Dallbun wrote:

Hey, welcome to the forums! Always happy to see new posters, especially new posters who bring lengthy interpretive essays. Hope you'll stick around and share some more!

Thanks!

Dallbun wrote:

I know that other folks disagree, but I think the movie and the series are pretty clearly their own things, and attempts to integrate them into a whole tend to sacrifice almost all individual events in favor of broad cosmological sweeps. I feel the same away about theories that the characters are stuck in a time loop of some sort. They leave me very unsatisfied.

Personally I feel that the movie/anime are two different reflections of the same thing - except the movie is Ohtori changed by the anime - just Ikuro was smoking LSD for the anime, and speed for the movie. I found the ending to anime Utena very unsatisfying - no real resolution to what actually happened to Utena, except we know that she's likely alive and Anthy has gone looking for her. But thats it, really.

Dallbun wrote:

For instance: under a theory like you describe, what does it mean that movie Touga drowned saving Juri's life as a kid? Nothing - it's meaningless, a mere arbitrary fiction created by a deteriorating reality... but then why does it weigh on movie Utena's memories so much? If Tatsuya... clearly a non-important personnel, completely useless to Akio or Mikage... is a mere illusion, could Wakaba have pulled him aside when they were kids and dubbed him the Onion Prince? Why on earth would such an insignificant detail exist? If Ohtori is so thoroughly fictional and Akio in such control of it, why is he engaged to the chairman's daughter, and why is would Kanae's mother show up to remind him of his position and complain about the lack of (ahem) attention? And perhaps most importantly: the characters change and grow as the TV series progresses, often in ways unrelated to Utena herself. Do we just assume that they've been though such growth repeatedly, and been rebooted every time? What's the point?

I thought the childhood memories, if my theory holds, would just have been fakes, I dunno, generated by Akio, to make the world seem more real. I take Utena to be an 'invader' - she's not intended to be there by Akio's planning, but she turns up there anyway - and stands out from the crowd, e.g - uniform, not being on the student council yet owning the rose signet - and since they all tend to be negative memories, they are used to torment the prisoners interned by Akio. Note how many of the characters don't change without Utena - it seems to stand, that pre-Utena Ohtori they didn't really work out their problems, and only after Utena changes the dynamics in the anime, do things start to change.  I'd say Kanae and her mother are trapped there by Akio, either willingly or unknowningly, like the rest of the cast. In my theory, Akio doesn't want people to figure out he's stuck them in this alternate dimension where they can't escape. I'd say the point of rebooting everytime is so that no one gets close to the truth of the matter - that they are imprisoned by Akio. Utena finds out the truth, despite having no memory of her original purpose there - but the fact that the dynamics have changed despite Ohtori forgetting Utena shows that Akio's world has been permantently changed, despite Utena's faliure to rescue anyone but Anthy in the anime, which leads to the reset Ohtori of the movie when Anthy and Utena come back, where Akio is starting to lose it because people have figured out the secret and are working to subvert  - like all the Duelists except Touga running off in the Wakabamobile - Touga leaves in the movie because he has already figured out and is making sure the rest are rescued by Utena.

Dallbun wrote:

Meanwhile, on a less cosmological note: if the TV series Shadow Girls have an anti-Akio agenda, why is he so cordial towards them? ...and if they have any in-world agenda at all, why do they spend most of their time performing whimsical shadow plays for the audience, with no other characters around?

I'm not quite sure - I didn't think of this. Perhaps Akio does not know they are anti-Akio? Perhaps the whimsical plays are intended for Utena, to pick up what is going on?

P.S.

Catbazaar wrote:

(what were they smoking?)

Dallbun wrote:

]Cars.

Damn, I thought it was pot.

I like the way you think, Cat!  Welcome to IRG! 

Catbazaar wrote:

I thought the childhood memories, if my theory holds, would just have been fakes, I dunno, generated by Akio, to make the world seem more real. I take Utena to be an 'invader' - she's not intended to be there by Akio's planning, but she turns up there anyway - and stands out from the crowd, e.g - uniform, not being on the student council yet owning the rose signet - and since they all tend to be negative memories, they are used to torment the prisoners interned by Akio. Note how many of the characters don't change without Utena - it seems to stand, that pre-Utena Ohtori they didn't really work out their problems, and only after Utena changes the dynamics in the anime, do things start to change.

