SKU Gave Me Herpes

Warning: Sexual Content

When Anthy had left, it should have been a relief. Kanae had never been able to connect to the girl, had always felt something eerie about her presence. Though she admired the tender way Akio cared for her, she’d also felt left out, as if she was an interloper in their tiny family despite being Akio’s fiancee. Kanae couldn’t help the sneaking relaxation and sense of hope that had begun to fill her at the news. Akio should have had more time for her once Anthy had left for the sister school in Amsterdam. He should have been able to spend a few evenings with her, should have been able to set aside some of his duties in order to enjoy their time together. He should have been able to show that tenderness to her.

Instead, he’d become even more busy. He’d suddenly become so preoccupied that even Mother had remarked on it, saying he was neglecting his familial connections for work. Now finished school, Kanae’s only reason to be on campus was because of her position in Ohtori; it was strange for her to be roaming the school, but she had nothing better to do, no one to talk to. Even her friends had left the school after graduation– and the outside world seemed so far away, too far away to reach. She had no purpose here, no duties. There was nothing to do but wander the school, looking for places to sketch or paint her watercolors.

The rose garden was forbidden to all but the Seitokai. She knew that. But as she stood across the courtyard staring at it, she felt a burst of resentment. This was her school. She was the fiancee of the Rijichou. She should be able to go wherever she liked. Anyway, she didn’t want to touch the roses, only to paint them. Clutching her portable easel case to her side, she strode towards the rose garden, trying to pretend she had every right to be there. It was after hours. No one would stop her.

I know I’ve been total garbage about keeping Tumblr up with the musical news! It’s happening so fast and we are currently planning our trip to see it! Musical Utena ~ Blooming Rose of Deepest Black premiered yesterday, and reports are COMING IN. We are getting a confirmed Blu-ray/DVD, two streams of the musical on 7/7 (ahem), new Chiho Saito art in the program, bromides fucking galore, a gorgeous fan, A REPRINT OF THE TEACUPS….WITH A NEW ADDITION: THE FUCKING TEAPOT. YES I AM BRINGING BACK AS MUCH MERCH AS THEY WILL LET ME BUY STAY TUNED. THERE ARE ALSO GOING TO BE AFTER SHOW SPECIALS ON FOUR OCCASIONS: one will be a full cast welcome, another is ‘Akio’s Secret Confession Room’ which will be on the Blu-ray, and unconfirmed but likely also on the Blu-ray will be one where Ikuhara announces something new on 7/3 and Masami Okui will be there, and the last, 7/4 (which I am seeing) is going to be a meeting between Mikage’s actor in the musical and Hikaru Midorikawa, Mikage’s voice actor in the series. THIS IS NUTS. uegfiweuygfuwyefgweg

Ahem. So. Unrelated to that mentioned stream. I am courting translators. I know no one person will want to take on this entire thing, but I am happy to be the overall editor for multiple people and am preparing my body to spend the next few weeks making the subtitle track. Let me know if you’re interested, I’d absolutely love to be able to share this with people with a working translation this time around. <3

PS. A LOT and I do mean a LOT of signs are pointing at this….being a middle child. Especially reports around framing of Akio, who the musical takes great pains to remind you…is Dios. This feels like a detail you wouldn’t stress if you weren’t expecting to finish the thought later….FUCK.

So the first image for the new Utena musical released yesterday, and tonight me and ? HOLY SHIT LIKE TEN OTHER PEOPLE ? are going to find out the ticket receiving situation from the first round lottery for access to this epicness.  What do we know so far? So far, as confirmed before, we have Utena, Anthy, Wakaka, Juri, and Nanami all returning from the first musical to reprise their roles, with Miki and Saionji being replaced by new actors.  C-ko will be played by the lovely young woman that played as A-ko (the brunette) in the first musical, and casting has been done now for Mikage, Mamiya, Akio, and Shiori. The full cast as of now, compiled by Stefani_msp of the Discord: Ami Noujo as Utena Tenjou Yuka Yamauchi as Anthy Himemiya Tsubasa Yoshizawa as Saionji Kyouichi Riona Tatemichi as Juri Arisugawa Yûta Higuchi as Miki Kaoru Arisa Suzuki as Nanami Kiryuu Yume Takeuchi as Wakaba Shinohara Fuyuna Asakura as Shiori Takatsuki Yohdi Kondo as Mamiya Chida Airi Kumata as Shadow Girl Yū Yoshioka as Akio Ohtori Hidenori Tokuyama as Mikage 

