transgenderer:

transgenderer:

i went back and reread all of kaworu’s lines in E24 and like. what is the appeal of this character. like 80% of his lines are just delivering exposition cryptically. i mean he’s *cool*, but like, i just dont really understand the affection or interest in him. maybe people read the manga or something? i read theres more shinji/kaworu in there. anyway aida best boy

@nostalgebraist said:

the first time jedd mason appeared in TLTL i immediately thought “this guy talks like kaworu” and then later i learned ada palmer owns a kaworu figurine

which i realize isn’t an answer to your question, i just wanted an opportunity to mention it

from one of her AMAs:

I have more than 60 Kaworu Nagisa figures! They have their own special cabinet and I enjoy counting them! I also have some duplicates in my office and other parts of the house from when I see one and get excited and buy it and forget that I bought it already

this is too many kaworu figurines! this is like….an order of magnitude too many kaworu figurines! i feel pretty confident palmer has spent over 1000 dollars on kaworu figurines. that is. that is really far too many kaworu figurines

Esther, reading this post over my shoulder:

“Ah! Bridger has his vast cabinet of toys … JEDD Mason has his vast cabinet of religious icons … and Ada Palmer has her vast cabinet of Kaworus!”

(via resinsculpture-deactivated20221)

(Thinking about Evangelion again due to the Lockdownime stream)

I know I probably have a sentimental attachment to the old ADV dub because it’s how I first watched the show (at age 12!), but … 

I defy anyone to watch Ritsuko’s dramatic monologue at the end of Episode 23 in the ADV dub, the original Japanese, and the Netflix dub, and not come away thinking the ADV version is clearly the best version of the scene.

- ADV Ritsuko actually sounds like a human being having an emotional breakdown in front of her friends

- Japanese Ritsuko is perhaps plausible as a very reserved person having a similar breakdown, but also really sounds like she’s reading off a script half the time

- Netflix Ritsuko also sounds like she’s reading off a script, but with zero preparation, and a mounting confusion that this isn’t the audition for an instructional audiobook about Windows 7.0 For Business that she thought she’d shown up for

bambamramfan:

balioc:

nostalgebraist:

@femmenietzsche

A few points:

1) It’s true that Ohtori Academy is cult-like, but if it’s a metaphor for anything, it’s a metaphor for the patriarchy. Not just being indoctrinated into a small group, but the indoctrination of society as a whole into unhealthy and abusive gender roles. So it’s not surprising that the show would reveal very little of the outside world. You can leave a cult and join regular society, but leaving society is harder. You’re necessarily going to the fringes (to the End of the World) where there aren’t ready made values to guide you.

2) We do see an alternate value system in the show, it’s just that the values come from within the cult-world itself, not from outside it. The stated values of the society are used to challenge the hypocrisy of that society. (Kind of like using the stated values in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution to challenge what America actually is.) Utena is the most noble character, but as it turns out she got her idea of nobility from a childhood encounter with someone who she later learns is an abusive monster. What do you do with that information? You could abandon trying to be noble and heroic because those ideals came from a tainted source, or you can continue to embody them and use them against the system, which is sort of what she does. She ultimately fails to overthrow her society and winds up outside it, but presumably she will keep trying to be noble on the outside, even if that desire originally came from within society. And her rebellion does seem to have improved things a bit within the Academy - some of the other characters have matured thanks to her and may escape themselves someday.

3) So since the show is about living in a corrupted world, it’s not surprising that we would see little of what’s outside the world. There’s very little to see there yet. And it’s difficult to imagine building a newer, better world because our worldview necessarily arises out of that which we know. Change doesn’t come out of nowhere. The tools to improve the world necessarily come out of the world’s corruption. You take what’s actually good in society and turn it against the rest.

Although the show is clearly “about gender roles,” I don’t find the details of this very plausible.  And in the end I guess this feels like the bad message I was worried about, in my OP.

