I think the purest form of love is just wanting someone to notice life with you. "taste this. look at that. hear this song." again and again. until you can't imagine noticing life without them.
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Racism in Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Revolutionary Messaging.
yes rgu depicts racism
no, none of the characters are white
"do you mean these japanese people are being racist to these south asian characters?" yes
do you know anything about japan outside of popular anime and the image it presents to international tourists? it was racist in 1997. it is still racist in 2026. the conservative government (the so-called Liberal Democratic Party) are leaning into Japanese nationalism and whipping up hate against foreigners, using them as scapegoats. people who are ethnically Korean who have lived in Japan for generations are treated as second-class citizens. to be not ethnically japanese is to be foreign. to be foreign is to be other.
racism, xenophobia, and prejudice against foreigners (especially people with darker skin) are everyday realities in japan. children who look different (especially bc of darker skin) deal with bullying in schools, and getting treated differently does not stop after they graduate.
"are anthy and akio presented in ways that are somewhat limited and stereotypical?" yes. they're both clearly depicted as indian. anthy wears a bindi. (she's the rose bride, associated w/ the color red, red the color brides wear at Hindu weddings.) akio also wears a bindi. this is something that indian men don't do. the creators got some very basic cultural details wrong.
i believe anthy & akio's inclusion is well-intentioned, despite being imperfectly executed, and apparently formed with no expert input from Indian creators or sensitivity readers. still, the creators know what they're doing when they're including these differences in two characters who are so integral to the plot & message of the show.
anthy's character was inspired by the indian (south asian) character in the original gundam series, which takes place in an era where space colonies are a metropolitan mix of people from all over the earth.
Lalah Sune (ララァ・スン, Raraa Sun?, also spelled as Lalah Sun[note 1]) is a character introduced in the anime Mobile Suit Gundam. Lalah has an I
rgu, as it is with its flaws, is still better for having dark skinned indian representation. anthy is one of the most iconic and recognizable characters from 90s/00s anime. she is also one of the most beloved.
(and it is a big deal for dark-skinned girls to have an anime character they can relate to. a character they can cosplay and get recognized as.)
i will say one of the things that made images of utena and anthy so visually striking was that i had never seen an anime that depicted an interracial couple as the main pairing. an interracial couple between a japanese character and a dark-skinned, non-japanese character. i have not seen it since.
anthy's plight being ignored by everyone else in school makes sense in the context of racism and xenophobia. she's not like the other girls. she doesn't fit in because she's not 'really' one of them, not 'really' japanese.
anthy is bullied in school not because the creators of RGU nefariously wish to punish her. they are realistically depicting what it is like to be dark-skinned and not japanese in an elite japanese prep school.
she has no friends. she's caught up in this odd 'rose bride' thing that apparently forces her to date members of the student council. she is repeatedly slapped by members of the student council, and other students. no one ever tells a teacher.
when anthy is not forthcoming about why she endures this treatment, people quickly get frustrated. they stop asking questions, they stop trying to help. utena does this, very early in the series. it's hard to watch, because once you've seen the entire series, you realize how cruel it is. (unintentionally, of course. utena's incurious ignorance is still cruel)
the sterotypes anthy and akio play into reflect how people like them are really perceived in japanese society (and often, in the world more broadly. but utena is a show about japan. ohtori academy, for all of its european-style architecture and trimmings, is still a japanese school in japan. stylized and fantastical--still japan. terrible things happen at this school. do you think that perhaps this is a societal critique?)
anthy and akio are both perceived by other characters in the story as exotic. many people find them alluring and seductive. their different sexes mean that this plays out differently for each of them.
as a man, and as a legal adult, akio has choice in who he decides to pursue sexual relationships with. he leverages his appealing exoticism to move up socially and assimilate. he becomes acting chairman of the school by becoming engaged to the chairman's daughter (and by fucking the chairman's wife). No one coerces Akio. He's firmly in control. he coerces others. (and his leadership role at the school makes this a lot easier to do completely unchecked)
the horror of akio comes primarily from him being a patriarchal figure. he is acting the way a powerful man is supposed to act. we SEE that! we see japanese teachers sexually harassing their students! (Juri and Mikki both narrowly avoid getting preyed on by teachers. Juri outwits her harasser. Mikki's sister PUSHES HIS TEACHER DOWN THE STAIRS and CALLS IN DEATH THREATS.) it is blink-and-you-miss-it, but it is THERE
akio being an abuser is not one of the ways in which he is othered. his abuse of students is what makes him THE SAME. he is a patriarchal abuser who looks a certain way. but there are many others like him. he's the most central to anthy and utena's story. but even within the small world of this school, he is one of many.
