Jul 28
THE THORNS OF IDEALISM
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THE THORNS OF IDEALISM
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I always wondered why inc/st was so common in revolutionary girl utena. What i mean is what are the chances that three seperate characters had a very specific brother/sister abuse dynamic in the same school. Akio and Anthy, Nanami and Touga, miki and kozue.
And then I realized, the students at othori academy aren't there just because. Theyre all stuck in a metaphoric timeloop that akio created so he can play prince/god. Obviously hes going to prey on students who have had a history of this specific kind of abuse cause he knows how to control them better. Its not lost on me that Miki and Touga also happen to be in the student council (a role closer to akio right after the teachers) while their sisters are either regular students or are able to get into that role through them only. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the students at ohtori are inc/st survivors
But what I find fascinating is that there is another type of inc/st that Rgu talks about and its parental inc/st. Specifically committed by fathers
Especially in the cases with touga and Kozue/miki.
With kozue and miki its a little hard to spot. They dont outright tell you theyre being abused by their parents. Just that they both deeply despise them, as seen with how anthy is represented as the mother figure there. And within the context of how thats shown symbolically in othori. Kozue is hypersexual and is being groomed by akio (a significantly older man) and miki is being groomed by his music teacher (another grown man). Those are clues that they have probably had a history with that kind of abuse.
And in the episode that spot lights Miki and Kozue. Anthy says this
And then for a split second it cuts to:
My thoughts are raw and all over the place but im gonna just leave this here for me to look at later when my synapses decide to play connect the dots a little faster
When I talk to someone whoâs just started RGU, it can be difficult to articulate the purpose of certain scenes without giving later plot points away. Nothing encapsulates this dilemma more than Anthy getting slapped.
Throughout the first arc, Anthy is slapped at least once per episode, often more. With the synopsis I give people about RGU as a master of subtle manipulation, theyâre usually like, âSubtle???â (because this show cannot be recommended without discussing that aspect. âOh, but spoilersââ nope. Ensuring people arenât triggered comes first). This is also coming from someone who nearly dropped the show because I was tired of seeing a brown girl get physically abused every thirty seconds. The student body (mainly Saionji) slap Anthy, say sheâs worthless and publicly humiliate her, to which Utena steps in as her prince on a white horse to defend her honor. Anthy is treated like shit, Utena saves her, repeat.
Then she loses the dual to Touga, and the vibe completely shifts. Thereâs sort of a running bit amongst live-bloggers where they keep tally of the number of times Anthy is slapped, but that only really happens in the first arc. Anthy accepts Utenaâs kindness not because she believes she deserves it, but because Utena tells her to accept it. Even the cathartic moment where Anthy slaps back is revealed to actually be Utena. With this revelation, Utena wins back Anthy, and though the episode most definitely marks a turning point in their relationship, Utena still, and I cannot stress this enough, wins back Anthy to regain her own confidence.
The second arc begins, and Akio enters the stage. Saionji, the showâs biggest encapsulation of Anthyâs overt physical abuse, is expelled. Touga, the big bad of arc one, is completely absent. Utena thinks she finally has a handle on the situation, that her and Anthy are now on equal footing, but that couldnât be further from the truth. This big, heroic, âI know exactly who I amâ moment against Touga only marks the end of the first of four arcs.
The first arc sets up a type of abuse you clearly see and object to, only to pull the wool over your eyes with Akio. Akio, who never publically mistreats Anthy. Akio, who invites the engaged into his home, into the trap heâs spent years setting up. Remember when Anthy used to stay up late in the dorms watching infomercials and eating chips? I do.
