Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

I used to be so anti-Nanami until it hit me how young she is, and that she has to live with Touga as a brother.

Ah, same here! I found her so annoying and unammusing until I, uh, grew up a bit and came to realise the sort of things she was going through.

I first watched the series when I was about fourteen, and I very strongly disliked a lot of the characters - Touga, Saionji, Shiori, Ruka, Akio, Mikage, Nanami - without ever understanding them or the reasons behind their actions.

Akio and Saionji I still dislike to the same degree, but now I feel more open to thinking about their characters - whereas before I just didn't want to see anything about Akio at all, I'll now gladly read a page of analysis on him because his role in the story really interests me.

With Touga, I've definitely gone from blindly hating him for manipulating Utena to viewing him a complex and tragically self-aware character. I haven't watched the Akio arc or Apocalypse arc for a while (currently making my way through Back Rose) but when I get there I'm looking forward to observing him closely. I still don't see Touga as a 'good' person (who is in sku) and his actions still make me kind of uncomfortable, but I definitely like him more as a character than the two I mentioned above.

Shiori is an interesting case, because it took me longer than all of the others to see her in a remotely positive light - I'd always seen people saying that they really liked her or felt sorry for her, and no matter how much I thought I couldn't understand why. Probably because I relate to Juri a lot and I couldn't see past that to consider her as a fully-rounded character. But now I'm on my third runthrough of the series and hell she's not the nicest person but she's also just a emotionally conflicted and isolated kid, the same as most of the rest of the cast.

Actually, I don't think my judgement on Ruka has changed at all. That is, indifferance mixed with a mild dislike. Maybe I'll have something more to say when I get to his episodes.

I guess Mikage is the last on the list? I didn't like him before for being a manipulator (that appears to have been a trend), and I think I continued to dislike him because I couldn't understand what was going on in episode 22. When I rewatched it last summer I just didn't connect with whatever reason I had to hate him beforehand, and I read a ton of analysis on the ending of the arc.

As for other characters, my view of those I really do like (Juri, Anthy, Utena, Kozue) hasn't changed quite so much, except that of course I feel that I understand them better. Utena is the exception - as a kid I only thought of her as a genuinely cool prince figure, but now I realise that she's also a tragically naive and misguided child.

It was definitely Nanami for me also. Every time I watch the show, she becomes a little more interesting to me. Like you say, one has to remember she grew up Touga's shadow, which is like the second least healthy shadow to be in in that school.

She seems so militantly like a nasty little brat, and she totally is, but she's very like Saionji in that buried in the ego and vitriol, she'll drop truth bombs no one seems to hear because they don't listen to her for one reason or another.

I'm watching ep 10, and... Touga's not as savvy as I remember him. He can manipulate, yeah, but he stumbles a lot more than I realized even a few years ago.

(God, this show is stupid deep.)

And... is Chuchu making fun of Utena? I know he's wearing the tie of evil like he's the "ape of Akio," and he's Anthy's Tsuwabuki and all, but he imitates assholes at all their most assholey moments, doesn't he? Saionji. Touga. Little bastard.

Well, I went into the series asking myself "which boy has the prettiest hair, so I can have a crush on them?"

So, you could say it's changed a bit, yes.

It took a second or third watch-through for me to really start seeing Touga as, well, a child.  I'm not even sure I can describe the shift or what precipitated it, maybe it's like DD said, that he's in over his head a lot more than he lets on, but one day a couple years ago I started a re-watch and… it just struck me how young he really was.  And when you see that… it's just, it's the saddest fucking thing.

Darkens my opinion of Akio a whole bunch, let me tell you.  I've not been too keen on trying to be understanding about him since then, to be honest.  As kind and forgiving as I usually am, as reluctant as I am to damn anyone, fictional or not, I hate Akio.

Miki feels more and more like an entitled prick.

I've gone from being kind of meh on Juri to really rather disliking her.  I've not got a lot of pity for people who make their own problems and then whine about it and use it as an excuse for being a dick because oh, they're so ~tragic~.  In my eyes, she's not tragic.  She made her own bed with Shiori; she was dishonest and refused to trust her, she let contempt taint her feelings, and at the point of the series (the beginning, even) she really needs to pull up her big girl panties and stop blaming other people for her problems.

The more I see Anthy's complicity and recognize the malice in her actions, the more I admire her for being able to walk away at the end of the series.

Saionji is my sweet darling and has been since shortly after my first watch-through.

I used to really like Touga when I was young. Now he's one of my least favorite characters. I went in the opposite direction for Anthy, I didn't like her much when I was younger but now she's my favorite character.

Unlike most people I started out hating Miki and Touga, but Now I can really relate to them and find them to be very well developed. As for characters I came to dislike more thorough the years, it is probably Wakaba. Used to relate to, but now I feel a little bit off with her and her psychopathic actions.

Kita-Ysabell wrote:

It took a second or third watch-through for me to really start seeing Touga as, well, a child.  I'm not even sure I can describe the shift or what precipitated it, maybe it's like DD said, that he's in over his head a lot more than he lets on, but one day a couple years ago I started a re-watch and… it just struck me how young he really was.  And when you see that… it's just, it's the saddest fucking thing.

I started out hating him because fuck off with that lame Prince shit, back when that was the prevailing opinion of the fandom. I felt this way 100% after a couple subsequent watches. He really is a child, and the show doesn't flaunt this exactly, but you know it, and it shadows his actions.

