bonus, another super needless and gratuitous encounter starring Miki after another pink haired fallen "hero" had been forgotten and erased:

I love this essay, and I laughed.    I agree; I've always thought Miki has noticed Ohtori's weirdness, at least subconsciously.  The stopwatch habit is the most obvious way it comes out, but I think you're absolutely right that staring at the ruins of Nemuro Memorial Hall is another.  I'm less sure whether Miki is unique in this way.  A lot of the characters have odd moments of sensitivity.  Saionji has his brilliant, truer-than-he-knows line in the first episode about the Sword of Dios having no power by itself, how it must be wielded by a great swordsman -- and about the castle being a trick of the light, which is literally the case.  Utena has her beautiful line during her last duel with Touga, asking him how many times they've fought there in the sky, a line I've always taken to mean that on some level she sees the connections between the duels and their actors.  Lines like these and Miki's are right on the edge of dramatic irony.  We know something the character doesn't, except that maybe they do.

There's also this:

pesimistamente wrote:

We are presented with two geniuses in the show: Mikage and Miki. Both are related with the symbolism of time and illusion; both of them are unaware of the unreliability of their memories, while both of them being very fixed on said unreliable -if not deformed- memories.

The parallels and contrasts drawn among characters in the Black Rose Saga are omnipresent and ingenious, but one theme that pervades the whole show is that almost everyone is very fixed on unreliable, if not deformed, memories.  How aware they are of their memories' deformity varies, but I don't think either Miki or Mikage is particularly smart about it.  Mikage sure looks surprised at the end of his duel.   I agree with a lot of what you wrote about relationships among Miki, Mikage, and Tokiko, but as far as the allure of idealized memories, that's not a Miki/Mikage thing, that's a Revolutionary Girl Utena thing.

pesimistamente wrote:

And then I realized I had been checking the date meeting scene wrong: I was so focused on Mikage wanting to be Akio by sitting in his side, that I completely overlooked Miki's place. If we go on this parallelism, Mikage echoes Akio while Miki echoes Tokiko, the only character in the show that knows for sure that time doesn't work in Ohtori. But Mikage is not Akio, Mikage doesn't even realize he's living in broken time while Akio knew, and Tokiko, aware or unaware, wanted that. Yep, that would make a very awkward setting for a date. In any case, maybe that scene wasn't meant just to read Mikage's echo to Akio, but also Miki's.

Astrinde wrote:

And while I've never compared him to Tokiko, that analysis works very well; Tokiko even provides a clue about exactly what Miki's doing, when she picks up her own version of the stopwatch and asks, "I wonder whether it's possible for an hourglass to run slow?"

I love this!

During my last rewatch I was wondering at Miki's appearance during the first and last scenes of the Black Rose arc; it seemed significant somehow. I love the idea of Miki being aware of time being funny in Ohtori Academy and using his stopwatch to track it...

Astrinde wrote:

Mikage makes the same offer, of the project, of eternity - his open posture, the open can - and is refused (closed can), in the same polite but firm fashion.  And of course, he isn't surprised by Miki's answer.  He's heard it before.

Mikki is such an overlooked character, I've never heard this point of view before and I just love it.
Thanks for sharing, seriously!

(( Sort-of-thread-revival,

Hey all, blame the early-morning insomnia for this, but I was wondering.  How many other timepieces do we see or are used in Utena?  I know there is Miki's stopwatch, and there is the metronome in the music conservatory (which sort-of keeps time in relation to its musical application), and there is a day-night cycle, and there are a couple of mentions of "being late" or " didn't realize how late it was", and I think I remember seeing a calendar at one point... but... now that I think about it, I don't really recall any other instances of seeing clocks or watches or day-planners or anything like that.  Shoot, on a semi-meta-level, while there is a day-night cycle, the seasons never seems to change.  (As an aside, I think the weather only changes when it is required too as well.) It always seems like late-spring / early-summer.  As an aside, I know I overused the "and"... I'm just too stubborn to go back and adjust my listing to be more grammatically correct. 

