I rather like to think that she came as close to it as people do, and then stopped being a person. While Utena existed, she was not an archetype, no living person is. But she did succeed at channeling it to an extreme, and then...

It's an interesting question whether this "channeling" made her be subsumed into the archetype. I seem to remember (my DVD's are chronically on loan) that nobody remembered who Utena was after her disappearance. The way I understand it, she, in essence, became the Prince, much like Anthy was the Witch. And it's a whole different quest to get a person's identity out of that. It's symbolic Anthy leaves for the rest of the world - the Hero's journey generally starts with leaving home.

So, yeah, she became the Prince. And that started a Witch's quest to become the Wise Witch who aids the prince?

Yeah, I'm closer to Jung than to Freud. Hard to help it. ;-)

Almaser wrote:

Personally, I'd say no. I think the whole point of that final sequence is to show that Utena doesn't succeed in suppressing her selfhood and adopting an archetypal persona. Instead of being the Prince, and making her way through the Rose Gate to the Princess, triumphing over the Villain, she fails. She is wounded, bleeding, and yet somehow manages to see past the gate to the coffin inside, the real situation. The real Anthy.
When she has the real Anthy there, she's capable of reaching to the person inside, not the archetypal masks that she's been donning the entire series (Witch, Whore, Gentle Bridge).
But most importantly, she continues to try and help Anthy, and asks her to accept that aid. She becomes the potential of rescue, if Anthy herself will choose it. And Anthy does. It cannot save her right then and there, things are too damaged around them, but she does indeed learn to become free because of it. She is no longer bound in stricture by the archetypal personas she had been adopting, but instead is her own person, free to seek out the one she wishes to see again.

Or maybe I'm just running low on sleep and procrastinating on my assignment

^--Completely agrees to the person above her..

Anyway, we all know there can never be real princes, and even the castle is really just an illusion in the sky.
On episode 38, Akio said that instead of Utena choosing the Chairman's room, she choose a castle floating up the sky instead, it's for naive people, this projector of his, he mentioned.. It's not really for gazing stars at.

And, while Akio and Utena fought, we see the castle and everything else started collapsing, remember what Akio said? "The projector shows what the duelist wants" and Utena wants all lies to be erased.. So thus, Akio losing to their duel, and the figure of Dios is shattered. (if you look at the series once more)

Because Akio only had power in the illusionary world, he is losing.

Then, later, we see Anthy stabbed Utena, the only strength Utena used was an imaginary prince (Dios) who was once kind and gentle hero appear to her, and at that time she needed a facade and swore to be 'prince' again in order to save Anthy, the only way to save Anthy, so she believed.

Thus, in the end, like she and Saionji knowing that everything's an imaginary illusion, she and him trapped themselves still in their coffin.

That is why, if you look at "Rinbu Revolution", in the end, only Utena is spinning in the rose, the rose which marks of wonderful illusionary things.. She still said she couldn't be prince to Himemiya in the end, right?

And Anthy said it's her turn to look for Utena.. And in their picture together, they did promise to help one another if one of them gets in trouble.. So there..

She is not prince, but rather, she is a true noble human.. And I do admire her for that.. n_n

I do believe she became a Prince. Maybe not the regal cape-wearing Prince, but a noble, strong person who revolutionized the worlds of those around her.


In the end, Utena's gone, but I don't think she's forgotten totally.


First we hear girls chatting up about what they plan to do w/ the rest of their lives, and one of them mentions she's found the man of her dreams. The other girls tease about how she used to idolize Utena...then they try to remember who Utena was again. But they never actually claim she dies or anything, but come up w/ several theories of how she -left- the school.


Then we see Miki teaching Mitsuru how to use the stopwatch while Kozue is practicing on the piano... Kozue's practicing on the piano! And doesn't seem to need Miki's constant attention.

Next, Saionji and Touga are practicing kendo. Not actually fighting, but more or less practicing. A friendly practice like back in the day. How could they have gone from trying to 1-up each other to suddenly being buddies again, and not remembering what happened all these months? And Saionji refers to it as "fooling around".