anthy does not get to make choices about who is allowed to have access to her. she's a girl. she's a child. she is not independent--she's entirely reliant on her family (which consists of only one person). she is young and trusting. she wants love and acceptance from her family. it takes her a while to accept that there's something wrong. (that's part of her resentment for utena--utena isn't trapped in the same system she is. utena is ignorant of what anthy has to deal with. but utena's outsider perspective in her home w/ her brother forces anthy to realize that there is something twisted and wrong about how her brother treats her)
even before we begin to understand the extent of the abuse anthy goes through--we see, very early on, how the rose bride is treated.
if someone tried to treat utena the same way, she would speak up. if someone tried to treat nanami this way, it would cause more of a scene. people would try to intervene more.
anthy's self-defeatism comes from living in a society where her worth has already been clearly communicated to her. there is a heartbreaking logic to it even aside from the surreal, fantastical, mythical, mysterious origins of the rose bride and the prince.
i do believe rgu ends with an uplifting message for anthy, and girls who look like her. utena didn't give up on her. utena loves her unconditionally. loves her dearly for who she is. and with that affirmation from utena, that steady support from her, it was easy for anthy to leave her abusive family and to start a new life with her lover and friend. utena showed SOLIDARITY for anthy's struggle, even though their struggles were not exactly the same. utena refuses to live in a world where anthy is left to eternally suffer.
TL;DR:
"wait, are any of the characters in utena white? because there are themes in this show that seem super-racist" DID YOU THINK YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD TURN INTO A CAR?
POSTSCRIPT: Revolutionary Girl Utena, in addition to taking strong inspiration from Funeral Parade of Roses, is also heavily influenced by the student revolts of the late 1960s:
so egg on the face of every casual anime fan who says that revolutionary girl utena was not about or inspired by real political revolution. just because you're ignorant of context and history doesn't mean that an animated television show from Japan is shallow and apolitical.
the creators of RGU want you to learn revolutionary history and read theory. they're not going to hand you all the answers to what a future society will look like while we sit on our asses and watch tv.
the ending of Adolescence of Utena is a world of possibility. the show's intention was to allow us to imagine a world where utena and anthy can live freely.
if you watched RGU and thought: "there wasn't a political message: only one girl was saved." THAT IS A POLITICAL MESSAGE! Anthy Himemiya being a girl who COULD be saved, a girl who WAS saved, is a huge political statement when you stop to remember the context she exists in!!!!
"take my revolution" means fighting against oppression. fighting against racism, fighting against misogyny, fighting against homophobia, fighting against exploitative systems that harm and disempower children and students.
(did u know that Japan has a politically functioning communist party? unlike the USA. anyways #TheMoreYouKnow)
Shout out to all the Black ppl that can no longer participate directly in the fandom they love because of the stresses of racism 👍🏾 you contain multitudes of value and I'm sorry that the color of your skin and the power of your voice makes people not want to acknowledge that.
The survey will be open until July 31, 2026, 11:59:00 PM GMT+9!! this zine WILL be happening if there's even one contributor participating. reblogs are appreciated! Thank you!! ☜☜☜
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while the 'nemuro/mikage's ultimate motivation was his romantic attraction to tokiko and the followed jealousy/that emotion being betrayed/tokiko being 'stolen' from him' is in fact a red herring and a false narrative being fed both to the audience and mikage himself i feel like his affection to tokiko (however it may be framed) is greatly underutilized when it comes to discussions of or fanworks about him. it's either the first reading being taken as canon or the relationship of those two being treated as almost absent
dragging my highlighter across every single tag but !!!! yeah the tokiko&mikage tag having 1 fic is still crazy to me
it wasn't simple jealousy but he did feel betrayed. it wasn't romance but he did latch onto her. she didn't say 'looking at you now is making me feel lonely' for nothing. she knows how to look at the monkey catching robot and see a person. she accepted that the flowers must inevitably die while the boy that said men must be humble with what god has given now chases eternity. past tokiko-nemuro and current tokiko-mikage symbolically switching places needs to be touched on more.
