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I watched a couple of episodes in high school and thought it was dumb as poo poo then. Saw the movie at DragonCon 20 years ago and that didn't do much to change my opinion either. I had intended to get in on the last group watch several years ago but was in a travel burst and couldn't keep up; we'll see if I can stick with it this time.
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Aug 26, 2023 03:09
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:27 |
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Strong visuals, main character has a crippling inability to do addition and subtraction (the prince who comforted Utena was probably older than 9 when he gave her the ring so there's no way Kiryu could be him). Entire school treats (what seems like) an extremely nice girl like utter garbage for some reason, so it's either an act or penance for doing something really heinous before Utena came to town. Four people on "the student council" hang out on the top floor of the extremely not phallic tower in the middle of campus and are getting letters from someone who calls himself the End of the World, who tells them they have to bring revolution to the world be fully born, sure okay hail satan. Speculation: EotW is probably also Utena's prince because that's how stories like this work. Let's spend a couple of minutes every episode on the elevator ride for the student council and Utena's trip up the staircase. The spinning rose frame device around character appearances and plot beats is a little cheesy; they'd be less distracting if they were stationary. The shadow puppet shows are amusing. I'm not bouncing off it as hard as I did 20 years ago but I can still see why I didn't like it.
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Aug 28, 2023 23:52
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Ohtori Akio posted:I like chu-chu and I think paying attention to him pays off. He is cut from the same cloth as the Penguindrum penguins.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:11
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I don't have a lot to say about these; they seemed to be setting up pieces for moves later though I appreciated the characterization they gave Miki and to a lesser extent Nanami. I found Nanami to just be annoying; tripling down on her idea to make a weird girl look weird just about made my eyes roll out the back of my head. I'd just as soon she get disappeared though we can see what they do with her as the story continues. I'm finding that I have a somewhat low tolerance for court politics in fiction and coming off a book that was way too much of that may be coloring my perceptions - Nanami seemed to be playing for chump stakes but pretending that they actually matter.
Midjack fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 02:32
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Slapping Anthy is still the school varsity sport. Green hair and red hair have history predating the academy, we'll see how this pays off later. Curry body swap episode was a lighthearted break from the drama.Lady Radia posted:nanami was my fave character for most of the first part. and then she never left that role. she owns so much I have found her to be an irritating poo poo so far but I'm willing to see what the writers do with her. Do the adults at school or in town have any thoughts about the off limits forest?
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Sep 11, 2023 23:16
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Utena looks a little too gleeful when she's pulling the sword out of Anthy before fights but I reviewed the earlier time when green hair did it and it looks like the animators just used the same face and skeleton, changing hair and clothing to match whoever is doing it. Also why does Utena do the "gimme revolution" invocation, is whatever Anthy is enchanted by ( ) controlling the sword bearer when they hold it too?
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Sep 17, 2023 22:40
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Next three are up, I believe. Hit the road, Saionji. There's no way he won't be back. Touga is an extremely adroit manipulator; he gets Nanami (more on her later) to make an attempt on Utena's life and plays on Utena's prince memory to get her to throw a duel against him. I'm still a little surprised Utena hasn't done the math to determine that Touga isn't that much older than her though to be fair, when you're a kindergartener the sixth graders may as well be adults. Nanami, on the other hand, is a more terrible person every time we see her. Killing the cat she gave her brother because it meant Touga wasn't paying attention to her is pretty hard to walk back. Breaking the duel rules and risking maiming or death just to take Utena out seemed to be Touga taking advantage of her devotion to him to have her do the dirty work instead of him getting involved. Not sure how the Academy would handle a homicide during a duel - it's still unclear how much the administration knows about the dueling society. Anthy's reprogrammable loyalty is kinda gross and I don't like it but I'm willing to see what's going on with since she seems to be a host for whatever that's about. Telling her to get into the sword to power it up is amusing and I'm sure what we saw isn't the only party trick it does.Lots of peeping through magnified optics in this show. Touga and Juri have both done it on screen and there may be some other instances I'm forgetting. Utena's moping around and deciding to be normal was a mercifully short interlude. They didn't reanimate the staircase climb for her womens' uniform. Slapping is still the Academy varsity sport, it seems. Continuity error: before the duel with Nanami, Utena has a sword in hand immediately before the "pull it from Anthy" sequence happens. Probably an oversight in production. Midjack fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Sep 18, 2023 |
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Sep 18, 2023 20:28
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We haven't explored Anthy's backstory or End of the World in enough detail to really feel like a finish unless the show had a couple of episodes following Utena before she arrived at the school to set her up as a wandering prince in search of her own prince. As it is, the school and everything Utena encounters there is the nexus of the plot so the writers can't get away with not answering some of those questions.