Yohdi Kondo appears to be far and away the most popular figure in this lot, with 250k odd followers on Twitter…a sum that dwarfs literally everyone else including Ikuhara himself. So that will be interesting and almost definitely involve bringing more butts into seats, similarly to how (and I can attest to this), Ami Noujo, having been a founding member of Nogizaka46, drew a fanbase of people who were clearly there to see her more than Utena. Also, Yuka Yamauchi has already tweeted a mention of Yuu Yoshioka as someone who ‘was already like a brother to her,’ and confirmed that these two at least have worked together in the past.

Thus far we have no casted Kozue or any further characters, nor do we have new shadow characters. This production is in a theater with 950 odd seats to the original’s 242, though, with a significantly larger, more vertical stage. So I do suspect more people will be cast to fill that space out in the way they did for the original musical, with ‘flavor scenery’ about as songs were performed. Also, the choice to cast Mamiya explicitly instead of use a shadow or Anthy does indicate a more literal interpretation of the arc, more in line with the first one. Casting Akio, IMO, is a huge sign they do intend to finish the fucking show, now. Why? Because in the arc on its own, he only interacts literally with three other characters in any way, two of them remotely important. (LOL Kanae) He’d be easy to remove from a BRS musical, because the point of his presence is to set up further content later. Soo…FML, I guess.

In the meantime, please consider donating to our GoFundMe, which has been adjusted now that we’ve booked everything to more accurately reflect the main sting of this for us. We…honestly didn’t expect this was coming, since it wasn’t announced at the meet and greet last year that was held for people who bought the Blu-ray at the show. At this point, though, I’m just working on the assumption I have at least one, maybe two more of these damn things on my hands, god help me. D:

I mean also hype, but God WHY YOU DO THIS TO ME YOU KNOW I AM WEAK AND POOR

Remember what we did last time?

We got you the music. We got you all the related images– cards, programs, everything. We spent thousands on merch that would never have otherwise made it over here. We even managed a translation project for the whole damn thing. We spent months campaigning for people to buy the blu-ray, so that we could hopefully get a Black Rose Saga musical. And now we have it.

We can’t even try to do all that again without getting there.

If you can’t make it there yourself, donating to our GoFundMe will help us pull this off again.

Warning: Sexual content.

It took approximately thirty seconds to get bored without Anne. Kirk ended up in the gym, working off some of those cookies she’d made. And some irritation. That reporter had annoyed the hell out of him. The moment she had gone past idle flirtation, he’d tried to shut it down. If that had been all, he would have just waited until she left, and then had a laugh with Anne about it afterward. But that reporter hadn’t taken no for an answer– she’d pushed, which was something he was sort of used to. Some people could get really insistent. But again, he’d tried to shut it down, a little more forcefully this time. And then she’d made that comment.

“I’ll bet I’m just as good in bed as she is. You wouldn’t regret trading up,” she’d said, posed to display her beauty to its best advantage, a little smirk on her lips.

Kirk couldn’t believe he’d actually heard her properly for a moment, but after reviewing it in his head, he had to admit that was indeed what he’d thought she said. “Let me ask you this,” he’d said, friendly enough to start with. “What makes you think you’d be a trade up? I mean, the only thing that comes to mind on this short acquaintance is that you might think you’re better looking than she is. But you know, even if I liked your looks better, you just insulted my girlfriend, to my face. So you can’t possibly be as smart as she is.”

Why hello, friends! As promised, we are selling the teacups in bits and pieces to maximize the chances for people who need to save up to get them, and we’re giving y’all plenty of lead time!