And another interesting layer to Tokiko and Mikage’s relationship: the parallels with Utena. Tokiko strives to be “professional”, detached, objective, at least with regards of her relationship to Mikage. I think this really shaped Mikage’s ideals of disembodied rationality: as much as he was trying to be the man, the prince, he was trying to be more like his image of Tokiko. In this respect, Nemuro views Tokiko as something to aspire to (and is doubly betrayed as by kissing Akio she breaks that “professionalism” he so admired) and Mikage, so full of his own ego, might start to view her as an equal. They are to him the same, or on a level(ish) footing. He thus identifies with Tokiko, and as we know he identifies himself with Utena. This, to me, could be an explanation of why he sees Tokiko in Utena too
I really hated this girl in my class and we kept exchanging notes with various threats of violence on them but then on a Zoom call I saw that she kept a bunch of them pinned on her wall with little hearts around them and I got the biggest crush on her after that.
anthy's feelings for utena are very complicated, but complicated does not mean that they aren't still ultimately positive. "she pretends to like her but actually carries a deep secret resenment" is only really the second layer of what is going on with anthy and you can't stop there. you can't simply look at the betrayals and the "don't you know how much i've always despised you" line from that one episode preview and ignore everything else. there is resentment, yes, but there is also guilt and hope. there is anthy trying to distance herself to avoid feeling those things. there is love, and there is fear. there is the surprise we see anthy feel again and again over how much she cares for utena (imagining her sitting at the table when they're seperated after she loses the duel to touga, the way anthy looks at her in the scene in the sunlit garden and tries to hide her feelings from akio afterward, all of their bedtime conversations in the third arc, etc.)
to attempt to frame anthy's choice to stab utena as logical and thought through on her part, and as something justified based on utena's actions and treatment of her, is to ignore the role anthy herself plays in all of this. utena's lack of awareness of how anthy is being abused in part because anthy, in cooperation with akio, is actively hiding it from her. utena starts out asking a lot of questions about the situation but is from the very beginning discouraged from this by anthy until she gives up, because anthy does not want her to know. utena idolizes akio because she is being groomed by him, something anthy is not only very aware of, but helping him do. resenting utena for these things is not rational, and anthy knows that (but she sometimes does it anyway because it's easier to try to feel that than the guilt.) they're both kids stuck in an impossible situation, and they both obviously make mistakes. they hate themselves and occasionally each other, but they love and forgive each other anyway. this is what the entire rooftop scene is about. anthy would not be attempting to kill herself if she believed utena deserved any of what has happened to her. she would not be sobbing and begging for utena to leave before the final duel if she wanted to stab her in the back.
this is not the face of someone who is about to act rationally, or in a way she thinks is the "right" choice, even for herself.
anthy stabs utena because she's scared. she's seeing her life as she knows it about to fall apart before her eyes (literally symbolized by the castle crumbling), and however bad it might be now, it terrifies her that it might change. utena is most likely going to kill akio, and anthy cannot let it happen - not because she doesn't love utena, not because she can't trust her, not because she thinks utena's declaration that she's "going to be a prince" means she's going to be just like akio - but because anthy loves her brother too. she can't imagine what her life would be like without him. she has already sacrificed everything for him once, how could she leave him now? another important part, i think, is that she doesn't believe she deserves that better life. stabbing utena seals the deal - she prevents herself from having it by killing the person offering it. she wants utena to give up on her, to hate her as much as she hates herself, because it would make everything so much easier. she's used to playing the villain. this is not something she does because she truly believes it is on any level a justifiable decision, and it's certainly not something she does to get back at utena or teach her a lesson.
Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing
I hate rgu fan's refusal to accept the idea that the show is racist. anthy is a south-asian coded racialized character who unfortunately plays into a lot of stereotypes associated with south asians. the only reason we know she is south asian is because of the bindi on her forehead. akio as the representative of the patriarchy is south asian and plays into the "brown rapist" stereotype. the only reason anthy and akio were racialized was to Other them. to say that the show is a thoughtful depiction of racism and colonialism is to give the show far more credit than it deserves. to say that race is a blind spot in the show is doing much the same. that's not to say that any analysis of utena through the lense of race is worthless, it actually adds to the show's critique of the structures of oppression. especially since racism is kind of inseparable to them. but that analysis can go hand in hand with acknowledging the show's inherent racism. a lot of south asians, including me identify with anthy as a character and they have given a lot of excellent meta that enriches the show but i don't want anyone to use that fact as a card to deny her orientalized depiction.
to add to this, a lot of rgu fans who try to analyse the show through a racial lense will impose western ideas of race onto the characters, this feels like ignorance of the very idea that racism can exist beyond the white/poc dichotomy and it's racism within itself. every character in the show is japanese in a japanese setting, anthy and akio are racialized due to being the only south asians in a majorly japanese setting. any analysis of utena that doesn't take this fact into account is worthless.
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kanae and mikage in ‘i died long before this tale began and nobody will ever know my story except the people i hurt, and they can’t save me. nobody can save me now. i’m already dead. i’m a burned out star, i’ve hit my expiration date, i’ve lost all my use. i’m nothing now. i’ve outlived my role, and i have nothing else ahead of me. also i am Eighteen Years Old’
God. Utena. Thinking about mamiya and anthy. Preserved in their suffering. Their images used as motivation to do horrible things, to Save them, to free them, while the people trapping them do nothing to actually help them. Preserved forever. They would never truly die. They will never get out of their misery. Butterfly pinned to a corkboard. Rose jam perfect to eat. Made to be Consumed over and over and over again. Dont you want to save them? Dont you want to Own them? They will never die. Recreate whats dead and gone over and over again. You dont have to move on. They'll always be here. They'll always love you. If you dont move on, they'll be stuck like this forever. They'll never get to grow up. You will never grow up. You need to let them go. Mamiya is already dead. Anthy is suspended in agony. But like this, you can keep them. You can still love them like this. Im incoherent and brainfog but HHGGHFHFH. Keep them alive! Keep them alive forever! Keep them suffering and beautiful! They are Motives. Their agony is presented as something that can be solved by doing this to them. Dont you want to save them? You cannot save them.
utenanthy? juriori? kanae x anthy is the real doomed, toxic yuri in rgu. there's the passive-aggression; the questionable age gap; the obsession underneath the surface-level pleasantries; the fact that she calls her a "god of pestilence" (to be avoided like the plague); the attempted murder; "i'll have the rose bride!"; the lingering implication that she poisoned her father; the fact that "mamiya" was anthy the whole time so when he drove the black rose into her breast that was actually her; kanae snapping "won't you ever call me your onee-sama?"; The Murder
been farming a lot of rgu takes lately but like i need to get this one out my system: I have never understood that one post thats like ‘If Kozue knew the truth she would kick Akio’s ass and defend Anthy’ bc A) she’s antagonistic to Anthy bc Miki likes her and B) she forces herself on Anthy in the duel. ntm Kozue in the show has always been centred on Miki and she’s doesn’t form friendships with any of the girls, and when she pushes the teacher down the stairs, she not doing it because he’s a predator but because he’s preying on Miki specifically. It also undermines the point of the show to be like ‘she would be the one to kick his ass’ bc the point is it’s Anthy’s retaliation that matters!!
tldr She’s not a ‘girl’s girl’ and i rly don’t see anyone else as one in the supporting cast either, this is one of the many things that irk me when ppl try to girlbossify the characters so i had to rant real quick ok. I feel the same way when ppl say the other characters in Mouthwashing would support Anya if they knew, they wouldn’t. And sometimes that’s the point.
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I do think Dios was victimized by that town too because like. Idk how else to describe seeing him laying down, battered and bruised, while dozens of pale men go to his house with various weapons, banging on the door trying to get him to do everything for them. The moment Dios wasn’t acting princely, there was more vitriol for him than other (pale) men who were also not doing that.
They would rather pick up a sword to basically threaten their brown prince than use it to actually defend the women they claim to care about. The hate is easily directed towards a more acceptable target, a brown girl, but the witch takes the sword in place of her prince.
Dios grows up into the absolutely despicable person that is Akio, yes. But I think the fact that while he does become bitter about it, he chooses to abuse Anthy for more power instead of standing in solidarity with her. Is meant to illustrate a point maybe.
dios being a victim is part of the point. expecting little boys to become princes is a form of abuse. they can never live up to that expectation--in fact, it is slowly killing them. hence the story of the drowned prince.
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