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batsplat · 2 months

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ok but what could be the motogp/casey stoner magical girl anime’s equivalent of rgu’s black rose arc……🤔

*cracks knuckles* okay admittedly I read this ask, had it jangle around in my brain for half a day and then read it back and realised I'd zeroed in on the 'casey stoner' side of the line and completely ignored the more general motogp prompt. since then I have had. some more thoughts. but they do come back to casey

so let's set out in proper scientific fashion and figure out what doing a black rose arc even MEANS. briefly summarising the arc, on the most literal level possible... it's the middle arc of the show, wherein characters proximal to the primary duellists get indoctrinated in a sham therapy session into fighting utena, a process symbolised by pinning black roses to their chests. she wins against all of them fairly comfortably in direct combat, managing to destroy the black rose and in doing so free the duellists. at the end of the arc, utena learns that the whole thing was orchestrated by mikage, a scholar frozen in time after burning down a lecture hall and killing the hundred boys within. he seeks to kill anthy, the rose bride, so that he can save his beloved mamiya by making him into the rose bride and achieving eternity. except his memories had been manipulated all along by the puppet masters of the whole show, anthy and akio, so that his memories of mamiya had been bastardised into what seems to be a version of anthy. mikage had been trapped in the school by false memories, has perhaps been dead all along, and had been used as a tool to bring utena closer to being able to achieve revolution. in the end, he too is discarded

which... okay, yeah, it's very hard to describe the show on a literal level, and I think in some ways the black rose arc is the one that's the most open to interpretation? icl it took me about three watches to really wrap my head around what on earth mikage's deal was supposed to be. which means you can also take the motogp crossover approach in several different ways... because of my own academic background, watching it the first time I kinda zeroed in on how the process by which the characters become black rose duellists is one of radicalisation/indoctrination into a cult. the process by which they are prepared to commit violence is built on humiliation, an experience where they want something and feel shame (or are made to feel shame) for wanting it. kanae is subjected to anthy's silently judgemental looks, keiko is made into a fool and an outcast by nanami, wakaba suffers a brutal rejection, and so on... it's not just that they have an enemy, somebody who treats them poorly - it's that a vulnerability is exposed that fundamentally threatens their self-esteem. it leaves them destabilised, unsure of themselves, with a fragile sense of self. when the characters go to seek guidance, they are quite literally being provided with a new sense of 'direction'. they are being guided towards finding purpose

the descending lift is a key part of the process, by forcing the characters to focus in on their negative emotions and let them consume them. the humiliation is strengthened, made more brutal - the voice instructs them to "go deeper" and bare more of their soul. they are expressing their vulnerability in front of a mirror that reflects their most twisted, painful desires back at them. subjected to the reflection of the negative emotions at the self... they are forced to make themselves weak in front of the voice, essentially debase themselves, and in doing so they strip away their own walls and barriers and mechanisms of self-defence. as the lift descends, so do they regress

the most obvious expression of this is the butterfly that becomes a cocoon (and then a leaf). utena is all about the process of becoming an adult, of achieving revolution as a metaphor for growing up, breaking the egg. but here, as an extension of anthy and akio's schemes, instead the characters are forced backwards in time. part of it is again this process of... well, ritually breaking down the characters, chipping away at their sense of self so that it can be reconstituted in a way that is useful to the order of the black rose. part of this is more generally about the show's themes of maturity and adulthood - the characters are being reduced, now governed only by their very worst impulses

it is at this lowest moment that mikage steps in to offer the characters their only solution. the only answer they have to somehow bring meaning back to their lives. all they have left to reclaim some kind of sense of self is to embrace mikage's vision of revolution. so you have a personal experience of humiliation, you have the character being guided towards a figure of authority who is supposedly able to help those in that kind of situation, you have a 'gradual' process stemming from externalised pressure to make the character focus only on their negative emotions, and eventually you have said figure of authority providing the character with the 'only' way out of the emotional turmoil and insecurity they are feeling. this route eventually leads to complete suppression of the self in the name of the cause and also... well, acts of violence. staircase model, my old friend! or if the staircase were a descending lift, I suppose

