Seconding the people who are reinforcing that the Wiki article was biased - not only was there Akio hate at one point, but one of those demented Akio fangirls who want to see him strutting his power and stomping all over everything and never losing (... masochistic much? >.>) put all these lines about how he's got Anthy under his control completely, how he didn't love her, etc.

.... right. (Has anyone else noticed that there's a segment of Akio fangirls that do this? It's the same with Jareth from Labyrinth. "OMG, MY EVIL, ALL-POWERFUL VILLAIN CANNOT LOSE." Way to make a character boring.)

I noticed the Juri/Ruka bias, too. Their description of Shiori makes me cringe a bit; I kind of doubt that Shiori is secretly hurt by all the pain she's inflicting upon Juri because she loves her. Seriously, people, even though I kinda like Ruka, NO ONE EVEN REMOTELY DESERVE JURI EXCEPT ME AND POSSIBLY MIKI- err, I'm okay now....

They've cleaned it up, though; at least now the character segment isn't fantastically spoilerific.

Last edited by Syna (12-03-2006 11:59:54 AM)

Giovanna wrote:

HILARIOUS JACKASS ON WIKIPEDIA wrote:

Weird Facts: Akio has a penchant, in the English language version, for saying the word "Ciao". And, as the Movie shows, defying gravity with dynamic butt-slides over he hood of cars. Even a taxi. Akio is also, arguably, the most hated character in Utena.
Fond (and not so) Fan Nicknames - The Devil, The **** wiped off of Dios' boot, Mullet-head, Mr. Mullet, Mr. Ciao

ALRIGHT. Who is the comedy GENIUS that did this???? SOMEONE THINKS THEY'RE FUCKING GROUCHO MARX. You people can shitcan the hair. Fine. It's a mullet. Dump on movie Akio all you like. BUT THIS IS BULLSHIT.



(...does series dub Akio really do the 'Ciao!' thing? )

I didn't bother to watch enought of the English dub to notice...

AND WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS GUY???  I think they just woke up one morning & said "Hmmm... I think I'd like to suffer from Giovanna's wrath for the rest of my insignificant life..."

Syna wrote:

Seconding the people who are reinforcing that the Wiki article was biased - not only was there Akio hate at one point, but one of those demented Akio fangirls who want to see him strutting his power and stomping all over everything and never losing (... masochistic much? >.>) put all these lines about how he's got Anthy under his control completely, how he didn't love her, etc.

.... right. (Has anyone else noticed that there's a segment of Akio fangirls that do this? It's the same with Jareth from Labyrinth. "OMG, MY EVIL, ALL-POWERFUL VILLAIN CANNOT LOSE." Way to make a character boring.)

Again with the Akio somehow being connected with Jareth. Christ I really need to just watch that movie already.

I feel the need to defend myself, since I'm betting I'm the prime offender here. I do, in fact, rather want to see Akio strut his power, stomp all over everything, and never lose. (Also I'm a masochist.) It's the nature of the beast to root for your favorite character, and you don't like a character like Akio unless you rather enjoy his cockwaving and being a jerk and seducing scared little virgin girls. (It happens to be very hot.) That said, I hope I'm the last person on the planet that would actually seriously try to present him as all-powerful, all-controlling, or for that matter, evil. That's the fantasy, and it's easy to indulge because it's his fantasy, too. He wants you to see him that way, and he wants to see himself that way. And why not? Much better than a pathetic manchild jaded to the point of blindness, that lives entirely dependent on a woman that could hang him out to dry with a few steps and a dismissing thought. Akio's god of a small and insignificant domain, and as masterful a manipulator as he is, it's all part of the illusion. Effective to a fault given the way he uses it, but still. He manipulates the walls people create on their own, a little nudge this way or that, but in the end, he has no real power. He approaches a city and claims it's his because he can tamper with the shape of the walls and put it under siege, but not once does he ever really get inside anyone.

