Her brother is dead. Her abuser is gone. The specter of him infects her world though. Anthy seeks out Utena. She brings the people Utena knows and loves into a miraculous school, and she goes to meet Utena, but then the moment is ruined. Utena does not remember Anthy. Even worse, Utena wears the Rose Seal.

In a world void of her abuser, Anthy realizes she does not know how to desire or be desired as anyone other than the Rose Bride. So she falls back into the role. She tries to seduce Utena as the Rose Bride. She tries to fit herself and Utena into a dynamic she is familiar: the naive Prince and the attentive Rose Bride. It doesn't work, and the body of Anthy's trauma rots beneath the roses until it's dug up.

I've always been confused about why Utena was so fixated on Touga in the movie, but on my most recent rewatch, it clicked. In the original series, Utena misremembers Touga as her Prince. In the movie, she is misremembering Touga once more, attributing to him promises and emotions she actually felt for Anthy. Touga is the violence Utena experienced in Akio's world and then forgot once she entered Anthy's world. It's another body Anthy did not account for.

When Utena has her breakdown in the rose garden, she acts in a way familiar to Anthy. She tackles Anthy and shoves her to the ground. White butterflies, associated with sexual violence, flutter in the background and Anthy gives into it willingly. She swears this is what she wants: to be Utena's even if it means being Utena's Rose Bride. But Utena surprises Anthy again. She doesn't hurt Anthy, she just mourns the fact that she never got to see the stars with Touga. And this brings directly to mind their most precious promise from the series: Someday, together, we'll shine.

Utena falls asleep, and Anthy is able to act against the role of the Rose Bride for Utena's sake. She stands, and she destroys her rose garden so that Utena can see the stars.

hand over the Zira natural hair/hairstyles art, we had a discussion about it and need confirmation (please)

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

I started playing pixel cat’s end a little over a week ago and one of my cats already has a nonbinary husband and an adopted fish baby