Revolutionary Girl Utena S2E1: "Plotting a Locus"

Officially, this is just the thirteenth episode of a unitary series. But, since pretty much every source I looked at was in agreement that episodes 1-12 and 13-24 form distinct cour-length arcs, I'm just going to go ahead and call this the season 2 pilot. We're supposedly starting something called the Black Rose saga here, but I don't know what that means. My first thought would be "evil version of Anthy," but at this point I'm not sure that Anthy isn't already the villain (or at least a minion/slave of the villain) herself, so that's probably out.

I was half expecting a new OP, but it doesn't look like there is one. Which is kind of weird, since almost all the visual elements of that intro have already been covered by the story, but oh well. Anyway, we follow the intro with another reprise of the fairy tale retelling of Utena's childhood meeting with Dios, just for any newcomers who might be tuning in, and then we're off!

This one starts us off with the shadow puppets, and it's their most overtly sinister show so far. They're still in their alien getup, and speaking together in a single, creepily monotonous voice. As they hover beside their flying saucer, breathing tubes softly lapping around them like the tentacles of a sea creature, they explain what the real moral of this story should be.

Utena won because she was better at fighting than Touga once he lost his lightsaber hax. Hooray! Losers suck, and should be stomped on as much as possible before being discarded and consigned to the dustbin of history. After all, did Utena not step away from this victory looking like a lily, while Touga ended as a contemptible wreck bereft of his suave mystique?

Still, the battle might be won, but the war may not yet be over. They chant eerie warnings to Utena as Maybe-Anthy yanks their flying saucer up out of frame.

Okay then.

Our next scene is in the Kiryuu family living room, where Touga is sitting in a big armchair and silently staring out at the sunset while listening to a recording of his own voice repeating the student council mantra over and over again.

Lol what a snowflake.

Nanami peeks in the door and stares at her brother with mixed fear and concern, before silently creeping away again before he can notice. It's probably the most wholesome scene they've shared so far.

Then, it's up to the sky arena, where Dios appears in a flash of light and paces across the platform, staring up at the castle with a thoughtful expression. This is our first time seeing him in what at least appears to be the flesh, outside of Utena's (possibly untrustworthy) recollections. The show is very matter of fact about this introduction, and to be fair I was pretty much expecting a Dios POV to happen at some point in the very near future.

After a moment of silent contemplation, his expression changes, showing a split second length's fiendish grin. Then, he flies up into the castle for a proper scheming session. Perched on a weird orb thing in the middle of the castle is what looks like a younger version of himself, which he regards with impatience. "You still aren't awake yet?" He asks it. No response.

Hmm. Maybe this isn't actually Dios? Or, the dormant one isn't? My guess is that the young, dormant version of him is an incarnation of his full power, or his paralyzed physical body, or something, but we could also be looking at a pair of brothers or something.

Also, the sphere that the other one is sitting on is apparently supposed to represent the eggshell of the world that must be smashed open.

I notice now that the version of Dios sitting on the egg is wearing the same outfit Utena remembers from her childhood, while the awake/older version is wearing red. Hmm. This is starting to seem more and more like they really aren't the same entity after all. Similar, but not the same.

When he still gets no response, Dios(?) just starts monologuing to the dormant figure. The student council president has failed. Disappointing. Utena is on her seventh trial, and still seems to be winning; she's gotten further than anyone else so far. Potentially promising. As he speaks, we see a series of color-coded hourglasses that I guess represent his patience in each candidate wearing out. The red one with sand the same shade as Touga's hair has just run out. The one with green sand, matching Saiyonji, ran dry long ago. The pink-sanded one is still tumbling, still running. Its time is growing short, but it hasn't run out just yet.

Also, apparently there's more to the duels than just the swordfights. Each of the battles has a...name? theme? Something like that. This was obviously already true subtextually, but now it's textual as well. As in, Dios has actually been arranging things (presumably via Anthy and Touga) to create specific social drama in the leadup to each duel. This explains why some of them are planned well ahead of time, and others seem to come out of the blue (though it doesn't explain why the other characters aren't getting suspicious about this, heh).

Apparently, Utena's first duel, against Saiyonji, was the battle of Companionship. Her most recent one, against Touga, was of course the battle of Self. If Touga had ended up winning that battle, perhaps it would have meant something different for him; a battle of Dominion or something like that. Basically, there's some kind of complicated ritual requirements that he's trying to meet, with each duelist having the potential to meet all of them depending on how they fight and how successfully he draws them into the surrounding soap opera.

That does answer a lot of questions about why Anthy is pulling such tense emotional strings, when much more mundane reasons would be sufficient to spur a duel. It isn't JUST the swordfight that Dios needs, it's also the emotions going into it.

Castle in the sky, partly disembodied villain trying to regain his old power, female agents sent out to manipulate mortal dupes into satisfying weirdly complicated ritual requirements for the return of patriarchal power...well, it looks like I was wrong. It's not Diablo 1. It's Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords. I've been shown.

