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strawberryjamsara · 11 months

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All girls are like the rose bride: a comparison piece between Sara Chidouin and Anthy Himemiya

Few pieces of media have female protagonists as engaging as Sara Chidouin, the heroine of Your Turn To Die. She’s kind, funny, and strong, yet she can also suffer and have a heart that buckles under pressure. It seems odd at first to compare her to Anthy Himemiya. Shouldn’t, one would think, she be compared to Utena Tenjou, the girl prince who wields a sword? However, Anthy Himemiya’s role as the rose bride who holds Ohtoris academy, and society itself on her shoulders may be a more apt comparison one might think. Join me as I look at this anime classic to compare it to a modern story.

Who is the rose bride?

Anthy is said to give whoever possesses her the power to revolutionize the world, a power that is talked around for most of the series… but it’s made very vague what that power is.

For Saionji, revolution means outdoing Touga. To finally have a leg up over his former friend for once.

To Juri she wants the power to disprove miracles. She wants to prove once and for all that her love for Shiori is impossible.

Then, Miki wants to possess Anthy. He wants the music she plays.

Everyone has a different definition of what they want from Anthy, but whatever it is they want, Anthy can provide it. She is the Rose Bride after all. She can make anything happen.

This also extends into how others see her. Saionji sees her as an object to possess. Juri sees in Anthy the cruelty she refuses to acknowledge in Shiori. Miki sees an extension of Kozue. And even in the black rose duelists. Kanae sees a demon. Kozue sees someone trying to steal her brothers love. Wakaba sees the special kind of person, who Saionji and Utena love who she will never be.

Even Mikage, doesn’t realize for an entire arc that Anthy is a completely different person. Anthy is able to slip into the role of Mamiya, almost like she’s putting on a dress, and Mikage never notices the difference. Anthy Himemiya is everyone. So who is Anthy?

Well… she’s goofy. She likes to play cards, she has a bunch of snails in her pencil case, she loves to mess with Utena as a sign of affection (and REALLY mess with Nanami as a sign of hatred) and she blew up Saionji once and put him in the body of her little monkey dude. She is more powerful than you know, yet she’s just a normal girl, who wants a normal life. She wants friends.

So, Sara Chidouin is very quickly in game designated the leader of the group. This is despite the fact she’s a teenager, something that even gets commented on, but dropped by quite a few people. She’s quick on her feet, intelligent and cool headed, so obviously it’s good for her to be the leader.

Sara’s one connection to the outside who saw her as whole is quickly snuffed out and soon, everyone has expectations, good and bad. Even people who tell her to take a load off like Reko eventually cave into letting her take the lead.

This doesn’t just extend to the group though. There is also Asunaro, wanting her to be their successor. Midori expects Sara to act as a killer. Shin Tsukimi thinks she’s evil. Hayasaka curses her name. Ranmaru wants her to save him and him alone. She’s being pulled in every direction of expectations. Asked to be everything when she is a normal girl. She is being put in a position of rose bride, but she acts the part. Conforming to the expectations of the people around her to be the leader. And sometimes snapping under Asunaros expectations as they push her more and more. She is everything.

And she’s also a normal girl. She has weird jokes, funny hobbies, and as it goes on it gets snuffed out as she becomes more compliant with her role. More of a rose bride.

Any girl who cannot become a princess becomes a witch

A line from Utena that fans will immediately recognize. ‘Any girl who cannot become a princess becomes a witch’. Or ‘Any girl who doesn’t perfectly perform womanhood will be burnt’. It’s also a nice little metaphor for Anthy. She did not please the crowds who wanted her brother so she was deemed a witch a mark that follows her the rest of her life.

It can also have interesting implications for how female characters are treated. Both Sara and Anthy are initially presented to the viewer as complete victims. Sara is the sweet girl who was dragged into this against her will and wouldn’t harm a fly, and Anthy is the Rose Bride being abused by everyone, including her brother. Then the audience starts being challenged.

