Serious response: It’s hard to tell whether Utena gets her strength from being a real person in a world of metaphors. Definitely some of it comes from her weird position as both “prince” (saves the girl) and “princess” (favoured by the prince) - especially at the beginning, she wins her fights because of princely favour, not because she’s any good at sword fighting or anything. But there are some moments which are all Utena and her personal force of will:
Less serious response: “ceci n’est pas un sunlit garden”!!!
In the cowbell episode, Nanami sees an item in the social context of “expensive jewellery”, and treats it accordingly as a status symbol - even to the extent that she ignores the opinions and whispers of the people around her.
In the egg episode, Nanami has no social context for finding an egg in her bed - so she obsessively attempts to predict the reactions of others, so she can work out how she is meant to feel about it.
I find this sequence very interesting, partially since the way Nanami reacts upon waking suggests that it was a made-up dream rather than a memory (well, as much as memories aren’t made-up dreams in RGU). Presumably she’s soon going to find the eponymous egg in her bed, making the dream something of a premonition as well. Nanami always has been a little bit more magical than most of the others.
Child Nanami’s initial reactions to the egg tie in well to teenage Nanami’s reactions throughout the episode. She finds a strange item under mysterious circumstances and doesn’t know what it is. The people around her grow concerned about how strangely she’s acting and ask her what’s up. But Nanami’s immediate instinct is to shield the egg from view. Is she protecting it because he might take it away? Or does she not want him to see because she senses that the egg is something strange and even wrong?
At the risk of putting the cart in front of the horse (i.e. doing analysis before I actually get to the bits where that analysis comes from), the egg does a lot of metaphorical work in this episode. It’s a metaphor for motherhood, with all of the protective instincts that implies. It’s a metaphor for menstruation, something that happens to most women as they reach maturity but also something that shouldn’t be discussed or shown openly. It’s a metaphor for struggles of orientation, which are often something that cannot or should not be shared. It stands in for anything that might set you apart from others and make them think you’re weird, and thus must be hidden. I think child Nanami putting the egg behind her back and pretending she never found it is an important prefiguring of all of these themes.
And here’s another thing, years later: even in her early childhood, and even in her dreams, Nanami is supervised. At the slightest indication that she’s acting oddly, someone runs out to check what she’s doing. It’s no wonder that her key neurosis in this episode is that someone will notice her egg and tell her it’s weird and (therefore) wrong.
I can’t really think of anything to say on this right now but it feels important, so I’m just putting it into the appropriate tag on the off-chance I get back to it later.
Sometimes in RGU you miss stuff because you’re moving too fast - here I think I missed something because I was moving too slowly during the liveblog. Literally the previous scene showed Akio getting aggressive with Anthy because she didn’t reveal what was on her mind, and then turning around and welcoming Utena into the family. That’s hardly the action of a tolerant brother - maybe it’s the action of a father, the head of the family whose word is law.
There’s probably a link to Miki’s strict family as well, who force their children to perform and call them wild animals and introduce “new mothers”.
(Utena, you’ve never had a family before but you don’t want to join this one.)
Huh, I’ve never noticed this before (I think). Akio’s car is a left-hand drive, which means it’s not just a fancy sportscar - it’s a European import fancy sportscar.
(I’m thinking European import because it’s a sportscar - if it was a US import it would be a massive 4WD. Which would be an equally potent symbol of over-the-top masculinity, to be fair!)
Oh, this hurts. Nemuro/Mikage has become a robot (he was suited for it already, after all the comments about him being a ‘human computer’) designed to catch troubled teenagers (monkeys) and turn them into Black Rose duelists. And he does this over and over and over, proud of his achievements every time but ultimately stuck in a rut. See how the robot hands disappear in the last shot? Tokiko sees through them because she remembers how Nemuro used to be, as a real human being. After all that talk about individuality he has become a robot doing what Akio tells him to do.
