Revolutionary Girl Utena S1E1: “The Rose Bride” (part two)

I'm getting the sense that "boyfriend" was facetious. Utena and Wakaba aren't a thing, just buds. Like, rose buds.

Cut to Utena confronting Saiyonji. She finds him in a dark basement room, practicing some lethal-looking katana moves. He's the student body vice president, after all. He denies having pinned up the note that Wakaba sent him, and says he doesn't even remember it; he gets a lot of mail, after all. Someone else must have found it after he threw it away.

When Utena pushes him on the subject, he just tells her that he can discard his own mail however the hell he wants, and it's none of her business. She responds by challenging him to a fencing match; he's the team captain, right? It won't be unfair of her to deliver the beatdown on someone who doesn't know how to defend themselves. He's amused by this challenge, and muses aloud that he WAS expecting there to be a new Duelist to challenge him. Utena has no idea what that last bit is all about, but anyway, he accepts her challenge. He instructs her to meet him in the forest behind the school, where no one is normally supposed to go.

It's left unspecified for now if this will be a battle to the death or to the first blood or what. I'm not writing off any possibility for what is or isn't culturally normative for this setting, at this point.

Cut to some creepy shadow puppets excitedly babbling about the new challenger for the hand of the Rose Bride. Which Utena doesn't seem to know she's elligable for if she wins this fight.

They start chanting about how there are rules in the sacred forest, and the hero must follow them or be at great peril. "Do you know the rules, oh hero?" they repeat over and over again. I think Utena probably does know them. She's proven herself adept at preemptively memorizing rules.

So, that evening Utena takes her sword and goes to the forest, which is surrounded by fortress walls and barred by an ornate gate that looks like you need to collect three different keys from three different bosses to open. You know the kind.

When Utena puts her hand near the seal, however, a droplet of water flies out from the physically impossible spiral channel and sticks to her ring. There's a gigantic fucking lightshow as waterfalls spill out of nowhere and fill up the marble basin under the bridge leading to the door, which in turn operates a magitech contraption that raises and lifts various parts of the gate away.

Well, go on in Utena. There's probably a Master Sword with your name on it in there.

She shrugs at the ostentatious gate design (but doesn't comment on the obvious supernatural aspects of it) and heads nervously on in. In the center of the sacred grove is a spiral staircase that winds away into the sky until it vanishes among the clouds. As Utena ascends, a chorus of unseen spirits sing a song of battle and conflict, good and evil, darkness and light, and the absolute destiny: Apocalypse.

Utena seems perplexed by this, but not exactly stunned. She ascends the staircase, not seeming to tire, until she arrives at the arena of the gods floating at its summit.

Hovering high above it, hanging upside down from the firmament of the heavens itself, is a big castle complex. Like a slightly less ostentatious version of her school.

Okay, fine, so it's not Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. So I was wrong. So fucking sue me.

As Utena tries to make sense of what she's seeing (though she's notably still more "huh, weird" than "ohgodwhatthefuckisthisevenreal"), Sayoinji steps out from around that oversized torii gate. He's surprised that someone like her was able to even enter this place. Um...so why did you tell her to come here, Sayoinji? Were you planning to just make her wait outside the door until she gave up and then laugh at her the next day? Did you think that would, like, resolve this conflict? Also, if you didn't expect her to be able to actually make it inside, why are YOU here waiting for her? I think he's just trying to rattle Utena.

She asks him what the fuck this place is, why its invisible from outside the forest walls, and what the deal is with nega-Agrabah overhead. He laughs her questions off with a non-answer about optical illusions, and then asks her how she came by that ring on her finger. He also holds up his own hand, to reveal an identical ring of his own. Only student council members are supposed to get these. Anyway, he calls "Anthy" to come out and prepare them for the duel. Anthy being Himemiya's first name, it seems.

Anthy Himemiya. Chrysanthemum. Hardy har har.

Anthy comes out of nowhere wearing a golden crown and weird red dress with jewelry all over it, and pins a rose blossom to each of their shirt chests. Utena is WTFing pretty hard at this. Moreso than she did at the flying nightmare architecture.

Anthy explains the rules of the duel; each duelist must attempt to cut or knock the rose off of the other's bosom. When Utena asks what Anthy is doing here, Sayoinji explains that of course the Rose Bride must be present for this duel, why is she even asking a question like that.