Sara is shown to be more and more involved with the death game than she likes. Then this comes to a head when it’s revealed in the simulations she got the highest score being more ruthless than the others. She killed with her own hands then manipulated others to her side.

Anthy meanwhile is shown to be more complicit in her brothers schemes than the viewer was previously let on. Despite her pleasant looks, she can be spiteful and angry, and she holds grudges, and she knows the right notes to hit in people to wrap them around her finger.

Audiences turned on these characters in an instant. It didn’t matter what we had seen before or after. They had become witches. Never mind Sara’s complete mental breakage, and the fact she’d been revealed to be raised by the man behind this death game. Never mind that Anthy was revealed to be shown to go through literal eternal suffering for trying to save her brother from an angry mob. They weren’t princesses anymore.

Throughout the show, you cheer for Anthy to snap back and kick Saionji hard, but when she actually does it, people start to shake their heads. People ask Sara not to be the leader but she does something selfish for once and suddenly it’s not sunshine and rainbows.

Sara did not act on the rules of the participants. She was not their princess. So she became Asunaros witch.

Abuse

Now for the false gods… Meister and Akio.

I don’t think these two are complete parallels. I could make a list of differences, but I’ll leave it at they have two very different goals. But I do think there’s some interesting things to go off of.

There’s the power. Meister and Akio hold a lot of power, Meister as head of Asunaro, which is some horrid cult and yakuza fusion, and Akio as the literal embodiment of masculinity, the prince, and the chairman of Ohtori academy. The sentiment stated by higher ups in Asunaro is that “Asunaro is God.” The organization gained its standing after a battle literally called ‘The Hades Incident’. Meister is on a higher plane than them. By contrast, Akio can be seen as having a higher authority both in the literal sense through the fact he controls the organization the series takes place within and a metaphorical sense as the embodiment of the patriarchal idea everyone is chasing after. His car is the embodiment of control, of adulthood, of power. Both of them have control over everything.

Then there’s the fact that Anthy and Sara are both pawns. Akio needs Anthy to take the thousand swords of hatred for him. He also needs her as something to save so he can keep reliving his glory days as Prince Dios after she locked him away from the world. So he manipulates her and convinces her that it’s the other way around. That it’s her who needs him. That the rest of the world are the ones responsible for her suffering.

Sara meanwhile is needed by Meister to be his successor. She has to be the one to take up the mantle of leader, and he takes steps to ensure that. He even hires someone to watch her at night, and never assuages her fears of this so called ‘stalker’. After all, one more person to fear makes you all the more acute doesn’t it? Sara constantly fears over her grades, how she acts in front of others, and Meister waits for the moment to put her in the death game for when she’s acting the most ruthless.

Which brings me to isolation. Sara has Joe and Anthy has Utena. Joe makes Sara act in a way that’s different than how she’s been ‘trained’ to. Meanwhile, Utena has an honest desire to help Anthy, and Anthy begins to let down her walls around her.

So they take steps to circumvent that.

Joe is put in the death game, and killed. Not only that, but Sara is made to be the one pulling the trigger. She gives the last piece of evidence that leads to Joes death. Not only does this destroy her, but the guilt of how this happens affects her ability to grieve, and remember Joe.

He even tries this stunt again later in the game. When Sara starts to care about Keiji, Meister takes the first opportunity to kill him, and even lets Midori make his offer to bend the rules, so she’d be the one pulling the trigger. Keiji is only saved by someone else’s intervention.

(CW for mentions of grooming in this next paragraph please skip if you are uncomfortable with that)

When Akio sees the threat of Utena, he begins to groom her so that she can’t stand up to him. He then forces Anthy to be an accomplice to him, so that they will share the blame of what happened to Utena. A way to isolate her from her only friend, and keep her under his watch.

