lea_hazel / Revolutionary Girl Utena

While I was studying for that last exam, I needed something to watch during breaks/in the evening to unwind. I'd been planning to catch up on critical anime studies, so I decided it was high time to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Oh em gee.

Okay, this series is pretty heavy. I had been forewarned, by the context of people's discussions, that the show is convoluted and has a lot of creepy themes. So, I wasn't exactly surprised by how the majority of the cast are shady, scheming, manipulative, power-hungry and frequently just plain mean-spirited. Utena herself comes across as very naive, in a way that's not exactly endearing, but also not as infuriating as the on-paper description might imply. Usually it's really easy to be frustrated with a character like that, to the point of detestation, but I love Utena.

I'm towards the end of the third saga now. Funnily enough, this series makes an interesting contrast to the season premiere of Game of Thrones, which I watched when it aired on Israeli TV (Thursday night). Both series involve a contrast between noble, honorable, naive characters surrounded by scads of schemers weaving webs within webs of conspiracies. Both of them have a huge emphasis on older males (mostly boys or very young men in Utena, actual adults in GOT) perving on very young girls. For some reason, though, GOT pings me negatively in a way that Utena doesn't.

One of the things that I wasn't anticipating was how much middle school shenanigans there would be. All the fandom discussions I'd seen of it focus on the dramatic relationships and the meta arc, but the series has a lot of humor in it, too. A lot of it struck me as weird, I don't know how much of that is due to the series itself, and how much is just my unfamiliarity with anime tropes. The shadow theater non-sequitors, certain of the background characters, basically Nanami's entire character -- I'm pretty certain the context for all of these is lost on me.

I still have to process Anthy's role as a villain or quasi-villain. I have a lot of feelings about female villains in general, and the roles of teenage girls, and all that complicated stuff.

One thing I'm looking forward to that I haven't gotten to yet is the fanficcy A/U aspect. I want to devour all the different versions of the story, and then compare and contrast them. Then I'll make a big chart comparing the different versions of the characters, and compile them into a three-dimensional A/U shipping chart.

If anyone has any recommendations for continuing my anime education, I'll take 'em. I'm particularly interested in genre stories with adult women characters, since those seem scarce on the ground in most of the stuff I've been consuming.