Obviously I didn’t get it this first time through, but Tokiko here prefigures Anthy in the final episode (by which I mean that Anthy in the final episode is based on Tokiko here). Letting your hair down and wearing a hat is the epitome of emancipated female adulthood in this show (actually, Kanae may fall into this category as well, to some extent). Luckily for her Tokiko never signed a contract with Akio and she was never a student at the school: when everything fell apart she just left and lived her life in the real world, while Nemuro stuck around here and never grew up.
Just watched this one again, it was pretty heartbreaking. Interesting how previously I’ve commented on how Tokiko prefigures Anthy - because this time I was thinking about how Tokiko is like Utena. She takes Utena’s customary role as watcher and commentator on the shadow play (and in the next scene we see Utena unconsciously echoing her anger about people who don’t take care of themselves); but where Utena typically makes a comment somewhere between ‘missing the point’ and ‘tone-deaf’, Tokiko cuts right to the heart of it. She really gets how the shadow play is related to the themes of the episode, maybe with the viewpoint of an outsider (she’s about to comment that Akio and Nemuro haven’t aged at all while she has grown up and matured).
Bonus: The backing song is telling the story of the sack of Troy, specifically the bit where Pyrrhus, the hotblooded son of Achilles, kills the aged king Priam of Troy. The death is particularly terrible because it supposedly occurred at an altar of the gods and in front of all of Priam’s female family members and grandchildren. Not sure if it has any particular relevance here but it’s nice to be able to recognise it.
I’m back 5 years later with an interpretation! The song follows Pyrrhus as he chases the king to the altar, hesitates at the horror and sacrilege of it all, then finally goes through with killing him.
Is Pyrrhus mapped to Wakaba, so full of rage? She’s had her chance to kill both Anthy and Utena and looked ready to go through with it without holding back from any sense of love or mercy.
Or maybe we can see Utena as a reversal of Pyrrhus. She is the more skilled and powerful fighter, she had a chance to take up her sword and end the fight easily. But she stays her hand from love and mercy: instead of bringing down the bloody sword, she only exerts the minimum necessary force to end the conflict.
d'ya know that the song is just a rough translation of hamlet act 2 scene 2 lines 471-484 (ish)? it’s originally from a version of the play seazer put on, as is kanae’s duel song.
I did not know that! That is kind of fascinating. The Pyrrhus/Priam story is obviously very thematically relevant for Hamlet, which makes it seem a bit overblown here. Here’s a link for the curious, scroll to line 477.
(I got nerdsniped a bit by this because Hamlet said “It’s the tale told by Aeneas to Dido”, to which I thought “Ah, this must be in the Aeneid!” Which it isn’t in exactly that form, I have since discovered, in Hamlet it is said to come from another play. But you can imagine why I might think that right: Narrative from Greek mythology, written in Latin by Vergil, translated into English by Shakespeare, translated into Japanese by Seazer (?), translated back into English for the subtitles. That’s exactly the kind of nonsense this show would pull.)
Bonus: The backing song is telling the story of the sack of Troy, specifically the bit where Pyrrhus, the hotblooded son of Achilles, kills the aged king Priam of Troy. The death is particularly terrible because it supposedly occurred at an altar of the gods and in front of all of Priam’s female family members and grandchildren. Not sure if it has any particular relevance here but it’s nice to be able to recognise it.
I’m back 5 years later with an interpretation! The song follows Pyrrhus as he chases the king to the altar, hesitates at the horror and sacrilege of it all, then finally goes through with killing him.
Is Pyrrhus mapped to Wakaba, so full of rage? She’s had her chance to kill both Anthy and Utena and looked ready to go through with it without holding back from any sense of love or mercy.
Or maybe we can see Utena as a reversal of Pyrrhus. She is the more skilled and powerful fighter, she had a chance to take up her sword and end the fight easily. But she stays her hand from love and mercy: instead of bringing down the bloody sword, she only exerts the minimum necessary force to end the conflict.