And Nanami casually says "Tea's ready."....since when was Nanami so casual about things and not clinging to Touga?


Shiori joined the fencing team. I think she did it to be closer to Juri.


And lastly...Wakaba isn't pining over anyone! She seems comfortable and confident in herself, and even has her very own little sidekick.



There you have it. Utena's mere presence, as well as the duels, revolutionized the worlds of Miki, Juri, Saionji, Touga, and Nanami.

She might not have revolutionized the entire world like Akio wanted, which is why he claims she's failed, but even being a tiny influence in the worlds of a few people; I think that's a big success.

Last edited by st0dad (11-01-2007 07:23:20 PM)

Actually, in the end the swords go out of control and destroy the duelling arena. If they were going straight for Utena then they wouldn't have destroyed everything else.

Utena didn't become a prince because princes and princesses are just fairy tales.

Utena had princely qualities though. Which is why she decided to save Anthy. But she couldn't do it. Even Utena herself admits she couldn't become a prince the moment Anthy slips away from her. What Utena did was help to break the cycle where they were all trapped in, hence she's a revolutionary, not a prince.

She couldn't save Anthy even tough she was being as princely as she could so in the end she stopped believing those fairy tales. I see the whole point of SKU disappear if she had become a prince. Meh, but that's just me...

I think, rather than having become a Prince (gotta go with that cap, I think), she became a decent human being.  Which, is better, because (a) they're easier to put your faith in than True Princes, real and not merely an illusory archetype, and can interact with other real live human beings, which optimistic archetypes have a hard time doing.

Princes, in the end, don't seem to be so worth going after, because they're illusory, impossible to have in reality in any functional or satisfactory sense, and you're just chasing depressing shadows.  Utena, on the other hand, is worth following.  And if you prefer the movie end (or the movie as a follow-up to the series), as I do, then Princes don't stand up to the light of day, but Utena becomes/is worth riding out of town with.

It's important to have high goals, but to realize perfection isn't the lowest you can set the bar.  Or something like that.

OnionPrince wrote:

As for the fairy-tale point, though, Ohtori is still at least partially a fairy-tale world. If an immortal witch and her husk-of-a-once-noble-prince brother can exist there, who's to say princes can't be real too?

Only for those who believe in it and until they believe in it. This is also why Anthy is not continuing her eternal suffering in the end. Akio on the other hand can't even imagine a different way of living.

I mostly agree with Gio. I think that what was crucial is that, at the very end, she stopped trying to become a prince. She accepted Anthy as a friend, rather than as an object to reflect her own semi-divinity. I don't take her last words as an admission of defeat: rather, as a discovery. Anthy took her hand. In one single gesture, they both refused Akio and with him, his world of illusions and false ideals. Anthy stops being the witch, and Utena the prince. Rather, they are simply friends in the truest sense of the word. I think it is that moment where their fate in the outside world is sealed. They must leave and resume their love (platonic or otherwise) in reality, with all of its chanegs and uncertainties.

Or you could be more pessimistic and just say Utena bloody died miserably, Anthy skipped out out of the disaster because she's superhuman, and Akio made Touga the new Rose Bride.

Giovanna wrote:

I don't think Akio would know a true prince if it crawled out of the water and bit him on the ass...

To be fair, neither would I.  I'd be like "Oh my God, it's some kind of ass-biting water monster!" 

Utena didn't become a prince; she outgrew her need to become a prince.  Instead she became herself.  The archetype of the Prince, as it's presented in Utena, is altruistic to the point of masochism.  No one healthy should want to be Dios.  The story of Utena, in my mind, is the story of this girl passing from the ideal of altruism to the ideal of enlightened selfishness -- from wanting to save Anthy to prove how princely she is, to wanting to save Anthy because Anthy is a part of Utena.  And accepting that that is an okay reason to want to save somebody.  Maybe even a better reason.  Remember, Dios would take the damsels in distress out to the French restaurant, but afterwards he'd ride away on his horse.  By the end of the series, Utena wants to save Anthy because she loves Anthy and wants to be together with Anthy.  Between the damsel and Anthy, I know who I'd rather be.

