Yasha wrote:

Giovanna wrote:

Also...the green roses never did open.

No

That's all right, next time we're home we'll get some more and this time they'll open. Or I'll tear off their heads and throw them in the bath like I did with the red ones. That'll teach them.

The lavender ones opened just fine. Saionji's so shy.

Anyway, maybe he was a subject of Touga's early experimentation and it just didn't go very well. It makes no sense at all to assume Touga didn't try anything at all with Saionji, and there is circumstantial evidence supporting that he had. It's just that it was never physically sexual, or if it was, I doubt it got past a little hand/genital contact.

We're assuming Touga would have experimented sexually, but he was from very early on shaping himself to be more than a hit in the sack, and Saionji offered other opportunities for honing his talents. I think Saionji may have been a subject for Touga's early experimenting with seduction and creating desire. It was never acted on, but there's something of a jealous lover attitude in Saionji where it concerns Touga. Something subtle that drowns out in his usual disdain for everything around him, but he's especially eyerolly and critical of Touga's sexual practices (more so, oddly enough, where they concern other men), and he seems almost to talk from a position of someone relating to persons desiring Touga. It's not a distant disgust with the situation, but it's not a close intimacy with it either. It's something he has tasted enough to know he didn't like it.

I'm still throwing this around in my head but it demands further contemplation. Thoughts?

Yeah, you really have to sort out how Touga feels about the two to get anywhere with it. You can't really deny there's something there, Saionji and Nanami are more important to him than others, but the nature of that importance...tricky.

Saionji and Touga late in the series is interesting that way, in the beginning we see nothing but amusement and a willingness to throw Saionji around, but the scenes later on are more...even? Saionji talks and Touga listens. He does so almost rudely, and a lot of the dialogue involves them both calling each other on their own brands of arrogance. IIRC, Touga says Saionji's 'hostile', but I suspect they both know that's not entirely what he means.

It's easy to take for granted that they will always be around each other. I think eventually Saionji will be the counterargument for Touga, the one that calls him on his bull and tells him he's barking up the wrong tree when he is. I tend to imagine Touga being very successful in life and Saionji having something to do with it by the things he says to him. And yet...it's a little harder to assume Saionji will be successful, or at least by the standards of his own goals.

I think it's because Touga's problems, even in the series, don't keep him from being, by most social standards, successful. Quite the opposite. Saionji...not so sure. Will he ever, ever learn to be coolheaded enough for high-pressure situations?

jmie5 wrote:

I agree that Saionji doesn't love Anthy, but that involves a whole explanation on what "true love" is or what we think it is.  I'd say he thinks he loves her.  In some odd way, he cares for her, wants to take her to eternity.  Or at the very least, he felt a common bond with her, when she wanted something eternal as well.  Way to show it, huh?

Yeah, that sounds about right. I don't think he loves her exactly, but he's in no position to judge well the status of his emotional affairs. He thinks he loves her, and he wants her approval so much he tries to beat it out of her. I wonder how he would have behaved if the love was real and 100%. I don't think he could have lived with himself treating someone he truly loved that way.

Tamago wrote:

Personally I believe that Saionji mistook Anthy's compliance and mirroring with the idea of a burgeoning love between himself and her which I suspect was what Akio wanted to occur to set up the first duel with Utena.

She didn't do that all that well, at least all the time, though. "For now I'm Master Saionji's Bride". The first words we hear her saying, if I remember correctly. Not exactly a declaration of love kind of statement. And Utena was nowhere near to hear it, either...

brian wrote:

Here again it might be insightful to check other versions. In the climax of the manga he grabs Anthy's hand and tries to get her to run away back to Ohtori. "It's because I love you..." ZAP. He is in the coffin of "assumption", 'the weakness that keeps holding him back.'

But what is he assuming? And what is the original Japanese word?

Is going according to the manga really such a good idea? I mean, the manga kind of... sucks. I mean, Touga is Utena's personal slave in it. There isn't much to analyze. >>;

jmie5 wrote:

When I think of Anthy, I don't think of Touga (although I'd always like to consider Touga and Saionji ).  I think he's so damn fixated on Anthy because he cared for her in some small way.  And she was his prize that was taken.

You probably won't know the reference, but now i'll have to imagine Saionji as Cnaiur from Bakker's novel "Prince of Nothing", which is very, very wrong but also so right it's giving me a headache.

I mean, the manga kind of... sucks.

I disagree, the manga is quite good in its own right and in some ways better than Ikuhara's versions. Saito is more internally consistant (let's face it, it's obvious that he changed his mind about some key details over the course of three years, not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that) and there is some fairly sophisticated metaphysics that I am still struggling with and will post about some day.