Hmm. I'm starting to think that, rather than Sayoinji taking Utena's challenge as some kind of sign that this was someone he had to duel for the Bride, he legitimately just misinterpreted the situation. He had the Rose Duel on his mind. Someone challenged him to a swordfight. He assumed she must have been talking about this, and have somehow gotten a ring from somewhere.

Also, as Anthy places the rose on her, Utena realizes that she smells familiar. The exact, deeper-than-rose scent that the barely remembered prince who gave her the ring had. And, in a stylized flashback, it looks like the prince had similar hair and skin tone to Anthy's. So, that was her in another form? Or another entity similar to her? Is there a whole pantheon of these rose spirits?

When Anthy wishes Utena good luck, Sayoinji gets buttmad and knocks Anthy to the ground.

He mocks Utena for white knighting Anthy. Utena refuses to be humiliated, and just plays the role of hero unironically and unabashedly even when he takes the internet troll "lol u triggered" approach. Anthy, from where she's crumpled on the floor, seems to be regarding Utena with growing admiration. Either that, or checking out her ass as she walks over to her own side of the arena. Possibly both, those aren't really mutually exclusive.

The opponents position themselves, and then Sayoinji speaks some ritual words - including something about the power to ignite a global revolution, which I guess is at least part of why the title of this show is what it is - and reaches into a suddenly holographic Anthy and produces...HAHAHAHA OH MY GOD SHE ACTUALLY IS GETTING THE MASTER SWORD!

This is the "Sword of Dios," apparently. Sword of God. It's a European language name in an anime, so you know this item is some serious shit. I guess this is why he cares so much about having the Rose Bride under his control. It's not what she can do independently, but the weapon connected to her.

He's surprised that Utena is surprised by this. Yeah, I was right, he just totally misinterpreted her intent when she challenged him. He assumed she was in the know, and then had that assumption "confirmed" when she had a ring that she could access the arena with. He says that he has no further interest in this duel, but if Utena insists, sure, he'll complete it just to get her off his back.

The battle begins, melodramatic music and all. Sayoinji tells her that her swordsmanship is surprisingly good, for a girl. Unfortunately, skill alone is not enough to offset the fact that she brought a wooden school fencing club sword, and the Sword of Definitely Not A Metaphor For His Masculinity That He Keeps Inside Of Anthy's Body is either steel or some bullshit magic metal that's even stronger.

"The hammer is my penis."

It isn't long before Utena's sword gets chopped off near the hilt. Rather than giving up, though, Utena has an inspiring flashback to the Rose Prince who urged her to never give up, never lose her inner strength, never be cowed into withdrawing from injustice rather than confronting it.

She lunges back into the fray, down a dummy blade but with a hefty morale bonus that balances it out. She charges Sayoinji with her broken hilt, dodges under his blade, and uses the close pass to tear the blossom off of his shirt by hand.

The battle is concluded. Sayoinji crumples, stunned at his defeat. The Rose Bride smirks at him and says "cheer up Sayoinji, my schoolmate." Pointedly not referring to him as master. A whole mass of church bells ring from nowhere.

From somewhere way off in the distance - either in the school below or some unseen part of the sky compound - SBA president Kiryuu watches through a telescope type thing. He seems most pleased with this development, and I don't really think you can blame him.

He makes a note to himself about Utena's relatively young age and obscure origins, and then makes a creepy comment along the lines of "oh, you light up my heart baby." Hmm. I think I see where this is going, thematically, but time will tell.

Utena returns down the infinite staircase of insanity, shaking her head about how fucking weird that all was and how she should probably just do her best to forget it ever happened. When she leaves the forest gates, however, she finds Anthy in civvies waiting for her new husband.

Utena's reaction could best be summarized as "u w0t m8?" Unsurprising, considering the everything. End episode.

Outro is a bit more musically generic than the OP (which wasn't too stylistically unique to begin with), and visually its just a static image. But the contents of that image hints pretty strongly at something plot related.

The entity that Utena's been referring to as a "prince" is seen here embracing both Anthy in her Rose Bride getup, and Utena in an off-color variation of it. Note that, even by this show's animu prettyboy standards, the prince is very androgynous looking. He wears something close-ish to the male uniform, but has Anthy's hairstyle and skin tone. He also has a very feminine-sounding voice, to the point where if you heard him without seeing him you'd assume it was a woman. So, I don't think this is a "prince," or a "he." The entity behind the Sword and Bride seems pretty agendered. And, it's motivations in giving a ring to an idealistic little girl who isn't part of the existing power structure aren't yet explicit, but the implications are pretty strong.


