Hi BlueRoseTree! That's an interesting one, and I don't think we've discussed it before!  KaleMarsh made the connection between Anthy and Lilith over here, but no one really picked up the gauntlet.  We went down the Utena = Jesus path instead. 

I had a reflexive "yes!" response to your idea, because Anthy-as-succubus is right on target.  But then I had trouble getting any deeper than that.  Lilith, just like you said, is notable because she won't submit to male authority, and that's why she has to become a witch/demon.  But it seems to me that storybook!Anthy has the opposite problem.  She becomes a witch because she can't become a princess, not because she won't.  She would prefer to be a princess.  She imprisons Dios in order to make him her prince, and then feels so guilty over it that she spends the next several centuries or millennia submitting to his authority.  None of that sounds very much like Lilith, who saw herself as independent of her equal Adam.

I do see how the show is about Anthy becoming more like Lilith: (re)gaining a sense of independent identity and using it to decide for herself what path she's going to walk.  But she became a witch long before that, didn't she?

Karuka wrote:

To be honest I doubt that the story line of any of the characters have any connections to Judeo religion and myths.

Now, that might be a little hasty!  Ikuni decided to give the backstory the trappings of a European fairy tale, and to name the central male character "Dios," and to explicitly connect his alter-ego to Lucifer.  Those are moderately odd things to do if he doesn't want to evoke Judeo-Christian ideas.  I can't think of any straightforward parallels between Biblical characters and Utena characters, but I feel quite sure that Ikuni is intentionally twisting the Jesus story in these scenes.  We have Dios evidently sacrificing himself to save humanity, no?  But then it's Anthy who gets crucified, making a sacrifice of her own, but not to save humanity.  I don't want to stretch the point because I don't think Ikuni necessarily has a specific point in mind -- he is not above shallow provocation -- but I think he very much intends to allude to the Bible as a point of comparison.  SKU is very interested in the theme of redemptive sacrifice.  It would be bizarre if he didn't make any reference to the world's most famous redemptive sacrifice story.

Anthy was punished by the mods for keeping Dios away from them

Hey, I punished Anthy for derailing the cooking thread, not for keeping Dios away from me.

As for Utena Jesus ahhahahahah sorry but WHAT?

Heheh, yeah, again, I don't think the comparison goes much more than skin-deep.  But read the original thread.  The contrast is as interesting as the comparison.