My two cents

It's very hard to know what's going through Utena's head at that moment.  I'm sure if you asked her "Utena, do you want to be Anthy's prince?" she would say "yes."  But what has happened is a subtle but important change in what being a prince means to her.  Being a prince no longer means helping people in need because they're in need, like it did when Akio showed her the Rose Bride in the church so many years ago.  Now being a prince means protecting people you care about, because you care about them.  That's a much truer and healthier definition of princeliness than what Dios embodied.

I disagree that the show encourages us to look up to the ideal of the Prince.  Look what happened to Dios, after all.  Okay, so it's Anthy's fault, but there's an important sense in which Dios brought it on himself: he was so busy helping strangers that he didn't make time for the person he ought to have cared about the most.  This is dysfunctional, and the series makes sure to drive that point home -- Juri and Shiori, Touga and Nanami, and Miki and Kozue all have strikingly similar relationships, always with the result that the neglected party feels simultaneously worshipful and resentful towards their partner.  Utena's ability to break out of that mold and act on her love for the person she cares about is what enables her to bring revolution.  If she has become a prince, it is not in the same sense in which Dios was a prince.  It's in a new sense, first whispered about in episode 12, hinted at by Mikage's rejection of Tatsuya, and now at last coming to a culmination as finally, finally, someone in this motherfucking series acts like they care about someone.  YAY UTENA! 

Last edited by satyreyes (11-03-2007 09:35:10 PM)

satyreyes wrote:

Dios brought it on himself: he was so busy helping strangers that he didn't make time for the person he ought to have cared about the most.  This is dysfunctional, and the series makes sure to drive that point home -- Juri and Shiori, Touga and Nanami, and Miki and Kozue all have strikingly similar relationships, always with the result that the neglected party feels simultaneously worshipful and resentful towards their partner.

Oooo, good point. I definitely agree that the series ultimately takes a great big morally superior dump on the whole prince thing. That it rejects it that absolutely I hadn't considered as critically. I took that Utena aims to be a prince and fails to be the lesson that an archetype is not a person, and you can only only use the idea as inspiration in your actions, not as a goal persona in life. To look at it that way seems to me to suggest the series doesn't even think you should look at the ideal as a source of morality or anything else, or at least that the closer relationships between you and those you care about should dictate your behavior instead. (Which in and of itself kinda suggests everyone is a decent person, since if you listen to your heart or whatever way you want to put that, you'll see how to express your love for others. As opposed to listening to your heart and finding it says 'Have sex with your sister on a couch that still smells of your fiancee! ')

If the series were a tribe in Africa, I'd get away with disagreeing with any possible main point it was trying to make on the grounds of cultural relativism.

Agree with the general consensus here.  Utena didn't become a prince, but only because, as we know by series' end, being the Prince is a BAD thing.  Had she become the Prince, I believe it would have just set the cycle again, and Utena would have lost her nobility in much the same way Akio did. 

We have to remember that Utena being Anthy's "prince" was based on a lot of false assumptios on Utena's part, and the fact that she still accepted and tried to save Anthy at the end is a very noble thing indeed, but not the actions of a true Prince.  What Prince would ever save the Witch?  So, while she's not a Prince, she's prince-like, which ultimately is the better option.  It allows Utena to remain human, to grow and change.  Much better than being doomed by the archetype   In the end, isn't the wishing for the power of the Prince what caused the Duelists to remain in their coffins anyway?  One can argue that the lesson we're supposed to get out of Utena is that only by becoming self-reliant, and letting go of childish notions of perfect heroes can one gain the power of "revolution" and really change.  But that's my two cents anyway.

Last edited by ArsenicForBreakfast (11-03-2007 11:31:23 PM)

That makes a lot more sense to me now. I feel like I'm learning so much about this extraordinarily deep series.

One thing still bothers me, though. Like Satyreyes said, "protecting people you care about, because you care about them" is a truer and healthier goal to live for. But in that case, what about the people who no one cares about? Are the plights of the huddled masses enough justification for a Prince in the world? I have no idea, really, so I'm just throwing that question out there.