Viva la Revolution!

[skjam]

Hi folks!

As I am going through my Animerica Extra collection (looks like I am going to have to sell a bunch of comics soon), I found the first chapter of the Revolutionary Girl Utena manga by Chiho Saito.



This was a tie in to the Shoujo Kakumei Utena anime series, which had some interesting themes about gender roles, the destructiveness of the virgin/whore ("princess/witch") dichotomy, Thelemic philosophy, and the need to "grow up" to become a complete human being. It also had some trippy visuals, some disturbing sexual moments, and a twist on the standard shounen fighting tournament story arc.

The director of the anime, Kunihiko Ikuhara, wasn't very good at explaining his concepts to Ms. Saito, so the manga (which started a year before the show aired) is very different in tone, and has some characters that don't appear elsewhere (but are referenced in flashbacks.)



Nine pages of twenty-seven, by the way.

We open at Serian Junior High School, where a busybody teacher is running after Utena Tenjou, insisting that she can't wear that uniform because she's a girl.




If it's actually a violation, she's willing to take punishment, but she ain't a-gonna wear the standard girl's uniform. The teachers respond by calling Utena's guardian, her interior coordinator Aunt Yurika. Utena is not thrilled about this.



Utena, convinced it's wrong to scold an adult for the child's misbehavior, bursts in to protest. Aunt Yurika slaps Utena lightly and tells her to go home as they'll talk there. After Utena and Kaido leave, Yurika tells the teachers that she takes responsiblity for Utena's oddness (having raised her) but that Utena's a good kid at heart.



Cut to Utena vaulting a wall, while Kaido struggles to follow her. "If you don't want danger...don't fall for me." Kaido wonders what she might mean by that. Could Utena be...interested?



The card has the scent of roses, and reads "This year, finally, we will meet." Kaido notices that Utena is blushing.

"Maybe it really is...a letter from him." When Kaido asks who "him" is, she replies, "the person I like!" and rushes into the house while Kaido's jaw drops.

In her room, Utena pulls out a box of similar letters, and a ring with a rose seal. Kaido is very interested, and Utena scolds him for coming in without permission. She explains that every year when the roses bloom, she gets one of these letters, unsigned. But she's pretty sure she knows the sender....



It's not clear from the text or in Utena's own memory whether she slipped on the wet grass or just let go, but she was falling into the canal when a man came out of nowhere and caught her. He smelled of roses and licked the tears from her cheek. He told Utena that she was not alone, would never be alone, and that he lent her his strength so she could go on living.





It was like a dream. and yet....

Kaido gets way more insistent than is reasonable that yes, that could not have happened the way she remembers it. Probably her aunt gave her the ring and sent the letters to cheer her up. Or something. He's in Utena's face and yelling, and grabbing her collar. Suddenly, he realizes that he's gone too far and backs off, but insists he can prove the mystery man doesn't exist.



The man with the jacket around his shoulders looks up at Utena's window, as the wind lifts the jacket like a cape. Utena wonders who this man is.


Kaido's behavior is a lot more disturbing to me now than when I first read this back in 2000, for various reasons.



Your thoughts and comments?
SKJAM!

Comments

[janegray]

He smelled of roses and licked the tears from her cheek.

A grown-ass dude licked a little girl's face? O_o

[trickster_puck]

Yeaaah, "The prince" in the series was into incest with his own younger sister, so I doubt licking little girl's faces is too weird for him. It's also possible Saito was going with the somewhat convoluted series idea that "the prince" was two people. One was the adult rapist, the other was the "imprisoned" young boy version who was sweet and kind. Two halves of the same dude. Maybe Saito was implying this was the younger boy prince Utena met.

It's been a while since I've seen the series and read this stuff, though.

[arilou_skiff]

Yeah, it's kind... Possibly metaphorical? As in, is he a real person or some kind of personification of "The Prince", or both? And their ages are all fucked up in any case.

Also, I fucking love that Utena's reaction to being rescued by a prince is "Princes are fucking awesome! I'LL BECOME ONE!"

[trickster_puck]

Oh yeah, Utena's characterization for the most part is badass. This was one of my favorite shows back in the day. The art alone is damn breathtaking!

[q99]

Utena's awesome like that ^^

[skjam]

Yeah. Even creepier when we learn more about the man and what he may have been thinking at the time. Or maybe he just likes the taste of tears.

[norj]

He needs the drink the tears of angst ridden teens to stay young.

[trickster_puck]

THIS.

