#i ... should probably go back and do some single-episode writeups but if so i'm skipping miki's. dumbass

[gurguliare]

Utena rewatch notes for eps 1-7, warnings for some (general) discussion of csa:

I’m going to spend some time here listing “things I always forget about Utena” in the faint hope that to do so will, in the long run, shorten the list. It won’t.

The fact that Miki and Utena are pals. Good buds. Gossip chums. I know about this intellectually but I forget how early it starts, and the fact that they seamlessly pick up where they left off after Miki a little bit tried to kill her. That’s not fair, of course. He a lot tried to make Anthy his property...? But look at him twiddling the parsley that’s so cute

The fact that Miki and NANAMI are pals even pre her formally inheriting everything Touga owns

How early it’s established that “eligible young woman expresses concern for ~damaged goods” is part of the script for assigning desirability and eligibility, and is in fact a prime site of matchmaking activity... Touga and Nanami’s split gaze on Utena and Anthy dancing at the party, and Miki going to tutor Anthy but bonding with Utena instead while Anthy zones out and animates an elephant in her workbook, and then Utena and Miki exchange half-worried, half-irritated looks about her trauma; it’s all so trivial at this stage, but still pretty hard to watch. 

^ corollary to the above: I think RGU as a show has a real mean streak in its heart reserved for “rape is not about sex, it’s about power” and similar rhetoric, in part because the sanctioned visibility of rape and sexual abuse, in a culture otherwise silent on the subject of sex, makes those things into powerful representational aids in the grooming and sexual “education” of minors. At first glance it’s strange to have a group of middle-schoolers who talk about romantic love in a distinct binary of, on the one hand, crushes and confessions, and on the other the servitude of the Rose Bride; but the reality is that designating rape as safely distinct from “real” adult sexuality--as a violent abstraction that doesn’t implicate even the perpetrator in anything as vulnerable or shameful as desire--is the best way to make rape and rape victims a conceptual magnet for repressed teenagers, and from placeholder fantasy it goes on to form an alienating pattern of expectation. It’s an excuse to talk about sex without ever saying or learning anything about sex, only defining what sex is not in ever-more stylized terms, and secretly imputing to that negative space all your frustrated doubts and curiosity. A child fed that euphemistic diet long enough will have a much harder time identifying coercive, nonviolent sex---or really sex with any grey area, any shadow of consent, pleasurable participation, interest---as rape. Especially a child who has a lot of social capital invested in distancing herself from victimhood, in part because she prides herself on helping and supporting her victimized friend. 

I have more I’d like to say about this but I’m not thinking super clearly at the moment. Better saved for later arcs, I guess. 

And one more bullet point for stuff I’d forgotten:

That absurdist uproar often gives way to normal, willful obtuseness before the scene limps to an end---presence of the fantastic in Utena isn’t a release valve because there’s never a moment where another child won’t turn to you and say, “too bad about your weak stomach, Nanami” after the screaming and the snails. No one really pulls their head out of their ass long enough to be amazed by the signal nonsense going on in the background; “surprise” on the part of anyone but the victim only exists in service of self-defense or self-justification, with everyone indifferently shrugging off blame as they wonder how so-and-so got themselves into such a strange situation. I mean, and obviously this is quite funny when it happens in the context of a giant octopus balloon, but. The culture of Ohtori as this really impermeable web of minimization and chosen ignorance, where the only hope of acknowledgment seems to come from abusers, is kind of the creation of the yawning filler episodes. 

The student council scenes are so great---funny, scathing, and (by the standards of early Utena) compulsively watchable. One thing about the first arc is that, almost more than anything subsequent, it kind of serves as training wheels for inhabiting Anthy’s POV... in that all these strutting proto-abusers with their tragic backstories and comic human foibles and fixations are in different ways rehearsals of the stories Anthy tells herself about Akio. He’s too weak to control himself, like Saionji. He’s too protective of her to treat her as a person, like Miki. He’s been betrayed too often, like Juri. The first arc is where these kids get to keep tight control of their own presentation, before the inconvenient backstory-survivors wander back onstage, and ironically that means they look a lot worse than they will when they have to interact with others on an equal playing field; because none of the student council kids are Akio, however much they would like to be. They’re children and haven’t done shit yet. But Anthy has to perform the miserable sleight-of-brain that is contemptuously distancing herself from these failures on the one hand, letting them hang themselves by any amount of rope, and, on the other, constantly pardoning and sympathizing with the person who has hurt her most---her biting perspective on the student council members is just grist for the world’s most devastating lapse in perspective, out of all proportion.