Utena was aware of who Touga was.
I can see it, honestly. The vice president usually doesn't have all that much attention called to them so I could see Utena not recognizing him even if she saw him at an assembly or something. Touga also seemed to have more a reputation so that might be another reason Utena was aware of him, it might not have been about his position of authority.

Saionji on the other hand is debatable on whether or not he has any sort of notoriety among the other students. Wakaba has a crush on him and Nanami uses what happened to Saionji as an excuse to sick her minions on Anthy; but I don't recall any other mention of him by students prior to his expulsion.
It's possible that he was just never around the middle-schoolers the previous semesters that Utena was at Ohtori. After all we don't know how long it had been since he had 'won' the rose bride in the first episode. I doubt he'd hang out around middle-school students if it weren't for Anthy presenting herself as one.

I'm not sure if you're talking about Akio when you mentioned the Vice Chairman or not? I think he's technically the acting chairman as opposed to vice chairman.
But I think the same logic I applied earlier of her knowing about Touga because of his notoriety rather than his authority could explain that. Akio probably doesn't have a particularly interesting reputation among the students. Wakaba seemed to know of his existence but had never seen him herself.

Mmm hmm, I think Jacrad nailed it!  It's actually really common for someone just finishing SKU to misremember this as being Utena's first year at Ohtori Academy.  Yes, she's oblivious about most of the campus bigwigs -- come on, Utena, didn't you at least notice the high schooler who walks around with green hair?? -- and on top of that, she gets a new dorm assignment.  I wonder whether the first draft of the script had her as a transfer student, as she is in the manga and the movie.

I don't remember what Japanese title is applied to Akio.  I want to say it's just rijichou, chairman, but I'm not sure and I can't immediately look it up.  I wish we had accurate transcriptions of the Japanese dialogue from this show; it would have saved me quite a bit of time over the years.

I just assumed that Akio was the Vice Chairman because he took over when Mr. Ohtori "fell ill". While we're on the subjects of the Aristocrats' Asian cousins, how much does Mrs. Ohtori know? I assume she's just another pawn who knows just as much as almost everyone else, but you never can tell with this series. She probably assumes Akio is just making a power play. (Which he is, just not in the way she thinks) And finally, I read somewhere (can't remember where) that the reason Akio was marrying into the Ohtori family to gain access to the projector but I have to ask why would they have something like that? I apologize for this going off topic but I figured I'd use this thread instead of starting a new one.

LateToTheRevolution wrote:

And finally, I read somewhere (can't remember where) that the reason Akio was marrying into the Ohtori family to gain access to the projector but I have to ask why would they have something like that?

Kanae 'jokingly' suggests that's why Akio is engaged to her, for access to the projector. It can be taken literally, or that she's aware she's using the projector as a metaphor for his position in the school. To be fair, the show does that all the time, anyway. Either way it's the kind of 'joking' comment that is rather pungent with denial given the super obvious insanely affectionate body language we see from Akio in that sequence, who couldn't be placing more distance between them if he was sitting on the opposite couch:



As for the projector, schools often have complicated and expensive equipment a civilian otherwise can't get at, especially if they engage in active research. (You know, like Nemuro!)

Others already covered Akio's title. I used to think the Vice Chairman was the dumbass guy that hits on Juri in the first arc and then tells Utena to wear short skirts in episode 30 before Akio steps in and strangely enough disagrees. But looks like he's the Vice Principal. (Kyoutou-sensei, it sounded like?) I'm going to assume that's a different set of titles, and that he's not Akio's direct underling. The chairman title implies the boardroom overseer of the school, principal would be the direct administrator over the students. The principal would be the one in charge of disciplining bad students, for example, while the chairman's pumping (ahem) parents for donations and local governments for permission to dominate the rental industry in the surrounding area. In most schools that's one role, but this is a school with international campuses that carries the title of a single family. So he owns the boat, but doesn't necessarily have to steer it. A lot of businesses work this way.*

As for the original subject (lol what?) I always took Utena's apparent ignorance in the first episode to be there to suggest to the viewer how completely unconcerned she is with these things. Wakaba knows the student council well, but never interacts with them. She knows them because she's doing the hero worship thing--Utena doesn't go in for that crap, so she doesn't know them the same way. It does seem likely she'd know Saionji less than Touga--I don't think that's necessarily a lack of exposure, they both get earsplitting screaming in the kendo hall, but she doesn't care about having school crushes either, which I suspects makes people less likely to recognize Saionji. Touga gets around more, in every sense.

*Trust me, I would know! According to an apron I own, I'm the Chairman of the Bordeaux.