So, first things first: this is one of the weirdest things I've reviewed, or even seen for that matter. It's right up there with Chainsaw Man. It's even weird in similar ways, come to think of it, with that fever dream mélange of the familiar, the foreign, and the impossible. Even before adding explicit "magic" to the mix.

As for whether that weirdness achieves anything positive, well...ish? As I said before, this is uncannily similar to some "weird for the sake of being weird" stuff I wrote in my late teens. So, the most immature part of me looks at stuff like Utena, and thinks it's the most awesomest thing ever. My adult half (okay, I might be flattering myself there; call it an adult third) just finds the deliberate weirdness sort of tryhard and vapid. Like too much frosting on top of the actual cake. There IS cake here, but a lot of the insanity taking place onscreen doesn't really do much for it. It doesn't work against the substance, but it doesn't support or help frame it either. It's just kinda sitting there on top.

Since we're on an autobiographical tangent already, the staircase leading up to the sky-platform also hit me really strongly, because I've had recurring dreams about a very similar landscape since my mid twenties. But, again, I can't really credit the show for coincidentally happening to strike a chord with my subconscious imagination.

Anyway. In terms of cultural impact, anyone whose been watching cartoons for the last couple of decades should be recognizing the seeds (no pun intended) of quite a few things, especially in terms of aesthetics. Like I said. Swords, roses, and lesbians, often strewn around a heroic narrative with mystical sensibilities. In addition to its ubiquity in the magical girl and related anime genres, there's a whole universe of powerful princesses in western animation that probably owes much of its inspiration to Utena. You could say that Utena is just an expansion of what Sailor Moon already had, but even then, it's an important expansion.

Finally, it should be obvious at this point that Revolutionary Girl Utena is a very literal story that doesn't lean on allegory or symbolism overmuch. However, if I were to pretend that this was not the case...

For all that RGU is known as "that rose lesbian show," the pilot doesn't spend much time on sexuality. It doesn't ignore it, obviously, but that isn't the main focus of its identity politics. Gender is, and not in the way that the first few minutes had me expecting. Utena (the character) is not genderqueer, though she looks like it at first. The title is Revolutionary GIRL Utena for a reason. She's trying to be a "prince," and the show seems to define princehood by a set of behaviors and aesthetics. Masculinity is just an incidental part of the Prince package that she aspires to. If the story is going where I think it might be going, masculinity will turn out to be worse than dead weight for her ideal, and rather something that she'll need to reject in order to achieve self-actualization.

In his series analyzing Mad Max: Fury Road, breadtuber Innuendo Studios coined the term "the avenging feminine." The whole series is worth watching, but for now just watch this video from the timestamp onward.

Power is violence. The distribution of power in society is determined by who has the most access to violence. In order to remain on top, the powerful must prevent those beneath them from being able to enact violence. This pilot was all about that access to violence; the Rose Bride contains a magical weapon within her body, and the conflict was resolved with her and it changing hands. The "prince" that Utena wants to become is defined by "protecting maidens from evildoers;" the use of violence to protect people who lack power from abuse by people who possess it. But for some reason, being a prince also requires you to be a man. Why is that?

If that's the thematic path the show is treading, I'm curious about where it will go with (seemingly?) female character Anthy. Her subjugation was both the source and the object of local toxic masculinity representative Sayoinji's power. He keeps his sword in her, and keeps her under his control to prevent others from using it. There's the obvious sexual metaphor here, with him putting his sword in her, but...well, to move up a level of abstraction from "sword = dick" to "sword = male ego," it's really not HIS sword in the first place. His confidence, power, and self-satisfaction all depend on his control of women. Of her. The question this raises is why Anthy can't just use the damned sword herself. Why does it have to be another woman who takes on that power, over the sword and over her personhood? Why can't Anthy be the Rose Queen instead of the Rose Bride?

I don't know what direction the story will go from here, but I suspect it will culminate in Anthy learning that she totally can. That she doesn't need Utena to wield the sword in her chest. She only thinks that she does, for the same reason that Utena thinks she needs to wear a boy's uniform in order to wield it. That might be what the "revolution" refers to. The creation of a world in which you don't need to be a nobleman, or a man at all, to pick up a sword when there's a problem in front of you that needs stabbing. That's the avenging feminine. Women taking back their share of humanity's violence from the patriarchal cultures that stole it from them.

Like I said though, this is just my inferences based on the pilot. I could be totally off. And it's not like this show is actually allegorical anyway.