in the dueling arena, female black rose duelists wear the prince's clothes: this gendered expression of power, which is so significant when utena does it outside the symbolic space, becomes natural, even from the most mundanely feminine women. I say mundanely feminine to emphasize that these are not women who feel any angst about being women. kouze, wakaba, keiko, kanae, and shiori may be tortued, they even may be tortured about the how the nature of their womanhood affects their relationship with other women (shiori being the most obvious, but think also of how any friendly relationship kanae may want from anthy is affected by the fact that she is another women in akio's life, or how keiko is targeted by nanami in a way nanami would never target a man, or how wakaba's feelings about anthy stealing saionji are clearly a projection of how she feels about anthy stealing utena which she cannot verbalize because she's been raised to center male attention), but they never turn toward their own womanhood as the fault in the situation.
shiori, unlike juri, does not wish she were a man in her relations with juri. wakaba does not realize that it is masculine power which makes saionji and utena "special." kanae does not wish that she could inherit directorship herself. and yet, they still wear a man's clothes when they attack anthy for their woes. their one claim to specialness, to power, to autonomy, is in the clothes of male authority. unlike juri, nanami, and utena, however, they do this under a psychoanalytic trance: they are far from realizing this desire consciously. the black rose duelists will never get what they want because they do not realize that their only autonomy within the patriarchy comes though imitation of (juri and utena) or proximity to (nanami) male power.
what is so interesting about rgu is that this dance with masculinity/princehood that the women in the show do could so easily be painted as a kind of freudian penis envy: the more "mature" ("enlightened"?) female characters (juri and utena) are the ones who emulate masculinity the most, who are the most upfront about the fact that they wish they were a man in their dealings with other women. compare juri with keiko: juri's desire for masculinity, her frank analytic understanding of her lust for shiori, are what make her a duelist, while keiko's passive femininity makes her so insignificant utena doesn't know her name. however, ikuhara makes it clear that this understanding of the power of masculinity under the patriarchy is not real maturity, and in fact takes duelists even further from graduating ohtori. akio, the embodiment of a powerless child taking refuge in this abusive masculine authority, will never leave the school and never grow up. it is the realization that masculine authority will always be toxic which allows duelists to mature. nanami spends most of the show as the most childish duelist, the one who is years and years from graduating, but once she realizes that her proximity to touga's power (the masculine safety of the patriarchal family system) will never serve her, she becomes clearly one of the most enlightened among them. the black rose duelists are so pathetic and hopeless in their dueling attempts not because they do not want to be men, but because they do not even realize that the world that they want to impress so badly wishes they were. juri, touga, saionji, and utena (for most of the show) trap themselves in an attempt to become what ohtori wishes they were: real men, princes. nanami and anthy, a little wiser in their way, accept that they will never be able to achieve this perverse ideal but, instead, attempt to find security by clinging to the coat tails of those in power.
dios presents the fantasy to the students of ohtori, the hope, that this power can be absolutely good, absolutely protecting, and absolutely eternal. a man has the power to stop something bad from ever happening again. when touga is a man like akio is, he will have absolute control over anyone who might hurt him and be absolutely safe. when utena is a man like the prince is, she will be able to save herself from the coffin and be absolutely safe. when anthy has a man like dios was, he will be able to keep the entire world away from them and they will be happy.
it is only by rejecting this power entirely, by recognizing that the prince is an impossible dream, that they can escape. utena realizes this when she sees that anthy will always be victimized by male oppression. on some level, this is the realization that the rose bride (who is every woman) will always be abused by the patriarchal society-- on some level, utena's realization is a theoretical one. but on a truer level it is the realization that anthy will always be abused. this is what it is to really love a woman as another woman: to realize that the way the world hurts her is so intolerable that it is better to enter the vast unknown than to abandon her in exchange a perfect, white picket fence life. to fall into the nothingness, the empty map of lesbian desire, and hope she will follow. it is better to free her and die than to live happily when she is trapped without you.
