Theonik
Member
<3
Though I find myself watching the OP more, then again that has to do with having listened to the ED countless times already
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Winter of Anime 2013 |OT -6| How much lower can we go?!
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Chet Rippo
Member
That shouldn't be possible.
Seraphis Cain
bad gameplay lol
GJ-bu 2
I told myself I'd wait until I finished Joshiraku, but dammit I couldn't wait. This show is great. I laughed hard at
.
Also I didn't notice it at first, but Mao is totally zettai ryouiki. Tsundere and zettai ryouiki. It's like Taiga Part 2 without the emotional baggage. This is a good thing.
I told myself I'd wait until I finished Joshiraku, but dammit I couldn't wait. This show is great. I laughed hard at
Kirara and Kyoya arm wrestling
Also I didn't notice it at first, but Mao is totally zettai ryouiki. Tsundere and zettai ryouiki. It's like Taiga Part 2 without the emotional baggage. This is a good thing.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
ZachDeKoromaru
Banned
Chihayafuru 2 10
Great episode with more perseverance to beat a "smarter" team through love of karuta. Taichi being kind of a jerk about
is completely understandable but it still makes me mad.
:3
Great episode with more perseverance to beat a "smarter" team through love of karuta. Taichi being kind of a jerk about
not allowing Chihaya to see Arata to let her focus on the matches
Rule of Cool put into effect. That's what.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
Ikuhara being given budget and time to do whatever he wants.
Except there's actual thought put into the symbolism in Adolescence.
Theonik
Member
Chet Rippo
Member
SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE.
Have you seen Hotarubi no Mori e? Watch that, and then you've basically seen every Natsume Yuujinchou episode, so you'd probably be safe!
Theonik
Member
信じてください!
It's one of the few series I don't flat-out skip the OP for after the first time too!
Chet Rippo
Member
You shouldn't be skipping any!
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
[Chihayafuru 2] 09-ya
Shit hits the fan-ya. Arata showing why he's not worthy of Chiha-ya. I hope he gets run over by a truck-ya.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
Theonik
Member
I beg to disagree, I increase my speed by 20% this way!
Chet Rippo
Member
It's just not worth it.
Joe Molotov
Member
Everything.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Needs lolis?
Yes indeed she did. It's so tonally similar it's essentially the "prototype" for Natsume, really - and with the same key animation staff working on Hotarubi as did on Natsume it's unsurprising they are so similar in animation style as well.
Chet Rippo
Member
Of course, everyone knows that.
Awwwww yeah!
Here's hoping I won't have to deal with that in Splash Star.
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
Cross posting from the Surface thread: Surface RT launches today in Japan, gets a cameo in Ghost In the Shell anime
Guess cybernetics really ages the person. Togusa looks pretty similar to his SAC self while everyone else looks significantly younger.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
[Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon] 001
Confession time: I did watch Sailor Moon when I was little very sporadically. I remember the very last episode because of the boobies and me being a horny prepubescent boy, but other than that everything feels brand new to me. And for being an opening episode, that was very good. I was expecting something along the lines of Precure where the writers spend a lot of time introducing every important character by giving them some screentime and then pushing the protagonist into the heat of the battle, but this was all Usagi and her Usaginess, with her wacky school life being a stark contrast to fighting a demon willing to strangle kids to death. Heavy.
What surprised me the most was the expressiveness of the art. Is it the manga origins showing through, or just Junichi Sato being Junichi Sato? And while we are on that topic, I recognised some of the sound effects as being taken straight out of Goldfish Warning!. Just some bit of continuity, here.
Geez, I wonder who could that person be?
Chet Rippo
Member
[Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon] 001
Geez, I wonder who could that person be?
Sailor V
Some of the former, much more of the latter. The anime is far more comedic than the manga.
By the way, not just just sound effects, but Takanori Arisawa did music for both in addition to other staff carryovers. Although it's hard to dispute that Arisawa did a much better job in SM.
Don't worry, once the shoe gets into gear you'll be able to decide.
Episode 4 is noticeably more dynamic, I'd say watch that and see how you like it. No point in watching all the show if it's not for you.
Okay, I'm pumped now.