Dios asks Paralyzed!Dios if seeing Utena fight to defend Anthy, even while wounded, reminded him of something. No response. Also, he seems to segue between talking about Anthy, Utena, and the doppleganger in front of him very fluidly, so his train of thought is hard to follow. It feels like this might be deliberate on the writers' part, only giving us a partial look into Dios(?)' mind and perhaps showing us that he might not be all there himself at this point.

And then it turns out that this is a clipshow episode.

We see Utena's initial duel with Saiyonji, with her memories of Dios from her childhood inspiring and encouraging her to keep going even after she was hurt and Saiyonji's magical blade had cut her wooden practice sword to splinters.

This version does put the emphasis somewhere different, though. There's much more visual focus on Anthy as she watches the duel. Was her face *quite* this expressive and reactive, when we saw this battle the first time? Maybe this isn't actually just clipshow material. I think there might be some new frames as well, showing Anthy being much more invested in what's going on when she didn't think anyone was looking.

Also, while this mugshot WAS in the original version, knowing what we now know about Anthy gives it so much additional meaning.

Literally "you mad bro?"

When we reprise the scene where Anthy approaches Utena after the duel and tells her that they're engaged now, Anthy's smile has a hint of that same mocking cruelty in it that it had when she gave Saiyonji that polite "fuck you" in the screenshot above. Not as much. Just enough to be recognizable, when we're shown it again with all the new context we now have. Is that Anthy's own predatory grin, though, or Dios'? And, if the latter, how many Dioses (Diosi? Diosen? Diosodes?) actually are there?

The second duel - the first of the Saiyonji rematches - was apparently the battle of "Choice." It looks like Dios refilled the green hourglass for this one, or else had two of them to begin with just in case he had additional uses for Saiyonji. The clipshow here focuses on Utena's insistence that she doesn't want to take part in these duels, but then ending up doing so anyway. If I'm remembering correctly though, the only reason she did it was because Saiyonji blackmailed her into it by threatening to get her expelled. Hardly what I'd call "choice."

I wonder. Maybe the ritual doesn't require the duelist to achieve these things, but rather to lose them? Utena was a popular girl - a veritable class celebrity - when the pilot introduced her. While she did gain a new roommate from that battle, her social life in general has only suffered since then. She's definitely more alone now than she was before. The second battle, the duel of Choice, was the one she most blatantly had her arm twisted into.

The battle of Self, against Touga, is one that I just criticized in my episode 12 review, but now I wonder if the problems I saw in it were actually intentional. The *framing* of that battle and its outcome was triumphant and restorative, but deceptive framing isn't outside of this show's bag of tricks. Utena somehow became convinced that her "self" was something she needs to prove things to other people in order to retain. And, the nature of that "self" is, itself, a codependent aspiration to be like her mental image of Dios. That entire episode might have been a single massive gaslighting campaign to make Utena lose her self while thinking she was regaining it.

Yeah. The more I look at things from this angle, the more it seems to fit. Let's see what Dios says about the other duels, though.

Oh damn, sure enough, the end of the Saiyonji II clipshow calls particular emphasis to Utena NOT having had any choice.

Specifically, Anthy asking her about it, and Utena telling her that she feels entrapped into this and doesn't see another way out. Which now seems like it might have been Anthy confirming for Dios that they've set everything up properly.

Also, hearing the second fight song for Saiyonji again now that I've learned to pay attention to those and their differing lyrics is pretty lol. "I'm a primordial brute destined to fall into the sea and end up as a museum fossil" lol.

Anyway, Dios says that it was on the day of that second duel that the seal on "your" power, the Power of Dios, really began to break. Which...okay, so the guy doing the villain monologuing here ISN'T Dios, and the dormant figure on the eggshell IS Dios. They really do look similar. Then again, Anthy also looks very similar to both of them. I'm thinking either a trio of siblings, or one entity split into three parts. For now, if the hibernating figure is Dios, then the monologuing villain one who plays the End of the World role is...I guess I'll just call him Endy? Dios and Endy. I'd previously thought those were one and the same, but now it seems not.

Hmm. If Dios and Endy really are separate, then maybe Utena's fixation on Dios wasn't actually quite as sinister as I've been thinking? Dios might not be nearly as bad as his brother/counterpart/whatever.

...the way Endy is talking at Dios seems sort of adversarial. But, at the same time, he seems to want him to break his shell and get free. Maybe once that happens, Endy thinks he can subsume or de-power Dios and take his power for himself? That would sort of fit the dueling motif of this whole plot, if its all to clear the way for a final duel between these two purple-haired godbois.

The following duels, Endy narrates, were all straightforward, unsurprising, and pretty much according to plan. The duel with Miki was the battle of Reason. I'm not as clear what that means, in this case, or how Utena's arc interacts with it. The focus of the clips here is all on Miki's thoughts and misstep's, not on Utena's. Hmm. Granted, these power words are all French, and the word raison has slightly different connotations than its English counterpart. If I'm not mistaken, it can also mean a case, or an argument. A justification. Which...well, Utena didn't lose OR gain anything related to that, as far as either the clips or my memories from the episode can show. I guess Miki himself sort of did? One of the clips that gets a lot of focus is when Anthy starts cheering for Utena in the middle of the battle, leading to Miki being stunned with shock and Utena winning.

