Giovanna wrote:

if Akio is not in transit somewhere or communicating with someone, he's actually just staring at walls. It would be very eerie/kind of sad to see, that while everyone else hems and haws over the question of 'who I am' and seeks solitude to contemplate it, he knows better than to ask, because the answer would ruin him.

Now I want Akio monologues and scenes of him just spacing out like a character from Evangelion.

BlueKnightSeiran wrote:

Also more Akio and Touga just hanging out. Because...reasons.

This was aired on public television...

There's been tons of speculation all over the place about the prince/princess/witch dynamic, because none of the content we get actually explains any of that. The closest we get is assuming they are literal archetypes, products of the worldwide human hive mind. In which case they coincide pretty well with a broadly stroked shift in perspectives over the history.

Ie. The Prince is the 'God' we want saving us, and exists simply driven by that demand that someone do so. Over time, however, being saved became harder to accept, and eventually someone asked, 'Can every princess be saved?' This question spawns Dios' sister: someone he can't save (because this capacity is tied heavily by implication to romance) and our reaction to that question, though it is answered, is to, for a time, cast it away, as Anthy was.

That question eventually pulls the illusion apart. If not everyone can be saved, is it perhaps because not everyone deserves to be? These thoughts eventually lead to an obvious, previously totally avoidable question themselves: must the Prince save everyone? As soon as that's not an immediate, unquestionable 'Yes' the conclusion that he can exhaust is basically unavoidable. And at that point, the Prince that can be exhausted, and the woman that cannot be saved, become natural allies.

And why do they not just slink off into miserable obscurity then? Why doesn't the archetype die? We came to ask different things of them. Once we accepted the possibility that we don't all get or even deserve saving, we needed archetypes to represent that aspect of ourselves--the fallen prince and the unrepentant sinner.

It takes a long time after that for us to realize that the characters in this little play represent aspects present in each of us, and the responsibility that implies: Not only are we the saints and the sinners both, but that ultimately, we have to save each other--and even more terrifying, we have to save ourselves. Utena becomes this figure, and is presented almost as a new archetype--one we haven't a name for, because she is the archetype of us, newly minted as a whole, instead of broken into little exaggerated parts. The implication that Anthy can now abandon her post (and likely Akio has lost his) is that this creation in effect breaks down the need for externalized archetypes that came before. The Prince, the Witch, and all the rest become unnecessary. Tools, at best, to help us understand ourselves, but no longer acceptable crutches to use to avoid doing so.

PS. I feel vaguely compelled to write these Akio monologues.