Revolutionary Girl Utena-Thoughts and Analysis
So I've been thinking about Utena the series now for a while, and here's what I have to say about it. Just keep in mind that I'm not exactly a film student who usually studies and analyzes these sorts of things.
I'm probably wrong about a few things. And there are some subjects that didn't make it into this post, and I barely mentioned Adolescence at all (I may say something about that at another time). Just know that nothing has prompted me to write this much about it in a long time, and that I probably haven't ever written this much about something just because I wanted to.
Revolutionary Girl Utena-Thoughts and Analysis
So I've been thinking about Utena the series now for a while, and here's what I have to say about it. Just keep in mind that I'm not exactly a film student who usually studies and analyzes these sorts of things.
So uh, a discussion on symbolism first. As Regulus pointed out before, the act of dueling is basically people using swords to deflower their opponent. Or sex. I guess one thing that confuses me about this symbolism is how the act of sex is being portrayed as a competition, or as a fight. For all of the sexual imagery in this show, that it would be presented like this is pretty bizarre. You'd think that with all that that Ikuhara would present sex as something more beautiful and wonderful instead of conflict, but, alas, he does.
One thing about dueling though. I think that the dueling symbolism goes a long way to establishing the theme of gender in this show. Since the sword in the fights represents the phallus (dong), and the rose represents...well, in the context of the duels it either represents purity (deflowering, and such) or just represents the vagina (at least to me, but the rose seems to have a greater meaning that I'll get too shortly, but I don't see how my view of that fits in here, maybe some of you could help me with that), it seems that the show portrays the male as the aggressive type and the female as the target of the male's aggression.
On this note, for a while I thought this show had a rather...misogynistic view of women. The way that they were constantly lusting after men in the show, even their own brothers in several cases, and the way they just threw themselves at guys like Touga and then begged for their company, it seemed as if they were being portrayed as weak, as needing men to make their lives complete. And the way that Akio would say about Utena how she "looks like a girl now", as she was falling head over heels for him and...not quite being the same Utena she was kinda enforced this. When she was with Akio, after all, something was different about her. She wasn't showing that same strength and courage that she showed at other times. It seemed as if the show was conflating these traits with masculinity. This also shows up when Utena starts wearing the girls' uniform after her defeat at the hands of Touga, and how, as Wakaba points out, she's no longer her strong, passionate self wearing that uniform. Putting her in that girls uniform seemed like a stripping of all of her strength and will.
But then Anthy said something in ep.35 or 36, I can't quite recall, that almost in the drop of a hat changed my theory about this show. She said, "In the end, all girls are like the Rose Bride". And to understand what this means, one must consider who the Rose Bride is. The Rose Bride, Anthy, was condemned to a life of eternal pain and suffering inside a giant rose. She was doomed to this fate for sealing away her brother's magic. Her brother, a prince, another source for sex role symbolism, protected and brought happiness to all of the girls in the village where they lived. But all of the men (fathers, husbands, etc.) began to depend on him too much, and asked him to come to the rescue for anything. This was draining on the prince, and was putting him in constant danger. Anthy couldn't stand this, so she let everybody know she sealed him away. They all claimed she was a witch and sentenced her to this fate.
The Rose Bride is doomed to suffer eternal torment as a result of her attempt to save her brother. Her love for her brother has led her to perpetual suffering. And so, when Anthy says that all girls are like the Rose Bride, this is what she means; they suffer because of their love. This is pretty constant throughout the show. Look at how Nanami suffers because of her love for her brother, and how watching any other girl go near him brings her raging anger and jealousy. Look how Juri is in love with Shiori, and how Shiori uses that to torture her and act cruel to her. Or Utena even. Her love for Akio is coupled with a lot of conflict, because she wanted to love her prince, and how she knew that Akio was engaged and how she felt deep down that her feelings were wrong. So to be a girl, according to this show, is not to be weak and dependent. It is being forced to suffer endlessly for the love they feel. It is to be a tragic figure. Ultimately with that one line, my view that this show was viewing women in a negative light shifted to one where the show was portraying them in a more sympathetic light. It wasn't highlighting the weakness of the female characters, it was highlighting their pain.