It's very easy to reduce Akio to LOL ALL POWERFUL VILLAIN HURR, because that's what he wants. There was a time (it's passed now, I wonder why...) when lots of Touga fans gushed constantly because he was a PRINCE DAMMIT and really he was a good person and he just wants to love, blah blah blah. But it's easy to see him that way, because that's what he wants. The illusion becomes real because they're that damn good at it. But Touga's no more a prince and a good guy than Akio is all-powerful. Really, Akio isn't very powerful at all. Half the point of his character is to rub it in our faces how brutally insignificant he and his style of thought is. He's a child that thinks fucking and acting grown-up can replace actual psychological maturity and responsibility as the cornerstone of adulthood. He sits in his little coffin all day playing with people like they're green plastic army men, with no care or understanding of the gravity of his own actions, or the world outside where he's not a scary powerful master of illusion. Ikuhara calls him the representation of adults in this world, and how true it is. How many adults never really do become adults. How many 45 year olds strut around Wall Street thinking the planets are revolving around them, and that all that matters in this world is the number in their bank account, with no concern for what they've done to others to add that extra digit. There is scathing social commentary surrounding this character especially, and I've never seen it addressed by anyone, and it's one of the few things about SKU that isn't us drawing our own conclusions. Ikuhara refers quite openly to it. It's an essay I have yet to write, but there it is, in the broadest of strokes. Akio is not all-powerful, all-knowing, or evil. He's just an asshole. The most you could say in his defense, and it's a lot, is that he had no choice but to be the creature that he is. He's not human, and if you run with the Jungian theme of archetypes, there was never any option for him to be anything but the archetype, and an archetype is by nature an absolute. But that's another subject.

This was your regularly scheduled rebellion from working. Giovanna yaps about Akio when she's being passive aggressive about refusing to work.

Giovanna wrote:

Ikuhara calls him the representation of adults in this world, and how true it is. How many adults never really do become adults. How many 45 year olds strut around Wall Street thinking the planets are revolving around them, and that all that matters in this world is the number in their bank account, with no concern for what they've done to others to add that extra digit. There is scathing social commentary surrounding this character especially, and I've never seen it addressed by anyone, and it's one of the few things about SKU that isn't us drawing our own conclusions. Ikuhara refers quite openly to it. It's an essay I have yet to write, but there it is, in the broadest of strokes.

The political divisions in this country are very poisonous, unless such an essay is written in the very broadest terms it will cause an explosion, even here in this forum where probably 95% of the members share common political beliefs. It's also a topic for a different thread -- but a long discussion about the myriad Akio Games that pervade our society in every realm from politics to "Reality" TV shows is way overdue.

....but see, you don't even remotely count because you're not COMPLETELY GODDAMN DELUSIONAL. You recognize the nuances of Akio's character; you've got awareness. Personally, not being attracted to assholes at all, if he just went stomping around being all-powerful, I would outright hate him because he'd be shallow. Which he isn't, so I can only really pity. Which is saying a lot about how well-developed he is because I identify with Utena in a major way, and I Anthy (... cause men can be jerks and I'll just spit on them, whereas show me a crazy bitch and I'll be reduced to a puddle, apparently... yeaah).

And that's part of it. Ripping Akio away from the bits of him that are very human, the pathetic bits and the bit that told Anthy "knowing everything of you, I love you" would just make him a complete failure of a character, to me. It would be like Anthy really being the wilting domestic femme flower, rather than a very miserable and very vindictive person. I hate the fanboys I've met who have wanted to reduce her to that and rail against her lack of innocence, and I hate the fangirls who insist that in the end, it's Utena who is broken, not Akio. (WTF???)

That means they're not being challenged by art. They're basically using it for their own petty gratification. Which is fine, to some degree, but it's reducing a very sophisticated show to a fantasy, and that upsets me.

