Stucco & Vines

“There’s a movie on TV. Four boys are walking on railroad tracks. 

-Nanami tells the audience to cheer louder after her number and refuses to leave the stage until she gets a full on standing ovation

-Miki panics when Utena comes into the room while he’s talking to Anthy so he tries to blend into the background by doing a russian step dance

-Wakaba Anthy and Utena sing little musical numbers together about being besties

-there are two songs and a mini arc dedicated to the cowbell.

-Anthys murder attempt on Saionji is cut, but in its place he starts making a total fool of himself and she is desperately trying to hold in her laughter the entire time and it’s honestly very delightful.

-The subtitles have Saionji calling Touga a motherfucker

-Okay no more funny stuff, did you know Shiori at the end of her duel asks Juri that if miracles aren’t real what was their meeting? I’m gonna think about that for years.

-Also when Wakaba gets the black rose impaled into her chest she screams the longest while Saionji goes back to his routine. Hey. Hey now.

-Wakaba also duets with Nanami during the second cowbell song.

-Touga says he wants to ‘capture all the things I cherish and keep them in (the rose brides) garden’ and then puts an arm around Utena he’s so sleazy I hate him.

-Wakaba reads a book after her love letter gets posted where after the heroine loses in love she finds another prince and lives happily ever after… then jumps on Utena.

Nanami must have felt like a cruel joke. Like watching a mockery of herself that happened to be a living, breathing, profoundly naïve girl. Anthy watches Nanami make all of her own old mistakes. Anthy watches her pose in caricatures of her own movements. It is a brutal reminder. “This is where I came from? This is what I was once like?”

I cannot say for certain wether it is true or not but i do lean on believing it as it can add another layer of depth to both her character and the whole storyline. In the post i will be discussing it as though it is true.

First off we know the duels have been going on for a very long time and i don’t remember exactly why i arrived at the conclusion cause i wrote a semi essay about it years ago but from the black rose saga i started believing that for a very long time the duelists or at least the winners of the cycles were male. Kanae being 18, 4 years older than Utena makes me think that maybe she was the first girl to ever win the cycle. We know Akio is set in his beliefs in gender roles but i do think his encounted with utena as a child might have made him consider that even a girl can get up to that point, while still maintaining her rolse as a princess.

Her winning the duels and not remembering is completely believable as we know time and memory work in funny ways in Ohtori. It would also explain why Akio is so certain in manipulating Utena through a romantic relationship, he’s done this before, he’s influenced the duels before. It’s also why he was so certain that Utena would accept her role as a princess and why he was so taken aback from Utena refusing and continuing to fight for Anthy’s freedom. Someone else accepted the role before her and that was Kanae.

With Kanae being a former duelist it also adds a layer to her duel, the sword she used was her own. While all the other had an extra motive, an extra strength (or weakness) to their duels, she is only fighting for herself as her own identity, an identity that might have been lost when she previously surrendered to her princess role.

Also If the theory is true, Kanae’s fate becomes a lot more detrimental to the show, as i said in my previous post, she does not only suffer the rola and the fate of the rose bride ultimately dying (in anthy’s case though she cannot die she would ultimately succumb to the role and lose any semblance of identity if it went on for long enough) but also the would be role and fate of ‘girl who tries to be a prince’, accepting that she is a princess and ending up being manipulated and then discarded by the prince.

I was in school and i couldn’t get to this earlier but never apologize for making me talk about utena i greatly enjoy it.

So the shadow girls are the only reliable narrators in Utena. They are the only ones who have all the information and are not affected by their own emotions being in the picture.

However a major contributor / help in understanding Utena is Plato’s allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory of the cave prisoners are chained and they cannot look at each other only at a wall in front of them, in which artists are moving objects and creating shadows. Since the prisoners have been there from childhood but not birth, to them, the shadows are reality. The voices they hear are really coming from the shadows and not from the artists behind them. This directly ties to the shadow girls as we as viewers in the beginning only see their plays as mere fairytales or comedic relief. To us what we see is what we understand.

However when one of the prisoners leaves the cave at first he is blinded by the light as he is not used to it, much like how the black rose arc hits us in the gut and can be overwhelming for first time viewers because the tone shift is very dramatic. The prisoner then would want to go back to what he knows, go back to the cave, the same way the characters keep on returning to their cycles of abuse. Suppose an external force makes the prisoner leave and see the sun, slowly he is accustomed to the light (in this case has gained external knowledge and can now accurately see that what was his reality was a projection of the actors behind the screen).