As you know, we always buy extras of swag we get to sell to you guys, since we often get things that are tricky to pre-order and such. The teacups, for example, you could only get if you were physically at the bloody musical. The profits from these auctions go to hosting Empty Movement (ohtori.nu) and the surprisingly vicious cost of acquiring new content, from new Utena artwork, to raw Japanese resources for interviews and such, to doujinshi, to the new scanner I’m going to need soon because this one is dyyyying… Though we do accept donations, we really want to at least give you something back, hence we do things like this and the merch store, Morphology, where you can get series-accurate Utena gym shirts made by me.

It looks like a lot of stuff. We decided to part out any sets and sell the items individually, to give people with less cash a chance to get the smaller items they want. Obviously, all auctions you win will have a single combined shipping cost, so don’t let that stop you from buying multiple items. The prices are based on the cost of acquiring the item, including shipping to me, eBid, and Paypal feels, plus a 10% markup as our profit. I often get donated doujinshi, so the pricing on those is based on the average between free doujin, and the ones I buy myself. The only thing with a significant markup (25%) is the teacup, because that’s only fair given the insane amount of being there + hoops it took to get them.

So this single, obscure panel in volume 4 of the manga got brought up on Twitter, and I was like, well hell, I can do that!! I ended up spicing it up with a few actual Chu-chus, that I ended up manually redrawing so they’d look consistent. There’s a more accurate sleeveless one, and a t-shirt that’s cheaper and comes in larger sizes. Yeah, I made this pretty much because one person mentioned it, but hey, now it exists. XD

Yes my friends, the time has come. I’m happy with the subtitles, having pored over the script literally all summer and most of fall. Also at this point, it’s fairly clear that there will not be another musical. Stores are starting to run low on stocks of the musical in Japan for purchase, suggesting a limited run print. I think most of the people that mean to obtain it already have. Which means…it’s time to share. <3 

It you like what you see, I absolutely encourage you to throw your money at this, it isn’t hard to get! However, if you want to do a little legwork, there is also a gigantic musical Utena hoodie being made, link here. You’ll need a Japanese proxy service, as it doesn’t ship internationally. 

The files are downscaled from the raw 20GB of material. The drop in video quality is absolutely minimal, however, and the musical itself is about 4GB, with the entire thing being about 7GB. Subtitles for the musical, the full stage musical numbers, and the student council meetings are there. The behind the scenes extra and the tea time extra are not subtitled, though I will absolutely correct that should anyone translate it for me. Also on the drive is a “Soundtrack” I’ve made from the raw audio. No official soundtrack appears to be planned, so I made one. Let me know if there’s any trouble getting these files.

I’m a monster…

Gogai! Gogai!

The pre-orders for the Ohtori Academy playing cards I’ve made have started, and will run through October 17th. 

I put together an info page, along with links to the application. But in short, what these are are series accurate playing cards as seen in the Student Council meeting in episode two. The box has NO “Utena” branding on it, the goal was to make it plausible within the world. The big deviation is that every face card has been altered from the classic design to include an Utena reference of some kind. Because it’s Ohtori Academy, and Touga absolutely would play old maid with a card that has his uniform and sword on it. 

Hi friends, Romans, countrymen! I had the great honor of joining Panda and Alice from the Imagine Me & Utena podcast to discuss my favorite bitter, love-hungry, self-loathing (and everyone-else-loathing) little java sparrow, as well as my own fandom history with her. Shiori Takatsuki is a character I’ve been rambling about on the internet for about 13 years, if you can believe it! We certainly didn’t cover everything there is to be said, and I probably dropped the ball on taking enough time to highlight Shiori’s more sympathetic qualities, but that’ll just have to be forgiven– it’s necessary, I think, to discuss the bad along with the good, and I’m a big fan of Shiori’s bad sides. At the end of the day, Shiori is flawed and those flaws are important, and I can only hope my love and appreciation for her still came through!

a few flower crown edits of some of my fav rgu characters :)