you may be wondering how I can possibly make this relevant to motogp and, well, *cracks knuckles again for good measure* let's see how this goes. I'm not going to make some big spiel about how becoming a rider (yes, even a vr46 one) is a comparable process of indoctrination or any of that. (there's some very broad comparisons, like how riders cannot choose to be assimilated into this strange and dangerous system but are instead sucked into it as children, following dreams that have been handed down to them by others... but I'm mostly gonna stay clear of that stuff.) what I'm more interested in is... hm, the emotional management aspect of sports, how delicate it is in what it requires of athletes. the eternal question of motivation, how you can bring yourself to put yourself out there and compete again and again - despite the eternal possibility of failure and, yes, humiliation. from here

'the challenge of managing vulnerability' is the key bit. on a very, very basic level, the process of growing up is about managing vulnerability, being able to manage your own emotions... there's a similarity between ohtori academy and the paddock in that they are both sheltered, closed off environments that send its young through unnatural, almost twisted approximations of growing up. their emotions are evoked by artificial scenarios, by competitions that aren't 'real' in the sense they aren't provoked by any naturally existing scarcity - but are instead elaborately designed shows designed to test its participants and, yes, reveal something of them. sports as a pure measure of human achievement is fundamentally hollow; it is only provided meaning by the ridiculously heightened emotions that are evoked by it. the characters transition into their new roles of duellists in a moment of vulnerability and it is only in this raw, unguarded state that they are able to fight

there's also another bit from a post I ended up not publishing in an exciting moment of self-awareness where I went, 'you know what, nobody cares about this', but it still exists in unedited form in my google doc. here (the post was about mozart + salieri, hence the references to music):

the idea here is basically that it's actually incredibly tricky to manage the exact right amount of self-awareness you should have as an athlete - and the emotions that come with it. you need to reveal yourself, to make yourself vulnerable, to be able to compete to your fullest extent. you need to debase yourself in front of a crowd, to accept the possibility of not just defeat but of humiliation, of the embarrassment of losing and how degrading that experience is. now, to stop yourself from actually going insane, everyone will need some kind of explanatory framework in their own head to process defeat. some of these narratives will by necessity rely on our good old friend delusion. young athletes cycle through victory upon victory and defeat upon defeat, often in ways seemingly inexplicable to themselves, which means their self confidence is fluctuating like a yo-yo on acid from generational levels of cockiness to the darkest self-loathing imaginable. some level of baseline self-belief, of thinking you will 'make it' despite all the odds being extremely not in your favour, is really kind of key to the process

the problem, of course, is that... so narrow is the emotional window that provides the ideal performance potential that it makes managing this window both crucial and horrifically difficult. maybe you can perform better when you're angry - or maybe you'll crash. or maybe you'll make a fatal error of judgement. you need hubris, but not too much. calm without passivity or complacency. joy might be the enemy of concentration. shame can motivate or it can make you retreat. your rival can spur you to action or paralyse you in your own inadequacy. and at the core, again and again, lies the concept of vulnerability. the moment you step into the arena, it is with the knowledge that it is possible for you to lose. competition is a moment of exposure, of revelation, of truth. this day may end in the gravel trap. you may humiliate yourself. you do it anyway - and to do so you need purpose, and to make sense of the defeats you need more purpose

plugging the autobiography passage again:

such a good passage, isn't it? to bring it back to the black rose arc... 'analogy' in the loosest of senses - you have moments of 'truth' in different forms. you have the truth found at the bottom of the lift, where the characters reveal their most painful insecurities - but it's fundamentally not a very balanced truth, is it, focused on the purely negative and self-loathing. they don't go out to duel in the name of passion, they are not duellists in the same way juri with her love for fencing is - which you can see from how they need to essentially steal the style of 'their' duellist to fight utena. there's no positive affect there. it's a power gained through vulnerability, yes, but one that is fundamentally self-destructive and exists in an ultimately fragile state of crisis. utena can free the duellists from their roles simply by cutting the rose; the student council members don't stop being duellists just because their roses are cut because this is something they care about for themselves. you can't be completely reliant on others to provide you with purpose in sports - some of it is going to have to come from some internal urge to compete, to win. no parental determination, desire, at times abuse can create an athlete out of nothing if their child is fundamentally unwilling (as ever, agassi's autobiography is very interesting about this). so while end of the world, in all the malevolence and abuse, may proffer a path towards meaning, towards revolution, to the student council members - it would be entirely useless if they did not still have 'hope in their hearts'. desire. the will to win. utena is able to defeat the black rose duellists with relative ease... she might not have entirely selfless motives, but her desire to protect anthy still stands up as being far more robust than a mere desire to lash out in response to humiliation. she wants to be anthy's prince, she wants to live up to this role - and in the end it means she will always be able to dig deeper than the black rose duellists