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Sep 18, 2023 23:13
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We don't really know all that much about Utena's past, do we? We have the frequently repeated sketch about the prince consoling her as a child when her parents died (and that could be changing minor details every time they show it and I'm just not paying attention to it because I've seen it ten times already) and her hiding in a coffin at the funeral, but we know nothing between that happening and her showing up at Otori Academy. Where did she come from, and who's paying her tuition? Utena has never spoken of her past beyond her encounter with the prince. Speculation: Utena never had any parents in the first place and only came into being relatively recently as another product of the same event that made Anthy the Rose Bride.
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Sep 21, 2023 04:19
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Oh hey, it's ! And we get a clip show in case we'd forgotten any of the sweet sword fights from the first batch of episodes. We see Utena's face in one of the origin story flashbacks, so that's definitely not staying the same every running. I still haven't gone back to see if there were any changes before that. Anthy's brother is the acting chair of the academy? Kind of surprised the students are slapping her around as much as they are when any of them could probably be expelled with a whisper from her - he seems to care about her. Pretty sweet setup living in a planetarium. The 360-degree view from a leader's sparsely decorated main hangout is reminiscent of Gendo's office in the NERV pyramid in Evangelion, which preceded this by a couple of years. Anthy seems like she's being more than a little passive-aggressive towards Akio's fiancee. Having a bunch of dead swordsmen possess random friends and family of the Duelists doesn't seem like a great plan for success, not sure what this Black Rose gang is getting at with that idea. Their goal is plain enough, and being the Rose Bride apparently confers some benefit on the person who fills the role. They can drag swords from the chests of other people similar to how the Engaged can. The confessional booth is amusing, especially the butterfly painting on the wall that reverses through its life cycle. Midjack fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 01:21
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Sleng Teng posted:Let's not forget the most important part of this latest batch of episodes: new version of absolute destiny apocalypse Okay yeah i thought the vocals were different.
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Sep 28, 2023 00:18
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It's been nice to see minor characters appear as Black Rose duelists when they initially seemed like they'd be one-hitter backstory props. They're all kind of bad at swordfighting though; Utena dispatches them in under a minute. Speculation: the basement boys are gathering data from each successive Black Rose duelist to create the Ultimate Swordfighter. We're at the halfway point and Nanami still sucks.
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Oct 2, 2023 06:43
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19 - Again, I appreciate the efficiency of exploring characters we've already seen rather than just throwing new people at us every episode and revisiting the love letter Saionji publicized is also good. Mikage doesn't take just anybody to be a puppet even if they have legitimate beef. 20 - Utena refuses to take up a weapon against Wakaba but unsurprisingly beats her anyway. Knew we'd see Saionji back at school. He's really thoughtless to Wakaba for sheltering and feeding him, kind of a through line for him. Seems like he's back for good so I'm assuming we can look forward to watching him pick fights with Utena and slap Anthy around again. Is there anything limiting the frequency of duels, or could someone with superior endurance like Juri just spam challenges at Utena nonstop until she just falls over from exhaustion? 21 - You know what I needed? Another episode showing how awful Nanami is. The Chu-Chu huffing his own farts in the sleeping bag thing seems like an animator doodle that they decided to put in the show because why not? The revelation that the Harpies only hang around Nanami because they want to get with Touga isn't that much of a surprise. I feel like Mean Girls does this better. We've gone a few episodes without seeing Utena's origin story sketch and with half the student council offline the elevator has been out of rotation too. Anthy doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot these last several episodes though Akio directly tasking her to monitor Utena is some heavy-handed foreshadowing. We still haven't explained the upside down castle. Utena's one liners at the end of the shadow plays are fun.