Oh, and watch Labyrinth. It's got all sorts of crazy-go-nuts Utena-style-crazy symbolism in it, and it's really kind of a bad and cheesy movie so I usually just can't recommend it to most people, but I assure you, if you like Akio and Utena, you're almost guaranteed to love it. (... just don't expect, like, anything from the fanfics. It's all OMG, SARAH WAS A BITCH AND I SHOULD BE WITH JARETH.)

Last edited by Syna (12-05-2006 02:53:25 PM)

Syna wrote:

....but see, you don't even remotely count because you're not COMPLETELY GODDAMN DELUSIONAL. You recognize the nuances of Akio's character; you've got awareness.

I know very well the message Ikuhara meant to send with Akio, and have no problem addressing it at great length. But truth be told, I don't agree with Ikuhara's philosophy there at all. Parts of it, yes, but there's also in itself a childish spite in what Ikuhara's saying, like the grownup equivalent of getting picked on in class and then drawing the bullies getting blown up or run over by trains. There's a hatred in his commentary that clouds it to me, something almost rebelliously cynical even in its own idealism. I'm not sure quite what I'm trying to say there, except to lay down a few hard strokes and not mind going over the lines a bit, Ikuhara's fanatical portrayal of adults as hugely awful and totally corrupt strikes me as the kind one develops in self-defense. I know it's a kid's show but come on. The adults in the series are given no redemption at all.

But then...I side with Akio, so one has to take most of what I say with a similar brick of Lot's wife. There's a whole lot wrong with Akio because whoo is he ever an extreme within an extreme, but his delusions are not completely pulled out of his ass, and a lot of the social commentary Ikuhara is blaming on adults is really part of a whole other problem not entirely their fault. I don't think being a vicious manipulator, sex maniac, or rampantly selfish are necessarily bad traits. Nevermind the ivory tower (heh) philosophy of the nice shiny world Ikuhara wants. The world we live in favors a person like Akio, and that is why he's our token adult instead of the ideal.

Personal_IceQueen wrote:

Gio makes a good point, Akio wants the illusion. And an illusion simply an illusion, Akio plays up people's desires to live a hedonistic lifestyle without having to confront the truth that is responsibility. People relate to Utena in different ways and when I first saw the show - I seriously hated Akio. It was not until much later that I discovered, omfg he's just a salesperson whatever you want the big bad wolf to represent -Akio can give it to you, if you want to place blame on someone else and not accept the dark areas of your personality, he'll make sure you get that illusion too.

Damn you! Everyone keeps stepping on things I want to yap about and put on the shrine and I have limited time here OKAY??

You said salesperson, and wow are you right. But isn't this why his own metaphor for himself is so irritatingly apt? What is the devil but the temptation itself and everything that surrounds it. He's a lobbyist for sin. In a direct appeal to the actual material, Akio acts as the devil because he does what the devil is almost universally portrayed to do: make it look oh-so-fun to be bad, and offer you the means to join him. Ultimately, it was your decision.

In another sense, he still fits. What has the devil become but a scapegoat for the dark parts of ourselves? A nice convenient place to swing all that dirty laundry and pretend it's not ours. Oh, Touga couldn't help it, Akio made him do terrible things to Nanami and Saionji. Bullshit. Akio doesn't create anything in anyone, and if he presents Touga with the option to do bad things, how is it not Touga's fault he took it?

And I'm a lot more cynical than that. I say even Utena acted on her own will. She was ignorant to be sure, and taken for quite a ride (heh) but she still got in the car. She knew she shouldn't, but she never did try to stop him, did she? I see a lot of fans themselves ignoring that. It's so easy to place blame squarely on him, because again, he wants you to. But no one, Utena included, was a pure and noble spirit in their entirety. To pretend Utena was pure and noble is absurd, she's human like (most) of the rest of them, and Akio couldn't have done what he did to her without that part of her that voluntarily went along with it.

