#c-ko

"You remember! She always wore suits to school and had that gold bracelet on her wrist."

"She was one of those Three Beauties who attended the academy."

"All the girls used to flock to her calling her St. Juste of the Flowers."

"Oh yeah, yeah I remember her now!"

"Didn't she take her own life by overdosing on painkillers?"

"What? No I heard she was hit by a train on her way to a date."

"I heard she got in a huge fight with that girl who used to run the sorority and there was a huge scandal."

Project A-ko

A-ko has a Project.

I was in school and i couldn’t get to this earlier but never apologize for making me talk about utena i greatly enjoy it.

So the shadow girls are the only reliable narrators in Utena. They are the only ones who have all the information and are not affected by their own emotions being in the picture.

However a major contributor / help in understanding Utena is Plato’s allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory of the cave prisoners are chained and they cannot look at each other only at a wall in front of them, in which artists are moving objects and creating shadows. Since the prisoners have been there from childhood but not birth, to them, the shadows are reality. The voices they hear are really coming from the shadows and not from the artists behind them. This directly ties to the shadow girls as we as viewers in the beginning only see their plays as mere fairytales or comedic relief. To us what we see is what we understand.

However when one of the prisoners leaves the cave at first he is blinded by the light as he is not used to it, much like how the black rose arc hits us in the gut and can be overwhelming for first time viewers because the tone shift is very dramatic. The prisoner then would want to go back to what he knows, go back to the cave, the same way the characters keep on returning to their cycles of abuse. Suppose an external force makes the prisoner leave and see the sun, slowly he is accustomed to the light (in this case has gained external knowledge and can now accurately see that what was his reality was a projection of the actors behind the screen).

Furthermore, Plato states that the prisoner would then go back to the cave to help the others see the truth as well, however as he is now accustomed to the sun, he can no longer see in the cave leaving him blind. The other prisoners would then rationalize that the outside world hurt him and would turn down any attempt to be freed (directly tying in with the last episodes where anthy ‘betrays’ Utena thought the allegory also states that with enough drive it is possible for the prisoners to be freed i.e. Utena’s lover convincing Anthy that she truly has a choice to escape Ohtori).

So back to the shadow girls, as the show progresses , we the audience, are the prisoners who have escaped. We can now see what the plays truly mean and what they foreshadow (in the cave the shadows are a form of indoctrination) but the characters are still blind to the sun. They still see the plays as just that fairytales. They do not see them as projections (projections are a recurring motif in rgu and i can write a whole post about it too). Which is why a lot of us get frustrated in the few occasions where Utena interacts with the shadow girls because they are clearly warning her but she does not see it. But we have to understand that she does not have the outsider knowledge we have.

But even the shadow girls are not all knowing. They have glimpses of information, more than utena and the audience, less than akio and anthy. So they deliver a version of the truth, a distorted version of the truth, but truth nonetheless.

They also serve another version from a storytelling perspective, akin to a greek chorus. The purpose of a greek chorus in ancient greek plays, which is a group of performs who are in an inbetween place, they are part of the play but they also serve as an idealized audience as they comment on the actions and themes that take place in the play. August Schlegel (highly recommend reading his poetry and critics) said that the greek chorus provides the viewer "a lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of contemplation". Thus they shows us what the characters in the show do not say outwardly but their inner conflicts and fears, which is exactly what the plays of the shadow girls (which can be considered lyrical to a degree) give us.