Not to say that there isn't some symbolism of weak women, just not in the way that I thought there was. It's there in the symbolism of the prince and the princess. The prince is a person who protects and brings happiness to girls, as mentioned earlier with Anthy's brother. Utena wants to be a prince because she wants to free Anthy from her eternal torment, and because she cares about Anthy and wants to be her friend and wants her to be happy. Akio is later seen as a prince by Utena, as she says that he really knows how to make girls happy. A true prince makes girls happy and ends their pain. A princess, however, as Akio claims in Adolescence, is basically a living corpse. No personality, no real traits whatsoever. A slave, eye candy, whatever. This is also shown when Akio says that Utena would make a great princess (but not a prince), and how he tries to make her one when she and Anthy make the passage to meet End of the World. He wants to basically conquer Utena and break her will, and make her his possession. But, as she shows multiple times, Utena is no princess. She's strong, and has the will to overcome anything.
Back to the Rose Bride. Ultimately what she represents is intertwined with what the rose represents, which, I believe, and has become a constant theme in this post, is pain and suffering. Fitting, as the Rose Bride is sentenced to suffer for eternity inside a giant rose. And the symbolism is apt; a rose is a flower that has nasty thorns on it, so if you touch it, you will feel a sharp pain when you do so. And the Rose Garden at the Academy looks a lot like a birdcage, so Anthy's role is be trapped, caged away with nothing but her pain and anguish. There's also the Rose Seal, and how the duelists all suffer in their own way, and how the Rose Seal was on Utena's coffin while she sat in a bed of roses as she mourned her parents' death and wished for her own. Juri's pendant with Shiori, her love who so torments her, has a rose on it.
At the end, after Akio defeats Utena (or rather, after Anthy stabs Utena, claiming that she can't be her prince because she's a girl, which I thought was interesting, though Utena proves her wrong), he starts some ritual in which the Rose Bride gets attacked by the million swords of hatred, or whatnot. Basically it is the curse of being the Rose Bride; to be the target of everybody's hatred for taking away the prince, for taking away the person who made their girls happy or, if they are a girl, made them happy, and basically made it so they had to make them happy, or have them find happiness, themselves. And the way Utena gets to free her from her coffin, her prison, is to shed a tear for her, for her to simply show she cares about the Rose Bride, and that she is willing to, as a prince, take on that hatred and scorn herself, as if to say that everything they blame Anthy for is not her fault. And she does free Anthy (at a great cost to herself of course; she has to be hospitalized and then leave the school) basically tells Akio to fuck off, showing her own feelings and demonstrating her newfound will. She leaves the school herself, and begins a journey to find Utena, no matter how far away she is. And she will goddammit. Because I said so.
I felt after ep.26 or so that this show was ultimately about maturation and growing up for the most part. And I think the final episode has kind of enforced that. Basically how Utena takes the swords of hatred and how that seemed to me to mean that she was taking on that responsibility. And then how Anthy leaves the Academy, her prison, at the end and goes off and ventures into a scary, unknown world, but one she must face. The way she goes from being in a safe, known environment, but one where she had no will and was a prisoner, to a largely unknown, intimidating world, but one where she's finally free and liberated struck me as sort of being like a child becoming an adult, leaving the safe home they grew up in and finding a new home and having to fend for themselves, but ultimately becoming free in the process.
One thing about dueling though. I think that the dueling symbolism goes a long way to establishing the theme of gender in this show. Since the sword in the fights represents the phallus (dong), and the rose represents...well, in the context of the duels it either represents purity (deflowering, and such) or just represents the vagina (at least to me, but the rose seems to have a greater meaning that I'll get too shortly, but I don't see how my view of that fits in here, maybe some of you could help me with that), it seems that the show portrays the male as the aggressive type and the female as the target of the male's aggression.
On this note, for a while I thought this show had a rather...misogynistic view of women. The way that they were constantly lusting after men in the show, even their own brothers in several cases, and the way they just threw themselves at guys like Touga and then begged for their company, it seemed as if they were being portrayed as weak, as needing men to make their lives complete. And the way that Akio would say about Utena how she "looks like a girl now", as she was falling head over heels for him and...not quite being the same Utena she was kinda enforced this. When she was with Akio, after all, something was different about her. She wasn't showing that same strength and courage that she showed at other times. It seemed as if the show was conflating these traits with masculinity. This also shows up when Utena starts wearing the girls' uniform after her defeat at the hands of Touga, and how, as Wakaba points out, she's no longer her strong, passionate self wearing that uniform. Putting her in that girls uniform seemed like a stripping of all of her strength and will.
