Let Me Get This Straight.

Let me get this straight.

Anthy is in love with Utena who is in love with Anthy who is under the control of Akio who wants to control both of them. Saionji is homophobicly in love with Touga who is so misogynistic that he sleeps with men, namely Akio, multiple times (and is probably in love with Saionji) and they all want to control Anthy and/or Utena and mistake that need for control with love. Juri and Shiori are in love but Shiori has enough internalized homophobia for both of them. Wakaba is in love with Utena but in denial, Nanami’s internalized homophobia has convinced her she wants a man even though whenever a man pursues her she runs away. And all the while, save for the the beginning, Miki is just kinda there.

Did I miss anything?

I have such complicated and mixed feelings about Supernatural, but I will always love Destiel as a concept.

“I will choose you every time, even when you are the wrong choice, even when you can’t choose yourself. You aren’t my soulmate because I don’t have a soul but I exist for the purpose of coexisting with you. You are my light and I cannot stand to live without you.”

“I will trust you even when you betray me for what you believe is right and when you do things I disagree with. I hate you for how I need you and I hate myself for not begging you to stay whenever you leave. When I’m at my lowest you are the one I pray to and when I’m at my highest you are at my side.”

I hate Supernatural and I hate what Destiel became, but I still think the concept is a true and visceral look at what love really is.

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A COMEDY WHERE THE GAYS WERE HAPPY WHY CAN’T THE GAYS EVER JUST BE GAY AND HAPPY???!!!

I think that instead of perpetuating heteronormative stereotypes with questions like “who wears the pants in the relationship” we should ask “who gets the spider and who runs away screaming”.

I really do love how Revolutionary Girl Utena takes the trope of “prince” and turns it upside down.

At first the series leads the audience to believe that Utena wants to be a prince due to her love/admiration for the prince she met as a child. This suggests that being a prince is something given to you, like the ring, that to be a prince means a higher destiny for you chosen by someone else. And, through this, the reason Akio is no longer a prince is for the opposite reason, where the higher power (Anthy) stole his princeliness from him.

But as the series progresses, we learn that’s not the case at all. Utena becomes a prince not because someone else paved that road for her or told her to (if anything the opposite, everyone tells her she can’t be a prince). She becomes a prince because she chooses a noble path, because she wants to save the girl, because she wants to protect others (Anthy, Wakaba, Shiori in the Black Rose arc, etc).

Likewise, Akio didn’t stop being a prince because Anthy took the powers of Dios from him. He stopped being a prince when he left the noble path. When he began abusing his sister. When he began manipulating the people around him for his own personal gain.

That’s why he can never regain the power of Dios; the power of Dios rejected him the moment he stopped helping others. The moment he stopped saving others.

That’s why Utena is able to harness the power of Dios; because she chose the noble and good path, because almost everything she does is for the sake of someone else as well as herself. She helps others to make herself feel better, yes, but she would never hurt or leave someone else behind for her own benefit.

It’s for this reason Akio thinks that Utena didn’t cause a revolution; the only thing he views as revolutionary is him regaining the power of Dios. The audience sees that, even if people are forgetting her, Utena caused a revolution for most of the characters (Shiori and Jury, Saionji and Touga, Miki and Kozue, Nanami and Touga all beginning to repair their relationships, Anthy gaining self autonomy) but because she wasn’t the literal cause it’s not seen as “revolutionary”.

She didn’t fix things for the other characters. She inspired them to fix things for themselves.

If that’s not revolutionary, I don’t know what is.