The student council is most definitely melodramatic. "Me and Anthy share hidden love", "I'm just chivalrous", Miki's world of parsley bit. Wakaba/Mitsuru/Keiko etc. actually seem much more level headed most of the time. The seem like normal student who are sucked into the crap of others due to their ties to them. And the issues at hand really aren't issues of eternity or miracles. Both terms are just veils for true desperation for Touga's cock and Shiori's pussy, respectively. And I know overdramatic people who couch simple issues in big sounding terms. My former best friend Anna watched V for Vendetta and now talks about all her daddy issues as being "a vendetta".

And isn't it true that the duelists' lives won't start until they are out of Ohtori? Ohtori is more a state of mind, a metaphor for the world of childishness, and must be escaped.

And the Breakfast Club is an awesome movie, no matter what.

But it's a valid point. Akio clearly 'relates' or at least prefers to interact with younger people. For better or worse because he's mentally still one himself. Either he's that pathetic, or we can do the cynic's route (which he certainly would) and propose that except for having given up on larger goals, adults are just as absurd, self-important, and petty anyway. The few examples of adults in the show, aside from Tokiko, would definitely reinforce this.

Melancholic--that's making me think of how in high school once in a while one of the super popular kids would crumple under the weight of their fame and then piss and moan about HOW HARD BEING A CHEERLEADER IS or OH GOD IT'S SO HARD BEING POPULAR and the rest of us thought 'Cry me a fucking river.' Except now, as adults, a lot of people follow the lives of celebrities with the same wondering awe and far less of the cynicism. I know grown adult women who feel for Spears and her ilk because oh god it's so hard being rich and famous.   

Actually it's also as hard to pay a mortgage on an income half what the mortgage was taken under, feed your children, and get by month to month. But that's much less glamorous. The school metaphor here seems to me very similar--it doesn't really matter whether they truly were popular or whether this was all blown up in their heads, everyone, but everyone's life seems to them a dramatic epic.

Another direction we could take there is that your descriptions, the awkward kid, the horny dog, were at some point exactly what these kids were. There are plenty of reasons why they're what they are in the show instead. Akio sniffing out potential and hoisting them to the Seitokai couldn't have hurt, but more likely, if Ohtori is the garden where no one ever ages or dies...what if these kids have lived dozens of high school lives without ever noticing it? They'd have developed their perverted set of skills and lack of skills to work for them within the small frame of their current environment. The Awkward middle school Saionji had more than two or three years of high school to develop into the cold and distant vicious thing he presents to hide that awkwardness--but it's still there. Touga the horny dog? It's still true--all that's changed with the passage of time is technique. So in the end you have what you have in the older characters, Akio and Anthy and Nemuro/Mikage--these creatures trapped between being adolescents and being adults, having learns bits and pieces of the latter without growing into it.

But Akio is always wrong! That's one of the lessons of the series! Any adults still in the school are either illusory puppets (as I always saw them. The constantly have the glasses flare that anthy only has when she's mindlessly obeying Akio, so maybe he just created them as a whipping post/cum-bucket/booster seat for his fragile ego.) or fellow manchildren.

YostinAust wrote:

And the Breakfast Club is an awesome movie, no matter what.

*sigh* I wasn't saying it was a bad movie - I loved it. But like I said before, the issues that are so rampant in high schools are trivial in comparison to the issues of the Setokai. I was just using the Breakfast Club as an example of what typical high school drama is like. While I agree that the steokai saw "eternity" and "miracles" as an end all to their problems, the manner in which their vices are dealt with are far more serious than teenage tripe. Incest, manipulation and physical/mental abuse of that degree are extremely rare in the high school world compared to the high incident rate in Utena. The development of these issues and their implications are what makes the difference.

While I completely agree with calling most of the cast losers, I completely disagree with the high school label. As Naji said, the school is simply a device, and one used to make events plausible. (OK, sort of plausible, the car/duel arena are debatable.)

As for who are losers and who are not, that is a whole other issue. While my definition of what makes a loser is different, I'd definitely have to say in terms of hierarchy, the Black Rose Duellists are definitely on the bottom.

Katzenklavier wrote:

Actually, I really like this topic, because it gets to the point of the series. NOTHING REALLY HAPPENS.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT YOU'RE RIGHT. WHy did I never see it that way before? I think I knew it subconsciously but never actually was like OMG NOTHING HAPPENED. Wow this is gonna change how I think about the series as I rewatch it.

Yeaj, things definitely happen. Big things, awesome things. But the greatness of SKU is that it all boils down to a coming of age story. All of the ancillary symbolism, all the cows and stopwatches, are the product of this being labyrinth as written by john lennon. Ikuhara has admitted that a lot of the stuff in the series was just thrown in to fuck with the audience. That's what makes the show and movie so damn fun.

But their satus is self defined. I know 120-pound weaklings who think they could take on anyone at the school due to their (fake) knowledge of pressure points. I think anyone can just declare superiority, the spanner in the works being the presence of other human beings.

What I think is interesting is how young everyone is. I think its was supposed to unrealistic because of how screwed up Ohtori is. I think that the reason why there is so many damn problems is that these are teens in an incredibly adult world. And on purpose they obviously made the weaker ones the innocent ones, and made those the younger ones.

And like many teens they believe that their problems are so big that they encompass everything and in the meantime if they looked at the big picture, maybe they would have been less pissed, desperate, and vulnerable. And while their all having their problems with many issues that teens face(sexuality, unrequited love, etc), someone who is older and is a predator can easily pick each one. Akio is very intelligent, but it isn't terribly hard to manipulate confused teens, especially if you're nice, trustworthy *gag*, and hot.

I fell in love with someone in the 8th grade and literally felt like I was dying for a year, but as I look back on it, it wasn't that big of a deal. Which goes back the entire illusion thingy. They themselves believe they are adults, they believe they are smarter then everyone else, but inside they're vulnerable and confused.
Like watching any high school show, the problems aren't that big. And as soon as they are thrusted into the adult world, they are weak, because they aren't adults, but they pretend to be.
Gotta love SKU.

But their adoration could have been misplaced. i'm being really subjective here, but I was personally suckered into the drama of one such person. The drama might have given the Black Rose Duelists a false sense of the student council's superiority. And we don't really meet anyone who obseses over Miki/Saionji/anyone else, we just see them in the background and hear their squaking. I t could all be in their heads, the student council's that is. I meant by spanner in the works that in the real world, the presence of others and moreso the actions of others prevent such illusions from persisting. I may have a friend in crew who kind of believed it when another girl told her that she could bench 200 pounds, but the fact that I've arm wrestled both of them and beaten the braggart while losing to the crew girl disproves the loser's boast.

I disagree that the Student Council is made of "bigger losers" than the Black Rose Duelists. When push comes to shove, the Black Rose Duelists are just as desperate as the Student Council. It only takes about two minutes of therapy each episode to push the Black Rose Duelists off the edge and into the dueling arena. The reason the Black Rose Duelists aren't as active as the SC isn't because they're wiser or more mature. They didn't see through Akio's games. They didn't consciously walk away from the Duels, or try to tear it apart from the inside out like Utena did. Instead, the Black Rose Duelists were so insecure that they weren't capable of openly seizing their ambitions with their normal mindsets. They had to have Mikage and Mamiya artificially remove their sense of helplessness in order to even pose a threat to Utena. In that way, they're arguably even "weaker" than the Student Council, because the SC at least actively tried to achieve what they wanted. "Knowing your place" and "not even trying" isn't inherently noble. It's what Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible would want you to do.

Last edited by Nights1stStar (07-20-2009 02:53:02 PM)