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Oct 9, 2023 20:54
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22 - Some backstory here that opens up a lot of questions. Mikage is the Nemuro of the building and apparently he, Akio, and Mamiya are affected by something that freezes aging, which may be the same “revolutionize the world” thing we keep hearing about. The entire school may be affected, I wonder if this has anything to do with Miki’s stopwatch habit. It’s not a time loop (at least not a short one) since we see nights and days pass and everyone appears to retain their memories though I suppose it could replay several months and some people could remember their previous trips through the loop for whatever reason. Akio was boning down with Tokiko when she was an inspector but she wasn’t around long enough to be affected. Mamiya also has some rose garden attraction like Anthy. Snow doesn’t melt in Mamiya’s garden. The Rose Seal at that time meant a contract with Akio, unclear if it still does and if Mob Researcher 100 were also duelling over a Rose Bride in their era, or if their efforts were towards research rather than sword fights. I tend to believe that since Mikage has a Seal but doesn’t seem to be a duelist - he’s still bound by the previous set of rules. Speculation: if Akio was giving out Rose Seals in Nemuro's time then he's likely End of the World today and if my earlier speculation is correct he's Utena's prince too, he'd be about the right age if he's been in a time warp but we don't know how long he's been affected by the academy's time freeze. Why did Mamiya burn the building down? It seems to have been rebuilt the same, down to Mikage’s office looking identical and having the same cardboard box on the floor. We see briefly again too. Anthy says something about having to follow someone else’s orders (Akio?) since she’s the Bride but that seems to conflict with what we saw earlier that she follows the Engaged’s direction - maybe she has loyalty to something that isn’t completely overridden by the Engaged. Also Mamiya looks an awful lot like Akio and Anthy and not much like his sister. Change in the elevator scene to show them holding papers this time and they don’t do the egg incantation. Not really sure what the significance of the cats was but the director really wanted us to count them. 23 - Mikage is hallucinating that Utena is Tokiko, and has enraged Utena to the point that she challenges him to a fight, only the second time that’s happened and apparently that doesn’t break the rules even though it’s to no benefit for her since she’s still the Engaged when she issues the challenge. Mob Researcher 100 was trying to open the duelling arena and the upside down castle is where Eternity is so they could become duelists. Mikage elevators himself and Mamiya is the one on the other side of the glass for him though he doesn’t go all the way to the leaf in the frame, just to a caterpillar. This is the hardest fought duel Utena has had and we entirely skipped the staircase. And it appears Mikage hallucinated Mamiya all along too, and Akio sent Anthy to be a stand in for Mamiya and guide the delusion? That explains why she's been gone and exhausted when we do see her. And then Akio just edits Mikage out of the school and he was never there at all, everyone’s memories are adjusted to remove the rebuilt Nemuro Memorial Hall and everything that happened there so Akio apparently has godlike powers over the school. Speculation: something similar will happen to Utena when we get to the end of the story. I feel like I need to go back over these two again, there was a lot going on and I don't take live notes. 24 - ~*fArTz*~ The opening and closing have been consistent from the beginning, much longer than I expected.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:55
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Also if Anthy and Akio are siblings why do they have different last names?Big Leg posted:but the cow episode is from the last arc... i guess it proves nanami is so cool you can't delete her presence from the timeline. That one didn't have any real anchors in sequence besides "Nanami is now a Duellist" and didn't have anything to do with the Black Rose stuff so it could have escaped the deletion of Mikage.
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Oct 17, 2023 00:08
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Ohtori Akio posted:inspector lady for #1 babe of utena. and it gets so much more intense with the timeskip I think she's only the second adult woman we've seen in the show so far besides the old maid guidance counselor.
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Oct 17, 2023 01:27
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I went back and rewatched 22 and 23. I missed two of Mob Researcher 100 holding hands on the stairs the first time around even with the beeps and finger, so yeah. Also at the end of 23 Akio says that Anthy isn't really there either like Mikage was, which I'm guessing we'll see resolved in the next arc.
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Oct 17, 2023 02:42
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25 - Akio has a uniform so I'm guessing he's joining the student council and duels. Speculation: He's the final boss of this arc. He has a car now too and the evening cruise down the highway with Touga is either what snapped Touga out of his funk or is the chariot to bring him back to the council. Akio invites Utena and Anthy to move into the big dick tower with him. Saionji seems like he'd almost decided to hang up the duels but then goes on a magic disappears! But then Anthy yanks one out of Utena's chest. So are we going to see Utena abandon her search for her prince and fully become a prince in her own right? And then Akio and Touga just broing out on a bed with their shirts off. Surely Akio won't do anything weird or gross with Anthy in the planetarium, let me just take a big sip of my coffee and unpause the last 30 seconds of this episode. 26 - Should have been titled Sex Drive. Akio is some kind of ferryman carrying the student council to the End of the World in his car. Possible metaphor for childhood's end? When I was in middle school, college and beyond seemed impossibly far away and I couldn't really envision what my life would be like beyond that black wall and getting your license was one of the big signs that you were on the edge of becoming an adult. Akio looks like he's loving Kozue too, which I'm sure Miki is thrilled to learn. Everybody's packing swords in their chests; during the Black Rose fights any old person could do it but does it require a girl in a dress and a crown to yoink it out now? 27 - Nanami is dumber than a box of rocks, or maybe sex ed in this school is somehow worse than rural Tennessee in the 90s. The egg as metaphor for menstruation was on the nose; was the song she sang to it some kind of traditional lullaby?
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Oct 24, 2023 04:53
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I don't have time to say much about these and I think other posters go into far more detail than I'm likely to anyway.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:26
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She seems to want to gently caress anyone who might have a hint of interest in Juri.
