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The heavy surrealism in RGU used to frustrate me as a new viewer, but now, I think it's such an integral piece of Ikuhara's storytelling. Because to me, the absurdities of Ohtori Academy perfectly capture how it feels to live under an abuser.

We as outside observers naturally question why there's a baseball game happening during the Student Council meeting, or how thirty cars can magically spring up in the middle of the dueling arena. And yet, the characters hardly bat an eye. Utena initially struggles to make sense of the duelists, the Rose Bride, and the Castle Said to Hold Eternity, but the more she becomes absorbed in this system, the more normalized it becomes.

We viewers fall for this, too! Show someone almost any Utena scene out of context, and they're going to have questions. Did that guy drive his car through a second-story window? Why is this boy boxing with a kangaroo?? Where the hell did all those swords come from???

"Yeah, don't think too hard about the logic. That's just how things are at Ohtori, you know?"

It's debatable to what extent the characters can perceive the visual symbolism that Ikuhara presents to us. Nevertheless, Ohtori remains a very weird place. But abusers possess the sinister power of normalizing behavior that any outsider would find absurd and unacceptable. They can — quite literally, in Akio's case — project their own version of reality onto their victims.

When Anthy gives Akio her glasses at the end of episode 39, she's rejecting the version of reality that he's convinced her to believe. Through Utena's sacrifice, she can finally see her circumstances for what they truly are.

The exit to Ohtori was always there for Anthy, but like so many real life victims of abuse, sometimes the logistics of leaving aren't what's keeping you trapped. An abuser can make themselves your whole world, and sometimes the greatest challenge can be realizing just how small, confining, and batshit crazy their rules really are.

Abandoning the life an abuser has made for you can feel impossible from the inside. But then you catch a glimpse of something beyond, something that makes you look around and ask, "How did I think any of this was even remotely normal?" And suddenly, leaving starts to feel like the most natural thing in the world.

#sku metas

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they were all in love with dying.

#sku fanart #anthy himemiya

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you pitiful thing

#sku fanart #juri arisugawa #🧡

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you got me in love again

#sku fanart #anthy himemiya

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#sku fanart #utena tenjou #❤ #gorgeous art #fucking gorgeous

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— Why do you want it so much? "The power to revolutionize the world"... I've never understood it. — Oh, that's easy. Tenjou, have you ever felt that you were an outsider? That this place we look down upon... It's like another world, far away from the real one? Our true world exists someplace else. We all want to get that world back... So we can finally return to our deepest selves. This world we inhabit, it's like an egg... A small world encased in a hard shell. The chick will die, unborn, if it doesn't break through that shell… Die, without ever knowing that it's a bird! If we don't break the world's "shell", we'll die without being born, without knowing we can fly! And I want to fly. That is why I will revolutionize the world... so that I can be myself...!

Utena & Touga in Chiho Saito’s manga

#shoujo kakumei utena #revolutionary girl utena #utena la fillette révolutionnaire #touga kiryuu #rguedit #skuedit #utenaedit #sku aesthetics #sku manga #mine #I made a thing #don't at me but touga being vulnerable for a sec with utena is one of my fav scenes yes

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Revolutionary Girl Utena

#sku anime #utena tenjou #❤

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Animedia Magazine, September 1997!

A Revolutionary Girl Utena spread led me to grab this used, and because I archive like a maniac, I also scanned the insert sub-magazine that sits at the centerfold: Animedia's 'Anime Eye: By Reader for Reader.' Check those out below!

Can I read any of it? Nope! But it's chock-full of vintage 1997 Revolutionary Girl Utena fanart that dropped as the show came out. A really neat artifact! I also scanned the advert image above of the first release of the series on home media.

#sku resources #sku anime

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Series: Shoujo Kakumei Utena Artist: Saitou Chiho Publication: Ciao Magazine (09/1996) Source: Scanned from my personal collection

#sku artbook #sku manga #utena tenjou #anthy himemiya #��

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#sku miscellaneous

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what if we danced on our hopes and dreams??😳 and we're both girls???😳😳

#sku fanart #utena tenjou #anthy himemiya #anthy x utena #so pretty! 💕

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#sku anime #anthy himemiya #utena tenjou #💕

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Kozue and Miki - an incestuous half or a broken whole? analysis

To this day I have no understanding of what was going on with Miki and Kozue. In fact, they were my least favourite part of the show not because they aren't interesting but because what they represent seems so muddled, and it's where the few criticisms I have of RGU come in. I only have a few ideas.

I think the main point of the twins being there was to highlight the difference in their life experiences because of their gender. Miki is relatively 'innocent' as compared to Kozue who knows more about the world, but misreads sexuality as a tool she can use for power rather than a part of a system she's only a cog in.

It's shown pretty early on with the teacher that is inappropriate to Miki - he doesn't really notice that the teacher he admires is a pedophile, but Kozue does and takes the matter into her own hands. She seems to resent him for this difference and how he idealizes their childhood that she does not remember as fondly, seeing him as immature and 'holier than thou' for it (while she herself longs for the cloeness they had). Miki just finds it difficult to accept her as the same person that was his best friend growing up and gets upset at her dating life.

This is where what people read as Miki's 'madonna/whore complex' comes in, which I disagree with. He projects the sister he remembers from his childhood onto Anthy, a girl who is sweet and nice and talented like him, while incidentally having a crush on her. Meanwhile, he sees Kozue as someone who's become unrecognizable and disproves of her. I don't agree with this idea, because that's not really what madonna/whore is - he's not really attracted to Kozue, nor does he see Anthy as a mother figure. He does however differentiate between their character based on how 'pure' he finds them to be. I think this idea could have been applicable if it weren't for the fact they weren't, you know, twins.