Anyway, I figured that since the original post was about Miki having some instinctual-inkling that something was off, that this question should fit here.  And, as a tangent off of that, do you think any of the characters get a sense of deja vu... or... Groundhog's Day?  What I mean is, if something was in a true perpetual loop, everything would repeat over and over again.  Everything.  It's a loop.   It has no beginning and no end... almost like a mobius strip.  So... no one should be noticing that they're doing the same thing that they just did.  And, in fact, during each loop, each character would perform their set of actions exactly in the same manner that was done during the previous loop.

To me, I think time/events somehow runs in a spiral in Ohtori.  A very tight, spiral that has upwards of 15-years to accomplish.  During that spiral, a detail or two changes, that only a couple of people realize (mostly the pair who implement the almost infinitesimal adjustment)... but such a large percentage of it remains the same, that the rest of the cast is overall in an infinitely repeating purgatory of doing the same set of actions over and over again.  And I think that's shown by how none of the cast seems to be able to reliably remember past events, even when dealing with their own past.  There have been so many spirals that the past, as a whole, has fuzzed just enough to have the sensation of being a photo taken one or two clicks out-of-focus.  At least that's the impression that I was getting off of Miki using the stopwatch.  Some... subconscious awareness of his that a measured value is off, but he cannot quite get the action to repeat itself, or be certain if something is wrong, or if he's just remembering it wrong.  In fact, I wouldn't be suprized if he had used the line, "Man, something just seems funny about this.  Not sure what... but... something."  When I think about it, it's almost as if Miki knows something should be different in his measurements... but cannot place his finger on why his measurements should be different, or if they even are.  In some ways, I'm kinda suprized that Miki hasn't gone mental trying to figure out the time-paradox.  (Double-ly Oddly, a similar time-paradox issue is actually discussed in the VN Steins: Gate).

So... does that make any sense? ))

satyreyes wrote:

I love Groundhog Day; it might be my favorite movie.  I also love Majora's Mask, and that one episode of Star Trek, and I love(/hate) Madoka, and I like Steins;Gate, and the horror anime [[REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]] is one of my favorites.  But I don't think SKU works quite the same way.

unrelated: Steins;Gate is crack for me. I'm 99% sure I know which anime you are talking about . . . is it [rhymes with Cool Jive]? that opening song...


But back to the topic. I'd really be curious for us to document those time pieces as you were saying Caroline. I do agree the seasons never seem to change -- (honestly I would have loved to see the changes in uniforms / things happening during the winter time though!)

Japanese seasons for school are a bit different than ours  (in the US) ... off hand, i didn't feel like googling it -- I'm pretty sure new school year starts ...next week actually, a month before Golden Week -- as Spring is starting... then school finishes  in the spring as well. Let me lay that out more bluntly

School Starts 3rd week of March(ish) with Spring. --> Golden Week time off is end of April beginning of May --> Summer, Fall, Winter --> [Graduation]

We are never really given a date? Except we *do* know Touga's birthday is June 4th. So, Summer time and he does have a birthday party during the show. [That poor kitten D:]

I don't remember off hand which star system Akio is looking at -- but that could also give some hints as to what the timing is as well... (Although, 1 was that even real and 2, did ikuhara give that much thought into which stars were in the sky when in relation to the show...)

When do we ever get to another season outside of Springy-summer? i'm curious now. What other pointers of time passing are there?

And the show ends, of course, near the end of a term.  The shadow play suggests, but doesn't come out and say, that it's near graduation, which would put in in March.  Akio says at that point that it "hasn't been that long" since Utena disappeared.  It's hard to know how long "not that long" is, especially to a person like Akio, but "between one and six months" seems like a reasonable window.  That's consistent with the autumn constellations zeedikay refers to; it seems like the Apocalypse Arc happens very fast, maybe over a period of just a week or so.  So can we say, with some confidence, that the show begins in April (the beginning of the school year), building towards the duel called revolution sometime in autumn?

KissFromARose wrote:

I'm 99% sure I know which anime you are talking about . . . is it [rhymes with Cool Jive]? that opening song...

No, sorry!  [It rhymes with Ben K. Bligh.]  I guess it just goes to show it's a popular trope!