Furthermore, Plato states that the prisoner would then go back to the cave to help the others see the truth as well, however as he is now accustomed to the sun, he can no longer see in the cave leaving him blind. The other prisoners would then rationalize that the outside world hurt him and would turn down any attempt to be freed (directly tying in with the last episodes where anthy ‘betrays’ Utena thought the allegory also states that with enough drive it is possible for the prisoners to be freed i.e. Utena’s lover convincing Anthy that she truly has a choice to escape Ohtori).

So back to the shadow girls, as the show progresses , we the audience, are the prisoners who have escaped. We can now see what the plays truly mean and what they foreshadow (in the cave the shadows are a form of indoctrination) but the characters are still blind to the sun. They still see the plays as just that fairytales. They do not see them as projections (projections are a recurring motif in rgu and i can write a whole post about it too). Which is why a lot of us get frustrated in the few occasions where Utena interacts with the shadow girls because they are clearly warning her but she does not see it. But we have to understand that she does not have the outsider knowledge we have.

But even the shadow girls are not all knowing. They have glimpses of information, more than utena and the audience, less than akio and anthy. So they deliver a version of the truth, a distorted version of the truth, but truth nonetheless.

They also serve another version from a storytelling perspective, akin to a greek chorus. The purpose of a greek chorus in ancient greek plays, which is a group of performs who are in an inbetween place, they are part of the play but they also serve as an idealized audience as they comment on the actions and themes that take place in the play. August Schlegel (highly recommend reading his poetry and critics) said that the greek chorus provides the viewer "a lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of contemplation". Thus they shows us what the characters in the show do not say outwardly but their inner conflicts and fears, which is exactly what the plays of the shadow girls (which can be considered lyrical to a degree) give us.

THE. THE FUCKING. THE FUCKING END OF A DUEL, RIGHT. TO END A DUEL YOU HAVE TO PIERCE THE ROSE WITH YOUR SWORD, RIGHT. GUESS WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

IT WAS FORESHADOWING???? FOR THE FINALE????? BC THE “ROSE” BRIDE AKA ANTHY GETS PIERCED BY ALL THE MILLION SWORDS?????? OH MY GOD?????????

i can’t believe it actually took me this long. to realize.

First of all i’m glad my blog is making people watch Utena and don’t worry everyone is confused at first.

So in the end Utena helps Anthy escape “her coffin” aka ohtori but the swords of hatred still need a target, for as long as the patriarchy exists, for as long as the idea of a prince exists, the swords of hatred will too. So essentially Utena took the swords upon herself, sacrificing herself for Anthy. It’s purposefully left ambiguous because maybe Utena taking on the swords makes replace Anthy in her suffering (the eternal thing utena saw as a child), maybe utena taking on the swords means the curse is broke and she just “vanished” and appeared in the real world.

If we’re going to follow the franchise there are 3 ways Utena’s ending goes:

1. The manga: utena is out there, she went to the real world, anthy knows because the final rose ring was given to her by Utena when the castle collapsed, promising to find each other again. And they do in the outside world.

2. The movie: As Anthy says “we were together in killing the prince”. Utena becomes the vehicle (literally) that helps Anthy escape and both of them go into the outside world together hand in hand. This deviates a bit from the original series but it still stands as an ending to the story.

3. After the revolution (the most confusing and my personal favorite): Utena is stuck in Ohtori with little to no recollection of the previous events. Not in a corporeal form but as an ideal, a symbol of the revolution (think dios vs akio). Akio is dead, all the student council members have continued their life, Anthy is no where to be found. Yet the student council members come back to Ohtori because while Anthy, Nanami, etc have “broken the world’s shell” the main 4 are still stuck in their cycles. A series of duels happens , touga vs saionji, juri vs (the ghost??? of) Ruka, Miki vs Kozue. Throughout all of the duels Utena comes down from the castle and bestows upon them the power to revolutionize the world. Yet we also see glimpses of utena as a child (wether it was her corporal form or just her in spirit is debatable) meeting each of them asking if they know how to get to “the girl she must save”. As the last duel has ended and Miki and Kozue play the piano, the notes build a staircase and Utena reunites with Anthy, as child, in the outside world, free of the constraints of time and space, promising that “ no matter what kind of future it may be, i will always find you”.