Akio, Predation, Trust, Victimization, and the Black Rose Saga
This came up in the Discord, and I wanted to take the opportunity to expand on it and develop the idea. I was trying to articulate how, especially on repeat viewings, Akio’s scenes in the BRS manage to create a mounting unease despite appearing less openly predatory than similar moments in the Akio Arc and beyond. I pulled random screen caps from these scenes into one place, and looking at them this way, it’s a lot plainer why.
**** I guess I should note, that this is spoiler heavy and discusses in detail Akio’s…well..predation of Utena. So if that, and the disgusting shit it pertains to, is a trigger for you, stay away. I mean for this to be a serious exploration of something that is absolutely horrifying, and my primary argument is that it was deliberately set up by the creators of the series to be that way. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’m in no way endorsing Akio’s behavior, trying to shift blame, or do anything to distract from the damage it does and how sickening it is that it happens. Kind of the opposite. Not only is it sick, the show made a concerted effort to make it even worse. This became a huge wall of text. Sorry. If I thought the uncomfortable wasn’t worth exploring, I doubt I’d still be running an Utena website after 15 years.
When we first meet Akio, there are four people in the room, it’s brightly lit, and Akio impresses on Utena that he’s 1. *just* the deputy Chairman, 2. an airhead that likes the stars, and 3. oblivious to the dueling game. He’s sitting back, Utena’s sitting back, and the whole thing appears offensively innocent, though seconds before he was making out with the woman he’s more or less ignoring right now.
In episode 15, they’re alone, but the room is brightly lit. Utena sits back. Akio leans forward. This is not a suspicious pose in itself, and is generally accepted as one a person would use to seem relaxed. However by this point, we already suspect absolutely everything Akio does, because we know what he’s like outside of this innocent little scene. Also…
A shot splitting off Akio’s space in the room focuses instead on the picture (that faces away) of him with his sister, as though to establish she’s there. The conversation focuses on Anthy, as well.
But what we see on Akio’s side isn’t Anthy. Not just a vase full of roses, but wrapped roses also, as if they’ve been delivered to him. This is the first time Akio and Utena are alone, and something else is on his mind. We see wrapped roses like this again, after all, in episode 33. His seduction starts here.
In episode 17, we don’t see the picture again–Anthy is gone. The room is now dark. Utena leans forward, becoming more comfortable in his presence. Akio is looking up, though Utena is not, and while he does so, he’s talking about Utena herself, comparing her to Ganymede, and warning that her innocence can be hurtful to others. This is the first time he talks about Utena in an abstract, *who* she is rather than that she just is, and what he says is both flattering and clearly not appropriate in the capacity of a Chairman. The pretense of his status separating them has been pulled down, and for those of us listening from the outside, his addressing of her innocence at all is foreboding. It’s made worse by an assumption I’m having that Utena is unfamiliar with Ganymede, who is a beautiful youth abducted by Zeus for his pleasure. A story that’s taken as an endorsement of the predation of young boys by adult men. Utena not being a boy is fucking irrelevant.
Though visually there’s no progression in episode 18, in this scene, Utena tells him about the Prince she dreams of, suggesting she’s now comfortable enough to look past his age, gender, role of authority, or any other of the number of reasons you wouldn’t say such a thing to him. She then doubles down and asks him if it means she’s not an adult. Akio tells her that stars lose their brilliance as they age, and this is not a veiled answer: “You’re a child, and I like that about you.” Utena registers on some level a wrongness about this comment, and she immediately diverts the conversation and brings up Kanae and him. His answer leaves her unsettled, and without a conclusion that would help establish her role when she’s with him, nevermind make it safe one.
Episode 19′s scene is all about the mounting tension between Akio and Anthy on Utena’s account, and her total obliviousness to it. At this point, that the siblings are locking horns over the issue establishes his progress as much as any scene we could have been shown with him and Utena. His body language has become very casual, especially with the arm slung over the back of the couch. This isn’t an unusual thing to do for a guy, but consider that we repeatedly see him pose this way when we’re shown his sexual relationship with Anthy–more than once, by this point. It accompanies the “Come here, Anthy.” line in this arc, as well as being how he’s posed in episode 32, when Nanami finds them. The dialogue in this scene is also rich:
Akio: But, Tenjou-san… The inside of a person’s heart is like something veiled in silk. Ahh… It seems like you could see through, but in fact you can’t. The prince people hold inside their heart…is surely something that others wouldn’t understand. But, I envy young people who are in love.
Akio: I hope you, too, will find your own prince soon, Anthy.
Anthy: Yes, Onii-sama.
We’re supposed to think he’s talking to Utena, but Akio and Anthy have their eyes cut off from the frame in succession, because the real conversation is literally going over Utena’s head. What Utena takes home as a deep thought about the complexities of the human heart, that he is sharing with her because he thinks she’s ready for such insights, Anthy is hearing as a reminder that Utena doesn’t know sweet fuck all about her, him, or what’s important to either of them. It is, after all, perfectly fine for him to sexually abuse this child, but not for her to give a shit or care about Utena in any serious way.