there's a few other ways we can torture this metaphor, while we're at it. "deeper, go deeper" is a phrase that to me is... very sports-coded, I talked about it in the mind games post I linked - going to the 'dark places' within yourself to win. to find release through the suffering, some form of revelation, reaching some kind of imaginary 'zone', to be able to perform at the highest level. only then can you achieve revolution... eternity, if you will. it's the performances where athletes dig the deepest that immortalise them, after all. but then, for all this talk of balance and some need for positive affect, of course there is a lot of negativity that feeds into the motivational process. the motogp twitter account posted a video today a few days ago by the time I actually post this... of our dear two time defending champion talking about how he primarily uses criticism to motivate himself

there's something ever so slightly comical about pecco talking about how, sure, he'd like to live by his 'go free' phrase and the associated ethos of just enjoying himself out there... but actually, he doesn't motivate himself through all that fun stuff at all. instead, he makes use of *checks notes*

reading something bad about himself

being told something bad about himself

making mistakes

when someone attempts to hit him in the mental side

well, that's nice! welcome back, casey stoner

am I saying pecco is going down the black rose arc lift to motivate himself? well, maybe I am. who's to say. a little bit!

you're getting yourself into the ideal performance window by basically... deliberately exposing yourself to criticisms, to degradation of the self, to the suffering of embarrassment and humiliation, dwelling on your mistakes, on those who do not believe you are adequate (or 'special', as in the black rose arc)... and, well, obviously I'm not saying the lift descent is a particularly healthy process... I'm admittedly a bit wary of the welfare implications of the sports equivalent. I actually had a long conversation last week before last about what essentially amounts to forms of digital self harm, this phenomenon of stars seeking out their 'haters', both within sports and other public fields... and, idk. there's 'being motivated by your rival being a dick about you' normal levels of spite and 'constantly subjecting yourself to what your cruellest detractors think of you' levels that seem distinctly unhealthy to me. without more context, you'd kinda hope pecco's sticking closer to the former type than the latter. casey also was a very spite-motivated athlete, perhaps somewhat in contrary to his assertion that he never got obsessed with rivals and didn't care who he beat. you see it with his whole 'ooh beating a spaniard at their home circuit' schtick, you see it with his 'yamaha rejected me so I'll show them' thing, quite frankly even his 'ah well mind games actually backfire because they motivate the other party more!!' line. he was constantly trying to prove a point to someone.... but was also extremely prone to self-criticism, to putting himself down, to being so perfectionist that it tipped over to being terrified of failing and crucifying himself for any mistakes. some of these things will have contributed to making him as good as he was - the same traits that tortured him also were what drove him to seeking perfection. sometimes, these roles of 'duellist' and 'athlete' may demand a fundamentally unhealthy emotional balance to excel at them