Finally we have demands for performance. In order for things to pan out as these two want for their respective goals, Anthy must continue being the rose bride, and Sara must continue being the perfect charismatic leader and ‘angel of death’. The two of them can’t show their true faces around their authority figures, or things will go awry.

The foils

I don’t want to spend as long looking at these two characters, but they are both very much meant to be foils to these protagonists, who initially come off as unsympathetic.

Nanami is a bully. She hates Anthy for perceived weirdness, so she decides to sabotage her. Meanwhile, Shin hates Sara believing she is evil. So he begins to torment her.

Both of them are vengeful, out for blood if it comes to it, yet a lot more pathetic than the theatrics make them look.

We look into both of these characters and see their fears. How Nanami worries about one little misstep means she’ll be outcasted from society, and Shin is paranoid at the idea he could be killed by Sara. So much so he’s locked himself away from forming bonds.

But furthermore the thing that links them back to the protagonist is their similar link of abuse. Shin to Midori and Nanami to Touga. They’re both deeply lonely people, and these abusers exploited this fact in them. Even their ‘breaking free’ of this abuser is incredibly quiet and tragic.

Conclusion

If you managed to read this far, congratulations, thank you for indulging me. I sort of wrote this up because I really liked both Utena and yttd and thought it’d be really cool to analyze their similarities so thank you for sticking with it to the end!

#your turn to die #kimi ga shine #yttd #revolutionary girl utena #rgu #anthy himemiya #sara chidouin #nanami kiryuu #shin tsukimi #gothitxt

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zenruption · 6 years

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Recognizing My Depression and What I'm Doing About It

Depression is a weird thing. Everyone gets into slumps every once in a while, and typically those are fairly easy to spring back from. But depression is different — it’s all-encompassing. I've suffered with on-and-off depression since I was a teenager. It's typically there, at some level or another, but when it's bad, it's really bad — like an-intense-fear-of-death-is-the-only-thing-that-kept-me-alive bad. It's only gotten to that point a handful of times, though I suppose it's not normal to feel like near-suicidal depression isn't so bad if it's only been a few of times … But that's where I feel like too many people in my generation are at right now. Every single one of my friends deals with some form of mental illness. Anxiety, depression, PTSD — I myself have all three; I’m a “triple threat,” if you will. Recently I had my yearly check up with a new doctor. I told her my health history, and she asked if I was depressed lately. I had to think about it, and I answered "no, I don't think so." After all, I’m not in bed crying every day with the crippling weight of hopelessness that was keeping me from going outside and making me want to die, so I must be fine. In fact, I haven't been feeling much at all. When I'm not writing for the internet, my day job is as an editor. I was recently editing an article by one of the writers in my department who also lives with mental illness, and she is a fierce advocate for de-stigmatization and mental health awareness, and is just an all-around cool lady. It was a piece about depression and recognizing signs. And it hit me: I'm depressed. You'd think having lived with it off-and-on for so long that I would have figured it out already, but this is at a level that I haven't experienced before. I'm at a point of numbness. I don't really feel much these days, happy or sad. I can't find the motivation to do hobbies I once enjoyed. I don't really enjoy the books, movies, and TV shows I once obsessively loved, but I don’t have any kind of desire to find anything new. I barely have the energy to shower most days, and there are days where I do just lay in bed and can't find the will to get out. But because I'm not crying for hours in bed, having full-on breakdowns in my car, or wishing I would just stop existing, I figured I was fine. I chalked it up to laziness and getting older. But there are a variety of symptoms of depression, and you don't have to be endlessly crying or standing on a ledge to be depressed. Some of the telltale signs of depression are:

Apathy

Anxiety

Restlessness and lack of concentration

Sleep problems

Changes in appetite

Sadness

Hopelessness

Thoughts of suicide

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize depression because you might not be exhibiting all the signs, or some of the signs might be overlapping with other mental illness struggles. But you don’t have to be experiencing all the symptoms to be suffering from depression, and often those overlapping mental illness struggles only prove to exacerbate depression.