[minervasolo]

I like how her boys uniform comes with hot pants. Obviously all the boys at the school are in violation, I and expect to see them in hot pants in future volumes!

I think I may have watched the EVA of Utena, but I don't remember now*. Considering the differences between the anime and the manga, which would you suggest trying first?

*Looked it up, it was Magic Knight Rayearth OVA I'm thinking of. Yay 90s female led anime!

[skjam]

Anime series first, to get the whole trippy effect. Then the manga if you can find it, and finally the movie which is where Ikuhara just went bonkers with the symbolism and implied lesbianism. All three of them should be considered different continuities that inform each other with aspects that as a whole make the story mostly make sense.

[arilou_skiff]

By the movie, it's far from "implied" anymore. Heh.

[trickster_puck]

I used to have this Animerica Extra and a whole set of years worth of them. I was always confused about how the two stories didn't match up, but Saito was obviously a little less crazy than Ikuhara. Okay, a lot less.

There was (I think) one volume of this released by Viz in English GN in the US. Obviously it wasn't the whole thing. A bunch of fan sites have the whole story translated, though.

[kurenai_tenka]

Nah they translated/released the whole lot, including the movie's manga. It was pretty short!

[arilou_skiff]

" Kunihiko Ikuhara, wasn't very good at explaining his concepts to Ms. Saito, s"

Ikuhara wasn't very good at explaining his concepts to anyone. Including himself. And half the time he was trolling anyway.

The Utena TV-series is fantastic. The movie is possibly even more trippy, but it loses a lot of the side-characters, which has some of the greatest stuff in the TV-show.

[ozaline]

From Saitou's interviews it kinda seemed like she also willingly chose to disregard some of Ikuhara's themes. Possibly because some of them squicked her out... I don't know that was just the impression I got, I could be wrong.

The movie I think had too many of the side characters for it's own good... some of them come in with little to no explanation, and makes it hard to understand on it's own... but yes there was a lot of interesting dynamics going on in the series that aren't present in the movie.

[skjam]

I got the "Saitou just kind of ignored the parts she didn't like" feel from the interviews too.

[skjam]

Mr. Ikuhara's later series, "Mawaru Penguindrum" is also pretty darn trippy and symbolic, and needs to be seen twice to fully understand what's actually going on.

[arilou_skiff]

Yeah, Penguindrum is good too.

Say what you want about Ikuhara, but he usually makes stuff interesting.

[icon_uk]

I found myself reflexively reading from right to left.. I don't think that helped with the narrative flow...

[hotfoot]

I did the same thing and didn't catch it until I got to the part about the letters. Then I had to go back and oh, hey, NOW it makes more sense.

Still not as bad as the time I watched Das Boot the wrong way, so there's that.

[skjam]

Viz was the last manga importation company to stick with the page-flipping to make it read left-to-right. I suspect that the people who made that decision in the early days of the company "because translations should read as though they were originally in the language they're translated into" are still bitter that no, the market wanted exotic right to left reading.

[q99]

I don't think it's bitterness, I think it's just when they started, non-flipping would've been *quite* a hard sell.

However, the flipped ones built the market. They established a small, regular corner of the book shelf chains. *Anime* began becoming a larger thing. And with anime a bigger thing and an established niche, Tokyopop was able to bring in the non-flipped, smaller size ones, and take advantage of the new demand.

Most of the companies leapt to non-flipped because it's cheaper, but Viz held out the longest largely because it wasn't going to change how it did the same series mid-way (or at least, not for some time).

[skjam]

This economics part may be true, but early on, Viz's communications with the community came across as barely tolerating, and in some cases actively hostile to the existing manga/anime fans. This was especially notable with their version of Justy, which went out of its way to use the opposite of the name transliterations the fan community liked and had used for years.

Sort of like One More Day in its way.

[ozaline]

I seem to recall a Viz mag with a one shot comic strip about some character complaining that his name was changed, and being told to suck it up basically (with some reference to Rick Hunter)... It was a long time ago so I don't recall the details.

I just had a hard time getting past the Chinese pronounciations in Fushigi Yuugi, which apparently Watase okay'ed, but it made jumping from anime to book confusing.

[zechs80]

And now the duel theme from that series is now stuck in my head. AAAAAAHH!!!

[skjam]

"The darkness of Sodom, the darkness of light, the darkness of distance, endless, endless darkness, absolute destiny apocalypse!"

[kurenai_tenka]

There are some rather huge differences between the anime and the manga, and I know I wouldn't like the manga as much... but I still kind of regret not getting all of it when it was more readily available.