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starladySophia and I had a good time wandering around to teeny Kyoto restaurants and eating sakura ice cream tonight. I read several interesting articles in Mechademia down by the river. God, Kyoto is beautiful. I don't know how I will leave.
I was reading an article about Rose of Versailles that went into a lot of the archetypes of shoujo manga, and I was really struck by some of what the author was saying vis-a-vis Utena. You being obsessed with it like me, I'm going to run some of it by you. Aren't you lucky.
"While this generic reliance on older douseiai conventions helped propel shoujo manga to mainstream popularity among girls, it has had a limiting effect on the genre. Shoujo manga still wrestles with the problem of female agency in heterosexual romance narratives. [...] Deprived of agency [in a heterosexual romantic relationship], the girl must rely solely on the "power of love" to achieve her goal. [...] Oscar remains popular among girl readers even thirty years after the story's initial publication not ony because she displays masculine strength and agency without sacrificing her feminine beauty and empathy but because she finds true love without losing her identity to her partner."
So obviously this sounded a lot better in my head, and much more coherent, but it seems pretty clear that in all arcs of the story Utena is caught by this "love trap" and the generic conventions that the author, Deborah Shamoon describes: Utena tries to be an agent by becoming a prince, and she succeeds to an extent, but her very act of claiming her own agency ties her into a homogender relationship with Anthy, and girls' homogender relationships are usually configured as "adolescent" in shoujo thanks to the legacy of prewar girls' magazines, since homogender relations were what girls did before they were ready to get married. Utena has at least two chances to spring the "love trap"--one in the person of Touga, the other of course being Akio. I find Akio's age significant because I think one partner being much older is one way to spring the love trap, and CLAMP in particular does this a lot; such heterosexual relationships are perhaps not normative, but they are more "adult" than homosocial/sexual ones. But in different ways taking up with Touga or Akio would deprive Utena of her own agency (Akio tries to make her a princess, Touga wants to "save" her), and in grasping this at all costs she winds straight back up in the homogender relationship (whatever it is, and it's different things in each version of the story) with Anthy, who is practically the "love trap" personified ("The Rose Bride"). Anthy claims her own agency at the end, but she is still tied into the homogender relationship with Utena, which is explicitly sexual in the movie and at the very least a kusare-en sort of thing in the anime, much stronger than any bond either young woman might have had with a man, even Anthy and Akio, who of course had a hugely strong, twisted bond.
I'm also just going to copy directly from the text of a photo essay about cosplayers, because although some of it is sort of pseudo-pretentious I found some of it worth thinking about. "Making art with a critical relationship to your own context is an honest trauma--an act of increasing velocity that moves you, as at the end of Utena, out of static, assumed relationships to your context. No longer do the desires and modes of a certain school, house, or fandom seem immutable and inherent. There is a vertigo but also a growing excitement in realizing that there are other goals, other communications--other desires to be engaged--even if they are yet unknown. Yet in this moment of liberation there is also a dangerous trap of selfishness: a strong lure of self-righteousness, pretension, even condescension. Beyond the apocalypse of the self, there is wisdom in understanding that the choices of others are not as simple to judge as we would care to admit--understanding that there is not a singular apocalypse of which we have sole ownership. Rather, we should always remember that in everyone it is thus."
The dude's name is Eron Rauch. I found the part about velocity and context pretty relevant, since for me the meaning of the anime, at least, is summed up when Akio tells the chairman's daughter that "only those who leave this school will ever become adults." Even Akio himself doesn't leave in the end, though I think the self-righteousness Rauch mentions is something to which Akio falls victim, since he at least believes he has experienced the revolution to some extent, and wants to do it again. (Did you ever see that Utena video to the boy-band cover of "Hit Me Baby One More Time"? Brilliant.) And, yeah, the end part about there being not a single apocalypse strikes me vis-a-vis Utena and Anthy in the anime, because of course Anthy betrays Utena at the before going on to be saved by and to save Utena herself. If anything, I find Utena's story to be less apocalyptic in the movie; the emphasis clearly falls on Anthy's transformation in that iteration. Tra la la. Join the revolution.
Edit: This just in: Bastards got what was coming to them. Seems I can take ATA off my personal "Do Not Fly" list due to its no longer existing. I'd say I felt sorry for the employees, but I don't, because all the ones I ever dealt with were assholes.
