Buttercup Flowertrousers and the Waste Garden

12 Days of Aniblogging 2020, Day 2

I shied away from it in 2019, but this year I sank my teeth right back into Revolutionary Girl Utena. It’s simply the best anime! Of course, something as popular as RGU is bound to get some spinoffs. These range from the concurrently-published manga to a shitton of drama CDs to a takarazuka-styled stageplay. And then there’s the visual novel they made for the Sega Saturn, which I decided to go into blind because I thought it might make for some good blogging. I hope I was right!

Yep, this is our main character. God help us

The Utena Saturn game, which was translated in 2015 courtesy of an ohtori.nu user, tries its hardest to integrate itself into the show, pulling artwork, voice actors, soundtrack, and even some FMVs straight out of the series. As such, it feels like a pretty low-budget affair, but I wasn’t expecting anything too glamorous from a tie-in like this. Plotwise, it takes place somewhere towards the end of the show’s first arc, which in practice means that the characters are underdeveloped and less interesting than they could have been (and Nanami is practically a no-show). The plot plays out like a test-run for the Black Rose Arc, with characters gradually getting bent to the villain’s will as the protagonist is left in the dark.

What a coincidence, I put poison in your tea

We find ourselves playing as a personality-free transplant to Ohtori Academy who quickly gets swept under Utena’s wing. As far as yuri-pandering goes, it’s both liberal by Utena show standards and not much at all. As a female student, you can ask the women of the show if they have girlfriends, but you’ll pretty much always get laughed off and chastised for it. I guess that’s true to form for Akio’s academy? Anyways, the character of note here is Chigusa, the other new transfer student. First and foremost, she’s the goth dream girl that the show never quite got, and when she does the same “I get told I look like a boy” bit as Utena, it’s even funnier this time around, considering she’s wearing a dress with a lace-up front. Chigusa is obviously the going to draw the player’s attention the most, because she’s new and mysterious. And the game slaps you on the wrist for that! You see, Chigusa is straight-up evil, and doesn’t even make an attempt to hide it. She starts off by whispering you the wrong answer in math class, but by day three she is straight-up trying to assassinate your character, from tacks in a cake to kicking your lungs out during a soccer match to a poisoning attempt. Unfortunately, if you like Revolutionary Girl Utena, chances are you are a lesbian and thusly like horrible women doing terrible things. Getting any positive relationship points with her will subtract points from everyone else, pretty much sealing your fate if you interact with her more than once.

So you’ve sacrificed everything for Chigusa and all of the Student Council is effectively dead. Surely you’ll at least get some special bad ending, right? Maybe even a little bit of homoeroticism, as a treat.

Your reward is an incredibly brief scene in which your character trips down the dark therapy elevator, confesses that she has no real friends, and is dispatched unceremoniously by Utena in a Black Rose duel.

What a cruel game!

Playing through the game trying to get a real ending unfortunately doesn’t make our villain any more compelling. Like Professor Nemuro, Chigusa is a ghost from the past, a duelist who only wants to use the power of Dios to… travel back in time, steal your dad from your mom, and paradox you out of existence? It’s not even a half-baked ideology like the Student Council members have, it’s just a shitty scheme.

We do get an FMV duel between Chigusa and Utena, but it’s almost entirely made out of recycled frames from past duels, which makes sense given this game’s shoestring budget.

Me at myself before spending an entire evening trying to get my emulation setup to work since this is a two-disc game and that makes it extra finicky

My final thoughts on this game concern everyone’s favorite miracle-iconoclast. I’m a lesbian first and a gamer second, so obviously I picked the Juri route over the rest of the Student Council. It’s mostly standard fare, with her being initially cold, later incredibly distressed at how you admire her and Utena for being Duelists, and finally trusting you enough to let her in on the whole locket mess. Shiori doesn’t actually appear in the game, so Chigusa has to play her part in instigating drama, even making a pass at Juri and stealing her locket (As an aside, Kozue is here, exclusively to have a gay relationship with Chigusa to piss off Miki).

“How do you do, fellow lesbians”

It’s the ending of Juri’s route that really eats away at me. Unsurprisingly, your character catches feelings and doesn’t know how to process being in love with another girl, and Juri pretty much just laughs her off. But as your character prepares to leave the academy for good, Juri kisses her goodbye and hands you a locket with her own face in it.

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y’all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

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