Well, seeing the bodies, now we know that they did not die in the fire... I think its smoke killed them, probably when they were all imprisoned

Good eye! I noticed that the coffins were opened, but I didn't catch that they had different things in them.

Here's one you didn't post: Shiori



--> nabbed from post #308 of this thread http://forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?id=1117&p=13


Do they all have items?
Wakaba has the leaf pin and neatly placed shoes.
Shiori has a lily...lol.
Tsuwabuki has a book bag
Kozue has Miki with shoes crammed between them in opposing directions.
And Kanae has loneliness and rejection. No remaster item for you.


Aren't there regular student hand holding dudes in the background randomly?

Last edited by codeblackhayate (08-31-2011 03:24:58 PM)

Shiori has a dead bird actually. I think it's interesting though, that they made the duelists in the coffin male for female duelists. It feels like an afterthought. Or maybe it's something I'm not getting?

MissMocha wrote:

Shiori has a dead bird actually. I think it's interesting though, that they made the duelists in the coffin male for female duelists. It feels like an afterthought. Or maybe it's something I'm not getting?

It could just be for coherency; so the viewer would not assume that Mikage was actually incinerating the dead bodies of the BR duelists, and that the bodies were only meant to be symbolic of a comparison between the duelists Nemuro killed and the BR duelists.

MissMocha wrote:

Shiori has a dead bird actually. I think it's interesting though, that they made the duelists in the coffin male for female duelists. It feels like an afterthought. Or maybe it's something I'm not getting?

I like OITL's explanation about not confusing the viewer, but do you want to know what I got out of it?  Ohtori Academy used to be an all-boys school.  I like this -- a subtle way of hammering home that Professor Nemuro lived a long time ago, when Ohtori was quite a different institution.  We could have known it was a boys' school anyway, of course, from the creepy group shot of all the dead duelists, but only when I saw the duelists in their coffins did the bell ring for me.

I agree with the consensus that the change seems a bit strange and random, but on the other hand, it did take me a number of viewings to figure out that those were coffins, containing bodies, and they were incinerated as black rose duelists lost.  Yes, I'm slow.  But I was hampered by the fact that there are a hundred dead duelists and only a few living ones.  Mikage presumably has a bunch of unincinerated coffins when he runs out of roses, which is odd.  Explicitly inserting corpses resembling the duelists makes it absolutely clear what's going on.  In some ways this is a bad thing, but it's at least unmistakable.

Leeg wrote:

Well, seeing the bodies, now we know that they did not die in the fire... I think its smoke killed them, probably when they were all imprisoned

Nah, they died in the fire.  I think you're applying too much logic to it.  Yeah, there are no burn marks, but there are no signs of decay either.  In reality, the coffins just contain blackened corpses.  Mikage is hallucinating the pristine bodies.

Last edited by satyreyes (08-31-2011 10:54:57 PM)

dirufacade wrote:

Or maybe they're sleeping.     Nemuro is a JERK!

Suddenly it all makes sense! Mikage kidnapped the secret twins of all those characters. Yes! Kozue and Miki were actually quadruplets!

Mikage also shows the strongest signs of not giving a flying fuck about sex and gender.  The male corpses are really just what he had on hand.

Using bodies that resemble the duelists does seem a little contrived.  Ideally, there would just be completely random corpses in there, and I think the audience would still get the idea, but I don't think the change really ruins any possible interpretations, so I don't see a problem.

This seems like a good place to ask, but could someone point out a thread where it's mentioned that all the 100 students did die for sure?  Everyone seems to have a pretty strong consensus, but I've always been confused by the end of the arc when Miki says that no one died in the fire.

KaleMarsh wrote:

Using bodies that resemble the duelists does seem a little contrived.  Ideally, there would just be completely random corpses in there, and I think the audience would still get the idea, but I don't think the change really ruins any possible interpretations, so I don't see a problem.

With that said, it's clearly demonstrated throughout the Black Rose Arc that Mikage doesn't see things at all the way he should -- Mamiya for one, and then towards the end of the Arc he looks at Utena and sees Tokiko, so it could just be part of Mikage's active hallucinations...and possibly something of a commentary on the fact that although Mikage has far more raw emotion to hand than the computer-like Nemuro, he's still a stone cold bastard. "You failed? YOU ARE NOW DEAD TO ME."

...kind of gives a horrible bit of irony to his graduation scene, really.

Last edited by Clarice (09-01-2011 09:28:31 AM)

Leeg wrote:

wait, Mikage and Nemuro are not the same?

Yes and no. It depends on how you view the arc, but personally I see Mikage as a "shadow-form" of Nemuro; he is the repressed side of Nemuro that Akio amplified and manipulated in order to achieve his goals. Nemuro was too emotionless to be of any real use to Akio in his plans, but when he saw how both Tokiko and Mamiya opened him to emotions he was so unfamiliar with...well. It made him ripe for harvesting, so to speak. This is why the series deals so much with teenagers in general, I think; it's a time when people are more malleable because they are just discovering who they are and what they will be. Mikage is what Nemuro became, but they are still the same person. Just the same person at different times -- which means personality-wise they're quite distinct in some ways.

KaleMarsh wrote:

I've always been confused by the end of the arc when Miki says that no one died in the fire.

I was always under the impression that everyone forgot about what had happened. Remember that Miki also said he didn't remember the building's name, right? Even though the beginning of the arc he was like "what, you don't know about Nemuro Memorial Hall?" when Utena asked him about it. Their memories about it all were erased, as were all the records of it ever existing, and 100 boys ever dying there.

That whole part of the series felt very 1984 to me.

For something to never have happened simply because "The Words of God" (Akio) said that he (Nemuro) was never here. This leads me to think of two possibilities:

1. 100 Boys did die in the fire. But as long as "God" says no one died, no one died (hence, the 1984 feel I'm getting)

2. There was never such a thing as Nemuro or the fire that killed 100 boys. Akio and Anthy just set up the illusory stage as a small experiment before putting Utena to the real test.