portrait of the duelist 🌹⚔️ // (study of portrait of the artist by antonie van steenwinckel)

nanami kiryuu youre the only girl ever

right and tsuwabuki is also there

no but can we actually acknowledge how crazy it is that wakaba literally leaves ohtori’s sprawling rococo campus to go to shopping. and the thing we see her holding at the grocery store is quite literally a STEAK. and the steak shakes in her hand as she considers the precarity of her very tentatively afforded “specialness.” and how steaks are a very deliberate obvious symbol of how exploitation and abuse reduces you to an object of consumption like livestock, like meat. no one ever wants to talk about the wakaba nanami foiling but they’re literally SOOOOOOOOO. crazy

utena and anthy 🌷🪻

juri is simultaneously the coolest council member and the most pathetic. she effortlessly picks up literally any skill at prodigy-level. one of her closest friends is a twelve-year-old boy. she's so confident in her identity as a lesbian that she makes the girl characters question their sexualities by just existing. despite being good at literally everything her hobbies mostly consist of long, brooding showers and projecting her insecurities onto everyone around her through cryptic speeches and stories that are sometimes so cryptic that even characters WITHIN a show as weird as rgu don't know what the hell she's talking about. she is objectively incredibly awkward (Your Ball? My Ball) but given she's surrounded by a bunch of equally pretentious teenagers she just becomes much cooler by comparison. she sees through others' bullshit by accepting her own bullshit. girl is BUILT on a card house of lies that can blow away in the wind at any moment if her own stubbornness and denial were not singlehandedly tying it down. she's just as effortlessly a sopping wet cat as she is a Cool Girl™. need more people to understand this

REVOLUTIONARY GIRL UTENA 🌹 EP 25: OUR ETERNAL APOCALYPSE

who will get the last piece

various utena doodles

empty gestures

[id: A digital redraw of an utena screenshot. In front of an ovular wooden mirror, Saionji holds the shoulders of Wakaba as she looks, uncertain, at herself. It is captioned “…this is the only way i can thank you.” Saionji has purple eyes and long, dark green hair in a loosely curly ponytail. Wakaba is pale, with big brown eyes and reddish-brown hair in a ponytail high on her head. She wears a pink bow and a carved leaf hairclip, as well as a puff-sleeved school uniform with a greenish sailor collar. End id]

I love Juri’s awkward little projection moments

you know out of all the bad takes in the james somerton rgu video i think my favorite has to be “we see anthy care about animals so we sympathize and see her as a victim.” he was so close. that’s how the trope is traditionally used to garner sympathy, but rgu does it to show anthy CAN have agency. animals are consistently used in rgu to show people robbed of their agency (nanami as a cow for the slaughter, the butterfly regressing into a caterpillar in black rose arc, etc.), and every time anthy messes with nanami is through animals…of course he doesn’t see nanami as more than a joke character so that makes him lose a lot of credibility in his surface level view of this part of anthy’s character, but i have always seen anthy’s resentment of nanami to be fueled by how similar nanami’s situation could have been to her own.

it’s baked into ohtori’s power structures. the only way to gain some agency yourself is to rob someone of their own. that’s why everyone is a chick inside a shell. an animal is something deserving of pity because it comparatively has a lack of agency to humans within rgu’s narrative (nanami and the cat being a perfect example of this, no matter how much people dislike talking about it). the animals aren’t a “shorthand for sympathizing with anthy” like james says because that suggests we need to see her as a “good victim” deserving to be saved. if anything they show her “bad victim” responses…by initially tricking you into thinking she needs to be this perfect victim to deserve escaping her abuse. seems he just didn’t get past that first half because it fits so perfectly into the Anthy Bad Utena Good narrative he chose to frame his entire video with.

unlikable girls

cant believe i never posted these doodles of my faves!!!

these are from february

REVOLUTIONARY GIRL UTENA 🌹 EP 10: NANAMI'S PRECIOUS THING

back again

dead end.