there's also something in how.... hm, mikage wanting to kill the rose bride so he can control eternity. the concept of 'eternity' is also big in sports, both in wanting to secure a legacy and wishing to preserve an un-preservable youth. inevitably, you will be replaced, they will move on from you, you cannot compete forever... mikage is frozen in time - and more than that, time is distorted in the ohtori academy. only a few like mikki even appear to notice it, constantly measuring it with his stopwatch as it continues to fluctuate around him. the uncertain nature of time is impossible to separate from how insular the academy is, from how it is cut off from the outside world, from how all point of reference is lost. sports does a similar thing in many ways, with the insularity heightening the stakes of this conflict, the occupants of that space living to different rhythms than the rest of the world.... the cycles of life and death, how rushed everything is, a youth that has to be captured and bottled before it slips out of your grasp, the calendar of races, of a travelling circus that touches the places it visits without belonging to it... valentino stretched out his career, even beyond a time when he was no longer competitive, due to his love for racing, his passion for it - a state of arrested youth, how he's been given the moniker of peter pan to go along with his own little band of lost boys. right at the opposite end lies casey, who achieved the truest 'revolution' early by leaving the cycle entirely, choosing to forsake this world that had constituted all that was of meaning to him - rebuking those who said he was wasting years of his prime, of the precious youth he still had one hand on, by stepping away. even though casey too had been striving for something unachievable.... the key thing about the 'revolution' is that it is something false, a mirage like the castle hanging over the arena, an ideal to be fought for without ever being attained. for casey, it was a quest for perfection that tormented him - so impossible is it for athletes to accept their own fallibility, their flaws. it can never be reached, because it is not an end point in and of itself. there is no definitive revolution that can be arrived at, no place of satisfaction, no easy way in which the power to revolutionise the world is granted to the duellists. all that remains is the process of working towards that revolution - that, in the end, is the only thing truly eternal

so, what does that process look like? you prepare yourself for the duel, you motivate yourself - either through positive or negative affect. athletes all lust after victory or fear defeat or both. utena ascends the staircase while the black rose duellists descend with the lift. for her, this also functions as a process of preparation, a repetitive yet effective way of bringing herself into the right mindset for the battle ahead and definitely not a way of saving animation costs

to me, it's key that those are stairs, and that there's a silly number of them. the black rose duellists are prepared swiftly, easily, with little effort from their part beyond the own horror of their emotions. they are not trained duellists and merely temporarily assume the mantle. utena has to work to even get to the arena - she has to put in an unreasonable amount of work, if anything. the demands to even be allowed to fight, to compete, are beyond what could be expected of anyone - and yet she willingly puts herself through it, because she wishes to fulfil an ideal she has been taught. the great athlete, the legend, the prince... it might work, she obviously does become an excellent duellist, for at least some of the time, she does manage to protect anthy.... but it's still one of the absurdities the academy is imposing on her, breaking her down as she no longer questions the surrealism of he world around her. she climbs the stairs because that is her role - and she readies herself for the battle she has been assigned

eventually, utena is allowed to both ascend and descend using a lift. now, listen, if you really want to get left field with this, you COULD say that her being allowed to ascend the lift rather than climb the stairs is... her no longer needing quite such an intricate method to emotionally prepare herself for the duel. she's integrated into the system now! she's an experienced duellist! she can get herself hyped for battle in a lift! but it's also a privilege she is being granted by the powers that be within the academy, which reserve the right to bestow meaning onto her, to single-handedly decide how worthy she is. and then, in the penultimate episode, the lift returns as akio attempts to break down utena. now utena is the subject, the patient, the one to be indoctrinated. she is invited to see herself as the princess akio wants her to be. she ends up re-embracing the ideal of prince (temporarily until anthy stabs her)... because that's what her power comes from. she'd never be able to find strength in the process of extreme self-degradation and exposing of one's own insecurities embodied by the descending lift. she needs to fight for positive reasons! some people are just like that, apparently

anyway, my pitch for how you'd black rose arc a specific period of casey's career... I reckon it's 2006, his rookie season in motogp at lcr honda. a seat that he'd had to scramble for, rejected by yamaha and not exactly high on options. he'd just finished second in 250cc to dani (if on inferior machinery) and was like.... well, he was definitely highly rated in the paddock, but perhaps didn't have the reputation of being particularly easy to work with. it's this version of casey:

as ever, casey was fast pretty much from the get-go. he had a very strong debut in jerez, exploiting a gap at the first corner after toni elias barrelled into valentino and finishing sixth. at the second race, after having been severely ill the week before, he rocked up like fifteen minutes before practise due to flight delays and ended up popping his bike on pole. that's also the race in which he had his very first battle with valentino, who came up to him to do the grabby hands thing on the cooldown lap. at the third race, casey came painfully close to winning - but scored his first podium of his premier class career