The scene is more complicated than I described. Saionji is creeped out by the castle itself. He feels that it is unhuman and perhaps he is worried that Anthy is not really human or will lose her humanity if she stays in it. It seems like he is trying to protect Anthy but instead Anthy has to protect him. Perhaps that is what he was assuming wrongly.

Right, so I was screencapping the first episode and stumbled on some FUCKING HOT.



This is one specific frame before his hand covers the INCREDIBLY HOT EXPRESSION ON HIS FACE. Oh yeah. I'm vectoring that, baby.

I always assumed it was sweat...

My men are such crybabies.

Giovanna wrote:

I always assumed it was sweat...

I taught he was frothing.
Has anyone got a picture of that frame so we can compare?

Ger wrote:

Lightice wrote:

Giovanna wrote:

I always assumed it was sweat...

I taught he was frothing.
Has anyone got a picture of that frame so we can compare?

XDDDDDDDDDDDDDD It's not sweat or frothing...it does show a closeup of his eyes, and there's a tear coming out of the corner of his right eye.

http://www.mitsukake.com/aoiryuu/saionj … onji05.jpg

Saionji, you're so emo and ghey. Lovely shot.

I've always felt a lot for Saionji, especially after episode 9. It's almost a "poor thing!" response on my part (does that make me Wakaba?) -- he's looking for something real for once, something that'll last, and he's looking for it in the worst possible place. Ohtori Academy has many merits (sexy chairmen, spiffy uniforms if you're on the council), but reality's not one of them. At all. No wonder he gets frustrated all the damn time. And he's usually pretty good at recognizing the school's rituals for what they are -- meaningless -- but he gets caught up in the games nonetheless, which always struck me as pretty tragic. A lot of people seem willing to place Saionji as comic relief or slap-happy bastard, but there's a lot more interesting things going on there.

...and, um, Giovanna's already said practically everything else I have to say on the big green guy, and she's said it a lot better than I ever could.

Manga and Movie!Saionji aren't nearly as interesting as his anime counterpart, though. I mean, he literally starts frothing at the mouth in the movie, which is not exactly an action that invites nuanced character development. Oh, well. Maybe Movie!Saionji just got rabies or something.

And mmm, Touga/Saionji. So beautifully screwed up. There's a whole barrelful of issues there, but there's also the ease that those two have. Yeah, there's a lot of backstabbing and outright stabbing during the first half of the series, but the relationship's just as fun when they hurl insults quite amicably. I could probably go on for pages about why I love the dynamics between those two, romantic or not, but suffice to say that I love when they finally reach the point where Saionji knows exactly what Touga's about in the final duel, and he still agrees to be Touga's Rose Bride, with no real tricks needed on Touga's part. That right there's something meaningful for Saionji to take hold of.

Last edited by puella_nerdii (11-25-2006 11:23:38 PM)

Ger wrote:

I see Saionji's willingness to get caught up in what he sees as meaningless games because really....what else can he do? There is no way for him to get what he's looking for, and he knows it. In fact, it would take a miracle....I see Saionji's taking part in the duels as a kind of opposite stance to Juri's - she fights desperately to disprove miracles, he fights desperately to prove them.

Of course, both of them are lying to themselves - Juri actually believes in her heart of hearts that miracles exist, just as Saionji believes they don't exist.

Seconded a ton. There's something about him, like he's a lamb being led to the slaughter, but it's the only solution he sees that life is offering him. How often does that happen though, that we miss a thousand other options because we see the world a certain way? Mikage is the same way, which I always found interesting given the strange meeting between the two of them. He only sees the world in logic and in terms of sacrifices and bloody hands, and so he's blind to the simpler solutions that actually work. Akio, too. (Though deliberately, in his case.) Really, most of the cast deals with that in some way. It's just especially noticeable, and perhaps pitiful, in Saionji, because his delusion is that the world is entirely a miserable ugly and cruel place, when all he needs is a little slice of safety, something he could so easily find, if only he'd accept that he himself wasn't too miserable, ugly, and cruel to have it. Definitely an odd contrast to Juri, who wants to reduce the world down to the mechanical place Saionji's so terrified of.

With Saionji it's always that he wants to go back to childish thoughts and find comfort there. Juri...is the opposite then? Is her need to disprove miracles an attempt to prove the adult reality that the show works so hard to tell us is wrong? Why? Does she think this is how one grows up? Or are they looking for the exact same thing but completely different ways. Juri hopes and wants to destroy that hope so it won't plague her anymore. Saionji hopes and aches to have that hope justified.

To put it another way, is the person that believes in god entirely because it hurts not to any more or less misled than the person that doesn't believe in god entirely because it hurts to? It's not that Saionji and Juri are asking the wrong questions, or barking up the wrong tree. It's that they're doing these things for the wrong reasons, trying to get the wrong things out of it.

Mmm. I love thought spilling. I have no idea how I got here.