AshnodI think there is room to paint SKU as having occurred in a more-realistic setting. Giving the characters natural hair color doesn't really eliminate anything except the fact that everyone in Japan [i wrote:

but[/i] the main cast has dark hair.

I have to wonder what is gained by making a character, say, blonde, though, instead of peridot or what have you.  If it's integral to the story, sure, but if there was a novelisation of the series, does anyone really think they'd ever feel the need to detail Utena's hair color?  It's a trivial detail in a nonvisual medium (at least ninety-seven percent of the time), especially if we're assuming most people in the story have black (with degrees of red) hair.  The change, as an unnecessary one, not only removes the piece from the world it's working off, but it also draws attention to itself as a change and probably doesn't give us much in return for the violation.

There's room for stories with similar character and situational dynamics to SKU with a more realistic bent, sure, but once you go down that road, it's essentially not SKU anymore, much as Dark Shadows pre-vampires, probably was much DS we know and love.  (I'm guessing here - never seen pre-vampire DS episodes.)

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

I have to wonder what is gained by making a character, say, blonde, though, instead of peridot or what have you.  If it's integral to the story, sure, but if there was a novelisation of the series, does anyone really think they'd ever feel the need to detail Utena's hair color?  It's a trivial detail in a nonvisual medium (at least ninety-seven percent of the time), especially if we're assuming most people in the story have black (with degrees of red) hair.  The change, as an unnecessary one, not only removes the piece from the world it's working off, but it also draws attention to itself as a change and probably doesn't give us much in return for the violation.

There's room for stories with similar character and situational dynamics to SKU with a more realistic bent, sure, but once you go down that road, it's essentially not SKU anymore, much as Dark Shadows pre-vampires, probably was much DS we know and love.  (I'm guessing here - never seen pre-vampire DS episodes.)

Actually, I was referring more to fan-fictions that go out of their way to remind you that Utena has pink hair, that Saionji has green hair, etc. It's one thing to see this in an animated medium, especially anime itself where non-realistic hair is a convention of the medium, but another in a text-based one where you aren't dependent upon the visual cue of someone's hair to distinguish them from another character.

Utena is a very intelligent series yet... almost none of Utena fanfiction reflects that. Sure, there's Archemage... and Alan Harnum's unfinished Opus, but not much else that catches SKU's acid trippy-ness and a cerebral backround at once.

Even my fics fail to do this.

Anthiena wrote:

Utena is a very intelligent series yet... almost none of Utena fanfiction reflects that. Sure, there's Archemage... and Alan Harnum's unfinished Opus, but not much else that catches SKU's acid trippy-ness and a cerebral backround at once.

Even my fics fail to do this.

That's one reason why I don't read or write a lot of SKU fic -- a lot of the weirdness and surreality of the series is in its visual cues, and it's very hard to be subtle about those in the written word. It's like a Brit comedy I used to watch called Teachers. For whatever reason, at some stage in every show you'd see a donkey. In the background. Being unobtrusive. It had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. But it would end with the audience in hysterics, usually. You couldn't be that subtle in words, because by writing the word "donkey" you've brought attention to it at a certain point in time. You have a similar thing with the anime, which has so much going on in the background that the audience becomes aware of on its own, and it's very hard to do that with text. You can, don't get me wrong, but it's a whole 'nother ball game.

With that said, the only fic I wrote for SKU where I thought I got the surreal bit right drew heavily from imagery of poetry by T.S. Eliot, which probably says it all, really. Fuck you, Eliot. Why do I love you?

Brian wrote: I think Kanae's hair is supposed to evoke a fresh sprout.

Hmm I think you may be right. Um why was this again? Is it meant to show innocence or something?
Anyway that gives the idea that I might settle for "wheat" as roleplay-Kanae's haircolor of choice. Not that it's a life and death issue...but don't you guys feel cool knowing you've influenced by writing choices?

Anthiena wrote re fanfic: but not much else that catches SKU's acid trippy-ness and a cerebral backround at once.