Keep reading

…or both!

Seriously, though.  Both.  The interpretation of a complex work generally yields – complexity.  And if you can say one thing about about Utena, that thing would be “it is overstuffed with symbolic metaphor, and many of its elements symbolize more than one thing at once.”

There are definitely things that militate towards your interpretion: Ohtori is a sui generis creation of Akio’s narcissistic madness, it is an abusive little private world unlike the real reality outside, you can [ahem] revolutionize the world just by stepping outside and shrugging and ceasing to care.  Like, for example, the ending, and all the stuff leading up to the ending.

There are also things that militate towards @femmenietzsche’s interpretation, wherein the insanity of Ohtori is a symbolic reification – or even just an instantiation – of the general insanity of society.  This is probably clearer to a Japanese person, or to someone very familiar with late-twentieth-century Japanese high-school norms, since a lot of the stuff we see in Ohtori is (a caricature of) deep normality rather than an outgrowth of Akio’s lyrical fairy-tale weirdness.  Queen bees and wannabes, big men on campus, confused yearning, blah-de-blah.  Most famously, so many people have found real-world resonance in the way that the show deals with adolescent sexuality and sexual politics – in the actions and desires of the heroes, and in the cruel crushing response of the setting – that it’s very hard to reduce that down to “it’s just Akio’s toxic cult.”  (Although, of course, culture has changed a lot with time, in Japan and elsewhere.)

…and there are also Important Symbolic Elements that are neither of those things.  One of the major persistent messages of the show seems to be, uh, “patriarchy is super gay,” which is a thematic strain that you definitely can’t comfortably collapse into either of the concepts above.  Etc.

I don’t have a lot to add to Utena discourse (analyzing Utena is like making fun of a clown), but I will say this whole cult allegory sounds overly reductionist. There are many key elements of cult life that one doesn’t see in Utena (recruitment, the tenets, and the fact that the leader is hidden for the whole first season.) There are definitely some parallels, but the most you can say is that Utena is about a hothouse atmosphere, and cults are also that, but so are high school and academia and tight-knit families, which are all about equally as valid a target for Ohtori allegories.

That being said, when people want to analyze epic works, they often put far too much weight on the ending and final reveal (as @nostalgebraist is doing.) That’s not what made the meat of the structure tick (count the mixed metaphors in that sentence on one hand!) Instead, watch a random or popular episode, and tell me what’s going on there. Talk about Nanami and Wakaba and Juri and what’s going on with them to create such compelling stories.

@femmenietzsche​ also responded:

I don’t have much to add other than to say that I don’t think that metaphor in a story requires the rigorous 1:1 mapping that @nostalgebraist does. Even if Utena herself is not concerned with the rest of society (as she mostly isn’t) that doesn’t mean her journey can’t be taken as a stand in for a broader political struggle. Even though there is no Bad Guy of Patriarchy in real life you can defeat, that doesn’t mean it’s not about patriarchy. Taking nebulous social forces and personifying them like that is just normal storytelling. Because a person is different from a society, that means that things don’t always “work” the way they do in the real world. The metaphor might be an imperfect fit when you inspect it closely. But as @balioc says, that’s fine because any good story will be amorphously about several things at once.

All of this is completely fair!  I think we can all agree that no scheme of correspondence is going to “solve” the whole thing by 1:1 resolving textual elements to their equivalents.

Although I slipped into this kind of talk for the sake of rhetoric, I’m not really trying to present my own proposal as a strict substitute for all others which “wins the contest” and is left standing alone.  I definitely don’t think the whole thing is “about” “a cult” and the rest is window dressing.

I don’t feel like I have anything to say that directly continues the thread’s debate in a productive way, but I do feel an impulse to clarify what is motivating me here.  It’s tough to phrase, but I’ll try …

To me, Utena seems as much “a story about metaphors” as “a metaphorical story.”  That is, it’s very concerned with the ways specific ideas, ideals, conceptual frames take root in people’s minds, the way people cling to these and project them onto others, and the tension that emerges when a person’s totalizing notion of What It’s All About comes into conflict with another person’s, or with brute reality.