Last edited by satyreyes (03-12-2016 04:22:40 PM)

Not exactly a 'timepiece,' but I see the Arena bells as analogous to a bell tower ringing the time, such that they announce every time at once, aka eternity whenever they clamour simultaneously to begin a duel.

Last edited by Astrinde (03-13-2016 12:48:46 PM)

An old Demian post by Gio just reminded me of this thread and how much the movie, at least, seems to reiterate a timelessness in the sense of time/causality dysphoria. The flashback scenes to "time" prior to Anthy and Akio's game are a never-time of cellphones and witch burning peasants. Touga's ghost ages, or at least seems to have. And, MAKio isn't even necessary as a real person, or entity with agency, certainly in the "present," but really, even in the "past." The Demian of the majority of the novel doesn't have to have existed, either, if he ever did.

SKU is a moment, much more than a continuum, but even inasmuch as it's a continuum, it's a very limited and specifically truncated one, that's probably mirrored and bounded by what we see of the three past eras we get outside the main timespan: You Get to Burning Times! (cosmic blame, persecution of incestuous witches, humiliated Devil), Bad Teacher Time (the "past" of the second arc), and Childhood Ends (all our flashbacks to characters as young children, learning that the world can suck and we can be part of making it suck).

Things don't always line up, but more than that, they don't develop, either. "Detachment from the past is key to that period in a person's life," as Ikuhara says. The past, whether that big Anthy/Akio cosmic fairytale past or the more grounded and intimate Saio-as-a-kid past, aren't in a continuum with what we see in the series, probably because none of it, reasonably, could be as remembered. We know Miki's idea of his Childhood Ends is wrong. We can assume Anthy's version of YGTBT! is probably unreal, but unreal or not, they're clearly present and real as sort of era-ghosts. They're being relived, reiterated, and not just when we rewatch them. It's as if they haven't lived continual lives in which those eras were only part of a continuity, but that they're just an information packet or a status quo for each person to work from. In some series that might come off as weak writing or poor planning, but with SKU, I don't think it is at all. It seems very deliberate. Especially in the midst of a very elegiac era for anime, in general. We had a lot of anime, at the time, that was concerned heavily with stepping outside time, lost time, and the sort of personal arrested development that spirals out of haunting trauma.

If Miki knows, maybe it's because things like Step-Mom Anthy just don't otherwise line up.

Astrinde wrote:

while I've never compared him to Tokiko, that analysis works very well; Tokiko even provides a clue about exactly what Miki's doing, when she picks up her own version of the stopwatch and asks, "I wonder whether it's possible for an hourglass to run slow?"

I'd never catch that, that's amazing!

I think the story behind the ruins speaks to Miki since he himself is a genius, in many ways similar yet somehow antithetical to Mikage. The similarity of names is not without merit. What differs them seems to be Miki's humility and caution as opposed to Mikage's hubris and ruthless determination - and that is what causes Miki to turn down Mikage's offer at the beginning. But it didn't have to go down this way. Maybe on some level Miki senses that, and that's why he lingers by the ruins.
Because what really cements the connection between the two characters to me is the theme of genius that rings hollow. Miki's music is that of technical perfection but it's also lacking in terms of feeling and meaning. This was exactly the case with Mikage (perhaps that's why he smiles when talking to Miki, reminiscing his old self); he was practically a robot before Tokiko and Mamiya. Ironically, Miki was the one to actively seek that shining thing of his whereas it basically sneaked up on Mikage. Given how their stories unfolded, perhaps people with such incredible capabilities at their fingertips are better off without passion (I don't think Miki ever really acts on his true desires; he seeks but he never dares connect with them and that's why Kozue calls him coward).

Agh, how I love this show, it's insane.

Astrinde wrote:

Not exactly a 'timepiece,' but I see the Arena bells as analogous to a bell tower ringing the time, such that they announce every time at once, aka eternity whenever they clamour simultaneously to begin a duel.

I like that! I think of the bells as "the shot heard round the world". Moments that have ripple effects. Changing how we/the cast perceive the past and what will happen in the future.

(Which is why I love how as far as we see, the bells don't ring for the end of Revolution until Anthy steps out of Ohtori's gate.)

Last edited by rhyaniwyn (03-19-2016 01:36:59 AM)