Anthy's Shady Brother: *interacts With Any Female Character*

Really proud of this one

Chaostober Day 28 - Goostarion

i’m currently reading stoker’s notes from when he was plotting out and researching dracula.

apparently he took 10+ pages of notes on whitby dialect & slang. it greatly amuses me to imagine the reason mr swales talks Like That is because stoker really wanted a chance to use his research notes at least once in the book

Hello. My name is Count D’racula Dementia Vampyr Way. I have long white teeth (that’s how I got my name) and a long white moustache with white streaks that reaches my mid back and red eyes like limpid blood and a lot of people tell me I look like my predecessor Dracula (if you don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!!) I’m not related to Attila but I wish I was cause he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire and my teeth are long and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a Count, and I live in a creepy castle in Transylvania where I’ve been for quite some time (I’m an age.) I’m a Goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and the blood of every conqueror ever flows through my veins. I’m also a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. For example today I was wearing a black shirt, black trousers, a black cape, and black mid-thigh boots. I was wearing no makeup. I was walking around inside my castle. It was nighttime which I was very happy about. An English lawyer stared at me. I threw his shaving mirror out the window.

it is ironic but i think an rgu fan's openness to talking about akio is a good gauge of how they're engaging with the show's themes. because he's much easier to digest if you keep him at arm's length, an abstraction of a concept rather than another person inside ohtori who is suffering because of patriarchy. i've seen this fan reactionarism that assumes any acknowledgement of this is inherently apologism, so yes, it's true that akio does hold and grossly misuse power by virtue of him being an adult who surrounds himself with easily manipulated children. it's also true that rgu is a show where just about every character does heinous and fucked-up things to other characters, oftentimes the characters they purport to care the most deeply for.

rgu is about the deceit of binaries, the princes and the princesses, the abusers and the abused, how all of these are assigned to the concepts of gender we encounter under patriarchy, and how this blurs what we can even define as 'abuse'. sure, it's easy when we see saionji and nanami hitting anthy, but does that change after the positions they later find themselves in because of touga? does shiori's manipulation of juri cancel out juri's impossible idealization of her? what about what miki and kozue do to each other? what anthy does to utena? how much sympathy you feel for any of them is probably subjective based on your own experiences, but you're just not gonna have a good time with this show if you need to sort every character into a category of 'abuser' or 'victim' - and i would in fact argue that you've missed the point if you are.

so is akio, then, a victim of anything? anthy calls it out in the end, that he as well has chosen suicide by pursuit of eternity. his sunlit garden of princehood, the devil who could not be a prince, who set up a game nobody can win without ever realizing that he is included in 'nobody'. this entire system is structured to mirror him in its every reproduction and he still can't be satisfied, because he's also just playing a role that's not what he truly wishes to be. you don't arrive at that fascinating a dissection of how patriarchy functions if you're just saying 'akio bad' and calling it a day. i think it's very relevant that akio is only the acting chairman of ohtori. we never meet the actual chairman of ohtori.

i wanted to draw utenanthy w their og hair colors

I like how Jonathan freely admits how scared he is or how he could be easily crushed by the other man or how he never states that he must stay the course because he's not a coward etc

And then all "academic analyses" of the text say he's hypermasculine as if Dracula didn't just pull a "make sure to break your hand-shaking partner's fingers to assert dominance".

Impending rant aside, Jonathan is a perfect example of fear meaning bravery. Unlike other protagonists of his time, he doesn't scoff and turn his nose up at the danger he's in. He's not a prideful Englishman self-assured of his main character status giving him plot armour. He doesn't callously dismiss the warnings or try to assert his British-ness over the Count.

He's humble and not afraid to tell his fiancée how unnerved he is by how much stronger the Count is than him. He can't even hide his distress from the Count out of politeness– he's very expressive: a contradiction to the British stereotype of an unmoved prig with a stiff upper lip. He also just doesn't get defensive about his bravery. He's not worried about being seen as a coward, and that is precisely what prevents him from being one. He goes forth with his work not to prove himself a man but to prove himself a dependable employee. And to get that bread.

Like, I can't help but compare him to Hippy Rowan from A Kiss of Judas. Hippy attacks a man who was merely minding his business out of irrational fear but presents his fear as disgust instead, and later on, he brags about never having ever felt terror, to which the men he is staying with respond with a bet that they can show him true terror beyond his imagination. They were just planning to put on masks and jumpscare him when he was not expecting, but just the anticipation of being proven a coward leaves him bedridden with dread. Now that is stupidity and cowardice.

Jonathan's a brave man. He's not stupid, he's not arrogant, he is aware of his helplessness but still determined to pull through for the sake of his loved ones.