i know that those miki/anthy/utena study sessions were annoying as fuck.. it warms my heart to imagine them. miki starts off trying to actually help utena and anthy learn prealgebra or geometry or whatever and utena is imagining edits of her playing basketball and anthy cheering her on (dead wife style) and anthy learned all of this like decades ago so is folding all of her homework into animal origami. but also miki is being like at least a little bit condescending about it && anthy already knows it and utena like generally understands it and doesnt need it broken down that much she just needs to practice it a little bit more. an endless supply of snails are slowly crawling out of anthys pencil case like a clown car and then utena leans wayy back in her chair and almost breaks her neck and then miki says well utena you aren't as graceful as miss himemiya but at least you aren't a whore like my sister and then utena says ok. eventually it devolves into miki having finished his homework already and he's doing like trig and precalculus and maybe calc 1 or 2 idk and then he just sits there and imagines anthy in place of kozue meanwhile anthy and utena are having a meaningless conversation and anthy drops an i only go to classes because that's what my spouse wants me to do and i am the rose bride. and utena responds you would skip school if i said it was fine (this is appealing to her(she is imagining hanging out with anthy all day instead of being in class)) and then she reconsiders and thinks well going to school is actually important so i shouldn't tell her to skip school. fortunately this moral dilemma is broken by anthy saying ill do your homework for you miss utena which is very appealing to utena because even though she's pretty good at math she is 13 and still doesn't really want to do it
Adolescence of Utena as a sequel to RGU is such a brilliant tackling of how Anthy navigates the fallout of leaving behind the abusive world of her brother.
Her brother is dead. Her abuser is gone. The specter of him infects her world though. Anthy seeks out Utena. She brings the people Utena knows and loves into a miraculous school, and she goes to meet Utena, but then the moment is ruined. Utena does not remember Anthy. Even worse, Utena wears the Rose Seal.
In a world void of her abuser, Anthy realizes she does not know how to desire or be desired as anyone other than the Rose Bride. So she falls back into the role. She tries to seduce Utena as the Rose Bride. She tries to fit herself and Utena into a dynamic she is familiar: the naive Prince and the attentive Rose Bride. It doesn't work, and the body of Anthy's trauma rots beneath the roses until it's dug up.
I've always been confused about why Utena was so fixated on Touga in the movie, but on my most recent rewatch, it clicked. In the original series, Utena misremembers Touga as her Prince. In the movie, she is misremembering Touga once more, attributing to him promises and emotions she actually felt for Anthy. Touga is the violence Utena experienced in Akio's world and then forgot once she entered Anthy's world. It's another body Anthy did not account for.
When Utena has her breakdown in the rose garden, she acts in a way familiar to Anthy. She tackles Anthy and shoves her to the ground. White butterflies, associated with sexual violence, flutter in the background and Anthy gives into it willingly. She swears this is what she wants: to be Utena's even if it means being Utena's Rose Bride. But Utena surprises Anthy again. She doesn't hurt Anthy, she just mourns the fact that she never got to see the stars with Touga. And this brings directly to mind their most precious promise from the series: Someday, together, we'll shine.
Utena falls asleep, and Anthy is able to act against the role of the Rose Bride for Utena's sake. She stands, and she destroys her rose garden so that Utena can see the stars.
When Utena confesses what she wants, Anthy does the impossible for Utena: she becomes a Rose Bride without roses. It's another step in Anthy and Utena's long and difficult journey of navigating the effects of the trauma they've experienced, and, like the series, it affirms that the agency required to recover from abuse is in the hands of the victim.
I tried this concept like 3 times since the quote fit them so well. Drew this instead of doing my lab that’s due literally today, but alas the yuri gods possessed me
Also heyy 👋 how have yall been it’s been a month… (ﾟ∀ﾟ)
Edit: I forgor the glass effect in america’s glasses so I added that ٩( 'ω' )و
Reading more about the famine in Soviet Russia (1919-1923) because I'm in a bit of a Rusame and Russian history mood, and these passages strike me as the moment Russia's idealization of America truly began in earnest (I believe I talked about this in a different post in which I explained how they idealized each other, and what groups among their population drove that idealization).
I think some of the provided quotes border on idolatry, even, with American aid being an act of god in Russia's eyes (although he's SUPPOSED to be atheists but old habits die hard I suppose), associating American corn with the Easter bells that toll during the observance of Christ's Resurrection. In one of the photos below you can see a group of villagers kneeling before one of the ARA members (which makes me feel a bit sad because these people were in such a desperate situation that any form of help inspired worship within them).
One could argue this idealization of America started prior to the collapse, during a famine that occurred some decades earlier in 1892 which also received an American (mostly civilian) response. The painting below by Ivan Aivazovsky sums up the prevailing feeling among the Russian people in response to American aid during that time (but I believe Tsar Alexander III wasn't to fond of the painting and relations between the Tsar and the American government were a bit sour).
I believe America started admiring Russia very early on, during Nicholas I reign (maybe earlier?) and this admiration reached a feverish pitch during Alexander IIs reign and the American Civil War, when Russian ships wintered in American ports. America's admiration waxed and waned during Alexander IIIs reign, and all but fizzled out after the Revolution, but experienced a resurgence during the Cold War era (especially during the space race) in which America's feelings towards Russia were equal parts contempt and begrudging respect.
