on the back - $10

Utena no Drug - $10

And now, last but not least,

if anyone gives us $50 or more and doesn’t want any of the other things, we will totally decant 2ml of either the Anthy or the Utena perfume and send it to you

This is not a “buying” thing. This is a “thank you” thing. We don’t want to give away too much of the perfume, because we did buy it for ourselves, but it’s also not fair that most people aren’t going to be able to get their hands on it.  So it’s going to be limited quantity, probably a max of 10ml per bottle. It’s not a heck of a lot of perfume, but 2ml is a usable amount, and we figure it’s probably the nicest way we have of saying thank you for a bigger donation. We’re going to find a way to make the teeny little bottles pretty, too.

(As for the perfume itself, if anyone wants to know what happened/is happening there I can post about it later. We might not be able to get the Akio perfume at all...)

So yeah, there you have it. And, should we happen to go over our goal amount, the money (paypal at emptymovement@gmail.com) would be used for the domain name plus the site hosting, and to finance even more SKU stuff to buy so we can put it online. We’ve spent hundreds this year already on such content, because really now

really

do you really think we’re ever going to stop?

Spoilers: 

NO

okay thanks a bunch for reading, you guys. If you want to send us cash for the japanese bluray release, you can paypal us at emptymovement@gmail.com. Please make sure to email me at yasha@ohtori.nu if you want us to send you one of the things (and mention it in the Paypal comments). I will post pics for anything people wish to see; for the most part, it is your bog-standard SKU merch in relatively good condition, with maybe a bent corner or something.

Edited to add:  hey guys I didn’t stress this enough but seriously any little bit helps, we know that a lot of people are financially rough, hell we wouldn’t be doing this if we were 100% great that way either, so if you can only pitch in five bucks please remember that makes a big difference too <3