When I First Watched Utena I Noted How Peculiar It Was That People Depicted In Their Coffins Were Always

Something I love about the romance in The Locked Tomb is how Gideon as our first POV narrator is like "this is Harrowhark Nonagesimus, she thrives on scorn and ambition and death" and as a seasoned enemies-to-lovers fan, my first reaction was "I love it, I support women's rights and wrongs, and I can't wait to see this cold evil character discover feelings eventually" but then the plot twist is actually that Harrow is a pathetic desperate emo who barely needs an excuse to say the most romantic shit imaginable.

Which is already a good payoff and the characterization is superb, but then you see inside Harrow's head in the next book and discover that despite her trauma and 35 mental illnesses, she is so much of a fucking soft marshmallow simp that not even her DIY lobotomy can keep her from indulging in a coffeeshop AU (?!?!) to soothe her yearning soul. Which makes rereading GtN delightful because now you can read between the lines and realise like "oh wow, she was down bad the whole time and Gideon just didn't notice". It gives so much lesbian Pride and Prejudice that you can only fully appreciate during a reread. I adore it.

idk man but something about Stanley "taught himself extremely advance physics/math/probably many other things while running a relatively successful business" Pines and Stanford "is wanted in almost every dimension with a judicial system of some kind" Pines is sooo fucking funny to me

relistening to mag 03 and i do say this every few months or so but i cannot stop thinking about how blatantly insanely obvious it is that amy patel was touched by the eye

their first glimmer of hope in the nightmare forest

The Fall

the final moments of angel!crowley

Twitter: X

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.

🌹⚔🌹

Blarmy!