But then Anthy said something in ep.35 or 36, I can't quite recall, that almost in the drop of a hat changed my theory about this show. She said, "In the end, all girls are like the Rose Bride". And to understand what this means, one must consider who the Rose Bride is. The Rose Bride, Anthy, was condemned to a life of eternal pain and suffering inside a giant rose. She was doomed to this fate for sealing away her brother's magic. Her brother, a prince, another source for sex role symbolism, protected and brought happiness to all of the girls in the village where they lived. But all of the men (fathers, husbands, etc.) began to depend on him too much, and asked him to come to the rescue for anything. This was draining on the prince, and was putting him in constant danger. Anthy couldn't stand this, so she let everybody know she sealed him away. They all claimed she was a witch and sentenced her to this fate.
The Rose Bride is doomed to suffer eternal torment as a result of her attempt to save her brother. Her love for her brother has led her to perpetual suffering. And so, when Anthy says that all girls are like the Rose Bride, this is what she means; they suffer because of their love. This is pretty constant throughout the show. Look at how Nanami suffers because of her love for her brother, and how watching any other girl go near him brings her raging anger and jealousy. Look how Juri is in love with Shiori, and how Shiori uses that to torture her and act cruel to her. Or Utena even. Her love for Akio is coupled with a lot of conflict, because she wanted to love her prince, and how she knew that Akio was engaged and how she felt deep down that her feelings were wrong. So to be a girl, according to this show, is not to be weak and dependent. It is being forced to suffer endlessly for the love they feel. It is to be a tragic figure. Ultimately with that one line, my view that this show was viewing women in a negative light shifted to one where the show was portraying them in a more sympathetic light. It wasn't highlighting the weakness of the female characters, it was highlighting their pain.
Not to say that there isn't some symbolism of weak women, just not in the way that I thought there was. It's there in the symbolism of the prince and the princess. The prince is a person who protects and brings happiness to girls, as mentioned earlier with Anthy's brother. Utena wants to be a prince because she wants to free Anthy from her eternal torment, and because she cares about Anthy and wants to be her friend and wants her to be happy. Akio is later seen as a prince by Utena, as she says that he really knows how to make girls happy. A true prince makes girls happy and ends their pain. A princess, however, as Akio claims in Adolescence, is basically a living corpse. No personality, no real traits whatsoever. A slave, eye candy, whatever. This is also shown when Akio says that Utena would make a great princess (but not a prince), and how he tries to make her one when she and Anthy make the passage to meet End of the World. He wants to basically conquer Utena and break her will, and make her his possession. But, as she shows multiple times, Utena is no princess. She's strong, and has the will to overcome anything.
Back to the Rose Bride. Ultimately what she represents is intertwined with what the rose represents, which, I believe, and has become a constant theme in this post, is pain and suffering. Fitting, as the Rose Bride is sentenced to suffer for eternity inside a giant rose. And the symbolism is apt; a rose is a flower that has nasty thorns on it, so if you touch it, you will feel a sharp pain when you do so. And the Rose Garden at the Academy looks a lot like a birdcage, so Anthy's role is be trapped, caged away with nothing but her pain and anguish. There's also the Rose Seal, and how the duelists all suffer in their own way, and how the Rose Seal was on Utena's coffin while she sat in a bed of roses as she mourned her parents' death and wished for her own. Juri's pendant with Shiori, her love who so torments her, has a rose on it.
At the end, after Akio defeats Utena (or rather, after Anthy stabs Utena, claiming that she can't be her prince because she's a girl, which I thought was interesting, though Utena proves her wrong), he starts some ritual in which the Rose Bride gets attacked by the million swords of hatred, or whatnot. Basically it is the curse of being the Rose Bride; to be the target of everybody's hatred for taking away the prince, for taking away the person who made their girls happy or, if they are a girl, made them happy, and basically made it so they had to make them happy, or have them find happiness, themselves. And the way Utena gets to free her from her coffin, her prison, is to shed a tear for her, for her to simply show she cares about the Rose Bride, and that she is willing to, as a prince, take on that hatred and scorn herself, as if to say that everything they blame Anthy for is not her fault. And she does free Anthy (at a great cost to herself of course; she has to be hospitalized and then leave the school) basically tells Akio to fuck off, showing her own feelings and demonstrating her newfound will. She leaves the school herself, and begins a journey to find Utena, no matter how far away she is. And she will goddammit. Because I said so.
