Regarding Utena, I wouldn't use the phrase "sleeping with each other" when most of the sex is outright abuse.

For example, Utena and Anthy are 14 years old, and cannot consent to having sex with Akio, so saying they're just "sleeping with" him frames the issue as if it was consensual and an active choice on their part.

Ah I wasn't just talking about Utena and Anthy. Akio also slept with Kanae (and Touga... I think) Shiori slept with Touga. Touga actually slept with everyone in school. Our main three sibling groups in the show, Akio & Anthy, Touga & Nanami, Kozue & Miki were all incestuous. So that statement was just an overall. Pretty much every relationship in this anime is heavily messed up in some way

Forgive me, I haven't watched Utena in a very long while, so there are some things I totally forgot about, but from my memory, the love square was insane. Utena started dating(?????) Akio, and then found out he was sleeping with Anthy, and then the two of them seem to passive-aggressively fight over him briefly?? This show is absolutely beautiful and started off with a somewhat clear story. A tomboyish girl named Utena joins a strange magical fight club at school for the hand of Anthy. Anthy is maybe under some kind of spell to serve whoever she is betrothed to. Utena doesn't seem to get it, and really only wants to fight for Anthy's freedom and happiness. After living together, the two become good friends and maybe even start to fall in love. Utena loses at one point and falls into a depression, dressing up like a girl again, doubtful and insecure about herself, only to make a comeback. There's a mysterious prince who descends from the heavens to grant her power through the sword she pulls from Anthy's heart. That castle could be real magic, from another realm, or just from her imagination from the prince who saved her as a child- (sike!!! its a projection in the sky?????? guess what, everything is fake!! ??? ....except for the swords pulled out of peoples hearts. Those are real, somehow.)

But yeah once Akio is introduced the show quickly devolves from "Magical LGBTQ+ highschool girl challenges gender roles and relationship norms, saving a princess in the process and falls in love with her," to backtracking, incest, sex, sexual abuse, weird comic relief, manipulations, illusions where everything isn't real yet at the same time it is, shirtless men, driving cars, dead people, etc. The bitter-sweet confusing ending where Anthy is finally free but at the expense of Utena, who in the end realized she could never be a prince, apologizing in despair at her failure, pierced with thousands of swords in Anthy's place...

It still has an interesting aspect parallel of Anthy, a princess, sacrificing herself for a prince who in the end becomes a corrupt shadow of himself. Vs. Utena, a princess acting as a prince, sacrifices herself for the princess who was a shadow of herself to free her. The fact that the thing that saved her all those years ago was her want to save Anthy was really poetic.

Like there's a lot of metaphors to be found here, really beautiful, surreal amazing ones, but in my head I can only see it as a horrific confusing tragedy. But the cliffhanger is like "Utena is out there somewhere in another universe! I'm gonna go travel to find her : ) " how and why did that happen and where on earth did she go-

(I don't know how to associate the movie with the anime because those feel like two completely different universes and probably are.) The show mid to 3 quarters of the way went absolutely bonkers. I feel like it kinda lost sight of where it was trying to go for a while. The ending was truly beautiful, but it was so odd due to prior inconsistencies in the story. You couldn't tell what was actually real or not, or how things came to be or why. And things that happened before, like all the sexual abuse is never addressed or brought up again. And it acts like the ending is happy, like there's hope for Utena and Anthy, but it just feels like nothing was really resolved. Anthy leaves the school, which, you know, good for her, her freedom was the point of the anime, it was what Utena was working towards her whole life, even if she didn't remember. But I don't know if she was well and truly saved if Utena was now in her place. Feels like they're just gonna go in a loop. Doomed by the narrative when the narrative itself doesn't really acknowledge that. I just got a "Don't try to be something you're not because you'll succeed but at your own demise" kind of moral from it, which felt like a loss rather than a win when it came to the gender role commentary.