Astoundingly hard to do. I don't even try. In fact I use other people's fanfic (and my own) to try and "come down gently from the high that is watching the anime". Y'know, to explain bits and pieces to me, to make me feel good instead of dead awful, and for all those lovely involved yuri/yaoi scenes that do not happen or do not happen in explicit detail.

But yeah, as a voracious reader of fanfic in many fandoms (so of course in SKU!) I'm finding it insanely hard to find good SKU fic (especially when you compare to non-anime fandoms). But when I do...aw it's so great to read. I love it. It fulfils a dif part of me to watching the anime/reading the manga/staring blankly at the movie. Much like AMV watching I guess.

Rag wrote: Personally I like it myself, it adds more flavour to the writing even if I'm fully aware of the visual cues it's making. I'm not sure how accurate this is to say; when I look at a picture of Utena I generally prefer one that's in colour, even though I'm well aware of how she looks in colour while look at a black and white rendition.

Well I love the illustration whether it's accurate or no. Very apt.

Clarice wrote about a donkey. sharnii laughed and thought it was a good analogy.

Baka wrote:
At no point, reading those, do you forget that you are reading a story, and probably one that some fourteen-year-old wrote with a thesaurus on their lap.

For some reason I'm still laughing...

Maybe because I've read almost every single SKU story on fanfic.net now - so you can imagine how much I've suffered. A LOT.

sharnii wrote:

As a new SKU fan I am wading through fanfic.net at the moment, and OMG you would not believe the mountain of trash I have had to skim through to find a few (very few) nuggets of gold. Or bronze even. (Or if you've tried it yourself, I'm sure you will believe me!)

I understand that all too well. This seems to be a problem with almost every fandom nowadays.

My main problem is fics written like this:

~~~

Utena: OMG i sudenly have crazy lesbain feelings for Anthy! CONFESSHUN!

Anthy: MEH PRINCE

*insert crazy kinky sex scene here*

Akio:

~~~

(I actually thought that was what most Utena fanfiction would be like. So far I've been pleasantly surprised )

I'm a complete grammar Nazi, so I never read anything with bad spelling-it just pisses me off too much to pay attention to the story. I can forgive minor spelling mistakes, but it turns me off of a story immediately if there are too many. I'm just OCD like that.

I also don't like misleading summaries, but that's minor...

As I stated earlier in the parentheses, I've so far been pleasantly surprised by the amount of deep, intelligent fanfiction for Utena. It has the highest ratio of good stories I've ever seen, and that makes me so ridiculously happy after putting up with all the other crap for so long.

I love RGU and its fandom as well

gorgeousshutin wrote:

My main peeve with some Utena fanfiction would be how post-series Anthy often got depicted as this poster-girl of North American Feminism (i.e. a physically and verbally aggressive tough chick who completely lacks the subtlety, maturity, and intricate grace of her canon character).  Just because someone is "empowered" doesn't mean they become a completely different (and infinitely more shallow) being afterwards, for Christ's sake. 

Like, at the ending of the SKU anime, they showed Anthy condemning Akio with cutting but civil words prior to walking out on him, in a manner befitting of a liberated lady - we don't see her bitch-slapping her pimp bro, torched his planetarium, then graffiti-ing the school buildings as she stormed off mouthing swear words, do we?

And now, I have this image in my head of Anthy as Tank Girl.

Oh goodness, mostly stuff that has been brought up already!

- Ski trips and other cliche romantic getaways
- Shameless (soulless) self-insertion
- Uncharacteristic displays of love, passion, angst, and the like (look, I'm not one to hold a fic writer back because -my- idea of such-and-such character dictates that they could and would never act this way, but it's not entirely undetectable when a writer is painting a character with his/her insecurities, anguish, and eyeliner)

Lastly, and I dislike this in all writing: being told, not shown, that two people are in love. Especially in fanfics, in which a non-canon relationship is at the core of a fic, an unlikely pairing of two complex characters. And once they declare their love, they are these two empty, plastic people in love with each other - no semblance of the characters they were before, simply in love and that's that. Why keep reading after that? This problem has plagued romance novels for decades; I can't fault fairy-tales for ending with the happily-ever-afters because frankly it seems to be a challenge to create intrigue in a loving relationship.