Mika falls easily into misogynistic thinking to get what he wants, even as it contradicts what he believes at first. It's the reason for his first and last duels. He wants to respect Anthy and her choices, and actively believes himself to be doing so, but when given power and opportunity to 'win' her, he always chooses the advantages the system gives him over her. He's not a flawless person.

However, I would actually argue it's more that the show portrays Kozue as the one who is unable to move on from the bond they had, to the extent that in the black rose duel, she tries to kiss him. I guess on some degree it might have been a comment to how her view of sexuality = power was so strong she tried to apply it to her own brother. She is highly implied to be a victim of statutory rape by Akio, and constantly has sex with older boys like Touga too, believing she is the one in power and control in both scenarios not that she is a preteen being exploited. It makes sense she would project the abuse outwards.

Their relationship is toxic on account of Miki's ideal for his sister as something she never was nor will ever be, and his dislike for her personality and choices, but Kozue does not want to let him move on or try to re establish their relationship as something else at first. He continues to drink the milkshakes (affection and care), offers them to her, she rejects them. It's the reason why she's get coaxed into dueling to supposedly kill anthy. It's only after that she becomes more amiable to him and accepts the milkshakes (and an innocent kiss on the forehead).

The black rose arc's sword scenes are a heavy metaphor (though not direcly meaning) for assault, and if we take the movie into consideration, it makes explicit how far this fixation of hers goes.

I honestly believe that their entire relationship in the show would make more sense if they were not twins, but childhood friends. As it stands, if you read the show from its commentary on gender rather than read based on symbolism and metaphor, it seems like it's more a commentary on the difference between female incestuous abusers and male ones. Kozue wants to keep Miki close to her because brothers are a boon in this system, and she sees his romantic interests as competition to her familial ones. It's a common dynamic, which I see especially here in Pakistan, where sisters and mothers in law treat the new wife badly or as a threat, and it does seem incestuous.

While I can appreciate the commentary, it seems strange the only female character that displays incestuous abusive tendencies is also seen as less threatening or not very serious. It seems less on account of their similarity in age, and more because the show does err on the side of women as perpetual victims, therefore incapable of abuse. (For anyone that reads this and gets upset, I know she's just a teenager being played by the system. I am commenting more on the show's portrayal of the idea itself than a repudiation of Kozue as a character.)

This is why I argue their arc would have been better if this obsession had seemed less romantic or if she was portrayed as a childhood friend (though I cant imagine a show like Utena not wanting to explore twins).

If you look at it more through a metaphorical lens of what they represent I feel there is a different story. I believe on some level, Miki and Kozue can be read as one person and the internal struggles of selfhood and identity in the loneliness of adolescence. They represent the ease of having a stable sense of self in childhood, before the ego develops, before life forces a split. They were one until music (mathematics, perfection) split them apart. I would say the second Miki duel episode is what makes this the most obvious - we literally see their ruptured childhood self and how they see themselves as a one that works in two pairs following their parents divorce and abandonment, instinctive wild animals according to Kozue (in other words, all id).

Miki and Kozue represent a lot of opposites not in terms of personality but choice:

idealism / cynicism (mikis perfectionism and distaste for kozues, understanding of the world as 'impure' and acting to 'game' the system)

the difficulty in reconciling two very different views of reality and history (Miki idealizing the past by projecting it into his present, Kozue acting on the present based on her love for the past)

the unhealthy obsession with the self (miki in his perfectionism, kozue in chasing miki's attention)

against unhealthy connection outwards (miki in how he judges how kaoru purposely picks those bad for her and her trying to use her sexuality in a system that exploits her for it, kozue in how she resents miki's ignorance of those bad for him and how he utilizies patriarchal structure to get what he wants).

All of this is based on an unhealthy understanding of the past as better, un'adult'erated even, an uncomplicated understanding of the world as best when not contradictory - but that is not reality. Reality is contradictions, it is the twins, and it is not their inseparablity in youth. There is no purity in being whole that is to be idealized.

In this sense, I would say the show does them right. It's where the whole twin thing does pay off.

Either way! I am confused.

#sku metas #miki kaoru #kozue kaoru #kaoru twins #interesting points #long post #incest tw

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Adolescence of Utena (1999) ↳ Dir. Kunihiko Ikuhara

#sku movie #utena tenjou #❤ #sku graphics

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run away with me

#sku fanart #utena tenjou #anthy himemiya #anthy x utena #dios #gorgeous art #fucking gorgeous #the colors are so pretty #and vibrant

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#sku miscellaneous #pretty!

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It kind of fucks me up to see some people come out of watching RGU having absorbed absolutely nothing of what the show has to say about patriarchy, misogyny, & queerphobia, outside of "men bad, lesbian good." Which like.....sure, I guess? in the absolute barest sense, I suppose RGU is partially about that.

But if this show's thesis were really as simple as "lesbian good," then Juri & her role as an antagonist on the mini patriarchy that is the Student Council would simply not exist at all. Juri would've won all the duels, kicked Akio in the nuts, freed Anthy, & ridden away into the sunset with Shiori in her arms before Utena even showed up if that were the case. But she obviously didn't do any of that despite being a lesbian, so there must be something more complicated at work here.

A lot of RGU's narrative is dedicated to deconstructing binary social systems & the ways in which they harm those trying to and/or being forced to fit within one of two narrow boxes; man vs woman, adult vs child, princess vs witch, prince vs devil, special vs not special, romantic vs platonic, etc. So for someone to watch all of that beautiful complexity, only to filter it through yet another essentialist binary...sucks, to say the least.

#sku fandom #sku metas #🍵 #preach sis