I think that it's all due to the magic in possession of Anthy and Akio. Somehow, the time in Ohtori is not the same as in the real world, as we have learned in Black Rose Arc. In fact, after "Revolution" duel everything could reset. Duellists had probably some sort of reminiscences of their past series of duels.
But I have also another theory, that pleases me more. Characters feel that they were fighting each other more times than they actually did (vide last Utena-Touga duel) and it might be connected with multiverse theory. Like, they were fighting but in different time-lines we don't see in TV series. The existence of them is slightly implied in the movie.

Akio and Anthy are Indians so I suppose that in the past they had lived there and maybe even were some kind of half-gods. They had to flee after mob had attacked Anthy and maybe have gone to the Japan.

LateToTheRevolution wrote:

And now for round three:.

The short answer, honestly, is that none of it matters, IMO. I very much doubt the projector has any power on its own, and if it exists at all as anything other than a metaphor and panty remover, it's Akio and/or Anthy that made it that way. The path to eternity/whatever is paved, apparently, by the actions of Nemuro, which happen in a vague 'in the past.' I always took this to mean, if we take anything literally, that the projector is created/imbued with whatever capacity it has, at the same time, whether that has anything to do with Nemuro's actions or not. The success of his experiment and the results coincide with what the projector is used for, so I figure it was either made, or 'turned on' then. This is when the dueling game starts, anyway.

Given the heavily implied ridiculous age of Akio and Anthy, I assume they either had some other scheme leading up to this, or that it took this long for Akio to see the need to convince Anthy he's trying to save her, at least in this capacity. There's probably always been some sort of performance to that effect, we just happen to see this iteration. Ultimately, trying to put a timeline to the school, or Akio and Anthy in general, is pretty difficult since the show really only tells us enough for us to make up our own ideas about how old they are. The death of the prince, cynically speaking, could have happened way the hell back in the middle ages, or is something so fundamental it happened in prehistory with the birth and death of the other Jungian archetypes. After the same fashion I don't assume them to be 'genetically' Indian either. I suspect if Akio and Anthy wanted to look Swedish, Nigerian, or whatever the hell else, they'd have that choice.

My headcanon, pretty much totally unsupported, is that the duelists are used and recycled over and over in time--under Akio's influence, apparently no one ages. So the dueling game could be decades old, and who knows--Touga and Saionji might have been fighting over the Rose Bride since the 20's. It would make sense on Saionji's part, anyway. Having met the real Prince and been changed or what have you, they have to graduate now, hence Akio saying he'll start the game over. But I don't assume he's had to do that every time, and maybe he's kept some of that crew longer than others. This is based partly on how old some of the characters act, how much they fit into different time periods (Miki and Saionji especially,) and that there's a riotous confusion of technologies like Ohtori Academy doesn't follow the same rational passage straightforward of time. There are cell phones, so one assumes we've advanced that far, but if Saionji's exchange diary was once delicately worded hiaku with layered meanings snuck to Anthy in the night, would he remember it? Probably not--Akio seems to have the capacity to alter memory where it would result in cognitive dissonance. Which is probably why Touga doesn't remember the powdered wig and heels phase either.

Utena did ask "How many time have we dueled?" during the last duel with Touga. He states three and she remarks that it feels lite it's been dozens of times.

I don't know about fan fic, but do note that the world has ended outside of the school in the movie, and the school itself crumbles with the shadow play girls turning into straw dolls. And the revolution in the show is what gives Anthy (and presumably everyone else) the ability to leave, and even though that's a metaphor for abuse, it can work on a literal level as is as well.

I had a theory I posted on tumblr once about how the world literally ends between the time period Utena enters Ohtori (in the manga) and leaves it (in the movie). Those are the only times the outside of the school is actually shown in present (excepting India which probably was just an illusion anyway) so if you view manga-show-movie as one story, there's a definite parallel between the normal, everyday world of the beginning of the manga and the wasteland at the end of the movie. Since time doesn't move in Ohtori until the revolution (which I place at the end of the show, as Anthy in the manga claims that the revolution hasn't occured yet) it's possible the students literally stayed there until the natural end of the world!!

...is my theory, anyway. but that's pretty literal.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention another part of that theory. It's that that is what Akio is taking people to see in his car. "I reveal to you the End of the World" - literally. He's taking them out to the edge of Ohtori to see the apocalypse, to further motivate the duelists into gaining revolution to find out exactly what the hell happened out there.

But isn't there a city (or at least a large town) outside of Ohtori? We see it plenty of times: when Wakaba goes grocery shopping in the episode where Saionji is hiding out in her room, in the episode where Utena and Akio go on their "date", plus we see it in the background whenever Akio takes the duelists on the highway to revolution. Then again, this is a series where we can't trust anything we see and it could all be one insanely big and complex illusion.