Final showdown. <- Previous • Next -> Afterstories.
In progress. More to go.
After we see the projector and dueling arena destroyed, the first shot of the epilog is blue sky with white clouds. It is blue for illusion and white for the prince—the world of the Academy has no visible change, at least for now. Anthy has not left yet, and Akio’s power is not affected. Neither he nor others of the Academy, except for Anthy who must be searching her soul, notices any difference. And the vanished Utena believes that she failed, and does not expect any difference.
We hear the voices of the shadow girls. The first segment is essentially the shadow play of the final episode, though (as in the First Seduction) the players appear only as voices. See shadow plays - episode 39 for a brief discussion. The shadow plays are stories that help us see through illusions to reality. You might say that, having seen Utena, the audience can start to look at reality directly and see through its illusions. In any case, the stories of the shadow play are now equated with the perceived real world—what we see as everyday life is a story or an illusion.
More to come. I will analyze this in more detail.
At the end of the Black Rose, Mikage disappears from the Academy and the events of the Black Rose are forgotten, though their effects remain. It’s parallel to Utena leaving and being forgotten, though the effects of her revolution remain.
The voices continue. They discuss Utena and trade rumors of why she left the Academy. The rumors sound incompatible with each other, but each is based on truth. Possibly each is entirely true. We can’t trust rumors, but we don’t have information to contradict any of the claims. It is Utena-like for the statements that sound the least reliable to be true.
We don’t know how much time has passed. One of the rumors comes with a vague time: Last month or some recent month. After Utena’s serious injury, I expect she would have been in the hospital for a month or more, and if we accept the rumors then she has recovered by now. Based on the symbolism of the Rose Gate, I conclude that Anthy leaves nine months after Utena. But are those Academy months, or real world months? Time passes differently in the Academy’s fairyland.
Anthy walking. As they discuss, we see Anthy walking. The segment overlaps with Anthy leaving, which is presented partly here and partly later. Anthy walking is meaningful in itself: Walking is transportation; freedom of movement stands for freedom in general. See other symbols - transportation. Now, at the very end, is the first time we have seen Anthy walk by herself from one area of the school to another; in the past, she appeared in different places, and walked with Utena, and was dragged to the dance floor by Nanami, and rode in Akio’s car, but did not exercise her own freedom of movement. In contrast, Utena is introduced in episode 1 walking to school, and disappears at the end of the series unable to move—leaving school without taking a step.
There is one exception, which only sharpens the point: In episode 14, there is a brief shot of Anthy walking in the rain, with a red umbrella, to visit Akio for their weekly sex session. She freely chooses to be with Akio, and that is the extent of her freedom.
The discussion of Utena is overlaid on the view of Anthy walking and tells us why Anthy is walking: Because Utena set her free. More precisely, Utena’s princely actions made it possible for Anthy to see through the illusions that bind her to Akio and set herself free.
Why is Utena being forgotten? With occasional exceptions, the stories of women are forgotten. The patriarchy suppresses them as unimportant. The people are to pay attention to the important men.
In Utena’s case, there’s more to it. Local culture (the system of control) does not support people of her description. The system of control protects itself against change by rejecting its own breakdowns. That is why the accomplishments of great women like Emmy Noether (Wikipedia) and Rosalind Franklin (Wikipedia) have historically been assigned to men or otherwise disassociated from their true source, sometimes in the woman’s lifetime and sometimes after. And often still are. Or have been simply discounted, like the verse novel Aurora Leigh (Wikipedia) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Wikipedia), or the poems of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (Wikipedia; see my translation of “On the Tower”). I chose the literary examples for their thematic ties to Utena.
If this theory is correct, then possibly Utena and Anthy forgot about each other in the prince story for the same reason. The system of control does not admit that it has victims. In the cultural narrative, anything bad that the culture brings about is either justified (“women have weak understanding and need male guidance”) or unavoidable (“boys will be boys”); nothing is intentionally bad.
Second theory: Memory fades because time is passing. Individual memory of Utena in the Academy represents cultural memory in the outside world of the social change that Utena brought. Outside the stasis of the Academy, time passes more quickly.
Third theory: Following the symbolism of Castor and Pollux, forgetting represents that Utena is dead until Anthy finds her, or until the next hero arises, when she is alive and will be remembered again. See afterstories - Utena’s fate - Castor and Pollux.