I posted this when I did my full liveblog of RGU and commented later that I wished I had focused on the Wakaba duel scene more (I guess I was tired, those liveblog were basically full day affairs - wish I had time for that nowadays :P).
Having just rewatched this episode, what strikes me about this part is the tenderness that Utena shows, in contrast to Wakaba’s aggression. Just before, Wakaba was grasping Utena by the hair and holding a sword to her throat! She is genuinely so full of rage as she outlines her grievances:
To which Utena responds as shown above - holding Wakaba in place and promising to save her. I think that Utena is halfway there. Like she says, she doesn’t actually understand what Wakaba is angry about (see my ‘protagonism’ tag). But she does know by this stage that the black rose and ring are inflating those grievances into something greater and out of control. So she does this, oh so gently:
As I said, it looks like they’re dancing more than fighting (could probably go into the pseudo-romantic elements of their relationship here).
Most of the black rose candidates looks scared or confused when they get down to the basement/morgue where the path has been prepared for them. Wakaba though? Wakaba is furious.
…huh, that’s a connection I hadn’t noticed before. This is a line from Tatsuya the Onion Prince about Wakaba. But it’s a very close echo of what Utena says about Anthy in the final episode - in fact, the final thing she says that pries the coffin door open:
Echo is the wrong word of course! I’m only calling it that because I’ve watched the whole series (uh, several times), and this line of Utena’s is so powerful and rich in context that it stuck in my mind, and triggered on this much less significant line while rewatching. It’s the kind of motif you are never going to notice the first time through, a thread between episodes 19 and 39.
I don’t know what this signifies at this point, but I’ll just leave it here to ruminate on.
Akio here compares his relationship with Anthy (and the relationship of big brother and little sister) to someone’s relationship to the moon - you normally don’t think about it, but sometimes you look at it and it makes you feel better. I’m partially leaving this here because I feel like there could be a major opportunity to tie this metaphor into a larger interpretation of brother-sister relations in the show (since that is one of the main relationship types that drives the character interactions). Is he telling accurately how he feels about his relationship with Anthy, and if so how are we supposed to read this in the larger context? Or is he lying to obfuscate something about the relationship (’it usually doesn’t serve any purpose’, what?) But I can’t fully unravel it right now. Maybe later, or anyone else can feel free to try their hand.
I also wanted to note the fairly direct association of Anthy with the moon, which to me is highly associated with feminine power. Maybe it’s just because I’m a classicist, but the immediate reference seems to be Artemis/Diana - notable in that her twin brother is the solar power (and playboy) Apollo. Now that I check, Hecate/Trivia, goddess of magic, crossroads and pretty much everything mysterious and dark is also associated with the moon. Link between Anthy and magic even before she is revealed to be the witch, nice.
Circling back to this, uh, 5 years later. Akio’s description of the brother-sister relationship is certainly idealised: distanced but always present, not vital but nice to have. Whether or not it’s a good ideal is another question, but the key thing is that none of the siblings in this show anywhere near live up to this.
In particular contrast with Miki and Kozue, the subjects of this episode, who haven’t felt a positive emotion about each other since they were 7 years old. Later on we will see Kozue’s Elevator Therapy Session ™, where she confesses that she dates boys her brother disapproves of so that he will be angry and obsessed with her. Because what she’s really worried about is fading into the background of her brother’s life, and that’s becoming a real risk with Anthy in the picture. Kozue can’t accept being a pleasant memory in her brother’s orbit - she has to be at the centre of his heart.
Oddly, I think that the sibling who most lives up to this metaphor is Touga. It’s clear that he likes having a little sister, but she doesn’t serve any purpose for him; Nanami is of course way too obsessed with her brother for this to quite work out right. Akio fails because (as I vaguely mentioned above) Anthy is completely indispensible to him; there’s no possibility of distance between the two.
