I just finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena today and it is a great anime! Before I continue this I want to give major trigger warnings
TW/ Discussions of Incest, Pedophilia, Rape and Homophobia
All of these triggers honestly apply to the show as wells
This show was amazing but a really difficult watch, the themes it got into were extremely dark and difficult to handle emotionally at times, however the show was also hilarious at times. It explores themes of gender and violence in ways that I have never truly seen a show get into before. A lot of what I have seen has felt surface level and pandering whereas Utena using its abstract symbolism and fairytale deconstruction gets to the emotional core of a lot of these issues.
I relate a lot to Utena herself throughout this show, I too want to be a prince. This desire has complicated my relationship with gender in recent years and I have even questioned if I may be trans due to my desire to care for and protect others and be a hero. Getting to see that desire itself ruthlessly deconstructed in this show was an experience and helped me reaffirm that I do in fact feel like a woman and that those desires to do or be in society don’t have to be gendered.
I found it interesting that Utena is constrained with the potential princes throughout the show who on the surface look like they could fill that role but are shown to be horrible incestuous people in the end, leaving Utena the only one with a seemingly pure desire to be a prince but even that ends up being deconstructed by the end as a symptom of her hero complex and only once she overcomes those ideas entirely she can be free of them.
Another interesting aspect of this show is that all of the potential heterosexual partners are siblings with only the homosexual pairings being non incestuous which is something I find interesting. It shows the way that almost anything is preferred to queerness in society in this abstract over the top way. I have yet to fully unpack this part because to be honest Utena is the first anime I have ever seen that unflinchingly looks at and explores the repercussions of those actions with no glamour and pure disgust.
I have major respect for the writers for keeping something that is so often sensationalized in writing in the dark where it belongs. There are absolutely heartbreaking scenes and the cinematography of the shots always seems to show the victims as if they have been murdered.
I don’t think I’ve fully gotten all of my thoughts about this show out but it will definitely be on my mind for years to come. I think it is an unbelievably important part of queer history and so many shows take from and reference this show and it’s nice to see the compared and contrasted progress, I loved that once I released that the finale of She-ra takes almost shot for shot a scene from the finale of Utena but gives their girls a happy ending. I think it’s a sign of things slowly but surely getting better
Luna By The Lake With Cake 