(side note, there is something amusing to how casey was yapping about valentino's disgusting yellow tainting the ducati when he's draping that australian flag of his absolutely everywhere he can, even in his rookie season. has someone maybe spent a little long away from home and feels the need to strengthen his own sense of self by plastering that thing on every available surface?)

anyhow - after that third race, casey's season went downhill. he crashed frequently enough to bag him the nickname of 'rolling stoner'

Like I had done my whole life I kept pushing and, of course, I kept crashing and I got slammed for it in the paddock and in the press, earning myself the nickname 'Rolling Stoner', which really bugged me. The pressure began to build as people questioned my talent and Ramon started to suggest that I was crashing because I wasn't physically fit enough. I knew this couldn't be the only solution, but l couldn't work out why I kept crashing. As a rookie I wasn't to know any better but people around me with experience should have helped me to understand the tyre issue. I would come in after a race saying, 'I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't make a mistake. I would know if I had.' But they would say, 'Well, you must have done because you crashed.' All the blame went to me and with everybody telling me it was my fault, I started to believe it. Ramon is a very good crew chief, extremely skilled at setting up a motorcycle, but I wish he'd listened to me a little more.

humiliation!! embarrassment!! others seeding uncertainty in him... being at the mercy of figures of authority who are giving him false guidance, but who he has to blindly follow. feeling unheard, beginning to believe what everyone says about him

he also had just a little bit of a temper back then, perhaps not completely familiar with the working process of top teams. but the crashes were not entirely his fault - they were (according to him) down to michelin seeing his potential but also exploiting his lack of status in the sport to essentially use him as a guinea pig for their new tyres. back then, this was how tyre suppliers handled things, and the whole thing was laughably uneven and unfair. whereas some riders like valentino were so successful and so influential they could generally lay claim to the best tyres (apparently with the exception of the actual title decider), others were at the mercy of the whims of michelin

Michelin had started to realise that I could do the lap times, especially on used rubber, so they started using me as a guinea pig. They would put me on a certain set of tyres for free practice and I would be happy as anything, right on the pace. Then on race day they'd say, 'You can't use that tyre.' They'd insist on us using a different tyre and then we'd find out on the grid that Dani or Nicky or somebody else was on the tyre I was planning to race on. Contractually we were obliged to use whatever tyre they decided on. [...] I kept pushing because I trusted them but there was some massive crashes which I thought were caused by the tyre combinations I was given at the last minute. [...] I started feeling like a crash test dummy and as the season progressed the situation got worse, to the point where I'd get angry and go off. I got a reputation as a spoilt brat. I am not making excuses but I was frustrated. Dad would come over to Europe to try to settle things down but the fact was I felt the tyres were causing me to crash. My confidence also took a hit and it took me back to the doubts I had in my first season of Grand Prix in 2002. I started to question myself a lot. Was it me or the bike? After a while I couldn't be sure. It was my debut season in MotoGP and I really didn't know what I was capable of. I'd proved I was competitive but the race results weren't showing what I could do. It started to mess with my head and unfortunately it seemed that my crew chief Ramon Forcada didn't have a lot of faith in what I was capable of either.

not only was this harmful for casey's reputation - it was also terrible for his confidence. as the autobiography passages describe, he wasn't getting good guidance about how to make the tyres work for him and inevitably the frequent missteps worked to erode his self-belief. after all, how could he know whether it was his fault or the fault of the bike? he told the team and the press these weren't his mistakes, but he wasn't believed... the paddock rejecting that he was to be taken seriously, enforcing a regression from the new 'adulthood' he had been granted by way of entering the premier class, but was illusory... which is where we get to the black rose element. it's repeated instances of humiliation - because there is something inherently humiliating to crashing. getting a nickname that makes it the thing people most closely associate with him. sinking into his own negative emotions, lashing out in anger at his own team, feeling the sting of embarrassment as well as frustration and self-doubt... and then, towards the end of the season, once again yamaha first seems to offer him a deal before changing its mind. another pattern he can't seem to break. casey has had plenty of self-belief in the past, not just dreaming of a title but believing he was capable of it - to the extent that he attempted to get to the premier class as quickly as possible, because he believed those were the titles that really counted. that's what he's here for... but what if it was all delusion all along, finally meeting reality?

