Feminist anime: Revolutionary Girl Utena
Apr. 4th, 2020 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungThis was the first feminist anime I downloaded and watched. I did a writeup back in 2016 for an email list I'm on, but I forgot to post it here.
First, I should say that despite the way the opening and closing credits portray the 2 main characters being a lesbian couple, this is not a lesbian or "yuri" themed anime. However, it is very, very queer. Also very disturbing. And also very frustrating to watch.
1. Some context first:
The show is set at a Ohtori Academy, a residential private middle school. It's one of those fictional schools where nobody ever seems to attend any classes and where teachers get maybe two minutes of on stage time in the entire series. Everything is centred on the students, their friendships and relationships.
Utena, the title character, has a memory of being "saved" by a "prince" long ago when she was very young, and she responded to that by deciding she wanted to become a prince herself. Her prince gave her a rose crested signet ring, which she always wears. She always dresses as a prince, in what the other characters describe as "boy's clothes", although, because this is anime, what she's actually wearing is a pseudo-military shirt and jacket, plus a pair of hot pants. Which I guess is more boyish than the blouses and skirts that the rest of the female students wear.
Mysteriously, the members of the Student Council all wear rose signet rings identical to Utena's. They also all participate in regular duels in a mystical dueling arena hidden in a fenced off grove of trees behind the school. These are swordfight duels. Both duelists wear roses in their lapels -- the winner is the one who manages to cut the rose from the lapel of the loser. The winner gets possession of the "Rose Bride," aka Anthy, a student at the school who becomes "engaged" to whoever wins the most recent duel, and who, for unexplained reasons, is unable to live her own life and must instead become the slave of the latest victor.
The student council members receive mysterious messages from "End of the World" instructing them who is to battle whom next. While they don't know the details, they have been told that the eventual winner of the final duel will gain the power to "revolutionise the world," ie, to make radical changes to reality -- as long as they don't mind trammeling on the humanity of Anthy to get there.
So Utena comes to the school as a new student, sees the current dueling champion slapping Anthy around, and intervenes. Because she wears the signet ring that marks those allowed to duel for the Rose Bride, the next thing she knows, she's fighting a duel against him, which she wins handily despite being armed only with a practice sword while he has the real thing.
So Utena, not knowing anything about all this mystical power fantasty mumbo-jumbo, and not understanding at first that Anthy has no actual say in any of this crap, finds herself Anthy's new mistress, but tries instead to be Anthy's friend. She doesn't want to be Anthy's owner, but even more so she doesn't want any of these other budding sociopaths to "claim" Anthy again either, she gets challenged to duel after duel, in between building a friendship with Anthy and making friends and enemies of various other students. And that's the backbone of the series.
2. Queer things
So while Utena and Anthy both appear to be heterosexual, this is a very queer series. First you have Utena wearing boy's clothes, and having absolutely everyone (except the teachers, in their rare appearances) accept her choice to do so and not think that this is in any way weird or wrong. She also competes on the boy's basketball team, and nobody blinks at that either. In fact most of the female students (this is a very female heavy show, only a tiny handful of male students outside of the student council get speaking parts) appear to develop crushes on her.
Second, you have some flamingly bisexual men on the cast: Student council president Touga and vice president Kyouichi are lifelong rivals and lovers. Because they both have sexy voices and good looks that make Fabio seem like a shlub, girls are constantly throwing themselves upon them, and they treat that attention as their due, but it's clear their real focus is on each other.
Third, the only woman on the student council, Juri (captain of the fencing team), is hopelessly and tragically in love with a straight girl.
Fourth (keeping this very general to minimize spoilers), the climax of the series deals with Utena and Anthy's friendship and about how they learn to place that friendship above a negging, manipulative PUA asshole who has seduced both of them into falling in love with him.
3. Which brings me to disturbing things:
The trigger warnings on this series can be seen from outer space. Touga and Kyouichi are complex and interesting characters, but they are also both mysogynistic assholes who manipulate and dump the girls in their lives without a second thought. The two "grown up" male characters in the series are also both manipulative slimebuckets. And the girls in the series are too young to recognize the warning signs so they fall for these guys and get hurt, and you see that happening over and over again.
