Hello, I’m Montana. I’m 20 years old, Indigenous, and use he/she pronouns. Also a Marxist-Leninist and a student of political science, unfortunately. Will be confined to academia for many more years..
My primary intellectual commitments are to Marxist and decolonial political philosophy. I am also interested in philosophy of science and technology.
Interests Les Misérables, Quatrevingt-treize, War and Peace (and most other Tolstoy works, especially Polikushka), Soviet cinema (Big fan of Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Yuri Bogatyryov), Elisabeth das Musical, the Iliad, Fryderyk Chopin, Franz Liszt (Yes, the composers) and much more.
For animanga, I like anything by Riyoko Ikeda (Rose of Versailles, Oniisama e, Claudine, Orpheus no Mado, etc), Revolutionary Girl Utena, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Mobile Suit Gundam (UC), Heart of Thomas, A Cruel God Reigns, Sword of Paros… amongst many more.
Tags #yappenings #webweaving
Socials I have an art blog. I am antynous on most platforms, except for artfight and my private instagram
The survey will be open until June 31, 2026, 11:59:00 PM GMT+9!! this zine WILL be happening if there's even one contributor participating. reblogs are appreciated! Thank you!! ☜☜☜
Duthil Novaes (2011). The different ways in which logic is (said to be) formal // Golumbia (2009). The Cultural Logic of Computation // Resnik (1997). Mathematics as a Science of Patterns // Erscoi et al. (2023). Pygmalion displacement. When humanizing AI dehumanizes women // Tasic (2001). Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought
💬 8 🔁 58 ❤️ 197 · RGU fans are incapable of actually reading what the creators, including the director Kunihiko Ikuhara and the mangaka Ch
I'm linking the reblog here because op has reblogs disabled, so I couldn't respond in the original thread. My disagreement is with the reblog's arguments, not op's post. I wanted to break down why I don't think this interpretation holds up.
Once a piece of media exists, it acquires meanings through the conditions in which it is produced, circulated and received. Not simply through what its creators consciously intended. A creator can intend, or not intend one thing while the work reproduces structures they never consciously recognized.
RGU is about cisheteropatriarchy but there are many aspects of it that exceed Be-Papas stated intentions. Anthy is very clearly coded as South Asian, and even if those design choices were made for aesthetic reasons, that doesn't mean the finished work cannot engage with questions of racialization in relation to patriarchy. For example, it would be reductive to argue that Anthy's position as a racialized South Asian girl in a Japanese school has no significance simply because Ikuhara didn't explicitly state it was intentional. We should not reduce the meaning of media to the psychology or intentions of individual authors. Ideology works behind the backs of individuals. Social contradictions appear in cultural production whether or not the artist consciously wills them.
I also want to address the appeal to Todd Cronan and the reading of Olympia. Clark did not "begin" racial readings of Olympia in 1990 as race was already a huge part of the painting's 19th century reception and has existed for quite a while in scholarship. That is not as relevant though. The the overarching claim from Conan that was quoted, that "every centering of racialized subjects" has the function of displacing class is incredibly reductive. It doesn't follow from the evidence he presents, and it overlooks a substantial body of scholarship that understands race as one of the historical mechanisms through which capitalist exploitation has been organized, rather than as a distraction from class. It sets up a false opposition between race and class. Race isn't some autonomous force floating above material reality, but neither is analyzing racialization equivalent to abandoning class analysis. Race is an ideological category produced through specific historical and material relations. Analyzing racialization can be an analysis of how ideology organizes labour, property, colonialism, exploitation, etc. Laure herself demonstrates this. She isn't simply "a Black subject." she's a Black domestic worker in 19th century France. Asking why the servant is Black, how colonialism produced this labour relation, and how race structures domestic labour is not replacing class with race by any means. This is analyzing how class is historically mediated through racialization. Capitalism has never operated through class in the abstract, it has always organized labour through concrete historical forms such as colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, and racialization.
I don't disagree with Cronan's broader criticism of liberal identity politics. But that doesn't invalidate every analysis of race, nor does it mean race and class are mutually exclusive categories of analysis. Race is an ideological category produced to organize and justify material relations of exploitation. Analyzing racialization, therefore, isn't "reifying race" by any means.
And, responding to this, "If we're really to draw any analysis by this flimsy reference, then Mikage must also be a prostitute given that he assumes the pose and place of the woman staring intently at the viewer who is coded as being a prostitue."
This is not how intertextuality works. References don't require every symbolic element of the source image to transfer entirely. If they did, no artistic allusion would function. Nobody argues that because RGU references fairy tales, every character literally occupies every role or inherits every attribute from those stories. The visual quotation of Olympia is interesting because the composition is reworked to expose different ideological relations. In Manet's painting, the white prostitute dominates the composition while the Black servant stands behind her. Although the servant is visually indispensable, she literally completes the composition, she is denied full subjectivity. Her labour facilitates Olympia's position as the object of desire, while she herself remains peripheral and historically overlooked. Nemuro/Mikage occupies Olympia's position as the central object of exchange. Why? Because he is reduced to a "living computer,” a role historically associated with feminized labour. Before electronic computers, "computers" were human beings who performed calculations, and by the late 19th and 20th centuries this work was overwhelmingly carried out by women. Their labour was valued as repetitive and endlessly reproducible. It was indispensable to scientific production but was rarely recognized as intellectual work in its own right. Just like Olympia, he becomes a commodity whose value lies in what can be extracted from him. Its not a far stretch to connect the line of "lets use him as much as we can" in reference to Nemuro to the later frame of Nemuro as Olympia. However, unlike Olympia, whose famously confrontational gaze returns the viewer's look and disrupts passive objectification, Nemuro closes his eyes and turns away. He does not confront the viewer as a subject but exists as an object to be acted upon, his labour already appropriated by the system he sustains. Mamiya, despite occupying the servant's position within the composition, meets the viewer's gaze. Once Mamiya is revealed to be Anthy, this becomes especially significant and a very interesting choice. Although Anthy occupies the structural position of the servant, she inherits Olympia's direct, confrontational gaze, compelling the viewer to acknowledge the racialized figure whose labour sustains the entire fantasy of eternity at Ohtori. Anthy endures exploitation, abuse, and so much more, yet it is precisely her position that maintains everyone else's illusions. Like Laure, Anthy's labour is indispensable while remaining structurally erased. This gaze does not translate into power, just like with Olympia, rather, the composition exposes the contradiction that the very figure who the system depends on is erased by it.
None of this requires claiming that Be-Papas consciously intended every aspect of this reading, nor is it the only one. I do not think anyone is arguing that RGU depicts these issues perfectly. It only requires recognizing that works of art can absolutely reproduce ideological contradictions beyond the intentions of their creators and that visual references and allusions generate can effectively generate new meanings, none of which is delusional to discuss.
ITS FINALLY DONE , my fanart for this fic ^^ by @onionstar123 on AO3 , you cant actually tell much from the cropping so heres the full version
😔i will be going on a trip tomorrow so i cant fix the the utena that is kinda unfinished and in a completly diffrent artstyle which is why i cropped her , and i couldnt add the hidden anthy face so i just hinted at her with the mamiya hairstyle being slightly more resembling of anthy in both color and shape 💔
this was my first full illustation in like 2 years . had to force myself to post it because its still unfinished in my eyes but it took me wayy too much time
Every time Mikage gets p > .05 he sends another middle schooler into the dueling arena, removes a few outliers, controls for three more variables, and still concludes that eternity exists. Somehow this gets published in a psychology journal.
