Let's not forget, too, that we're not actually comparing students to stars.  Stars are far away, unreachable.  You can't manipulate a star, making stars a poor metaphor for students with respect to Akio.  We're talking about fake stars projected on a ceiling by a magic planetarium.  Akio has absolute control over these stars, as he does over the students.

And fuck it -- while we're at it, let's go into this whole Gemini thing.  Akio compares Utena and Anthy to the Gemini twins, Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux).  Did you know that the twins have another name besides Gemini?  They're called the Dioscuri: the youths of Dios.  In the myth the twins had this name because Zeus was their daddy, but in SKU the implicit meaning behind calling Utena and Anthy the "youths of Dios" is quite different and more exciting!

We don't have to stop there, either.  There are various versions of the Gemini story, but according to the most common, one twin -- Castor -- was mortal, because he was the son of a king of Sparta, not the son of Zeus, who sired immortal Pollux, who was Castor's twin.  (If the Greeks had had even a tenuous grasp on reproductive anatomy, they would have known this was madness.  Madness?  THIS IS SPARTA!)  The point is that one twin was mortal and the other immortal, again a match for Utena and Anthy.  By all accounts, Castor and Pollux were very close, and when Castor fell at the hands of Thebans, the devastated Pollux convinced Zeus to let him share his immortality with Castor.  By some accounts, each twin spends half his time alive and half in Hades.  This last bit doesn't seem to match exactly with anything in SKU, but Anthy's ultimate decision to leave Ohtori behind to search for Utena does smell like Pollux giving up a piece of his immortality to save his brother.  I don't know if Castor died to protect Pollux, but I'd believe it.

Well -- not a cycle, per se, since SKU is the story of how a cycle is broken -- but certainly a symmetry.  Utena saves Anthy; then, after the series, Anthy saves Utena.  (At least if you're an optimist.)

Utena is the cup that brings the earth to the stars. For anyone who saw the third Indiana Jones movie () she's the Holy Grail you have to use to scoop up that water of eternal life. But in a more SKU-ly metaphorical sense, perhaps she's the gondola in the dueling arena. It was only with her sword that Anthy and them all were able to access it, no?

Hmm... I'm seeing her as transportation, or the key to the rusty car. She's down here with the rest of us, but she's definitely got access to the heavens above. Whether she's actually in both currently, I'd be disinclined to believe.

OnionPrince wrote:

With the exception of the rogue comet Utena, Akio seems to have all the stars of Ohtori mapped out, and he has an excellent grasp of the "physics" of the human heart. Now what I'm getting at here is, if you can predict what something is going to do, isn't practically the same thing as controlling it?

I'm going to go with "no"   If you're very clever, you can appear to control it -- I'm thinking of the famous story of Columbus and the lunar eclipse -- but predicting is not the same as controlling.  To continue the astronomy examples, just because we predict that a giant comet is going to smash into the earth doesn't mean we can keep it from happening.  Now, understanding physics might help us understand how to change the course of the comet, and undoubtedly Akio's manipulations are informed by his understanding of the human heart.  But being able to predict the movements of the stars is not enough to control them.  You have to be able to touch them to do that.  Or spin your projector.

Also, for that one episode of Futurama.  :cry:

Clarice wrote:

...of Maori mythology. Papa/Rangi

Oh, it's really fascinating story. I've never read about this, but now I want to read myths.

Clarice wrote:

It's obvious anyway, but Akio's got his tower reaching up to the heavens and Anthy's got her roses and her garden way back down on ground level.

I haven't noticed that... But it really makes sense...

brian wrote:

Looking over this and other threads it looks like that Dios was a Sky deity, Anthy an Earth deity. Akio lives on the earth with Anthy but yearns for the stars from which he is exiled.

Perhaps Utena is both: Utena = Earth; Tenjou = Heaven.

I'm really impressed how gracefully you put this all together.

Right, that's the thing.  It's an awesome idea, but it seems pretty clear that without Anthy and Akio's direct machinations (not just predictions), events with Nanami would have played out differently in the IFD episode; Saionji would have made a different decision about taking Anthy to the arena at night; Utena would not have lost her nobility in her own eyes; Mikage would not exist; and none of the duelists would have had third-arc duels.

I guess where you take this metaphor depends on how you want to see it. There's no right or wrong answer. For one, it could be that the students are nothing more than the stars Akio projects, which suggests they, like his projection, don't even exist outside the school, they're merely there to give the comets that do come along gravitational fields to lure them in the direction Akio wishes by their clever placement along the comet's path.