Maybe it's not the one duelist who has to lose a thing in each battle, but it can also be their opponent? Miki lost his raison d'etre for fighting here, after all, but its weird that all the others have Utena as the sacrificial victim except for this one that has her opponent as the sacrificial victim. I can't quite puzzle this one out.

There is a cool lyrical thing I'm noticing now, though. Miki's song ends with a callback to Saiyonji II's, about the fossil returning to life. It comes simultaneously with him abandoning his alleged desire to help Anthy and acknowledging that he really just wants to use her as a means to the end of getting his "shining thing" back. The white knight's armor comes off, revealing just a wimpier, more dishonest version of the primordial brute. Well played, lyrics.

Juri's power word was Love, amour. This one also confuses me a little. Juri seems to have lost her love long before the events of the duel, or even the events of the leadup to the duel. Utena...I guess she lost an apparent chance at physical love during the leadup, when Juri pretended(?) to be into her before going aggro mode, but that feels awfully thin. Nothing in the clips helps me put it together. Drawing a blank here.

Nanami's word is Adoration. Which I don't think anyone gained or lost any of in that battle, so I think my reading of this whole thing might be bunk. Too many apparent exceptions at this point. Nanami is largely DEFINED by adoration of her brother, but that doesn't apply to the other duelists. "Raison" doesn't define Miki, or "Choice" (or "Companionship") Saiyonji, and neither do any of them work for Utena herself.

I guess it could be that each power word needs to be made manifest in a different way. Like, some of them need to be sacrificed or lost by the victor, some need to define the motivations of the loser, etc. That makes everything less clear and more complicated, but I'm at a loss for alternative readings.

Nanami's clipshow fixates a lot on the kitten she murdered. Which I guess is a thing that Touga (briefly) adored, and lost, but once again that's way before the events of the duel and only very tangentially connected to them via Anthy's gift being a reminder for her. And, the penultimate duel of the first season - the Touga I battle - was apparently Conviction. That one actually makes sense in my initial framework, but the previous ones don't. Which brings us back to Self, where Endy's litany started.

He finishes his monologue by musing on whether Utena really could be the person "we" have been waiting for.

Seven duels. Six victories, including one that negated a defeat. She has many trials ahead of her. This was only the first stage of the ritual tournament. But still, the fact that they've made it to stage two at all is major progress. Perhaps she really is the one who can awaken Dios and restore all his power, which "both of us" can profit from equally.

In response to that, Dios turns his head toward Endy. He can move a little bit after all, it seems. His face is still shrouded in darkness, but his posture seems upset.

I get the impression that Dios disagrees about both of them standing to benefit from Endy's plans. It's seeming more and more like Endy has sort of bullied the other two Rose Entities into submission. Dios is unable to act. Anthy is...possessed? Browbeaten? Something. Endy seems to think he's acting in all of their interests, but they both resent him.

Which kind of makes sense. Touga is basically an Endy Wannabe (even his inflections and expressions seem like they might be teenaged attempts at imitating Endy's, now that we've seen and heard the latter), and his underlings sure as hell resent him lol.

Endy gets up and walks out of the great hall, where he is joined by Anthy near the entrance. I guess she can fly up here too, sometimes. A rain of black roses fall ominously from the ceiling as they walk away together.

Later that evening, Anthy returns to the nuptial dorm that she's in the process of moving back into. Utena asks her where she just was, she was starting to get worried. Anthy ignores her question entirely and starts talking about the weather.

Lmao. Utena, why are you still letting these people get away with this bullshit?

A final blur of imagery includes the shadow puppets' flying saucer landing, a black version of the rose rings, and then a bunch of boys wearing an unfamiliar uniform. I guess this relates to the next stage of the tournament. Duelists from another school. Or maybe an alternate dimension version of the same school. Who even knows with this show. End episode.

It was a clipshow episode, but it was one that came with some new revelations. And, to be fair to it, I think it was much less clipshow-by-mass than, say, FMAB's "Interlude Party" episode that had a similar concept.

It's starting to look like Dios might actually be the one who needs rescuing, depending on exactly what the story is between him and Endy. Anthy, meanwhile...well, she might play a role in the rescuing, since she already seems to be making progress toward freeing herself. Not much, just a little. But it's something.

That's the last Revolutionary Girl Utena I have in queue. Has it won me over? Ssssssort of.

The characters are still too allegorical and inhuman for me to get conventionally invested in. That's probably going to remain my biggest complaint about the show no matter how much more of it I ever end up seeing. I'm curious about where it's going. I'm interested to see what philosophical and allegorical directions it takes next, and what the whole Rose Entities' deal actually is. I'd like to keep watching and find out. But that's not the same thing as being invested.

My biggest problem is with Utena herself. I like her concept. I like her look and vibe. But the way she just keeps being yoinked along by the plot without expressing any relatable kind of scepticism, curiosity, or indignance, no matter how much bullshit gets thrown at her, is just too frustrating for me. I could deal with all the other characters being allegories and caricatures if the protagonist, at least, felt a little more like a human being. If she did, I could maybe be invested instead of just curious.

Also Nanami episodes why do they even