But for Ivan, I think his feelings ran much deeper (one of the reasons why the USSR/Soviet leaders often pushed for peaceful coexistence during the Cold War) and it isn't hard to understand why when you look at it from the perspective of someone who was on the brink of death, receiving life-saving aid from an old friend turned nemesis. He latched onto that moment of compassion, camaraderie and struggle in their joint efforts to help feed his people. And it was a very long effort, they would have spent a considerable amount of time together working out the logistics to distribute aid across the incredibly large country and partaking in those missions to do so together (which was often the case in real life, with American humanitarian workers, Russian government members and civilian volunteers working closely together).
In my mind he's a very emotional, overly nostalgic person and he simply did not and could not let that memory go. These emotions probably increased during WWII, during that brief moment when they were allies and America once again delivered aid to him. I would also say these feelings increased during the 1930s when American companies sent factories and engineers to Soviet Russia in an effort to speed up industrialization/modernization. (Pictures below are texts from book passages describing private US companies contribution to Soviet modernization in the 1930s + meeting at the Elbe during WWII)
Also, you had Stalin saying stuff like this in 1924, so it's safe to assume that some of these sentiments were a reflection of Ivan's own subconscious/thoughts:
To say nothing of the Bolsheviks/Soviets, including Lenin, who admired the American Revolution and founding fathers in a way the Tsarist regime simply did not. If anything Russia's turn toward communism and revolution made him more appreciative of America's early revolutionary qualities than when they were friends as Tsarist empire and fledgling republic:
I don't think Ivan was open about these feelings of idealization toward America, especially during the Cold War, and of course these emotions ran concurrent with feelings of contempt. Still, internally the idealization, nostalgia, and yearning ran rampant, and eventually those feelings contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I mean, he eventually regrets allowing his emotions and nostalgia to overwhelm his polticial sensibilities which cost him his empire, but at the time perestroika and glasnot seemed like a pretty good idea in hopes of appeasing the one who he secretly idealized and admired at the time, much to his sorrow.
if i posted my rusame ramblings to tumblr would anyone gaf or read them… i’ve got a LOT of stuff like character analysis, original au rants, or scenario/headcanon ramblings.
SOMETIMES i post them on twitter but no one on twitter rlly reads rambling threads 😭 idk ill post an example here… here’s one i just wrote about touch starvation rusame (this is like, to an egregiously obvious extent a projection, but it works well enough i think lol)
touch starved alfred being extremely lonely and deprived of genuine affection (but too prideful to ask for it) so he resorts to desperately and pathetically begging ivan for it non-verbally; he’ll rub his head on his shoulder like a cat, or stand uncomfortably close to the point russia has to put an arm around him to be comfortable, stuff like that.
i think ivan would really love it too— he’s even more touch starved than alfred is, and everyone except for america is scared of him. to see someone so willingly and desperately seek him out makes his heart melt and it makes him feel so happy. i think he’d get some cuteness agression or intense happiness and like, smush alfred in a bone crushing hug. and alfred would love it so so much because it’s exactly what he needs. ˙ᵕ˙ their need for affection and subsequent joy at getting it is so extreme that they fuel each other into oblivion… the same kind of mutual feeding the flame that caused the cold war😭 they’re the most extreme in the world, they’re crazy… but perfect for each other…
i also think it would be important to alfred that ivan wants to be affectionate w him just as much as alfred wants that affection— hence part of why he doesn’t want to ask for it. it would be great, but not enough, if ivan just did it because alfred asked him to. he wants ivan to truly want to do those things. he constantly has the world bowing down to him and glazing him, giving him handshakes and stuff, but none of that is genuine. it’s all to get something out of him or gain his favor, not genuine affection and wanting to be around him. to alfred, it hurts more than if people just didn’t talk to him at all.
a little off topic quick, but i think alfred and ivan’s different kinds of isolation provide an interesting conflict in their relationship. alfred might feel like being left alone hurts less than being constantly surrounded but never loved, whilst ivan would be outraged by that sentiment due to the isolation he’s been left in for his whole life. ugh rusame and how polar opposite they are yet they’re also exactly the same.. so much in common yet so little trust…
but anyways, i think that’s also why his begging for affection is baiting ivan into giving it rather than alfred always forcing it on him like he does with other people. for example with kiku, he forces physical affection and proximity on him (wrapping his arm around his shoulders, shaking him, etc) because he knows kiku would never give it himself, because he doesn’t want to. but alfred wants ivan to want to do it. he wants him to make the first real move so that he knows ivan isn’t just doing it because he has no choice. (don’t get me wrong, i think alfred totally ‘forces’ physical affection on ivan in the same way a lot, but here im referring to when he’s starved for genuine affection. when he really needs genuine physical affection, it’s the one time he won’t force it on someone, because he wants them to do it.)
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