I think it's pretty clear that the writers know exactly what they are doing and have put in all this complex, deep, heavy gut-wrenching triggery stuff in order to make a point about how not to treat the people around you. That doesn't make it any easier to watch.
It's a series about and probably for middle schoolers, tweens just starting to discover adult emotions and relationships, but experiencing them with the intensity of children. So while there's a lot of depth and subtlety here, it's wrapped in some very direct, non-subtle, heart-on-sleeve storytelling. Which again, doesn't make it easy to watch when they put these characters through the wringer.
And don't forget the racial angle -- while the rest of the characters are light skinned Japanese, Anthy is drawn as South Asian. Nobody ever mentions this in any way whatsoever, but it's no accident that the slave girl in need of rescuing is also the only brown girl (I'm not so sure the writers knew what they were doing here).
4. Finally, the frustrations.
There's formulaic and repetitive scenes in most episodes. Sans opening and closing credits, each episode is about 20 minutes long. Every single time there is a duel, we get a three minute music video sequence showing Utena going to the mystical dueling arena, showing Anthy transforming from her schoolgirl outfit into her rose bride outfit, and showing the mystical sword which Utena wields being drawn from a glowy portal that opens in Anthy's chest. There are other canned sequences that get used and re-used. Once you eliminate the credits and the repetitive stuff, these are very short episodes in which not very much happens. To make matters worse, each story arc in the series ends with a clips episode.
Then there's the whole "middle school students" thing -- while this is a very grown up anime, it's also aimed squarely at children, and so there are bits that would be a lot more fun to watch if I was 12 years old. It's better than Speed Racer, which I find so juvenile as to be utterly unwatchable, but it would be a lot more fun if the tone didn't shift so often from "heavy morally ambiguous drama" to "juvenile pratfalls."
Basically there were bits in almost every episode where I either scrub forward to the end of the scene or I alt-tab away from the media player and surf the web for a minute or two while listening with one ear.
The good news is that the repetitive and formulaic stuff stops when we get to the final six episodes, in which all the mysteries get cleared up and the final showdown between Utena and Anthy and the bad guy ("end of the world," aka the PUA jerk) happens.
All in all, it's good, and I am glad I watched it, but I will not ever be re-watching it. Semi-recommended.
First, I should say that despite the way the opening and closing credits portray the 2 main characters being a lesbian couple, this is not a lesbian or "yuri" themed anime. However, it is very, very queer. Also very disturbing. And also very frustrating to watch.
1. Some context first:
The show is set at a Ohtori Academy, a residential private middle school. It's one of those fictional schools where nobody ever seems to attend any classes and where teachers get maybe two minutes of on stage time in the entire series. Everything is centred on the students, their friendships and relationships.
Utena, the title character, has a memory of being "saved" by a "prince" long ago when she was very young, and she responded to that by deciding she wanted to become a prince herself. Her prince gave her a rose crested signet ring, which she always wears. She always dresses as a prince, in what the other characters describe as "boy's clothes", although, because this is anime, what she's actually wearing is a pseudo-military shirt and jacket, plus a pair of hot pants. Which I guess is more boyish than the blouses and skirts that the rest of the female students wear.
Mysteriously, the members of the Student Council all wear rose signet rings identical to Utena's. They also all participate in regular duels in a mystical dueling arena hidden in a fenced off grove of trees behind the school. These are swordfight duels. Both duelists wear roses in their lapels -- the winner is the one who manages to cut the rose from the lapel of the loser. The winner gets possession of the "Rose Bride," aka Anthy, a student at the school who becomes "engaged" to whoever wins the most recent duel, and who, for unexplained reasons, is unable to live her own life and must instead become the slave of the latest victor.
The student council members receive mysterious messages from "End of the World" instructing them who is to battle whom next. While they don't know the details, they have been told that the eventual winner of the final duel will gain the power to "revolutionise the world," ie, to make radical changes to reality -- as long as they don't mind trammeling on the humanity of Anthy to get there.
So Utena comes to the school as a new student, sees the current dueling champion slapping Anthy around, and intervenes. Because she wears the signet ring that marks those allowed to duel for the Rose Bride, the next thing she knows, she's fighting a duel against him, which she wins handily despite being armed only with a practice sword while he has the real thing.