For this reason, an interpretation which makes the events onscreen into a microcosm of reality or society feels like an instance of the very behavior whose appeal, ubiquity, and perils the show investigates, problematizes and parodies.

“Is this the world, or just a high school?  Should I keep pressing on in pursuit of the beautiful story that has shaped my life for years – and if I stop, what even am I then?  Am I in conflict with one person and their beliefs, or a whole social order/reality and its nature?  When my frame breaks, must I accept yours?”

When I talk about cults, it’s because cult members – and those in similar groups or under similar pressures, I don’t want to be overly specific here – experience these tensions with unusual intensity and personal relevance.

It’s wrong to take one fork of these dilemmas and say “oh, it was all this guy’s frame, and it then breaks,” as I sort of did earlier.  But my motivation was to push back, dialectically, against the other fork (common among interpreters of any work that feels metaphorical) that interprets the story’s particulars as representatives of more universal, more eternal types and structures.

“Is this The Way Thing Are, or just the way you/I have chosen to be?” is a question the characters wrestle with and fight over.  The answer “it feels so much like the first one, yet sometimes it is shockingly the second” feels at least truer to the spirit than “yeah, it’s the first one.”

@femmenietzsche

A few points:

1) It’s true that Ohtori Academy is cult-like, but if it’s a metaphor for anything, it’s a metaphor for the patriarchy. Not just being indoctrinated into a small group, but the indoctrination of society as a whole into unhealthy and abusive gender roles. So it’s not surprising that the show would reveal very little of the outside world. You can leave a cult and join regular society, but leaving society is harder. You’re necessarily going to the fringes (to the End of the World) where there aren’t ready made values to guide you.

2) We do see an alternate value system in the show, it’s just that the values come from within the cult-world itself, not from outside it. The stated values of the society are used to challenge the hypocrisy of that society. (Kind of like using the stated values in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution to challenge what America actually is.) Utena is the most noble character, but as it turns out she got her idea of nobility from a childhood encounter with someone who she later learns is an abusive monster. What do you do with that information? You could abandon trying to be noble and heroic because those ideals came from a tainted source, or you can continue to embody them and use them against the system, which is sort of what she does. She ultimately fails to overthrow her society and winds up outside it, but presumably she will keep trying to be noble on the outside, even if that desire originally came from within society. And her rebellion does seem to have improved things a bit within the Academy - some of the other characters have matured thanks to her and may escape themselves someday.

3) So since the show is about living in a corrupted world, it’s not surprising that we would see little of what’s outside the world. There’s very little to see there yet. And it’s difficult to imagine building a newer, better world because our worldview necessarily arises out of that which we know. Change doesn’t come out of nowhere. The tools to improve the world necessarily come out of the world’s corruption. You take what’s actually good in society and turn it against the rest.

Although the show is clearly “about gender roles,” I don’t find the details of this very plausible.  And in the end I guess this feels like the bad message I was worried about, in my OP.

Keep reading

(via femmenietzsche)

@cthulhubert replied to your post “Having finally watched Revolutionary Girl Utena (thanks to…”

The most common metaphorical reading of Utena of which I’m aware is one of adolescence. Everything matters so much, everything is bound by rules that just seem like part of the world, rather than choices individuals make. Part of its tale is one of how it was beautiful, how nice it was to have meaning we didn’t have to make ourselves, how it’s something some of us ache and long for, but it’s still something that at the end, we have to leave.

Yeah, I can definitely believe this is common – I saw someone saying something similar to this last night in another post-stream discussion.  But this just … really does not feel compatible with what I just watched?

I mean, yes, the show does capture an adolescent state of mind which you describe very well in this comment.  But virtually all of the focus is on the pain this mindset can cause, and the way it exposes you to manipulation by the very worst people.

