This Is SO Dumb But Take It. The Idea Just Decided To Eat My Brain

To those who passed through fire For those who walked away

another gravity falls animation! :3 hope yall enjoy!

Ninth Saints

close up on faces cause I like em

What do you think of Docholligay’s take on Ruka, that being that he’s a projection of Juri’s dark side and that, in shattering the locket, she overcomes?

Man, it is a good-ass take that I love a lot.

It really fixes the one big issue with the otherwise amazing two-parter of episodes 28 and 29 wrapping up Juri’s issues. Which is of interloper Ruka. Personal feelings about Ruka as a character aside (which is really kind of tied up in the ‘men of Utena’ as a whole, that he seemingly gets to waltz in, fuck shit up, and leave with relatively little consequence to himself), it is profoundly weird that this issue of Juri and Shiori’s relationship is only ‘solved’ when this random guy who we have never heard of before and never will again shows up. But that ends up only SUPPORTING Doc’s read.

I had previously read the whole thing of Ruka not being spoken of before and after his time to be more of a function of the insular space-time weirdness of Ohtori where anything that isn’t there might as well not exist to those within it. But that’s just the thing - space and time does weird things in Ohtori and that manifests in odd ways - SEE MIKAGE. Which only grows more relevant as both Mikage’s final episodes and Ruka’s episodes are some of the most blatant foreshadowing of the ending of the show (where Utena ‘leaves’ the school and Anthy frees herself). If Mikage is a ghost, then why isn’t Ruka as well?

I don’t think that Juri necessarily invented Ruka wholecloth. With Doc’s reading in mind I do read him as a combination of Juri’s dark side manifest AND a ghost (that at some point in Juri’s past there was a ‘Ruka’ who mentored her but he’s long dead, hence why everyone else is so confused when the ‘old’ fencing captain shows up). Much like most of the cast, Juri has trapped herself in a toxic pattern regarding her inability to move on from her feelings for Shiori and imagine a happy future for herself (something she thinks would take ‘a miracle’ so mired she is in self-loathing). We see her try to break the cycle before and fail miserably - in episode 17 she throws away the locket, a good and healthy thing, but the moment it reappears in front of her she cannot reject it again. Juri must be aware on a subconscious level that she needs SOMETHING to break through this, but she isn’t prepared to do it on a conscious level - she is tied up in the idea that she can only be happy if Shiori returns her feelings, so to reject Shiori would to be giving up any hope, thus she chases her tail over and over for ‘a miracle’. So the idea of an influential man in her life (and that it is a MAN who is able to, briefly, have a ‘normal’ heterosexual relationship with Shiori is a big part of that) becoming the avatar of all the things she feels she can’t surpass or are holding her back - that sounds like just the kind of thing that can manifest as a ghost in Ohtori’s weird space-time-ness.

Which really only makes the foreshadowing of the end of the series only more potent. I used to bristle at this idea of Ruka being ‘a prince who saved Juri because of his man-love bleh’ since he ‘dies’ after Juri is freed, comparable to the young man in her story about her sister nearly drowning (and comparable to Utena disappearing after opening the coffin). BUT this changes it significantly - much like how Anthy cannot be pulled out of the coffin and must choose to reach back to Utena, Juri ultimately frees herself. Ruka is her manifestation and he ‘dies’ like a prince because ‘princes’ are fuck-all useless - at the end of the day the true ideal of ‘the prince’ never existed, and pursuing that ideal only leads to failure. We are supposed to read Akio and Dios as denigrating Utena in the final episodes when they say she’s ‘just a girl’ - but a nonexistent prince can’t help anyone. Only by reaching out to Anthy as a human being, as a GIRL, can Utena help break this cycle of abuse and loathing that Anthy has mired herself in. By giving herself someone to struggle against, Juri can throw away the rose and forfeit the duel, finally abandoning the endless and futile search for ‘a miracle.’ So really when you read Ruka not as an actual dude who suddenly dies after inserting himself into the drama of these two girls, but as the ghost-simulacrum of who Juri both wants and fears to become, Ruka suddenly makes much more sense in regards to not only Juri’s arc but to the overall themes of RGU.

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twilight girlies

Things that Adaptions have robbed us from #5829:

Van Helsing having red hair! He doesn't have gray hair yet, which should tell you he's on the younger side of being "old"!

AHHHHHH I thought we were doing friendship and they were getting to know each other but he was HACKING her, she's disappearing he's BREAKING THROUGH THE FOURTH WALL

I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don't have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a "known cause of persistent clinical depression" kind of way.