Or they are truly stars, moving by the laws of physics, that Akio can only predict but not change. In this case, it's Akio's cleverness, his capacity to be the illusion magician in the Victorian sense, that gets him by. He controls nothing, but tricks everyone into thinking he does by shining lights, dimming the room, distraction, etc.

Perhaps they're both. The projection Akio controls and manipulates, that hangs in the night sky about them, and the less visible, yet truly solid star Akio can only predict, but cannot touch...but it matters little, because that star is hidden from view, obscured by the light Akio creates, so that it exists in every one of them yet none ever realize it's there. It's only when they leave his influence, graduate, that they find their star is more solid, more their own, and that it follows its own path.

The latter is the one that's perhaps the most humane, and it would agree with the conflict some of the characters have about being in Akio's world. Saionji, and later on Touga through his influence, both realize something's off. That their will is not their own. There's an intuitive instinct to seek out where their star really is, but they both fail to find it by the end of the series.

Cute thing about that is how unlikely any of them are to find their star in the night sky littered with stars, when most stars are almost impossible to find if you stare right at them. Perhaps Saionji spent the whole series seeing his real star out of the corner of his eye, but if he turned his head, eyes accustomed to Akio's bright lights could never locate it.

Giovanna wrote:

Jellineck wrote:

Hmm. According to Wikipedia, black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. Not to mention it's the utter negation of stars, planets, comets, what have you (Gio please correct me on this). So I think it would describe Anthy's hoo-hoo pretty well.

It would also make her the center of the...well, galaxy. And eventually the center of the universe if you wanna get really silly with astrophysics.

By the way, a fed black hole is certainly never black, it shines with the light given off by objects still being devoured by it. It glows with the radiance of its victims but produces no light of its own. There's something about her relationship with Akio in there.

Stormcrow wrote:

I like this thought of Gio's that not all of the students at Ohtori are even alive. Certainly you could make a case for Mikage being some sort of specter or wraith, but what about others? Leaving Movie!Touga out of the equation of course, too obvious. Is it possible that any of the other characters are just lingering dream images of some sort?

That's the terrible thing, there's no way to tell by looking who is alive and who is dead. IIRC, you can determine much about a star, including whether it's coming toward you or moving away, but you cannot tell whether it's still alive, and that's not important on the most superficial level anyway. It's not important to Akio whether they're alive or dead if they still 'live' in the coffin.

This-- both talk of illusions created with the projector, and of the states of being dead and alive being irrelevant in Akio's world-- all brings to mind the shot of Ohtori in ruins as the main character leaves (in one of the endings, of course). The game shouldn't necessarily be connected to the canon of the series, but at the same time it would be silly to dismiss its imagery entirely.

See, I get a bit mindfucked whenever I think about Ohtori as a world in and of itself, because of the very, VERY rare times that characters supposedly leave Ohtori. Though we can't really take that as written, either. But the idea of Nanami somehow being fooled into believing she went to India just starts to sound all too silly.

Now I'm starting to think the issue of occurrences of goings-on outside the academy and what they might signify could probably deserve its own thread, if it hasn't had one already.

Baka Kakumei Reanna wrote:

See, I get a bit mindfucked whenever I think about Ohtori as a world in and of itself, because of the very, VERY rare times that characters supposedly leave Ohtori. Though we can't really take that as written, either. But the idea of Nanami somehow being fooled into believing she went to India just starts to sound all too silly.

Considering what happens to Nanami in India, I don't think it's that silly. That entire episode reminded me overpoweringly of Ranma, what with all the ancient spices which take two-hundred years to make, the implausible elephants and the body switching. Amid all that silliness, if Nanami never called it, I can completely accept that she was fooled into believing she'd been to India. Let's also remember that Nanami is gullible and leaps to conclusions. It wouldn't be hard to convince her.

Mishi wrote:

Baka Kakumei Reanna wrote:

See, I get a bit mindfucked whenever I think about Ohtori as a world in and of itself, because of the very, VERY rare times that characters supposedly leave Ohtori. Though we can't really take that as written, either. But the idea of Nanami somehow being fooled into believing she went to India just starts to sound all too silly.

Considering what happens to Nanami in India, I don't think it's that silly. That entire episode reminded me overpoweringly of Ranma, what with all the ancient spices which take two-hundred years to make, the implausible elephants and the body switching. Amid all that silliness, if Nanami never called it, I can completely accept that she was fooled into believing she'd been to India. Let's also remember that Nanami is gullible and leaps to conclusions. It wouldn't be hard to convince her.

Hmm, you definitely have a point there. I don't have much to start on, since it's been about a year since I watched the series in its entirety (bad me), but I may as well start things off!