Utena - Utena’s arc

In progress. More to do. As the title character, Utena is tied to everyone else.

character

Utena and Anthy are complementary in the sense that they are opposite in nearly all character traits. They fit together into one whole, and together stand for all women. It starts with their fundamentals: Utena is an overpowered storybook hero with stereotypical anime hero qualities: She is earnest, steadfast, strong, naive, and none too smart. Her personality is unrealistic and simplified, while Anthy’s is realistic and complex.

As one person split into two, Utena and Anthy naturally belong together. They are twins, and were (at least metaphorically) born at the same time to the same father, Akio: The patriarchy split women into adherents represented by Anthy and opponents represented by Utena.

Even with a simplified personality, Utena is complicated. It’s just that Anthy is on another level.

Utena harms no one. As a hero, one of Utena’s goals is to harm no one. Anthy of course is dangerous and harms many; it is a sex role reversal. Compare their parallels Miki and Kozue.

Utena is brash, but she never physically harms anybody, deliberately or otherwise. In sports her ball does tend to end up in Nanami’s face, and in episode 16 she punches the nerd boys, but those are gags. She knocks down Mikage, but (despite his claim in the dueling arena) stops before injuring him. When she falsely believes she has harmed Touga after Touga’s episode 9 plot, she is depressed. In the duel in the final showdown, she aims for Akio’s rose. She occasionally seeks emotional revenge: That is why she challenges Saionji to a duel in episode 1, why she writes an insult in Saionji’s exchange diary, and why she speaks rudely to Touga after winning the duel in episode 12. In all those cases, she was pushed hard and reacted impulsively. The only times she thoughtfully chooses emotionally hurtful action are under Akio’s nearly irresistible sexual temptation, after her corruption in episode 30. See moral injury. She reasonably believes that she is hurting Kanae. That is Akio breaking Utena out of her role as prince and hero as part of bringing her under his control. He works to make her girlish—see the next section.

Utena and Anthy

prince story

When we first meet little Utena, in the children’s cartoon version of the prince story at the start of episode 1, her parents have just died. Did Akio have them murdered? I think it is likely, because suspiciously many people die at times convenient for Akio. But there is no direct evidence. It’s possible he was “only” taking advantage of an accident.

The prince story is a cartoon for small children because Utena was a small child. We can take it as showing what she remembers of events—not much. It represents that, as far as the prince is concerned, at age 14 she still keeps the attitude of a small child. In episode 34 we get a fuller and more realistic version of the story. I take it that she is gradually gaining maturity.

The children’s cartoon prince story runs in Nanami episodes. It’s one of the signs that Utena and Nanami are closely connected. They are alike in many features, and opposite in others; see web of characters - Utena ~ Nanami.

self-confidence

Utena has high confidence in herself, sometimes to the point of dangerous overconfidence. We see it from the first episode: She wins at basketball, and her attitude is “yeah, that’s how it is.” She challenges the captain of the kendou club to a duel as a way to punish him. In the duel, when her bamboo sword is sliced off by Saionji’s steel sword, she doesn’t give up or even worry, but charges him. But her confidence is vulnerable. At key times when she comes under pressure and meets setbacks, it temporarily collapses. Utena is mercurial; she adapts quickly to changes, rather than soundly. When her confidence collapses, she soon finds a new path and restores it.

• In the episode 7 duel, Utena proclaims that she doesn’t need a miracle to beat Juri. Oops, it turns out she did. Utena says “no way” but doesn’t seem to notice that her expectation was false. She was overconfident and remains so.

• Touga’s plot of episode 9 leaves Touga mildly injured. He plays it up. A prince never allows another to be hurt, and Utena’s confidence shatters. She starts episode 10 in depression—but, even as she wonders whether a girl can become a prince, her hair is prince-length. Her confidence begins to recover when she and Anthy go to Touga’s party, and she is back to normal by the time of the duel with Nanami.

• Touga wins the episode 11 duel, and Utena becomes depressed again at the prospect of being an ordinary girl. And again, symbols attached to her say she is a prince. She accepts Touga’s story. She recovers abruptly when Wakaba suggests that she can take back what she lost. She rejects Touga’s story.