which, yeah - it's those elements that make it very black rose-y to me. it's almost like... a touch of infantilisation, of refusing to take him at his word... he trusts these more experienced adults - in the same autobiography section, he talks about learning not to trust people just because they had a lot of experience. constantly choosing or being forced to listen to these guys who aren't giving him good advice, who don't have his best interests at heart, who don't have faith in him... and it chips away at him, it makes him angry and frustrated and will inevitably have contributed to some of the turmoil of his rookie season. he's being returned to the 2002 version of himself, a newbie in grand prix racing who didn't know what he was doing - and he doesn't know if he has a future in the sport. he wants to believe in himself, but maybe he can't. and it's just... creating this foundation of negative emotion that he would continue to use for the rest of his career to draw motivation from. the insults, the criticisms, the doubters, the haters... yamaha once again closing their doors before opening it a year later to some other young rider whose name escapes me. humiliation turned into a source of motivation. and once the process is complete, he emerges as the primary challenger of the champion (yes, yes, not literally, but vibes-wise obviously still THE big name at the time) in the following season

in the end, ducati gave him the call - he wasn't the first option, but he'd do. utena functions partly as a deconstruction of the type of story in which the ordinary wakaba would be the protagonist (ordinary girl romance protagonist surrounded by larger than life characters)... and the wakaba-centric episodes have akio posit that there are fundamentally 'special' people in the world and all those who can only hope to be special for brief, rare moments. in the meta-narrative of a show like utena, of course that is true, where some people have added significance by dint of being main characters in a story. in sports, too, there may be an unfortunate truth to it - an inevitability to the hand each athlete has been dealt. even if casey was publicly flayed and humiliated and figuratively descended the lift, like utena he was fundamentally still one of those 'special' people, whose natural talent meant none of his confidence was unearned. at ducati, he swiftly showed how he had been judged far too soon by the paddock. unlike the black rose duellists, he successfully challenges the champion. unlike the black rose duellists, he could never have been swiftly stripped of his status as duellist - even if there might be the occasional princess who attempts to trip him up and torment him. still, the bedrock of his determination in 2007, the steel that led him to a title, was ultimately established the year before. he was going to prove yamaha wrong for hanging him out to dry; he was going to prove the paddock wrong for ever doubting him. yes, the passion for winning is undeniable - but so is the spite. in seeking to achieve perfection, he found his motivation for the fight in his own way. and eventually, he would be granted the power to humiliate others... before eventually breaking free of this small world entirely

#something funny about how valentino accidentally raised a mini casey #neurotic spite-riddled wary of drama introvert..... where did it all go wrong. how did this happen #anyway don't you have to climb the stairs or descend with the lift every time you compete... does this even make sense #not to shock anyone here but I was always a descending lift kinda player. wanted spectators to be on the opponent's side. annoying child #//#brr brr #spec tag #batsplat responds #heretic tag #if a tumblr post can have a troubled publishing history this one does #i wrote it mostly on my commute but was like. super sleep deprived. so let it lie for a couple of days. scheduled it as per #and then realised?? it hadn't posted?? and it was just GONE. and like an idiot I hadn't backed it up. icl I was ready to end it #so I'd made a few bullet points from memory but was extremely not feeling it... this has happened to me before which makes it even dumber #but THEN I figured out the post still existed in the mass post editor drafts section. like a lil ghost. which?? what help is that #I tried a fix I'd read about by adding and removing tags. nothing. if you follow the link to the post obviously there's nothing there #BUT you get the number of the post. and if you combine that with the url you'd use to edit a post... presto there it was #ready to be backed up and scheduled anew. anyway if anyone has THAT particular problem. hopefully that should fix it #quite possibly the dumbest spiral I ever had over breakfast cereals #anyway i will make a tag for this family of posts at some point. i do enjoy turning them over in my head

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