#it was difficult to be a shiori apologist in 2005 but it is too easy in 2022. i am now a movie shiori apologist.

[docnoctem]

What do you think of movie Shiori and her motivations?

Hi! I've had a lot of evolving thoughts about movie Shiori over the years, and I hope you don't mind if I copy-paste a few of my own past thoughts about her here.

-I'd argue that Shiori in the movie is in some ways a representation of what a girl is left to be when the fairytale narrative they exist within has already filled the necessary roles with the other women in the story, and she is establishing (or desperately clinging to) an existence in the story through her actions. She isn't quite the maiden. She isn't quite the witch. She isn't the princess, even as she cares for the ghost of the prince, because the prince did not ultimately choose her. (Utena was once the maiden as an innocent child, but she denies a familiar past for a more honest future, casting off her chance to be the princess. Anthy is denied the title through Dios' relation to her more than her own standing, and through the cycle of abuse her blood begets, she becomes both princess and witch.) In an arguably more structured fairytale now, Movie Shiori is more closely related to the townspeople than she is her own character in the show.

-She knows the truth of that school and that world, but what's she going to do with it? Her prince is dead, and he died for another; even if she "makes Juri play the prince" as she claims, Shiori knows she's not the princess, and she isn't empowered or punished enough to be the witch. Shiori is something in the movie that exists, but it's a role the fairytale as we know it hasn't defined for her, and so she just moves through the confined world at a whim, neither rewarded nor stopped, she speaks to the shadows and lives among the dead and holds back the living. You could say she's just trying from every angle to affect this story-- or to play a part in this story that she knows is all a façade. I think that's an interesting aspect to her heightened selfishness and perhaps arrogance in the movie: why should she want it? She shouldn't. She should get to reject it and escape, she should get to leave for the outside, she should be the one who is bigger than her place in the world... but... why shouldn't she have a place in it to begin with?

-Not that dissimilar from Wakaba honestly, I think she's resentful of her place and her lack of "special" qualities in both continuities, but the movie just makes it more... well, more. It's just more. Shiori is a girl that was abandoned by the prince-- more than that, she's a girl who was touched (in the sense of being impacted by the prince, being close enough to change her life) but never loved by the prince, and that has set the foundation for who she can become in the rules of the story. That's not someone who gets to be the bride who breaks the chains of the dead prince's possession, nor the tragic victor who lets go of the chains of the prince's lost love. Her prince is dead, but he didn't die for her; she can be with him still as they are now, white sheets covering the room she shares with a phantom, and it isn't seen as a triumph. She's starting at the bottom of the tower, and the fairytale is taking place in the highest room, a room she'll never get to. And that just isn't fair.

-On her design: The movie really stepped it up in making Shiori seem more beautiful, but she lacked that immediate visual cue of demureness, which is kind of interesting in how much it calls attention to how simple but well-designed she already was. The series design has a clean, polite charm to it, but what stands out most is the reservedness in her styling and posture, and the sadness of her eyes. The show succeeds in this with all of the characters, but I really have to commend the expressiveness in Shiori's eyes, even (and especially) when that expression is one of resignation. Something I highly enjoy about Shiori's character is how it juxtaposes that timid outer appearance with something much harsher and much more destructive under it-- a very sharp bite of loathing and resentment directed toward herself and the people who make her most aware of herself. The movie makes her look feminine but not demure, reminding us that those aren't the same description.