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Nov 1, 2023 07:02
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Ohtori Akio posted:you get at something very important, which is how 30 is so tough because it feels so loving real. wakaba does so much for it! she's just a girl doing girl stuff. the fantasy framing of the show so far has led up to this gut punch of, oh no they're just kids at abuse academy. it's normal, in the bad sense. To a larger part than we've seen so far it stays out of the dreamlike setting. We see not one but three (count 'em!) adults here. Four if you count Akio's fiancee. The car doesn't go down fantasy streetlight boulevard, it's out in the regular world for Wakaba and Utena's rides. The Wakaba/Akio/Utena triangle is pretty normal all things considered.
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Nov 3, 2023 00:47
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Everyone in the cock tower gets hosed. 31-32: I was prepared to fast forward this one when I saw the preview. After 30 episodes the writers finally did something worthwhile with Nanami; too bad I ran out of patience with the character hours ago. Get hosed, rear end in a top hat. Or don't. Whichever makes you  more. Not sure why Touga is jerking her around with the whole "we're blood relatives, ha ha sike, no really we are" thing. "Just kidding" recurs through this one with a number of other characters too. Nanami seems most upset that Anthy is getting molested by her brother and she's not; seems like she's winning that comparison but what do I know.33: Clip show confirming that Akio is End of the World, plus Akio fucks Utena. Anthy seems to be actively helping Akio date Utena. Lipstick on female characters seems to indicate that they're having sex; both Utena and Anthy have had it for a while in the elevator duel ascent and Nanami now also has it in 32 though in all characters it's gone in high motion/low detail shots. I don't remember if Juri ever did, though. At this point all of the main cast has seen The End of the World('s dick) so with a handful of episodes left we wrap it up, hopefully explaining something about .
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Nov 6, 2023 14:56
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Ohtori Akio posted:the bento scene specifically is absolutely incredible animation and voice work. she's dissociating and denying what is occurring, as the viewer is most likely at first denying what is occurring. then, over the course of the shot, it becomes undeniable. Utena is also drawn in a much more feminine style in this scene than she has been in the series so far.
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Nov 7, 2023 00:57
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Big Leg posted:frick you There are other ways the writers could have taken the character where I would have liked her! I appreciated what they did with her here; she was the one person who went into the cock tower and pointed out to everyone else how messed up the whole situation is there. I think she even could have been a good audience viewpoint character for more than just these couple of episodes if they'd written her to be a less awful person and she was around like Tsuwabaki seems to be. Or they coudl keep her as terrible a person as she currently is but not shove her in my face every three episodes like she's a crappy fast food hamburger you're trying to convince me to buy. As it is, it feels like they ran her into the ground like a mid-90s Saturday Night Live character because "loud + repetitve = automatically funny" was the formula of the era.
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Nov 8, 2023 05:29
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Okay fine but that's information from the future.
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Nov 8, 2023 08:26
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Ohtori Akio posted:we were just talking about how shes grown into a decent human being ready to face the real world!! ! !!! I went back and rewatched 31 and 32. Keep in mind that I've never seen this before and am not watching ahead or looking for information about episodes I haven't seen yet; I only have information from episodes 1-33 of the show. At the end of 32 Nanami's status is "I can't build my identity solely around being Touga's little sister anymore, what am I supposed to do now" and that development was largely backloaded in 32. Immediately prior to the duel in 32 she slaps the poo poo out of the girl squad when they tell her they're tired of being bossed around, slaps the poo poo out of Anthy (to be fair everyone but Utena does that), and takes Chuchu hostage, all of which are in line with her character from the prior 31 episodes. There's no character arc here, it's more like a character Dirac delta function. If her story continues beyond episode 33 then I'm open to revising that evaluation as new information arrives, but as of the end of 32 she isn't a "decent human being," she's just a person with an opportunity to change but that hasn't been shown yet.
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Nov 9, 2023 00:51
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Ohtori Akio posted:i think after the show wraps, i definitely want a movie week I'm up for continuing through the movie.
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Nov 10, 2023 23:04
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Tonfa posted:Also what feels half a dozen times when he goes whoa whoa I'm just a little sick boy, what can I hope to do. It's a parallel to Touga amusing himself with his machinations but with Ruka it's stupid little jokes. He would have fit in great with pre-car student council. Like Akio his uniform is similar to the current council but just different enough to suggest that he was in fact a member of an earlier iteration.
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Nov 11, 2023 17:14
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Are you saying that the show's message is "all sex is rape"?
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Nov 12, 2023 17:09
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:27 |
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I agree that a lot of the sex alluded to or displayed in the show is coerced when it's not outright assault but I vehemently disagree thatTwoStoryHouseCat posted:Our dads had to give our moms their Ohtori Akio at some point to give birth to us. Come the gently caress on, this is removing agency from women to a repugnant extent and goes way beyond the boundaries of the show.
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Nov 12, 2023 20:53
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