I like this last part: Utena is definitely the catalyst for change at Ohtori for almost all the characters, to the extent that they change.  A lot of standing conflicts get resolved because of her, usually by accident.  I don't think, though, that this necessarily means Utena is an unplanned fly in Akio's ointment.  In fact, it seems to me that Akio led Utena to Ohtori on purpose.  Why else would he give her the ring?  And given his near omnipotence over campus, why wouldn't he eject her if he didn't want her there?  No -- instead of ejecting her, he leads her on, enmeshing her more and more deeply in the campus's mysteries, and capping it all off with Anthy's betrayal.  He wants to mold a convincing fake prince so that he can break her sword against the gate, shrug, and tell Anthy he tried.  I really think that throughout the series, almost everything goes according to Akio's plan.  He makes only two mistakes.

A) Utena is slightly more true to her ideals than he anticipated, and
B) Anthy hasn't lost the capacity to hope, as he believes.

His blind spot with Utena is rather small.  He pegs her pretty well.  (That's what she said!!)  It's really not until the last episode that she shows Akio something he didn't expect to see, when she pulls herself off the ground and stumbles to the gate.  Even then, his reaction is one of surprised amusement, not of real bewilderment.  We don't see that until Utena does something that, we presume, no one has ever done before: she begins to pull open the gate.  The swords stop in the air.  The gate's transformation is a reflection of Utena's resolve.  Akio's blind spot here comes about because he doesn't believe in real princeliness, though he pretends to for Anthy's benefit; he would never have expected that her "strength or her nobility" would persevere after her friend's betrayal.  Even now that he sees it, he doesn't recognize it: he yells at Utena, "Stop!  You don't know what you're doing!"  (That's also what she said!!)

But in the end, Anthy has to take Utena's hand.  Here, Akio's blind spot is gigantic.  It's fair to say he's almost completely oblivious to the importance of his sister's emotional growth.  Akio, in the end, makes the same mistake about Anthy that everyone else but Utena does: he thinks she doesn't have feelings, or at least doesn't act on them.  He abuses her (and she him, for that matter) throughout the series, while Utena always treats her like a friend, to the best extent that Utena understands friendship.  Anthy even begins to chafe a little; something about pulling the sword out of Utena during Saionji's third duel made Akio do a double-take, and he dealt with Anthy afterward through... well, rape, to call a spade a spade.  But Akio nonetheless continues to assume that the bond he shares with Anthy is enough to keep Anthy from betraying him.  He was right that Anthy would stab Utena in the back, just as he's been right throughout the series that Anthy would continue to lead Utena on through his labyrinth, all the way to this final chamber.  But at this pivotal moment, when she could defeat Utena in spite of Utena's unforeseen perseverance just by rejecting her hand, Anthy takes a leap of faith -- and lands hard.  (That's what... never mind.)  Akio didn't expect this.  He's been through a lot of "revolutions" with Anthy before -- with different casts each time, I believe, perhaps with occasional repeat appearances by people like Ruka or Mikage -- and she's never failed him yet.  Utena is the first one to win his rigged game, because she's the first one to care about Anthy enough to get up off the floor, and even after all this abuse, Anthy has kept enough of herself alive to notice this and trust.  Though she has to see Utena discard her own betrayal of her with her own eyes before she'll believe it, Anthy finally trusts her, and it's this trust that gives her the strength to walk out on Akio afterward.

That's how I read the last episode, and I think it's quite beautiful.    Your mileage may vary, of course, and there's something to be said for the decisiveness of the movie's ending: yes, they escaped for real; yes, they're together; yes, the other students will follow them.  The series makes you draw your own conclusions and refuses firm answers.  We only get hints.  I share Dallbun's feeling that it's perilous to conflate the anime with the movie, or either one with the manga.  Many characters -- especially Touga, but also all of the others except possibly Utena herself -- mean something different in each of the three media.  I find it's better to think of them as reimaginings of each other, though for fic and personal canon purposes I'm happy to break this rule when the result is sufficiently awesome. 

Clarice wrote:

The SPG, to me, felt like a personification of the audience of a story. Because without an audience, what is a fairytale but a bunch of words?

I see what you mean, and I think that what I'm going to say means about the same thing, but I conceptualize it differently.  I feel like the Shadow Girls (in the anime) are somewhere between a Greek chorus and an author insert.  They watch; they reiterate; occasionally they push along.  And clearly they know everything and are giddy at getting to point it out as it happens.  They break the Fourth Wall.  Their agenda is to make you and me giggle and goggle.  Akio has no power over them, but that's all right because they don't really have anything to do with him; they expose much more of the plot to us than they ever do to Utena, if only because Utena is oblivious to all symbolism and metaphor.  You could take them out of the series entirely without materially changing what happens, but we, the audience, would lose the very special kind of immersion that the Shadow Girls encourage.  They are three of my favorite characters!