Rebel Prince wrote:

Lastly, and I dislike this in all writing: being told, not shown, that two people are in love.

Ugh, yes. How hard is it to let actions speak for themself? This doesn't just go for romance either, though it's often the worst offender.

gorgeousshutin wrote:

My main peeve with some Utena fanfiction would be how post-series Anthy often got depicted as this poster-girl of North American Feminism (i.e. a physically and verbally aggressive tough chick who completely lacks the subtlety, maturity, and intricate grace of her canon character).  Just because someone is "empowered" doesn't mean they become a completely different (and infinitely more shallow) being afterwards, for Christ's sake.

Sounds like the "real women never wear dresses" fallacy to me - in other words, the tendency of many fans to worship tough action girls and brand feminine women as "inferior" and "anti-feminist", despite the fact that bashing feminity is pretty misogynistic in itself. There used to be a page about it on TV Tropes, though I think it's gotten butchered now... anyway, there are many ways for someone to be empowered, whether they're tough action girls or girly-girls or anywhere in between, and the fact that end-of-series!Anthy has gained that much more confidence and is finally able to walk out on her brother makes her plenty strong.

As for my own grievances...

*Calling Anthy "Anshii". I know that's how her name is literally pronounced in Japanese, but to me it's like refering to Cloud from FFVII as "Kuraudo" or something.

*Gratuitious character bashing - and on a related note, warping a character's personality into a strawman for the sake of easier bashing. If a writer hates a character so much that they can't even write about them in a neutral manner, then I have to wonder why they bother including the character in their fics in the first place. Don't like Shiori? Don't write about her! Can't stand Touga? Don't give him a major role! Not only is it irritating to fans who actually like the bashed characters (and I should know, since Shiori is my favourite) but it can be disruptive for people who just want to read a good fic.

*On the other hand, giving the Draco in Leather Pants treatment to baddies is annoying as well. It's okay to like villains and still recognise that they're bastards, really. Also, in the case of good characters, deifying them to the point where people refuse to acknowledge that they have any flaws at all.

*Blatant soapboxing. The characters do not, and should not, need to be mouthpieces for a fanfic author's political and/or fandom views.

*Pointless AUs that do little more than slap SKU characters' names onto generic archetypes that don't even try to be anything like the canon characters.

And I think the rest of mine are the usual problems with crappy spelling/grammar and OOCness that apply to any fandom ever.

gorgeousshutin wrote:

At last, someone aside from myself who likes flawed but non-dumbed-down-demonized Shiori!

Demonised portrayals of Shiori piss me off so much. I know she's no saint, but I still hate it when people make her out to be nothing but a jealous bitch whose entire existence revolves around making poor perfect Juri-sama miserable; it's like they view every one of her scenes through super-narrow Juri-blinkers without even trying to consider her side of things. Also, Juri isn't perfect.

As for Touga, while there's plenty of legitimate reasons to hate him, the way some people portray him still rubs me the wrong way. To them, he's a monstrous, misogynistic Akio-wannabe and that's the be-all and end-all of his character; okay, he is a misogynistic Akio-wannabe, I won't deny that, but they act as if he never got any development at all - and that's what I disagree with. Episode 35 suggested to me that he didn't really want to be like Akio anymore and that he was fooling himself, so to see him still be the other man's lackey in post-series fic doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Also, yeah, he went about trying to protect Utena in a dickish way even after coming to care about her, but I think that's more realistic than for someone like him to suddenly become a wonderful person overnight. He's still no prince by any means, but he does change, and that ought to at least be acknowledged; people don't even need to like him at all to do that.

I guess I just get sick of these characters and others being portrayed in too shallow a manner, because I believe that to dismiss any significant SKU character as shallow is doing the series a big disservice.

I have a very specific peeve, which is post-series Utena living on her own immediately after leaving Ohtori. I've seen this in a few fics, and it makes no sense. Judging from the attendance at her parents' funeral, she must have had quite a few relatives, even without an Aunt Yurika figure. It's not like the Swords of Hatred aged her four years and made her completely independent. This is a fourteen year old girl; one who's gone through more shit than anyone else at that age, but a child nonetheless.