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...EMPTYMOVEMENT.COM. Yep, our nonsense is so unwieldy at this point that we have two domains!!! It's hard to say how they will work with one another yet, but ohtori.nu is OBVIOUSLY not going anywhere, and might be where I do 'retro' format stuff, with emptymovement.com being intended to have a much faster updated front page.

What I'm getting at is that emptymovement.com will hopefully be the central location for new content and Utena meta, regardless of what Elon Musk is doing! It's going to be presented in blog format, and I'll try to make sure it's tagged and sorted over time for ease of use! It sounds wild but at this point, ohtori.nu is SO huge, that anyone that's not from That Era of Websites has a hard time finding anything, and it's my hope this blog eventually makes the content, new and old, easier for folks to find! So check it out, bookmark it, and be gentle, I've been banging this this against my head all day, lmao.

BUT THE CONTENT.

Discord mod teasot lovingly ripped the graphic assets from the CD-ROM of the Utena video game, and I've done my best to present that work in an easy way to cover multiple use cases. I break them down here! In short, there are zips with accompanying contact sheets to show you their contents, because 1,700 tiny images would absolutely destroy the navigability of larger areas of the gallery.

If you're wondering what the hell one might do with this stuff, this is how I made a video accompaniment to Nagumo's translations of the Sega Real Doll bonus audio dramas for Utena and Anthy! Neat huh? Also, rose crest icons on EVERYTHING.

Oh yeah, and we also signed up for Mastodon! Catch up https://mastodon.lol/@emptymovement!

We may be celebrating Utena's 25th anniversary this year, but we do that based on the anime! Chiho Saito actually began publishing the manga in June of '96 in Ciao! magazine. This, the November cover visual.. says a lot about how aware Saito was of the ~VIBES~, long before the show even began airing. Proto-Chu-Chu here vibin', too.

Scanned from the Chiho Saito Illustration Collection at a ludicrous 8k tall by yours truly.

We sure as hell wouldn’t have the kind of shows we do now if Revolutionary Girl Utena didn’t exist. Even back in the 90’s, it was revolutionizing the face of animation– and now it’s come around in a ton of influential western animation that references it. My Little Pony did it, Steven Universe drew heavily from its themes, She-Ra pulled on the queer and relationship elements, Owl House referenced it, there are others I don’t even know about, and what about that highly suspicious hands scene DuckTales did in “Nightmare on Killmotor Hill?” At this point, it’s basically the hidden Godmother of modern western animation. And every time something new gives it a shoutout, a ton of people ask, “Should I watch Utena?”

Now, that’s a pretty fraught question, because when I said Utena was the Godmother of these shows, I didn’t mean the fairy type with the dreams being fulfilled and all– I meant the “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” type with a gun in hand and a lot of pain to inflict. It’s hard enough to boil Utena down to the basics as it is, let alone avoiding spoilers and trying to make sure triggers are respected. It takes forever, it’s hard to do, it’s really easy to miss things, and it ends up confusing people more often than not. So, here’s my shot at an answer– it is not a list of triggers, there are a couple purposely vague spoilers, but nothing that you won’t figure out from watching the first episode. I’m not going to concern myself about specific plot points or items. Instead, I’m gonna explain just enough for people to get the idea and judge for themselves.