Internal Clock, Municipal Orrery

Tuesdays: Cardio drills

Wednesdays: Swordfight with someone whose worldview and/or neuroses are embodied in the events of the fight itself

!!!☞UNNAMED HIMEMIYA ANTHY&MIKAGE SOUJI FOCUSED FANZINE INTEREST CHECK☜!!!

I was a living computer back then.

I'm linking the reblog here because op has reblogs disabled, so I couldn't respond in the original thread. My disagreement is with the reblog's arguments, not op's post. I wanted to break down why I don't think this interpretation holds up.

Once a piece of media exists, it acquires meanings through the conditions in which it is produced, circulated and received. Not simply through what its creators consciously intended. A creator can intend, or not intend one thing while the work reproduces structures they never consciously recognized.

RGU is about cisheteropatriarchy but there are many aspects of it that exceed Be-Papas stated intentions. Anthy is very clearly coded as South Asian, and even if those design choices were made for aesthetic reasons, that doesn't mean the finished work cannot engage with questions of racialization in relation to patriarchy. For example, it would be reductive to argue that Anthy's position as a racialized South Asian girl in a Japanese school has no significance simply because Ikuhara didn't explicitly state it was intentional. We should not reduce the meaning of media to the psychology or intentions of individual authors. Ideology works behind the backs of individuals. Social contradictions appear in cultural production whether or not the artist consciously wills them.

I also want to address the appeal to Todd Cronan and the reading of Olympia. Clark did not "begin" racial readings of Olympia in 1990 as race was already a huge part of the painting's 19th century reception and has existed for quite a while in scholarship. That is not as relevant though. The the overarching claim from Conan that was quoted, that "every centering of racialized subjects" has the function of displacing class is incredibly reductive. It doesn't follow from the evidence he presents, and it overlooks a substantial body of scholarship that understands race as one of the historical mechanisms through which capitalist exploitation has been organized, rather than as a distraction from class. It sets up a false opposition between race and class. Race isn't some autonomous force floating above material reality, but neither is analyzing racialization equivalent to abandoning class analysis. Race is an ideological category produced through specific historical and material relations. Analyzing racialization can be an analysis of how ideology organizes labour, property, colonialism, exploitation, etc. Laure herself demonstrates this. She isn't simply "a Black subject." she's a Black domestic worker in 19th century France. Asking why the servant is Black, how colonialism produced this labour relation, and how race structures domestic labour is not replacing class with race by any means. This is analyzing how class is historically mediated through racialization. Capitalism has never operated through class in the abstract, it has always organized labour through concrete historical forms such as colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, and racialization.

I don't disagree with Cronan's broader criticism of liberal identity politics. But that doesn't invalidate every analysis of race, nor does it mean race and class are mutually exclusive categories of analysis. Race is an ideological category produced to organize and justify material relations of exploitation. Analyzing racialization, therefore, isn't "reifying race" by any means.

And, responding to this, "If we're really to draw any analysis by this flimsy reference, then Mikage must also be a prostitute given that he assumes the pose and place of the woman staring intently at the viewer who is coded as being a prostitue."

This is not how intertextuality works. References don't require every symbolic element of the source image to transfer entirely. If they did, no artistic allusion would function. Nobody argues that because RGU references fairy tales, every character literally occupies every role or inherits every attribute from those stories. The visual quotation of Olympia is interesting because the composition is reworked to expose different ideological relations. In Manet's painting, the white prostitute dominates the composition while the Black servant stands behind her. Although the servant is visually indispensable, she literally completes the composition, she is denied full subjectivity. Her labour facilitates Olympia's position as the object of desire, while she herself remains peripheral and historically overlooked. Nemuro/Mikage occupies Olympia's position as the central object of exchange. Why? Because he is reduced to a "living computer,” a role historically associated with feminized labour. Before electronic computers, "computers" were human beings who performed calculations, and by the late 19th and 20th centuries this work was overwhelmingly carried out by women. Their labour was valued as repetitive and endlessly reproducible. It was indispensable to scientific production but was rarely recognized as intellectual work in its own right. Just like Olympia, he becomes a commodity whose value lies in what can be extracted from him. Its not a far stretch to connect the line of "lets use him as much as we can" in reference to Nemuro to the later frame of Nemuro as Olympia. However, unlike Olympia, whose famously confrontational gaze returns the viewer's look and disrupts passive objectification, Nemuro closes his eyes and turns away. He does not confront the viewer as a subject but exists as an object to be acted upon, his labour already appropriated by the system he sustains. Mamiya, despite occupying the servant's position within the composition, meets the viewer's gaze. Once Mamiya is revealed to be Anthy, this becomes especially significant and a very interesting choice. Although Anthy occupies the structural position of the servant, she inherits Olympia's direct, confrontational gaze, compelling the viewer to acknowledge the racialized figure whose labour sustains the entire fantasy of eternity at Ohtori. Anthy endures exploitation, abuse, and so much more, yet it is precisely her position that maintains everyone else's illusions. Like Laure, Anthy's labour is indispensable while remaining structurally erased. This gaze does not translate into power, just like with Olympia, rather, the composition exposes the contradiction that the very figure who the system depends on is erased by it.

[image description: a still from revolutionary girl utena showing shiori holding out an orange rose with the caption, “miracle deniers be like ‘believe in facts and logic and they will know your feelings.’”

two edited stills of shiori standing in a classroom. in one she says, “you really are… a poor little meow meow” and in the other, “you really are… my #WomanCrushWednesday.”

edited text reading, “unlike other notable black rose duelists, shiori is an authoritative disseminator of narrative signs: she speaks in public, controls discussion, and operates as a weaving narrator of her own story (3.125ff.).”

an edited screenshot of a tumblr post. the original post a photo of a person kneeling by a row supermarket shelves. the person has shiori’s head edited over theirs and the cans on the shelves are labelled, “orange rose,” “miracles speech,” “rose bride dress (purple),” “juri’s sword,” “loitering pointedly in front of the shadow play stage,” “locket w/ photo of herself in it,” “????’s fencing blade.” the groceries already in her cart are labelled, “like at least 12 java finches in varying states of aliveness.” the photo’s caption is edited to read, “shiori takatsuki gathering supplies (’props’) for her art. an edited comment reads, “lmao that b***tch she loved mimesis.”

the same image but the original photo is a still of shiori leaning against a locker in the fencing locker room.

a still of shiori in the nemuro hall elevator with the caption, “images, they consume me.”

an animated heart locket gif that opens to reveal the photo of shiori in juri’s locket and the text, “because i can’t make you realize how i feel.”]

[image description: four versions of the meme of a car swerving into an exit. the car is labelled “shiori” and the sign on the left reads, “process your childhood best friend’s crush on you by having an honest conversation with her, interrogating your own internalized homophobia, and finding healthy ways of coping with your deep-seated inferiority complex.” the sign on the right that the car is swerving towards reads, 1) “f/f/m fencing team triangulation,” 2) “evil elevator therapy,” 3) “pull a fucking sword out of her chest,” 4) “‘i’m a car now too’”]