All the theories can be true.
More to come.
Good characters have made progress in their personal journeys. They are not permanently trapped in Akio’s system of stasis, but have the potential to escape. Bad characters have made little or no progress. Metaphorically, good advances with time while evil is static or slow-moving, gradually reformed in the direction of good. In Utena’s view, the good learn to correct their mistakes, and evil is redeemed bit by bit. It depicts the Manichaean idea that good gradually frees itself from evil in the material world. See Manichaeism.
Akio hurts people, and they pass along their hurt to others. Utena helps people, directly and indirectly, and they pass along their kindness and helpfulness to others. Utena untraps Juri in episode 29, and that leads to Juri teaching Miki in episode 36, which leads to Miki teaching Mitsuru in the epilog. This is part of the historical process by which Manichaeism says that good frees itself from the material world. That is not to say that Utena’s victory was inevitable. Some kind of victory at some time was inevitable; Utena’s victory and its nature were contingent.
Juri loses her obsession with Shiori (though not her love) and comes to treat others with respect rather than condescension (Miki) or antagonism (Utena). Shiori is freed from the locket and becomes good. She joins the fencing club, where she shows new self-confidence. Miki overcomes his unthinking lust for power over Anthy, learns some of Juri’s insight, and becomes a mentor to Mitsuru. Mitsuru is learning rather than fumbling blindly for maturity. Wakaba moves toward realizing her goal of becoming special. Tokiko (though corrupt) has left the Academy and leads a normal life. Utena and Anthy leave the Academy and become adult. Anthy counts as good: Corrupting Dios into Akio was not a choice she made, it was a false myth that didn’t happen, and the great evil she has done was at Akio’s orders or due to Akio’s corruption of her. All the characters have done bad things: Evil can be redeemed.
Mikage, who seeks an eternity of stasis, represents standing still. Of course he does, he is dead. I think it doesn’t matter whether he is at the Academy or gone from it, because he is always the same and always there; he will last as long as his story is remembered. Touga and Saionji are sparring like always, with the same results. Saionji wants to move forward, but hasn’t gotten anywhere yet. Kozue (in the background in the left image) is seated at the piano, watching; she’s at least not openly hostile. Akio is at his desk revising the rules of the dueling rings, seeming unchanged. Saionji, Nanami, and Kozue show signs of progress; Mikage, Touga, and Akio do not (half and half, as usual).
Class S. Saionji, talking with Touga, refers to when he was “playing around.” He means when he and Touga were a couple; they have broken up. They’re still under Akio’s pressure to conform, and they yield to it. The subtitles translate it as “fooling around” to catch the implication. It is a play on Class S, in which lesbian schoolgirls grow out of the phase and seek marriage. Saionji sees himself as having grown out of the phase. Touga sounds amused at the idea; I think he knows better. They are the reverse of Utena and Anthy, who grow out of their relationships with Dios and Akio and seek a lesbian relationship. See the note at the bottom of Takarazuka - the Top Star system for my source.
Nanami is a complicated case. She is making tea, sitting in a traditional position and tamely playing a female role, no longer rebelliously seeking power. Tea stands for friendship (though it is usually subverted, for example by Akio), but Nanami makes it with a kappa hot water dispenser like Wakaba’s. A kappa is a water monster, so I have the idea that Nanami has made peace with her self-perceived monstrousness. But it is still a monster, and it lives in the water of illusions. It subverts the meaning of tea here, just as it does in episode 20 with Wakaba and Saionji—they are not real friends. Nanami is behaving as she did in the cowbell episode, at a low point in her story. Her inability to escape Akio’s influence was foreshadowed in episode 16, when she went from cowbell to nose ring.
Her coronet hairdo looks looser, not as tight and controlled as before (though it might be in the normal range of variation). I think it is no longer a queen’s crown (see Nanami’s character design). She has presumably lost her minions, who left her. Has Nanami lost ground because she dropped her rebellion and accepted the system? Or has she gained, because her rebellion was harmful? She remains standing after losing the duel of episode 32, unlike other duel losers, and in her rant seems to seek another way to be special. From the second Student Council interlude of the final showdown, I conclude that she is coping with her failed rebellion by refusing to face reality. She has not found a new way to rebel, but she may yet. She has changed, so to me it feels like she has made some progress.