• During the Black Rose arc, Utena never loses confidence. Akio is training her power of miracles, and she must remain confident to learn well.

• In the First Seduction, Akio and Utena play othello. Utena loses. It is a setback for Utena, but she does not recognize it as one. She is surprised and wondering, but not troubled. Her confidence is untouched. Akio exploits her naive evaluation and takes power over her—she was overconfident.

• In the first challenge of the final showdown Akio takes Utena’s sword and she willingly becomes a princess. But soon she changes her mind and steals back her sword.

• After being backstabbed, Utena gives up fighting to rescue Anthy. Instead of taking action herself, she calls on Akio (who predictably ignores her). Only after Dios talks down to her does her determination return.

Compared to Akio. Utena and Akio are alike in being rule-breakers, and alike in self-confidence. Like Utena, Akio’s confidence bites him occasionally: When Utena opens the Rose Gate, and when Anthy leaves. The difference is that Akio’s confidence comes from knowing what he is doing—not perfectly, but to a large extent. Utena’s comes from not knowing. She has the confidence of naivety.

sex roles

Utena is gendermixed: She sometimes plays the conventional role of a boy, and sometimes the role of a girl. As a little girl in the episode 34 version of the prince story, she was purely girlish. Akio (playing Dios) convinced her to want to be a prince and to want to marry the prince. It made both roles available to her, and she unconsciously but smoothly switches between them.

Many cues and clues tell us when Utena is boyish and when girlish. To me her voice is salient—is it firm and clipped, or soft and gentle? It’s not binary, she has a wide range and sometimes shifts abruptly. Her body language varies too. When girlish, she has long fingernails. Even her character model is variable: When boyishly playing sports, her breasts are drawn smaller. When girlish in episode 35, her breasts are drawn larger and wobble when she flops back.

Utena does not get sex roles. It is an aspect of her naivety. She takes on conventional sex roles that are obvious to others, and yet she is oblivious. She does not know that sex roles exist, and despite being puzzled sometimes, seems not to suspect a gap in her knowledge. In the Routine Date when Akio tells her she is girlish, it flies over her head. There are other examples.

mutual attraction makes Utena girlish

At the start of the show, Utena is introduced as a prince, in romantic soft focus because every girl is supposed to seek her prince. And yet:

Utena has a characteristic reaction when with a person who shows attraction to her, whether real or false. One, she looks upward at them—they are always above her. Two, she puts on a wide-eyed expression as if surprised and unsure but interested. It can also be read as straight up interest: “I have to see this.” Three, she passively accepts whatever they do and takes no action on her own initiative. (In episode 11, Touga moves as if to kiss her and she prepares to be kissed. In episode 30, Akio presses her down lightly and she obeys, dropping back into the car. In episode 36, Akio cues her to act and she does.) In short, she subordinates herself and treats them as the boy and herself as the girl of the two. There are a lot of examples.

Utena shows this reaction to Wakaba, Juri, Touga, and Akio. See the note just below for Dios, who is different. I take it that she is following the rule almost as laid down by the system of control, and seeking her prince, whether male or female. She shows no interest in Touga until after he insinuates that he is her prince (in episode 3, before Wakaba notices Utena watching Touga). In any case, an attractive person she perceives as attracted to her is a potential prince, and she subordinates herself to “him”. It’s a passive, girlish approach. When she thinks about marrying the prince—any prince—she forgets about being a prince.

Compare Utena looking up at Juri in episode 7 with cases where they are in conflict. In the episode 7 duel, Utena looks down at Juri’s sword and up at the falling sword, not up at Juri. In episode 17, trying to convince Juri to forgive Shiori, she looks levelly at Juri, or down and to the side. In episode 29, Utena never looks up at Juri.

When Mikage hits on her in episode 23, Utena reacts differently. She tries to be polite and respectful (without full success), but she’s not interested. It’s how she should have reacted to Akio. Akio is attractive; dead Mikage is not.

In episode 37, Utena is motivated by jealousy, not by Akio’s perceived attraction to her. She doesn’t show the wide-eyed reaction around the Routine Date. The relationship is established, and she is not surprised.