And then a couple more watches and I feel a little differently. He's a child, for sure. And he's being taken advantage of on an absolutely epic level. That said...at what point does a person become an adult compared to how Touga acts? He's a child, but I kind of wonder if he's not a child in the same way a not at all small number of legal adults are. If he'd been 23, would he have acted very different? Have I not seen grown-ass people act similarly? Maybe it's the jaded adult watching the show, but it becomes extremely hard to age him based on his behavior, and between him and Akio concepts like consent and adulthood become very nebulous.

I've tried watching from the assumption that he's a child. From the assumption him and Akio are both children. And from the assumption they're both adults. It's kind of scary how easily the show humors these premises, despite the wildly different implications they have for the characters.

At this point my internal viewpoint is somewhere between. He's a child, and Akio is...more or less not. It has a lot less to do with maturity than the power differential at that point, and while he's absolutely being manipulated, I wonder if he would have fared any better as an adult, with more experience. The vulnerabilities Akio uses against him aren't necessarily ones he'd outgrow over time, and while the behavior is absolutely reprehensible and sick...Akio wouldn't deserve a pass just because Touga was older.

I had written a long thing about Trump, Putin, and Bannon trying to illustrate the distinctions I'm trying to make. Then I started gagging because it worked too well and was making me very sad. So you just...do that yourself.

Actually Akio is Putin and/or Bannon. Really depends on who you think is pulling the strings more, although given recent developments, yeah you're right. Bannon is going the way of Saionji--out the fucking door. One hopes.

Well.... Putin is the only one in that miserable bunch that looks remotely fit enough to even get on top of a car, nevermind not have the frame crush in under his weight.

Then again, Trump's grab em by the pussy pedigree is a lot to live up to and I don't know if Touga's quite there yet.

Yes, we did cast him as Akio anyway.

I know we jest but there's a horrifying takehome here. Akio in the real world would do just fine.

This seems like a great thread to just jump right into; considering I apparently "last posted in 2011" I've had a good while to reshape opinions!

...But despite that, I don't know how much the real meat of those opinions has changed, as much as my approach to the characters has.

Starting off where I always started, Shiori. As a long-time Shiori fan, it's been fascinating and butterfly-inducing and kind of unbelievable to watch popular opinions start to shift from quite an extreme level of hate to a more sympathetic view. It isn't across the board, certainly, and that's alright, because even just this much is enough to embarrassingly uplift my spirits. (I think I might have maybe almost cried about it once? That can't be proven.) My opinion on Shiori hasn't really changed, just evolved (can you believe I have even more things to say about her, jesus, wasn't it enough before?) and softened around the edges. That would be the real change, I think. When I look back at the, er, intensity I kind of just existed with, I can definitely see changes there even if the favored character still remains favored.

Touga is a character I always sort of felt at odds with. I found Akio to be very compelling as a villain and eventually as a character, I found Mikage pitiable more than despicable, and smaller "baddies" like Saionji or Nanami were enjoyable in their big personalities while lacking any actual leverage in the situation-- but Touga, for whatever reason, was the biggest outlier for me of this "antagonistic" grouping. I think I've come to understand one version of Touga's appeal now, though, and can enjoy his episodes and his part of the story much more by not looking at him through a princely lens (a lens he fell short of) but through the lens of, as others put it, a child. A child who is kind of an ass, and kind of feels unfulfilled by it but doesn't know how to feel anything else properly, and thinks he's an adult and can see the scope beyond his fellow student council members who are so easily manipulated, and is actually living in his coffin way deeper than the rest of the student council because of this belief that he understands the game or holds any cards in it. That's something I definitely failed to fully see in him before, and it's moved Touga into a more neutral light for me.

Miki is a character I found a bit bland, but have warmed to a good bit. I loved Kozue, and still do, but I've come to really love the way the twins play off each other in equal parts rather than so strongly favoring her half of the story. Like Touga, the stasis Miki kind of exists within didn't thrill me, and impacted how much I could really hook into his development, but now I've come to appreciate what that stasis says about the character and their place in the story.

With Juri, I often liked her but even more often ended up batting opposite her during discussions of her relationship with and to Shiori, but even during the supportive days there was still... some sort of barrier around her that I wasn't always interested in getting through. My feelings on Juri have expanded as I focused more on the ways Juri is so deeply self-indulgent with her own pain, and I love her so much more because of it. Like Touga, there was a time when Juri was regarded as a would-be prince a bit, and sometimes as a product of that a lot of her chips and cracks were smoothed away, and in the past few years I've really just gone nuts picking at all the little cracks until I could see a character that I truly loved. That's sort of a common thread, I guess-- the characters I used to think were a little too one-note are actually whole entire characters with like, flaws and dumb ideas and good intentions and bad followthrough and it's amazing how much that realization matters.

I used to think Tsuwabuki was relatable but not very likable; I think the same thing about myself and my posts from a decade ago.

Finally, I went through periods of liking Anthy, and then being a bit too hard on Anthy, and then being a bit too soft on Anthy, and finally I've settled on the belief that the depth and nuance of Anthy's writing is an actual masterpiece. Anthy is not the good guy. Anthy is not the bad guy. Anthy is not the villain. Anthy is not the martyr. Anthy avoids any neat characterization and goddamn does the series as a whole benefit from how well every facet of her was teased and then turned on its head. I think now that SKU's legacy is really owed to Anthy more than any single character.

Last edited by dollface (05-29-2017 01:25:11 AM)