Akio's bad, there's no doubt about that, but he's not the source of it. Akio only shapes and magnifies things that are already in each and every victim of his manipulations. A bad person, but he's in a bad world, and nevermind it's a world of his own making, that mechanic would be the same whether he was in a coffin, Tokyo, or Tahiti. The world can be an ugly, ugly place, but no one, however much they swim in that fact, can have the honor of all blame. Everybody contributes. What ruins Akio in the end is that he's all the dark and none of the light, where people are otherwise some combination of both. He's presented as something that experienced that contrast in stages instead of all at once, but the world didn't follow him in that path. It was a bit of dark and a bit of light to begin with, and he went from magnifying one end to magnifying the other.

I completely agree with you, Touga realizes that his life is going no where, even Saionji can see through his little schemes by that point.

"You've never truly loved anyone, you pretend to be chivalrous but that is only to serve your own ends, you are simply a manipulator, though now you have fallen. I can see your confidence evaporating from your sword..."

Or something like that, I believe once Saionji told him that, Touga realized he needed to actually get what his heart desired and stop trying to get it all. Though we are shown later that he has a desire to be like Akio. So... it's safe to say that he does love Utena (the shape of his Soul Sword is the stereotypical Longsword of the Prince. So that's proof enough of him changing.)

I think I agree with your posting Giovanna, although I think you are overstating things almost to the point of exonerating Akio. He may not have created the weaknesses and flaws of the other characters but he does everything in his power to inflame them.

I fancy that when Ikuhara talks about the wickedness of the Adult World he is being a stereotypical Baby Boomer, with a stereotypical Boomer's nonsense about how their generation is somehow more virtuous or innocent or something. Miki talks the same way when he says he does not want to be manipulated by selfish adults.

It makes sense in some ways to "demote" Akio. Heck, in the movie manga he's just a figment of Anthy's imagination, a distraught goddess' bad memory.

Nonethess he is the number one villain. The duellists have the flaws that they have, but many of the cruel words and deeds (including murder) that happened would not have happened without Akio's active manipulations.

The world is a terribly naughty place, maybe we should all buy Akio this shirt :



or maybe he just needs a hug and lots of 'em.

I am not an authority on this but Akio seems more like an Islamic devil than a Western one. Supposedly the Islamic devil is given to langorous poetry, sad music, self-pity, selfishness, and triviality. He does not go around with pitchfork or rapier but is more of a whisperer. Again my information is second-hand.

Last edited by brian (12-08-2006 06:53:07 PM)

brian wrote:

I am not an authority on this but Akio seems more like an Islamic devil than a Western one. Supposedly the Islamic devil is given to langorous poetry, sad music, self-pity, selfishness, and triviality. He does not go around with pitchfork or rapier but is more of a whisperer. Again my information is second-hand.

Akio doesn't strike me as a struggling artist type, but otherwise that sounds about right. I'm not up on my Islam but as I understand it their concept of Satan is more or less what the original idea of him was. Kinda god's creature stuck doing the crappy job of being what people have to decide against to reach god's glory. The pitchfork crap didn't show up in Christian faith until much later, and there aren't many lines to draw between Akio and that devil. Pitchfork devil is the one that eats babies and kills your parents. Not quite what we're looking for there. Akio's a whisperer, definitely. The thing is he seems to have an uncanny ability to whisper after making sure you absolutely cannot hear anyone else.

Tamago, you can't jump out of the Popemobile.

Giovanna wrote:

Tamago, you can't jump out of the Popemobile

Why would he wanna do the exact same thing in the Popemobile that he does with his Akiomobile? The popemobile not only offers great protection from any nasty flying objects that might head his way, its also excellient for pulling in the Catholic School Girls with, *hehe*

SexingTouga24/7/365 wrote:

PILES OF QUIVERING FLESH!

Sounds like a plan to me!

Last edited by Tamago (12-10-2006 07:31:02 PM)

In some ways I think of Akio as a few too many beers. Yes the duellists do things under his influence that they probably wouldn't do if he weren't present but it's not anything that they never thought about.