Nope, it's definitely not just you. There was this one bit of dialogue in episode 27, "Nanami's Egg", that I don't think makes any sense at all unless viewed through this interpretation:

Anthy:  Utena-sama. Do you believe in reincarnation?
Utena:  Hmmm. I dunno.
Anthy:  They say that an elephant, at the end of its lifespan, parts from the herd and dies in solitude.
Utena:  Maybe it doesn't want to make its children sad, and dies alone so no one can say anything.
Anthy:  From parent to child...hearts being passed on eternally.
Utena:  I see. I guess bequeathing one's heart to one's descendants could be called a form of reincarnation.
Utena:  Why are we talking about this?

Giovanna wrote:

Aside from that, for all Anthy's involvement with Nanami, she doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about Touga. I wonder which of them she preferred, him or his hostile friend. Touga essentially ignores her when he's the victor, which to some would be worse than Saionji's abuses, but Anthy seems to likewise have very little opinion of Touga. Perhaps the almost hopeful view she has of his relationship with his sister breaks down too much when she thinks too carefully about him; in that case, she wants to keep up the jealousy she feels, and it becomes a rare instance of her betraying her own hopes a little bit.

I don't think it's that Anthy doesn't have an opinion of Touga, necessarily...most of it might just be that she knows that Touga is in good with her precious brother, and there's not much that she can do about it at the moment. Touga's been walking a fine line - being in the "good graces" of Akio so to speak, and so does have some sort of hold over Anthy, I think, even if it's just "I know about you and your brother ha ha ha"

Saionji on the other hand - I think he amuses Anthy. That episode when Touga challenges Utena to one last duel always amuses me, when Saionji flops down on Anthy's lap and she looks at him with this bemused expression, as if saying "oook...."

Here are two pictures that support this thread. It's likely that both of these girls don't  really understand what they are doing, and I'll bet neither one of their brothers do at that point. Dios because he is too noble and Touga, well, I am not so sure. Although both girls are being semi-innocent, they are unknowingly corrupting their brothers and asking to be used by them.

http://www.ohtori.nu/gallery/maison/Couple07.jpg

http://www.ohtori.nu/gallery/revelation … ap0164.jpg

Ger wrote:

Saionji on the other hand - I think he amuses Anthy. That episode when Touga challenges Utena to one last duel always amuses me, when Saionji flops down on Anthy's lap and she looks at him with this bemused expression, as if saying "oook...."

I've always figured that was a concerted effort to appear to be encroaching on Utena's territory, antagonizing her into action. Any more than that and you have to start considering Saionji making a last ditch effort for even the slightest illusion of intimacy.

Lightice wrote:

It seems to me that Anthy is still a teenager, just like Akio is still in his mid-twenties. They may have been that way for aeons, for all we know, but mentally or physically they don't seem very different from their respective ages. "In this garden we call the Academy no-one can become an adult", or something in those lines - I don't remember the exact quote. There is a subtle difference in looking like a teenager for millenia and being a teenager that long.

That would line up with the manga, where he says he's in the university. I actually place Akio as much older, but I don't deal with a lot of people in their twenties, and I know bunches and bunches of people in their forties that are similarly faithless and often nearly as selfishly infantile. Anthy also acts like an older woman that's just kinda gone bitchy. But that's the perspective I work from so that's what's familiar to me.

But this raises the question...is Nanami actually her age? Time is awfully funky in that school, she could have spent a decade in the same grade. I've wondered this before because it's seemed to me that the characters are young but their mental problems are highly developed, as if they've had much, much longer for those problems to sink in and take hold. Still, on any scale, Anthy's far older, and can look at Nanami and see where she was, or might have been, or could have been had her brother not been Akio.

brian wrote:

Here are two pictures that support this thread. It's likely that both of these girls don't  really understand what they are doing, and I'll bet neither one of their brothers do at that point. Dios because he is too noble and Touga, well, I am not so sure. Although both girls are being semi-innocent, they are unknowingly corrupting their brothers and asking to be used by them.

That's an interesting point, but given there are pictures that suggest Juri and Miki are an item...

I'd say three out of four of those characters are in the dark as to what they're doing. I think Touga knows. He's grinning too much not to.

brian wrote:

When girls are growing up they practice flirting and the first male they practice on is Daddy. Responsible Daddies play the game properly, but if they fail in some fashion or other they can supposedly do varying degrees of damage to a girl.

Nanami and Anthy appear not to have fathers so they were practising on their big brothers.  Their big brothers failed. In Akio's case that is a huge understatement. In the manga Akio said, "She offered me everything and I took it."

I don't think that Nanami had any real control as far as Touga is concerned.  Even after she eventually rebuffed him, (late in the series, although I don't remember which episode.) she still didn't have any meausre of equal footing.  The type of flirting behaviour you are describing usually involves the girl having a measure of "power" in the relationship. 

Anthy, on the other hand, is as involved in the relationship with Akio as he is with her.  Though they have vastly different methods of dealing with their mutual confinement, they both realize that they are trapped with each other, and the only games they play are for thier own amusement.

