The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
—Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 12: “For Friendship, Perhaps.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
Watch for free here.
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We have now reached, at long last, the final episode of the “Student Council Saga.” We’ve had a complete story arc and an introduction to most of the major players, though exactly what’s going on remains a mystery (and will until the very end).
Having lost to Touga, Utena is feeling low. We already saw her questioning her goal in life, and now she’s considering giving up entirely. She changes into a girl’s uniform and acts generally mopy.
Oh, and for this essay, I am once again going to steal images from Utena: Texts from Last Night. I’m struggling against the temptation to post some of the NSFW ones.
Anyway, in this episode, the obsessive best friend, Wakaba, gets a chance to shine. She doesn’t know what is going on and assumes Utena and Anthy must have had a fight. Although she’s slightly off-base in her criticism, she nonetheless manages to slap—literally—some sense into Utena.
Meanwhile, Touga continues being a world-class jerk. He ignores Anthy and flirts with other girls right in front of her, apparently just because he can. Anthy takes it in her usual passive fashion.
It may be worth noting as an aside here that there was originally going to be a flashback episode revealing that Touga has grown into a messed-up jerk because he was raped by his stepfather. That little detail got cut from the final production, but it is, you might say, lurking as a subtext. We haven’t hit the really crazy sexual stuff in this show yet, but we will soon after we enter the second arc.
We’ve seen how the different duelists treat Anthy. Saionji beat her up but also convinced himself she was in love with him. Touga ignores her. Juri backhanded her. Miki was considerably nicer but was trying to use her as a substitute for his sister. Only Utena is trying to befriend her, so it’s easy for the audience to root for Utena and hope she wins.
At the same time, there is perhaps some irony here: Utena, just like the others, insists she knows what’s best for Anthy (that Anthy should make friends and quit being the Rose Bride), but we still don’t know what Anthy herself wants, if Anthy is even capable of wanting anything. As Touga pointed out in the episode previous, Anthy only wanted friendship and to quit being the Rose Bride because that was what Utena wanted. Utena, like Saionji before her, had convinced herself that her own desires were really Anthy’s.
However, there is a scene in this episode that suggests some stirrings of an actual personality are buried under Anthy’s performance as the Rose Bride. She and Touga are sitting on the student council’s balcony and having tea. Touga ignores her, of course, gossiping on his cell phone as he sits across from her. He gets up and leaves to attend business elsewhere, leaving Anthy alone. Anthy looks up and, for a brief moment, envisions Utena sitting across from her.
Anthy’s dialogue in this episode suggests that her memory might be erased every time she passes to a different duelist. She doesn’t quite clearly remember being Utena’s Rose Bride, but has little memory fragments that appear at times, suggesting that Utena left a strong impression on her.
This is the first time anything in the show has been from Anthy’s POV. For that reason, it’s rather jarring, and I admit I don’t particularly like it. I think it might have been better to leave Anthy’s thoughts wholly ambiguous, especially since we are never again going to get anything approaching a clear idea of what she’s thinking.
After Utena stops moping and gets her mojo back, she challenges Touga to another duel, determined to beat him even if he is her prince. Interestingly, for the duel, she receives a sword from Juri, suggesting some grudging respect. Utena ascends the staircase to the arena, but without the customary playing of “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse.”
The battle that follows is the climactic action scene of this arc, and it’s a tad silly: Touga reveals a secret technique whereby he can fuse the Sword of Dios with the soul of the Rose Bride and transform it into a light saber.
Yes, really.
During the fight that follows, we are treated to Anthy’s internal monologue. She thinks Utena will almost certainly lose, but also has some dim sense of attachment to Utena.
Of note here is that Utena decides to fight this battle in her girl’s uniform, which gets shredded in the process, perhaps symbolizing Utena’s re-taking of the mantle of her princely role.
During the fight’s final moment, in which Utena pulls off a surprise victory, Anthy suddenly remembers Utena’s first unlikely win against Saionji—perhaps indicating that her memories of Utena have come flooding back now that Utena is becoming her betrothed again.
The episode ends with Anthy giving the same formal greeting to Utena that she did when Utena won her the first time, but then they stop talking and simply smile at each other, making clear that they can pick up where they left off.
It’s unfortunate that the rules of the Rose Duel are not exactly clear. From what we’ve seen, the student council apparently has a duel whenever the members receive a letter from World’s End, and they apparently duel in order, taking turns when their numbers come up. But then again, certain details seem to contradict this: Utena, for example, was able to challenge Saionji to a duel, apparently without a letter. Saionji then turned around and challenged her again right afterwards, which gives us the impression that it’s a best two-out-of-three kind of thing … yet most of the other duelists accepted their defeat immediately when Utena beat them. But Utena was able to challenge Touga to a rematch—and Touga for some reason accepts his defeat even though they are actually tied, she having won once and he having won once.
Exactly what are the rules of this thing? The only rule I can discern is, “The duels will continue until Utena wins.”
Being done with the first arc, we are also done with the first boxed set of the remastered edition. As I’ve mentioned previously, this thing comes with a lot of bonus material. The booklet that accompanies the set comes with episode commentaries from Kunihiko Ikuhara, interviews with the staff in charge of the remastering, artwork, and laserdisc liner notes, which I’ve already referenced repeatedly. There is also an essay entitled “Revolutionary Girls: Girls Manga.” This essay has no attribution.
In my humble opinion, “Revolutionary Girls” is about equal parts insight and balderdash. Consider, if you will, this quotation:
As a group, [shoujo anime] were gentle works in which the subtleties of human emotion were depicted in detail or dangers were escaped via the fantastical actions we call “magic.” And then, in 1992, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon began, and the tides changed. Girls actively used their physical skills to defeat evil. Kunihiko Ikuhara, a Sailor Moon director, once commented that “Seeing girls be violent is pleasurable to viewers now.”
A few comments: Girls engaged in violence did not get its start with Sailor Moon, and even some of the titles this essayist mentions run counter to her thesis—Rose of Versailles most especially, which is about a woman fighting in the French Revolution. Even magical girls would fight from time to time before Sailor Moon made its appearance; Minky Momo slung a six-shooter or even piloted a mech on occasion.
For that matter, although the sailor scouts employ some martial arts, they still mostly fight with magical phlebotinum. What Sailor Moon actually did was mash up the magical girl genre with the superhero team, and it also drew quite heavily on Cutie Honey.
But at any rate, building off the above quotation from Ikuhara, I think “Revolutionary Girls” correctly discerns the appeal of the magical girl warrior: “What’s most important, however, was not that our popular image of girls had fallen so low that we could see them as violent; it’s that even when they had action scenes like that, the heroines were still beautiful.”
I do believe this is the basic appeal of magical girls, the sharp contrast between the action violence and the hyperfemininity. I discussed this before in one of my essays on The Powerpuff Girls. I’m convinced of this partly because people who’ve never heard of my theory sometimes point it out to me: I recently had someone wholly unfamiliar with the magical girl genre look over the children’s chapter book fan fiction I was writing on a whim, and specifically said she was delighted and amused by the contrast between the action violence and the fancy girl main character.
One more quotation from the “Revolutionary Girls” essay: “The world of Utena was a logical extension of the fighting girls you saw in Sailor Moon: what you could call the consummated form of that world. And there was this theme that you fought the male prince as an outdated ideal.”
I’ll leave that without comment, as we’ll come back around to it at length later.
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