It’s portrayed as “beautiful” insofar as the mindset involves seeing this stuff as beautiful, internally.  It captures that feeling onscreen, even for an adult viewer, through the Romantic architecture and overwrought (“adolescent”) symbolism and all that, and perhaps a viewer whose adolescence was less woeful than the characters’ can experience this with a kind of conflicted nostalgia.

But for the characters themselves, it starts out bad and gets worse.  In its earliest and most innocuous stages it’s about a high school clique of mean weirdos with a fight club where they chant ominous nonsense; by its last third it’s simply, unrelentingly, not at all metaphorically about sexual and psychological abuse (often incestuous) of teenagers by adults.

The salient thing here is not that the abuse victims have nonzero flaws, it’s that they’re being abused.  (Indeed their “immaturity” is cited by the main abuser in his own defense, and we’re clearly meant to see this as a despicable attempt to transfer blame.)

The character who most dramatically flips over to making-their-own-meaning is depicted before this flip as experiencing apparently endless, Christlike suffering, metaphorically pieced by a million swords.  Leaving behind such an experience is not what I would call “a bittersweet decision to put aside childish things.”  It’s what I would call “getting the fuck out of there.”  Maybe said character is more grown-up after this happens, maybe they aren’t; it doesn’t matter and it shouldn’t matter.

youzicha:

nostalgebraist:

Having finally watched Revolutionary Girl Utena (thanks to @femmenietzsche​’s stream) after a billion years of literally everyone recommending it to me, it strikes me as (at least) a story about living in a cult or cult-like circle.

In particular, it reminds in various ways – some trivial, some deeper – of Red Star Tattoo, Sonja Larsen’s good and horrifying memoir about being a teenager in a “communist revolutionary organization” that was really a Manson-like patriarch cult.

There’s a key difference, though, between a nonfictional account of cult life and a work of fiction dramatizing the cultist experience.

Both must portray the apparent completeness of the cult’s worldview, the sense that this stuff (bizarre as it seems to outsiders) simply is the world, with nothing else outside it.  With nonfiction, we as readers can place the story in the context of our own broader worldview, and see how the apparently complete world is just a snow globe sitting around somewhere in a much bigger space.  This is the case even if – to depict the experience more powerfully – the work focuses on cult life and says little about life before or afterwards.

But in fiction that does this – in Utena – a refusal to depict the outside of the snow globe, while it portrays the mindset powerfully, also inevitably dances near the edge of implying the mindset is actually true.  Taking the “cult interpretation” of Utena means reacting to its grandiose symbol systems – even to most of its surface-level themes about gender relations and so on – as actively wrong about reality, things to be ultimately overcome.  But the show on the screen is 99.9% comprised of very artful, lovingly elaborated versions of those symbol systems and themes, while the rejection of them is nothing more than an artless, faceless “but, no” stamped on top of the whole thing.

It’s inevitable that many viewers will take that stuff, not even “at face value,” but as having some value – to think the structures that look meaningful onscreen are actually supposed to be meaningful, given the labor that went into constructing them.  This is in fact very natural, the way most things want to be read, and I’m less confident in my own reading inasmuch as it demands so many standard interpretive instincts be ignored, and so much apparent structure simply discarded.

However, given my own reading, any other reading would have the show actively endorsing something like pro-cult messages (or the sort of message that would push one further into a cult’s worldview), which is really bad!  I’m not saying it’s an immoral thing to have created, necessarily, but there’s definitely (on my reading) something very weird about it, this loving built trap that can actually, functionally ensnare people (to the extent that any art can have such effects), with an explanatory museum plaque next to it bearing the title A Critique of Ensnarement.