For me, the apathy is what really stood out. Apathy for hobbies and things I once enjoyed. Numbness to personal struggles and news stories. Lack of motivation for pretty much anything. Hopelessness is another feeling I’ve been experiencing but in a more concentrated way than before. I’ve had some health issues come up this year where several professionals have given me radically different advice, all of it being very uncertain and very expensive — giving me a pretty hopeless outlook on my future health.

As for overlapping symptoms, I also have generalized anxiety order, which affects everything from my sleep, work, and relationships, to just giving me a constant feeling unease and stress. I also have ADHD, which affects my ability to concentrate and sit still, symptoms that tend to make matters worse in the depression and anxiety department. Having these problems already made it hard to recognize that they had been worse lately due to depression.

Taking Steps to Help Myself

Eventually, everything affecting me this last year and the year before (much of which is not mentioned in this piece because it would be 4,000 words long) eventually came to a head, and instead of going into a complete breakdown like I might have in the past, my brain just decided to go a different depression route. Now that I’ve recognized my depression, I’m doing what I can to address it and help myself.

Recently I been focusing on self-care and setting realistic goals for myself. Self-care isn’t just spa days and retail therapy — it’s finding ways to take care of yourself and your overall well-being.

I’ve made it a goal to go for a walk every day. That may not seem like much to some, but when depression leaves you laying in bed most days with no motivation to move, walking every day is a big deal, and getting out in nature is a good way to beat stress. On the days when it’s really hard to find the will to move, my dog is there to annoy me right out of bed for his daily walk that he’s become accustomed to.

I’ve made it a goal to food-prep every week. I try and take every Sunday to go shopping and get stuff to make at least four days worth of home-cooked lunches, and then have quick-and-easy healthy foods for other times, such as protein smoothies in the morning and sandwich wrap components for dinner. This eliminates the propensity to turn to takeout and other unhealthy foods that leave you feeling like garbage by their very nature.

I’ve made it a goal to be open to medication. One of my big anxieties is taking medications and their potentially harmful side effects, so despite my history of depression, anxiety, and ADHD, I’ve pretty much avoided seeking pharmaceutical treatment and have just dealt with things (ineffectually) on my own. I’ve been working with my doctor to find a medicine that will help me deal with my mental health struggles. I actually started doing this before realizing my depression (this time) as I sought treatment for ADHD, but now that both I and my doctor know more of what’s going on with me lately, we are working together to find the best course of action and medicine for me.

I’ve made it a goal to be more open about my struggles. I used to just deal with things on my own — especially with past friendships and work situations making opening up about mental health struggles very bad experiences — but I’ve realized that’s a very self-destructive way of living. I now reach out to my friends when I need to, and I talk to my boss about my workplace anxieties and personal struggles, both work and life-related.

I’ve made it a goal to be better about the little things: Brush my teeth twice a day — that’s typically the first of my hygiene practices to go out the window when I’m depressed. Take showers more often. Do my laundry once a week. Actually put my laundry away after cleaning it. Groom my dog more regularly (German Shepherds or German Shedders, amiright?). A lot of these things get forgotten or put off in the throes of depression, so trying my best to take time and force myself to do them is a step in the right direction.

And I’ve made it a goal to not beat myself up when I fail one of these goals. Depression is a difficult beast of an illness, and it can be all-consuming. Some days are harder than others, and if I let these small failures get to me, I’m at real risk of spiraling. So, on the extra hard days, I let myself wallow, I forgive myself, and then try to do better the next day.

I’m typically not super open about my own struggles, but like my friend’s article helped me, I hope this can help someone else. Depression is hard, but when you can connect with others who are struggling, it makes it feel a little less isolating, and a little less lonely.

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Mila Sanchez is a writer with a BA in English Linguistics. Her ambitions include traveling the world, studying languages, and taking pictures of her dog, Baymax. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram!

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