I felt after ep.26 or so that this show was ultimately about maturation and growing up for the most part. And I think the final episode has kind of enforced that. Basically how Utena takes the swords of hatred and how that seemed to me to mean that she was taking on that responsibility. And then how Anthy leaves the Academy, her prison, at the end and goes off and ventures into a scary, unknown world, but one she must face. The way she goes from being in a safe, known environment, but one where she had no will and was a prisoner, to a largely unknown, intimidating world, but one where she's finally free and liberated struck me as sort of being like a child becoming an adult, leaving the safe home they grew up in and finding a new home and having to fend for themselves, but ultimately becoming free in the process.
I'm probably wrong about a few things. And there are some subjects that didn't make it into this post, and I barely mentioned Adolescence at all (I may say something about that at another time). Just know that nothing has prompted me to write this much about it in a long time, and that I probably haven't ever written this much about something just because I wanted to.
When I was a kid, I knew many boys who watched it; girls on the other hand...not many did :S
My memory of the series is very poor though. Plan to pick it up again one day.
Haganai NEXT 10
After the arranged marriage revelation in the previous episode, I anticipated a plot development happening and so I went on to read the LN. It makes me very curious how they will end this season. Being a dense douche was something really obvious (and obviously a common trope in many harem anime) but pretending to be one was unexpected. It's pretty cool that the OP is a lot closer linked to this plot device than I realised.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
One thing I have to point out is that
I always interpreted Utena as being damning of the entire Prince/Princess set up. It is an ideal that simply cannot exist in this world because, as Dios showed, he could not take care of all the princesses in the world without working himself to near death. Utena's big flaw throughout the series was her desire to become such an individual: a prince is naive and foolish by nature, and in a world run by adults she was always bound to suffer. Her stubbornness also caused pain to Anthy. Just how much was Utena dueling for her friend and not just to self-validate her own individualism as a prince? There's a reason episode twelve is titled For Friendship, Perhaps.
This point gets across more easily during the movie: it is not until Anthy and Utena defeat the idea of Princehood that they can leave Ohtori for a world with no roads. Revolutionising the world meant, to me, getting rid of the rules set by society about how a Prince or a Princess should be. The system is oppressive by the nature of the power balance between the Prince and the Princess, and one cannot defeat it unless one decides to take part in it no longer.
This point gets across more easily during the movie: it is not until Anthy and Utena defeat the idea of Princehood that they can leave Ohtori for a world with no roads. Revolutionising the world meant, to me, getting rid of the rules set by society about how a Prince or a Princess should be. The system is oppressive by the nature of the power balance between the Prince and the Princess, and one cannot defeat it unless one decides to take part in it no longer.
You gotta keep it PG-13.
I think you might be right.
That also explains why that opening they would show sometimes (when I rewatch this, one thing I'll want to pay attention to is which episodes have this opening and how it applies to the episode) would say at the end "But was that really such a good idea?" And I think Utena's ultimately revolutionizing the world comes not so much from her inability to become a prince because she's a girl but from ultimately realizing and accepting the Rose Bride as a human being equal to herself.
Why?
The rest of the survey stuff, mostly demographics. Sorry for the delay. 42 respondents. Find the previous reports here (thread likes and dislikes) and here (hours spent in the thread).
I'll try to make the next survey more focused so there's less haphazard stuff to report, and it won't take so long.
If employed or otherwise working, listing a specific job was also optional; the responses of those who filled it in:
(providing your country was optional; 2 people abstained)
Finally, the question asking for knowledge of non-English languages was also optional. The responses:
And as previously noted, the gender results (which was also actually optional to report, but everyone did so anyway) were a predictable 41 male, 1 female.
I'll try to make the next survey more focused so there's less haphazard stuff to report, and it won't take so long.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
Well it was shown in the movies. I imagine nipples are just like genitals in Japanese censorship rules! (don't quote me on that)
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