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empty-movement · 1 year

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sorry but please... post your akio plastic covered couch tweet here... the world needs to know...

Warning: pics of gross shit happening on the couches

I'll do you one better and include the STORY! So, I, Vanna (note: Yasha mostly does the Tumblr and I mostly do the Twitter,) was smoking enough weed to knock out a large horse or put a very tiny dent in my constant back and shoulder pain, as one does when when they're a middle-aged Registered Nurse in the year 2023. (I'm 39 but it's an old 39, lmao.)

Scrolling through Twitter, I stumble on a fanart of Suletta from Witch of Mercury sitting goofily on a white couch. Now I haven't seen this show yet, but the white couch....looked familiar, and I know the show is very much a descendent of Utena in terms of creative teams. For those that don't know, the series is written by Ichirō Ōkouchi, who also wrote the two Revolutionary Girl Utena novelizations...which if you didn't know about before, you know about now, and can read translated on our site here! (Warning: Touga and Miki uh, in the novels...)

Anyways, so I hop onto my own website and start downloading the images that will constitute receipts, before realizing 1. these images are all on multiple computers feet away from me, 2. the couch isn't an identical match, 3. that'd have been weird anyway, and most importantly, 4:

AKIO'S COUCHES DON'T LOOK RIGHT. OBSERVE:

The edges of the armrests have sloppier upholstery than the blanket I have covering my computer desk. I took the time to tuck seams at least. What is this??

Now it could absolutely be leather, I thought. It would absolutely track. But leather upholstery doesn't look like this. It doesn't wrinkle quite this way. It would have cleaner seams.

No. No that's too shiny for leather. So here I am, presented with this strangeness I'd never really considered in how Akio's couch is drawn, and having spent the last few months learning about my Italian-American family history, my chemically altered ass came to the only reasonable conclusion:

Akio Ohtori has plastic coverings on his white couches, like he's a depression era American in poverty.

Fuck yeah, I though, A HIT TWEET, there, at the end of all Tweeting things. (Yeah I'm working on that, stay tuned, lmao. I of all people know when to bail on stupid men with stupid power.) Because I am me, I framed it as semi serious by pulling a context to explain it out of my ass:

I was joking.

But the replies? They were not. And then I thought about it some more. And I've kept thinking about it. Do I seriously think Ikuhara and Co literally are intentionally drawing a plastic covered couch? Doesn't that feel, Vanna, like a bit of a stretch, even for Utena meta?

Listen to that CRONCH when Akio sits down in episode 31, before Anthy is seen by Nanami. Look, the buttons on the back rest don't quite fit, but the rest? Yeah it kinda does. I was high, but not wrong!?

Akio *does* surround himself with a bizarre hodgepodge of Americana as an aesthetic. The arm garters. The piping and cut of his cowboy-ass shirt. His American car. His mullet. His miniature fucking golf. Why not the plastic covered couch? It's a trope of American poverty that would absolutely have fallen neatly into the diet of American pop culture that influenced Ikuhara. (He makes references to E.T. and The Godfather and Suspiria and all kinds of things in his other work, Utena itself is a little less obvious with individual references but inherits HUGE amounts of vibes from the same content--Ikuhara and Co watched Lost Highway in theaters during the production of the Akio Arc and I will not be convinced otherwise.)

So yeah. That's the story, and that's the theory. Do I seriously believe it was deliberate? Maybe. Probably. Possibly. But it fits so well it's headcanon for me, and in the Utena fandom, pretty much all canon is kind of headcanon so enjoy this one.

What an asshole.

#utena #revolutionary girl utena #utena meta #akio ohtori #akio's couches #do I really need to point out the functional utility of plastic covered couches for this particular character though

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