So Utena, not knowing anything about all this mystical power fantasty mumbo-jumbo, and not understanding at first that Anthy has no actual say in any of this crap, finds herself Anthy's new mistress, but tries instead to be Anthy's friend. She doesn't want to be Anthy's owner, but even more so she doesn't want any of these other budding sociopaths to "claim" Anthy again either, she gets challenged to duel after duel, in between building a friendship with Anthy and making friends and enemies of various other students. And that's the backbone of the series.
2. Queer things
So while Utena and Anthy both appear to be heterosexual, this is a very queer series. First you have Utena wearing boy's clothes, and having absolutely everyone (except the teachers, in their rare appearances) accept her choice to do so and not think that this is in any way weird or wrong. She also competes on the boy's basketball team, and nobody blinks at that either. In fact most of the female students (this is a very female heavy show, only a tiny handful of male students outside of the student council get speaking parts) appear to develop crushes on her.
Second, you have some flamingly bisexual men on the cast: Student council president Touga and vice president Kyouichi are lifelong rivals and lovers. Because they both have sexy voices and good looks that make Fabio seem like a shlub, girls are constantly throwing themselves upon them, and they treat that attention as their due, but it's clear their real focus is on each other.
Third, the only woman on the student council, Juri (captain of the fencing team), is hopelessly and tragically in love with a straight girl.
Fourth (keeping this very general to minimize spoilers), the climax of the series deals with Utena and Anthy's friendship and about how they learn to place that friendship above a negging, manipulative PUA asshole who has seduced both of them into falling in love with him.
3. Which brings me to disturbing things:
The trigger warnings on this series can be seen from outer space. Touga and Kyouichi are complex and interesting characters, but they are also both mysogynistic assholes who manipulate and dump the girls in their lives without a second thought. The two "grown up" male characters in the series are also both manipulative slimebuckets. And the girls in the series are too young to recognize the warning signs so they fall for these guys and get hurt, and you see that happening over and over again.
I think it's pretty clear that the writers know exactly what they are doing and have put in all this complex, deep, heavy gut-wrenching triggery stuff in order to make a point about how not to treat the people around you. That doesn't make it any easier to watch.
It's a series about and probably for middle schoolers, tweens just starting to discover adult emotions and relationships, but experiencing them with the intensity of children. So while there's a lot of depth and subtlety here, it's wrapped in some very direct, non-subtle, heart-on-sleeve storytelling. Which again, doesn't make it easy to watch when they put these characters through the wringer.
And don't forget the racial angle -- while the rest of the characters are light skinned Japanese, Anthy is drawn as South Asian. Nobody ever mentions this in any way whatsoever, but it's no accident that the slave girl in need of rescuing is also the only brown girl (I'm not so sure the writers knew what they were doing here).
4. Finally, the frustrations.
There's formulaic and repetitive scenes in most episodes. Sans opening and closing credits, each episode is about 20 minutes long. Every single time there is a duel, we get a three minute music video sequence showing Utena going to the mystical dueling arena, showing Anthy transforming from her schoolgirl outfit into her rose bride outfit, and showing the mystical sword which Utena wields being drawn from a glowy portal that opens in Anthy's chest. There are other canned sequences that get used and re-used. Once you eliminate the credits and the repetitive stuff, these are very short episodes in which not very much happens. To make matters worse, each story arc in the series ends with a clips episode.
Then there's the whole "middle school students" thing -- while this is a very grown up anime, it's also aimed squarely at children, and so there are bits that would be a lot more fun to watch if I was 12 years old. It's better than Speed Racer, which I find so juvenile as to be utterly unwatchable, but it would be a lot more fun if the tone didn't shift so often from "heavy morally ambiguous drama" to "juvenile pratfalls."
Basically there were bits in almost every episode where I either scrub forward to the end of the scene or I alt-tab away from the media player and surf the web for a minute or two while listening with one ear.
The good news is that the repetitive and formulaic stuff stops when we get to the final six episodes, in which all the mysteries get cleared up and the final showdown between Utena and Anthy and the bad guy ("end of the world," aka the PUA jerk) happens.
All in all, it's good, and I am glad I watched it, but I will not ever be re-watching it. Semi-recommended.