So, yeah, when I tell people to stick with the show, I donât mean because it gets better. It gets far, far worse, in both covert and realistic ways, and thatâs precisely the point.
thinking about kanae being distanced from the other female students even though sheâs no different from them. she doesnât wear the uniform even though she attends school. she doesnât go to class, she doesnât have a dorm, she wears makeupâŠsheâs made to seem more âgrown-upâ despite barely being an adult. sheâs adultified so that her status as a child bride isnât questioned. itâs fine that utena finds her and the headmaster in a sexual position because she isnât a student, she isnât a child, she isnât allowed to be. sheâs expected to act with the emotional, sexual, and mental maturity of an adult, but isnât afforded any of the power that comes with adulthood (ex. her mother having such control over her, her father deciding who sheâll marry, she doesnât even get to eat the poison apple herself).
no wonder she wears such an unfittingly small and vibrant uniform as a black rose duelist. her idea of reclaiming the power taken from her is being a child again; no longer having to carry the burden of the adulthood that has been pushed onto her, she can become something that nothing is expected of. her dueling item is a lily, which of course represents death and lesbianism, but also innocence.
when she shatters the lily with her blade, it serves to show us that what she wants isnât really to be a child again, she wants control over her own situation. her being fed the apple is reminiscent of a child being given food; when she loses her usefulness, even the facsimile of adult power is stripped away from her. she is only allowed to be a child in death, when her powerlessness is shown to no one but her captor.
I'm rewatching utena and I noticed one thing in episode 9. While Utena and Saionji are arguing towards the beginning of the episode, Saionji saying that next time they duel he will beat her and win Anthy back, Chu-chu is seen fighting with a frog. Now, Chu-chu is supposed to be a monkey I believe, though due to his size one could argue he looks a tiny bit like a mouse. And this is important because of an epic that was written, supposedly, as a parody of the Iliad during the classical period. This parody, the Batrachomyomachia, is the tale of a one-day war between mice and frogs, and the term is used nowadays to refer to "a useless, trivial fight". And what's more trivial, useless, hopeless, than fighting for the Rose Bride? What fight is more devoid of consequence and meaning, than one that exists within a cycle of abuse in which everyone, whether loser or winner, is harmed?
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I love Shiori and her desire to inflict the same sense of inferiority she feels by just being in Juriâs presence back onto Juri by hurting her, just to feel worse in the end because she needs to go out of her way to get her hands dirty in order to hurt Juri while Juri doesnât need to try at all, hurting Shioriâs self esteem just by existing in a way thatâs superior to her (at least from Shioriâs perspective).
My interpretation of Mikiâs character is that he represents (among other things, of course; nothing in RGU is black and white) societyâs obsession with the âpurityâ of woman.
Content Warning: Mentions of incest and sexual abuse
So, Miki wants to preserve things he finds beautiful, âshiningâ, but never really goes into what that means. Well, what he found âshiningâ was his childhood memories of Kozue, before she changed. This change was spurred by the implied sexual abuse of her by their father, which led to her becoming hypersexual and being unable to enjoy the innocent activities of their childhood any longer. In a sense, she was forced to grow up extremely quickly, while Miki stayed trapped in the idealistic version of their childhood. To Miki, her becoming âimpureâ meant that she was no longer âshiningâ. Heâs also shown to be extremely affected by displays of sexuality towards Kozue or Anthy; Touga manipulates Miki through a relationship with Kozue. He loses his second duel when Kozue kisses Anthy. Touga all but outright tells Miki that the only way he can preserve the purity of women is to own them. Miki wants things to remain as they did in his childhood; he wants Kozue to remain as her child self. He also is shown to value femininity in Anthy. These two things reflect the infantilization and feminine ideal that go hand-in-hand with the standards for womenâs purity.
This also ties into how he objectifies Anthy and Kozue. Obsession with purity reduces women to objects whose only value is tied to sex. Miki's burgeoning misogyny might not be as blatant as, say, Saionji or Touga's, but it is still very much present and represents, like them, yet another facet of patriarchal control.
Interesting how in Adolescence of Utena the general aesthetic is very water themed; Utena's outfit is a sailor suit, Ohtori buildings look like the prows of ships, the rose garden dance scene is started by Anthy bursting a pipe, Touga and Utena's history with the river (+ drowning), the final elevator scene. I think when we first see people in Ohtori Academy itself, they're cleaning something because the floor is wet, and Utena is washing her face.
but in the show, the water imagery is much less prominent, and we see it mostly associated with Juri (her shower, her locket), Kozue (swimming pool and that scene where she's trying to hold the water), and to a lesser extent Nanami (cat). And the water imagery is mostly used to mark out certain character points, stages in their development, or their current mood.
I feel there is a lot to be analysed here but idk.