Nanami’s minions. We’re not given new information about the minions, but if Nanami has given up on seeking power then they were presumably successful in getting free of her. Nanami learned that Akio’s control is bad—though she submits to his regime—and her minions learned that Nanami’s control is bad. Maybe someday they’ll learn about Touga. The nerd trio Suzuki, Yamada, Tanaka has given up on chasing Nanami, who looks down on them. They chase the ex-minions instead. The ordinary boys should realistically have a chance to couple up with ordinary girls, and I have to count it as progress. But it’s not much progress. The minions may be ordinary, but they want Touga who is special.
Unfinished.
Anthy’s decision. Why does Anthy decide to leave? To seek her prince Utena. The bells that ring when she leaves are the bells that ring at the start of a duel, which are wedding bells. Anthy leaves her symbolic husband Akio to seek her new love Utena, who she now wants to marry (literally or otherwise). The duel starting bells suggest that a duel is yet to come. I expect it is the duel of Anthy giving up her patriarchal beliefs, which she has not done.
Has Anthy come to hate the patriarchy? She has learned that Akio is worth leaving, so it must be part of her motivation. But Chu-Chu is sad to leave Akio behind; Anthy still has love for the patriarchy, and dissociates those feelings onto Chu-Chu by her usual coping mechanism. Anthy takes Utena as her prince because Utena played the prince role so convincingly, sacrificing herself for Anthy. That is a patriarchal belief that comes from loving the patriarchy: She follows Utena because she believes that Utena’s patriarchal power is greater than Akio’s; she takes it that Utena won the Revolution duel.
I take it as another half-and-half thing: Anthy half loves and half hates the patriarchy. She is somewhat like Utena was at the start of the series; back then, Utena half rejected and half accepted the patriarchy (though Utena was different in that she had no understanding of it).
Anthy walking away. After Anthy leaves the academy, the ending credits show her walking away. The scenery is shown as backdrops with Anthy’s shadow falling on them, not as real places that she walks through: They are metaphors for where she is going, not a literal depiction. The technique is the same as in the original prince story in episode 1, and reminds me of the Swiss landscape in episode 16. The backdrops are sky at first, then bare trees, then a path through the countryside. The bare trees and the path were backgrounds in the prince story. She is symbolically following the path that the prince followed, seeking her own prince, who is no longer Dios but Utena.
Anthy carries her suitcase at her side in one hand. She has dropped the Academy’s stylized (as in Takarazuka) “female” posture of holding her hands together in front of her. That’s how she habitually carried her school briefcase.
Anthy’s hair is no longer rolled up tightly, but free for her new freedom. But seeking her prince implies that she still lives in the storybook world.
Manichaeism. When Anthy takes leave of Akio, she directly invokes this religion’s ideas. See Manichaeism - someday, we will shine together. Utena died in this world, Akio’s dark world, and left it for the spiritual world of light. Utena and Anthy will “shine together” when Anthy becomes entirely good like Utena, and joins her in the world of light. In the allegory, Utena understands the patriarchy and has entirely escaped its influence. Anthy stands for all other women, and will join Utena when all women have escaped patriarchal influence. That will presumably not be for a long time! But she is determined to do it, and Manichaeism says it will happen eventually.
Akio will not be fully defeated—the patriarchy will survive in some form—until all other members of society join the women Utena and Anthy in shining together. I like the theory that Wakaba’s victory will include convincing Tatsuya to leave the Academy. If so, he will represent men who reject the patriarchy.
Bells. The duel starting bells ring when Anthy leaves the Academy at the end. They are wedding bells. See duel symbols - bells. One way to look at it is that Anthy loves the patriarchy, and like Akio chooses the one with the greatest patriarchal power, not knowing that Utena has given it up. The opposite way is that she has started to hate the patriarchy, a road that Utena walked to the end of, and now follows Utena down the road. I imagine it’s both at once, in the same way that Utena is both at once.
Anthy is trying to join Utena in transcendence, and it is depicted as a duel. Anthy is deeply corrupted, and I imagine she will have a long struggle to become as pure as Utena and join her, or in other words, it will take a long struggle to defeat Akio entirely. When she succeeds, like Utena she will die in this world and (if you like) transcend to a higher one (whether Olympus or Christian heaven or the world of light or whatever). The duel ending bells will ring; they are funeral bells.
Jay Scott <jay@satirist.org>
first posted 17 March 2024
updated 16 September 2025