and thus, Lazarus was raised!

About three years ago, I did Utena reviews for the Mark Watches community and crossposted them here. I went through each episode and explained my take on its symbolism and themes, armed with my years of Utena research and geekery. Though it was just my take, many said it helped them understand the show a little better, which I was super glad to hear. In fact, the reviews were surprisingly popular. Some people even seemed to love them!

So recently, I decided to go back and clean them up a little. I fixed broken links, replaced dead photobucket images and even updated some the analysis with new text/slight edits (most notably the movie post). (I don’t think I updated everything, so there’s probably some phrasing I don’t completely stand by today somewhere in there, but I think most of it’s all right).

And then I decided to do a masterpost. Though you can find all the reviews in chronological order in this tag, masterposts are handy too.

I should note also went back and added an link to the Rot13 descrambler to nearly every post. See, one feature of these posts that confused a lot of people is the fact that because the Mark Watches community was spoiler free, all spoilers were garbled using Rot13. So basically, some parts of the episode reviews look like gibberish, but if you run the text through the rot13 website, it unscrambles to reveal my spoiler-y parts on how this episode relates to future episodes or the series a whole. Otherwise, these reviews are totally newbie friendly.

But! If you’ve seen the series and don’t want to go through the trouble of running the spoilers through a descrambler, I have reposted fully descrambled versions of most of the posts that feature lots of spoiler text. These posts are also listed below, marked as “ungarbled with spoilers”.

Utena is an incredible series full of great storytelling and pointed critiques of misogyny, rape culure, the cultural narrative, etc. But it’s important to be wary of heavy content warnings for this series- there’s discussion of rape, sexual assault, abuse, incest and homophobia in these reviews.

And a big thank you to @utena-tfln​ whose incredibly funny mashups I constantly used to break up the text in the reviews. I also remember trawling the forums and website of ohtori.nu to get facts, resources, and read different people’s interpretations so I could better form my own.

This is a series that means a lot to me, so I’m glad I got to share some love for it. Enjoy! (I’ve linked the first few reviews above the cut and the rest are below it).

Episode 1- The Rose Bride

Episode 2- For Whom the Rose Smiles

Episode 2- For Whom the Rose Smiles (Ungarbled with spoilers)

Episode 3: The Night of the Ball

Episode 3- The Night of the Ball (Ungarbled with Spoilers)

Episode 3 (In Defense of Anthy’s Social Anxiety Reblog w/ spoilers)

Episode 4- The Sunlit Garden-Prelude

Episode 5- The Sunlit Garden-Finale

Episode 6- “Take Care, Miss Nanami!”

Episode 6- “Take Care, Miss Nanami!” (Ungarbled with spoilers)

Behold, my visual propaganda fool.

Behold, my visual propaganda fool.

Behold, my visual propaganda fool.

Behold, my visual propaganda fool.

Behold, my visual propaganda fool.