At Nerves End

And I just keep flashing to that episode of Hey Arnold where the gym coach fills in for the Synchronized Swimming coach and has Arnold and all his friends compete in order to impress his ex-wife.

My notes were to make him a sun bear and very gay and they succeed perfectly in that regard.

It feels so nice to have a take on my favorite photo of me with my fursona.

Lmao Utena fans in 2001 like 'the setting is an anachronistic western style of archi-'

Ohtori is an eternal grade school, right? A looping pre-adolescence that one only escapes from through internal growth. Stasis, in the shape of nostalgic beauty but teeming with rot under the surface.

Of course it's the mansion of a fascist who conmitted seppuku, who made big dramatic gestures about changing the world only to abandon it for an imagined idyll. Akio has abandoned the real world to live in a puppet territory of his own creation, where no one is happy but him no matter how he pulls the strings, but to him that's fine. Because he's got his. That's fascism babey.

End of the World claims to want to bring revolution, and we think of this in the sense of cycle-breaking; but the only revolution he's actually interested in is an eternal repeat of the past. Akio/fascists continuously try to recreate a time that they feel was perfect, even though it was really only perfect for them (if at all), at the expense of others' suffering.

Another early inspiration of his to both art and weirdness was experimental art and theater of that era, which was very much connected with the Anpo protests (and which, not incidentally, includes a company which is still going called the Revolution School), which was also following a wartime tradition wherein Shingeki (Western-style theater) which Angura reacted against, had been appropriated for propagandistic purposes by the military too.

I feel like I MUST bring up Tenjou* Sajiki here too because it was a fixture of the Angura (experimental/underground) movement listed above, and because much of its music was done by none other than J. A. Seazar. Also because:

the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy (x)

So it totally makes sense to me that an aesthetic of modernist authoritarianism would represent the “shell” which is broken by a messy, adolescent group of weirdos (affectionate), and that the world-breaking happens to look a little like Ikuhara’s theatrical and artistic radicals (and their own egg shaped things).

EDIT: Wait I found more specifics. Mishima was a literary “rival” of one of the most critical founders of the Angura movement, Shuuji Terayama! Here is more. Warning for a fairly graphic description of Mishima’s committing ritual suicide, though.

Mishima’s contemporary and sometime adversary Shūji Terayama responded to Japan’s cultural crisis of the sixties by arguing that only art could transform the world. The only real revolution, he said, was in the imagination. Mishima disagreed with this view profoundly. To back up his ideas, he formed a private militia—which he called the Shield Society—made up of university students who shared his right-wing values and his vision of a prelapsarian Japan. At the end of his life, Mishima claimed that writing had little value for him: he wanted to leave the world of words for a world of action.