Somewhat tangentially—sorry for hijacking your post!—this reminds me of another take: when Matthew Skala finally quit academia after many years of postdocs etc, he tweeted a screencap of Akio’s “as expected, no revolution took place” line. It’s a really good fit! Constant duels (getting admitted to a phd program, trying to get your papers accepted, finding a tenure-track position, tenure case…), which some charismatic figures imply will lead to great things in the future, while in fact you are at best competing for fame within a very narrow circle… I guess academia does have a cult-like tendency to impose its own values and world-view on the participants.

Presumably this is not the intent of the authors, it’s “applicability not allegory”. (Although the story does take place in a school…) I think it’s an instance of more general patterns, and you can in fact see e.g. idealistic people being manipulated through their ideals elsewhere too.

But I think Utena does more than just put a plaque next to the story! In particular, in terms of structural devices, I think it’s significant that all the “core action” of the series is in the relationships between the characters. There’s two parallel developments going on. Towards the start of the series we don’t know very much about the characters (particularly Anthy), while there is a lot of establishing shots describing how the architecture of the campus fits together (this is originally portrayed quite realistically, with Utena asking “how can there be a castle there”, etc). Then as the series progresses we learn more about each character in turn, while at the same time the physical setting becomes more and more surrealistic. In the last two episodes, even the rooms constantly change geometry, and the magical elements seem quite arbitrary—but the characters’ memories and interactions with each other are unambiguous.

As a viewer you can’t obsess too much about the world of Ohtori, because there isn’t any consistent world provided to you beyond the beautiful art-nouveau rose designs, so instead you obsess about the characters. And the final reveal in the story is that the Ohtori world is merely a pretty illusion, while even in a cult the friendships you form are actually real and valuable.

Having finally watched Revolutionary Girl Utena (thanks to @femmenietzsche​’s stream) after a billion years of literally everyone recommending it to me, it strikes me as (at least) a story about living in a cult or cult-like circle.

In particular, it reminds in various ways – some trivial, some deeper – of Red Star Tattoo, Sonja Larsen’s good and horrifying memoir about being a teenager in a “communist revolutionary organization” that was really a Manson-like patriarch cult.

There’s a key difference, though, between a nonfictional account of cult life and a work of fiction dramatizing the cultist experience.

Both must portray the apparent completeness of the cult’s worldview, the sense that this stuff (bizarre as it seems to outsiders) simply is the world, with nothing else outside it.  With nonfiction, we as readers can place the story in the context of our own broader worldview, and see how the apparently complete world is just a snow globe sitting around somewhere in a much bigger space.  This is the case even if – to depict the experience more powerfully – the work focuses on cult life and says little about life before or afterwards.

But in fiction that does this – in Utena – a refusal to depict the outside of the snow globe, while it portrays the mindset powerfully, also inevitably dances near the edge of implying the mindset is actually true.  Taking the “cult interpretation” of Utena means reacting to its grandiose symbol systems – even to most of its surface-level themes about gender relations and so on – as actively wrong about reality, things to be ultimately overcome.  But the show on the screen is 99.9% comprised of very artful, lovingly elaborated versions of those symbol systems and themes, while the rejection of them is nothing more than an artless, faceless “but, no” stamped on top of the whole thing.

It’s inevitable that many viewers will take that stuff, not even “at face value,” but as having some value – to think the structures that look meaningful onscreen are actually supposed to be meaningful, given the labor that went into constructing them.  This is in fact very natural, the way most things want to be read, and I’m less confident in my own reading inasmuch as it demands so many standard interpretive instincts be ignored, and so much apparent structure simply discarded.

However, given my own reading, any other reading would have the show actively endorsing something like pro-cult messages (or the sort of message that would push one further into a cult’s worldview), which is really bad!  I’m not saying it’s an immoral thing to have created, necessarily, but there’s definitely (on my reading) something very weird about it, this loving built trap that can actually, functionally ensnare people (to the extent that any art can have such effects), with an explanatory museum plaque next to it bearing the title A Critique of Ensnarement.