Utena does not show the reaction to Anthy. She either sees Anthy as below her, an object of rescue, or Anthy as level with her, a teammate, as when talking in bed in the Apocalypse Saga. She never takes Anthy as above her. Though sometimes she should.

Akio induced Utena’s behavior pattern. He lured her to want to marry the prince, and his system of control taught her how to behave with a prince: He is in charge. We see it impressed on her when she was small in episode 34. Utena’s naive inability to discern sex roles, that makes her able to imagine herself a prince, allows her to imagine Wakaba or Juri as (just maybe, in this moment) her prince. Therefore, she can’t have an equal relationship with Wakaba or Juri (that is part of what Wakaba’s episode 20 duel is about). She can eventually have an equal relationship with Anthy because she never looks up to Anthy. Casting around for ways to carry out her princely duty to rescue Anthy, she hits on the unprincely idea of each helping the other. Irony is central in Utena’s structure.

first love

I notice three times when Akio fully absorbs Utena’s attention. She freezes and briefly disconnects from the universe, staring at Akio and so lost in her feelings that she can’t act. 1. Episode 30 after Akio has rescued her from the teachers and tells her that she is a dear friend. He says “let’s go” and walks off, but she stares after him for seconds, unmoving. 2. Episode 31, when their hands touch on the first aid box. See the stupid face. 3. In episode 35, in the setup for the Second Seduction, after Akio rescues her from the fall off Touga’s horse. See Second Seduction - the rescue.

It is Utena falling for a patriarchal illusion of first love. She believes the story of what first love is like. In reality, it goes differently for everybody, and is often fuzzy or uncertain. Her love of Dios is an earlier patriarchal illusion and could count as the first. At the start of episode 30 she wonders if Dios kissing her tears away counts as her first kiss. But Utena’s love of Anthy is her real first love, and Utena is so unprepared that she can’t recognize it. That is the power of Akio’s stories.

lesbian

One of the perversities of human nature is that the less important the question, the more people argue over it. Is Utena bi or lesbian? It barely matters to the story. But there is hidden evidence to answer the question: Despite loving Akio and enjoying a night with Touga, she is closer to the lesbian end of the Kinsey scale. Though it’s better to say that her homosexual desires are key to her character, and her heterosexual desires are not. Of course, no evidence could end the argument; it’s not that kind of argument.

In episode 7, Utena says Juri is “like a supermodel” in appearance. In episode 20, when Wakaba is with Saionji, Utena can’t get over how pretty Wakaba suddenly seems. In episode 28, Utena is too embarrassed to admit that Anthy is beautiful, but the secret gets out. That’s once in each arc, and can’t be an accident. She never comments on Touga’s or Akio’s looks. In episode 25, Wakaba brings up Akio’s attractiveness, and Utena does not get what she means. Of course, according to Akio, women more than men are to be judged by appearance. But that’s not counter-evidence: Wakaba enthuses about Akio’s looks in episode 25 and later. The female teacher calls out Akio’s good looks in episode 30. That Utena does not, tells us about Utena.

I think that for Utena, Touga and Akio have only the illusion of attractiveness. She does not notice her own underlying desires, but we can.

At night, Juri sits next to the pond, facing Utena who is out of frame to the right.

Episode 7, meeting Juri

“like a supermodel”

Utena tells Juri about the prince she met when small.

princess Juri and prince Utena

I find the episode 7 sequence particularly convincing. When Utena compares Juri to a supermodel, she sits in a female posture mirroring Juri’s. She puts her hands together, a symbol of togetherness that can stand for her heart being trapped (see the hand catalog). She not only finds Juri attractive, she seems to want to get together with her. But Juri asks why Utena dresses as a boy, and Utena switches to a male sitting posture and interlaces her fingers, which seems to say that Utena wants to be with Juri girl-with-girl and not boy-with-girl. Utena’s fingernails are long though; she is being or has been manipulated.

Then Juri attacks, swapping her own sex role. Their hands are together, but not in togetherness. It is one of Akio’s reversals.