I was reading an article about Rose of Versailles that went into a lot of the archetypes of shoujo manga, and I was really struck by some of what the author was saying vis-a-vis Utena. You being obsessed with it like me, I'm going to run some of it by you. Aren't you lucky.
"While this generic reliance on older douseiai conventions helped propel shoujo manga to mainstream popularity among girls, it has had a limiting effect on the genre. Shoujo manga still wrestles with the problem of female agency in heterosexual romance narratives. [...] Deprived of agency [in a heterosexual romantic relationship], the girl must rely solely on the "power of love" to achieve her goal. [...] Oscar remains popular among girl readers even thirty years after the story's initial publication not ony because she displays masculine strength and agency without sacrificing her feminine beauty and empathy but because she finds true love without losing her identity to her partner."
So obviously this sounded a lot better in my head, and much more coherent, but it seems pretty clear that in all arcs of the story Utena is caught by this "love trap" and the generic conventions that the author, Deborah Shamoon describes: Utena tries to be an agent by becoming a prince, and she succeeds to an extent, but her very act of claiming her own agency ties her into a homogender relationship with Anthy, and girls' homogender relationships are usually configured as "adolescent" in shoujo thanks to the legacy of prewar girls' magazines, since homogender relations were what girls did before they were ready to get married. Utena has at least two chances to spring the "love trap"--one in the person of Touga, the other of course being Akio. I find Akio's age significant because I think one partner being much older is one way to spring the love trap, and CLAMP in particular does this a lot; such heterosexual relationships are perhaps not normative, but they are more "adult" than homosocial/sexual ones. But in different ways taking up with Touga or Akio would deprive Utena of her own agency (Akio tries to make her a princess, Touga wants to "save" her), and in grasping this at all costs she winds straight back up in the homogender relationship (whatever it is, and it's different things in each version of the story) with Anthy, who is practically the "love trap" personified ("The Rose Bride"). Anthy claims her own agency at the end, but she is still tied into the homogender relationship with Utena, which is explicitly sexual in the movie and at the very least a kusare-en sort of thing in the anime, much stronger than any bond either young woman might have had with a man, even Anthy and Akio, who of course had a hugely strong, twisted bond.
I'm also just going to copy directly from the text of a photo essay about cosplayers, because although some of it is sort of pseudo-pretentious I found some of it worth thinking about. "Making art with a critical relationship to your own context is an honest trauma--an act of increasing velocity that moves you, as at the end of Utena, out of static, assumed relationships to your context. No longer do the desires and modes of a certain school, house, or fandom seem immutable and inherent. There is a vertigo but also a growing excitement in realizing that there are other goals, other communications--other desires to be engaged--even if they are yet unknown. Yet in this moment of liberation there is also a dangerous trap of selfishness: a strong lure of self-righteousness, pretension, even condescension. Beyond the apocalypse of the self, there is wisdom in understanding that the choices of others are not as simple to judge as we would care to admit--understanding that there is not a singular apocalypse of which we have sole ownership. Rather, we should always remember that in everyone it is thus."
The dude's name is Eron Rauch. I found the part about velocity and context pretty relevant, since for me the meaning of the anime, at least, is summed up when Akio tells the chairman's daughter that "only those who leave this school will ever become adults." Even Akio himself doesn't leave in the end, though I think the self-righteousness Rauch mentions is something to which Akio falls victim, since he at least believes he has experienced the revolution to some extent, and wants to do it again. (Did you ever see that Utena video to the boy-band cover of "Hit Me Baby One More Time"? Brilliant.) And, yeah, the end part about there being not a single apocalypse strikes me vis-a-vis Utena and Anthy in the anime, because of course Anthy betrays Utena at the before going on to be saved by and to save Utena herself. If anything, I find Utena's story to be less apocalyptic in the movie; the emphasis clearly falls on Anthy's transformation in that iteration. Tra la la. Join the revolution.
Edit: This just in: Bastards got what was coming to them. Seems I can take ATA off my personal "Do Not Fly" list due to its no longer existing. I'd say I felt sorry for the employees, but I don't, because all the ones I ever dealt with were assholes.
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Date: 2008-04-08 02:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-08 03:41 (UTC)But there are still two types: Chapter 11 and Chapter 13. One gives a company time to put itself back on its feet while absolving its debts, the other is finito. ATA was in the first, got out, and then went into the other.