I think it's likely that Anthy and Dios are archetypes manifested by the collective belief of humanity (and are "siblings" not because they have the same parents, per se, but because they were both born of humanity's ideals).  This helps explain why they have special powers and why they appear to age in a non-linear fashion.  I think it's also possible the people's belief in these archetypes was so strong that somewhere along the line, the two developed a consciousness more akin to that of a human, and were then able to err, be harmed, and deviate from the endless cycles that the rest of the world expected them to follow.

As for what Ohtori is... I guess I always thought it was meant to be the "world of childhood."  An allegory for the state of mind that people leave behind when they become adults.  (My thoughts on this aspect are fuzzier, though.)

Last edited by Alexa (02-16-2010 08:25:38 PM)

spoon-san wrote:

Even the concept of Eternity...to freeze a memory in time and relive it, to never move past that and never truly reach adult hood (especially being stuck in the past which is universal for the cast) is just a state of mind.  Until they can let go of that state of mind and see past their own delusions (as in the cases of Mikage, Anthy, and Utena), they cannot leave Ohtori.

Described that way, it sounds like it could also be an allegory for some of the ideas in the religions of Indian subcontinent.  Which seems apt, given Akio and Anthy's "Indian" character design.  Many traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga philosophy, Sikhism, Jainism, etc., have similar or interconnected ideas about the nature of reality: life and what we consider to be reality is an illusion (maya) --> life, for the unenlightened = suffering --> all suffering is the result of craving/clinging (to the way we want things to be, or think they "should" be) --> enlightenment, and the release from suffering, can be achieved by letting go of your attachments.

As it relates to SKU, the "clinging" would be to the concept of "eternity," or the unwillingness to let go of something in your past.  Buddhism likes to emphasize the idea that the only thing constant in the universe is change, and so the desire to keep anything in your life from changing, no matter what it is, would be a one-way ticket to suffering.

(If you want to see most of these ideas clearly used in modern, mainstream storytelling, see the first installment of The Matrix.)

Using this analogy... Ohtori is the world of illusion, and what keeps the students suffering in their world of illusion is their inability (or refusal) to let go of their attachments.  And I think some of the attachments SKU stresses the most are the archetypes and traditional gender roles that society tends to shoehorn people into.  Which brings us back to the idea of Anthy and Akio as archetypes who weren't able to sustain in their intended roles.



I could probably keep daisy-chaining concepts together like this until I passed out.  Maybe I'm digging too hard and seeing connections where there really are none.  But it's interesting to think about.

Ohtori is definitely one of those soft places, where dream and reality meet. Is it so ridiculous to see a kangaroo in Japan in a dream? Or a girl with a pet monkey? Or swords in numbers beyond comprehension? Dreams are a place where collective conscience may meet. A legion of sleeping adolescents, dreaming of the day they were little and the day they fly... and yet afraid of their wings.


(Can you tell it's 1:30 am for me? lol)

I was having the same thought (so great minds do think alike ) except mine was more along the ideas of this being a 'dream apocalypse' as defined by Tvtropes. I first thought that maybe Utena's dream of being a prince became reality thanks to Akio, and the whole thing was engineered by Akio so that Utena doesn't realise/blinded to the truth (nature) of the dream... Then after Utena 'awakens' from the dream, the whole tower falls apart because she awoke to the truth and she disappears from the dream world (and the students were part of Utena's dream) .

Or maybe the movie was set in the dream world??

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M … Apocalypse

Really interesting theories here and I'm agree with some of the posts. Before I watch the show, I read the manga and there Ohtori has a physical place in Japan, obviously the symbolism in the manga is pretty different from the anime. But while I was watching the show I went through a lot of theories and ideas about what Ohtori may be. First of all and I still think it that way, I see Ohtori like some kind of Neverland and Akio like some kind of perv and grown up Peter Pan Yeah, could be creepy the concept but even when Akio is an adult, he represents the most light and irresponsible part of the adulthood. Sometimes I think like a twisted and perv (I can't let out that word XD) version of Pied Piper of Hamelin. But I always thought that Ohtori wasn't a normal place. We can say that is like Matrix, sometimes reminds me to Haibane Renmei. Hell, in the last episode I even thought that everybody was dead and Ohtori was like some kind of purgatory where they wait till release from their sins/delusions or traumas, and the revolution was the freedom of the soul to be reincarnated. Sometimes I think that the events of the series are based on the reality but what we see is the interpretation of the characters, something similar to the last two episodes of Evangelion.

The whole adolescence is a duel in which we must buried our childhood in order to become into adults. In fact we must face duels in all whole life, but in the adolescence we fight the most difficult ones. L ike our first love, our first looses. In the teenage world, to broke up with a boyfriend/girlfriend is perceived like a tragedy and is like a duel, the same goes for the loose of a friendship or the loose of virginity. And when we face a duel moment like when we must accept someone's dead we use different defence mechanism to deal with the situation.

Last edited by Carrie Asagiri (02-18-2010 04:12:56 PM)