  Akio or Touga know EXACTLY what their respective sisters intend.  Why else would Touga play his sister like a samisen?  Anthy doesn't flirt with her brother in public.  Nanami is openly adoring of "onii-sama".  Akio kept his relationship with his sister secret, Touga did not.  Akio actually had sex with his sister, Touga did not.  Anthy was quiet and reserved about everything, including what her and Akio were up to.  She couldn't even tell her best friend.  This doesn't sound like a young girl experimenting.  This sounds, to me, like one of two very seperate things.  Either a young, abused girl who is terrified of being found out to be "dirty"(and I don't think this applies to Anthy at all) or a cunning, manipulative woman, who is doing this because it suits her.  There could be some debate as to exactly how it suits her, but that is a seperate discussion.

Everyone, from the shadowplay girls, to Tatsuya and Mrs. Ohtori (not Gio sadly) couldn't help but hear Nanami's piercing voice scream "Onii-Sama"( ) about twice a second.

Neither of them unknowingly corrupted their brother.

_ J _ wrote:

Anthy, on the other hand, is as involved in the relationship with Akio as he is with her.  Though they have vastly different methods of dealing with their mutual confinement, they both realize that they are trapped with each other, and the only games they play are for thier own amusement.

Wow we agree a whole bunch on that. I define pretty much all events in the series as part of these games, though.

_ J _ wrote:

Neither of them unknowingly corrupted their brother.

This, however, I'm not so sure about. Before the sex, Anthy sealed her brother away and got a bunch of stabby for it, but I find it very hard to believe she understood the repercussions this would have for him. As for the sex...I wonder about that. It's as easy, perhaps easier, to assume there are actually relatively innocent origins to their naughty Saturday nights. I would go so far as to say that part of the venom and viciousness in the sexual quarter of things comes from how it's been warped over time. It's a nasty ugly power play now, but maybe it was originally an attempt to find closeness or intimacy, or perhaps Anthy consented to satisfy a need neither of them understood at the time.

Even in this we could continue the Anthy/Nanami parallel. I don't think originally Anthy quite understood what they were doing, and Nanami was completely in the dark about it. Perhaps they both loved their brothers in ways they shouldn't have, at a time in their lives when they didn't understand what was wrong. Anthy found out, but perhaps also, right at that moment, had something like the prince she remembered. Nanami's image of her brother is almost completely cracked when her chance comes up, and she already understands too well the nature of her interest and it revolted by it.

brian wrote:

Please excuse the following half-baked pop psych.

When girls are growing up they practice flirting and the first male they practice on is Daddy. Responsible Daddies play the game properly, but if they fail in some fashion or other they can supposedly do varying degrees of damage to a girl.

...wow, that is most definitely pop psych. Most psychologists today consider the Oedipus/Electra Complex to be one of the less valid psychological theories, if one of the more infamous ones. Even Freud's two disciples Carl Jung and Erik Erikson didn't buy into all the sexual theories Freud did. Erik Erikson, the most prominent Neo-Freudian, considered his seven stages of emotional and cognitive development more revelant than Freud's five psychosexual stages. And Carl Jung so disagreed with some of Freud's ideas that he rejected most of Freud's psycoanalysis and founded Analytical Psychology in its place. (And yes, I've taken Psychology classes. Yay, academic digressions!)

For good reason, too. Freud's sex-based psychoanalysis had two failings: First, it assumes all children sexually pursue their parents, unconsciously or otherwise. Pedophiles love to hear this stuff because they interpret it as justification for their crimes. Second, it has no way of distinguishing childhood sexual motives from emotional and cognitive ones. Brian, if you saw an eight-year-old girl happily talking with her father, would you automatically assume that she was attempting to flirt? Would you be able to prove it? Do you have a perfectly systematic way of discerning the girls with sexual motives from the ones who are just happy to talk to Dad? No one does, and that's why modern (trustworthy) psychologists downplay sexual psychoanalysis. Because attributing sexual motives to problems actually unrelated to sex is damaging to psychological patients. Imagine you're a depressed teenager who often fights with his/her parents about something non-sexual, such as school. If a therapist said that the reason you're so emotional is that you're secretly in love with one/both of your parents, then the therapist wouldn't be helping you. If anything, he/she'd just be adding more trauma.

That's why I don't assume Anthy loved pre-Akio Dios in a romantic sense. Because you see no concrete proof in series Anthy (movie Anthy is a different story), that she did, and seeing sex when it isn't there isn't productive. Nanami, definitely loved Touga in ''that way''.  Her sneaking into the bathroom to watch Touga shower was a pretty blatant hint...but hopefully, none of us would be naive enough to think that Anthy truly loves Akio, not when Akio continuously leaves her to be stabbed by a million swords. That's why I don't believe Anthy torments Nanami because she sees a similar image of herself in Nanami. Anthy only pretends to sexually love her brother because she's afraid that the world outside Ohtori would be even worse than life as Akio's pincushion, but Nanami's the real deal, and Anthy resents that Nanami is actively and happily playing the part that Anthy desperately wants to shed.

Last edited by Nights1stStar (05-21-2009 11:27:59 AM)

Whenever any theory related to Freud gets refuted it fills me with delight. Refute away!