DUEL 01 - THE ROSE BRIDE.

O POWER OF DIOS THAT SLEEPS WITHIN ME,
HARKEN UNTO THY MASTER AND REVEAL TO US
THE POWER TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE WORLD!

EPISODE THOUGHTS:

I don't have a whole lot to say about the first episode. It's mostly here to introduce our main characters, give us a little plot, and provide a basic formula for the rest of the series. If there's one thing Utena loves, it's formulas. The use of repetition is unironically really, really good.

My first and most serious thought is that Utena's whole look in her tragic backstory flashback is really cute. The frilly dress, the ringlets, the lace! Actually, now that I'm looking at this screenshot again, I realize that her dress has the same ridiculously round sleeves as the generic girl's uniform at Ohtori. I'm not sure what to make of that, nor if it really is possible to make anything of it at all. But it's cool!

Also: Akio/Dios definitely isn't wiping her tears. He is sucking those things up like a Hoover.

Here are our first spinning roses, only a few minutes in.

Look. I'm going to say it.
I don't think the color of the roses has a particularly deep meaning.

I see people all the time trying to assign different meaning to the different colors, the contexts they show up in, and so on. The red roses mean love, sometimes (though not always) they match the hair color of an important character, Wakaba got her own brown roses once which was weird, whatever. The thing is, nobody who worked on the show remembers what they mean.

I hate a "the curtains are blue!" motherfucker, truly, but this is a case where I genuinely don't think it's that deep. The spinning roses are used for emphasis when something important happens. They can be different colors depending on which character we're supposed to be paying attention to and/or what looks visually best. They're just not consistant enough to derive much else.

I think it's interesting how, in the beginning of the show, Utena is basically a power fantasy for a very specific kind of person. She's popular, talented, and witty. Everybody loves that she "dresses like a boy," (though her outfit is cooler and more regal looking than the actual boys' uniform), and the only person who gives her shit for it is an incompetent authority figure who Utena always pwns with her perfect comebacks. She can singlehandedly beat all the boys at every sport, and when she's done doing that, all the girls in the school gather around to praise her.

It's a good backdrop for Revolutionary Girl Utena as a critique of the magical girl genre. The power fantasy, to me, is the core of the magical girl genre. You're selling children the idea that, through fantasy, they can obtain superhuman strength and speed; they can get all the luxuries afforded to adults; they can become idols; they can make friends; they can get the guy. Ikuhara of all people is intimately familiar with this.

Or to view it from a slightly different angle: Utena being a childish power fantasy only makes it more gut-wrenching when the show makes it clear that, at the end of the day, she is nonetheless a child with the same vulnerabilities as any other child. There's a reflex many people seem to have where, when confronted with the realities of abuse, immediately go "that wouldn't happen to me because I wouldn't let that happen to me." I remember all too well growing up being surrounded by this rhetoric from other middle school girls. Any girl who got raped, abused, assaulted, bullied, what have you, was only targetted because they were too weak to fight back. The girls who whispered about this in hushed tones in locker rooms and at sleepovers made sure to clarify that they were immune to any of this. They are smarter, they are braver, they won't put up with it, they know better. Utena, at least in the beginning, is one of these girls. Unfortunately, no amount of chutzpah will protect you from being 14 years old.

Anthy's greenhouse doubling as a giant bird cage is such a fantastic design choice. The architecture in this show is so cool.

Yeah, I'm sure this "End of the World" guide won't stand for anyone abusing Anthy.

Our first shadow girl play! I look forward to these segments every episode. It's fun to have these little meditations on the themes of the episode to break things up. The theme for this one is "hey guys, it's us, the shadow girls!" They will rarely be this literal going forward.

Our very first glimpse of Touga to cap off the episode is excellent. Shot, chaser. He gets maybe 10 seconds at most, and those ten seconds feel like they've been engineered to make you mutter "who the fuck is that" to yourself while watching. His cunty little opera glasses. Oh yes, baby. Who the fuck is this guy, for real?