In episode 20, we’re alone, the room is dark, and we’ve abandoned the couch for a different kind of intimacy: idle comfort. Utena is stretching, going about the business of what’s important to her because being in Akio’s presence no longer constitutes a visit, but simply hanging out. It’s the difference between friends you sit at the table and talk with and friends you make help cook first and then sit in the living room watching cat videos with. (What?) Akio has positioned himself similarly, on his back lying down so he can comfortably watch the stars. Utena is no longer a visit to him, either.
This growing comfort allows him to say things to her, about her, that she would have found uncomfortable back in episode 18. He says her lack of self-consciousness is a special trait she carries from birth, that separates her from others, who are mostly without any personal trait of value themselves. This is an invasive, flattering thing for an adult to say to a teenager. It’s also implying an expectation about how she will act, assuring that her behavior continue to suit him.
Us poor viewers get even more from the scene. He says this while she’s stretching, so that when we see her do a great deal of the same in episode 33, we are called back to this scene, and her apparent lack of self-consciousness. We see then a comfortable, familiar behavior being retreated to in her nervousness, her special trait diminished under the press of his attention.
In episode 21, the last of these scenes in the Black Rose Saga, Akio is not even initially present. However, he very much is there, and this scene is something of a mirror of the first time Akio and Utena are alone. In episode 15, Anthy’s presence is created partway through by her being in the photograph, and here Akio’s presence is only established well into the scene. (The elevator dings right at the beginning, so he’s in the room the entire time.) In episode 15, the topic of conversation was about Anthy to begin with, and in this scene, Utena is repeating things Akio has said, so that in both cases, the sibling is present from the get go. Utena now has established, separate relationships with the two.
Utena focuses on what he’s taught her about the stars here, which feels almost like revisionism at this point, as if to make sure we know he actually bothers to. What we’ve been shown up to this point isn’t their astronomy and mythology lessons, but rather the progressive establishing of intimacy between Akio and Utena. A deliberate and focused effort to build her trust, by appearing to physically keep a proper distance, while verbally doing anything but. Framed as discussions about the various goings on Utena experiences in the school, Akio tells her hopeful things, cynical things, and most often, things about herself. He flatters her, but also reinforces her childishness. He makes invasive observations about who she is, and then implies an expectation that she not be self-conscious around him. And now we see he lets her use his prized projector when he’s not around, which is not a thing most adults would let a child do.
The unease these scenes create is deliberate. The show goes to great pains to introduce Akio as a sexual creature; we first see him in the context of the story making out with Kanae, and by the end of that episode, we know he’s sleeping with Anthy as well. Several episodes in the arc, in fact, end on this note. We’re reminded over and over that Akio is not only sexually active, but is so by way of an extremely taboo relationship that doesn’t appear to bother him in the least. Taken apart from that (if one could ever really do so) these scenes aren’t nearly as suggestive as they feel; Akio never leers at Utena, and in fact doesn’t even touch or go near her until much later, in episode 25. He says flattering things but they dance a fine line between flattery with a sexual end, and just encouraging things an adult (unwisely, perhaps) might say to a child to drive their self-esteem.
Utena is elsewhere in the show often oblivious to the subtext of events going on around her, so it’s not surprising she never seems suspicious of Akio. What we take to be extremely concerning, she has no reason to. What we see as the unambiguous predation of a child by an adult, she has no reason to think of in that way. She has no previous history to make her suspect (the way Touga would) and he does nothing that would be obvious to her to shift her reading of his actions away from Anthy’s friendly brother to sexual predator.
As naturally suspicious viewers that have watched an arc of Touga draped weirdly on beds, we probably would have been concerned anyway. Maybe we’d bring very real, very rational points of view to it, and be worried on her behalf because he’s an adult man in a position of power over a young girl. Instead, the show makes a concerted effort to make us suspicious from the moment Akio appears, sacrificing what could have been a slow, dramatic reveal (his relationship with Anthy) for what we get instead: unambiguous awareness that what he’s doing is predatory. That his end goal, from the moment Utena is in a room alone with him, is sexual in nature. Their first meeting, and the culmination of that effort, are marked by the wrapped roses that have been delivered to him. The show makes sure we know, every moment, what is happening here.
By the shift in tone he takes in his own arc, Utena has been made comfortable and familiar enough with him that her impulse isn’t to run. Her violent reactions to Touga’s invasions of her space in the first arc are nowhere to be seen. Akio’s slipped just far enough past her boundaries to mute the alarms that should be going off. He can sit close enough to her for body contact, and her embarrassment at the intimacy appears totally apart from any fear of it. She can retreat into discussing Kanae when he declares a trip to the hospital is a date, but in the aftermath of their kiss (that Akio watches, lest we forget), her reaction is guilt and interest. She’s been groomed past directing that concern at the proper target, and instead blames herself. A sad but common side effect of this kind of predation.
But you know what? I expect nothing less from SKU. This is a series that builds up all of this creeping tension and disgust, and cashes it in on an episode framing the act entirely from Akio’s point of view. It isn’t enough to spend several hours watching with horror his stalking of this prey, we’re forced also to watch what it does to her, her discomfort and awkward rambling, and how he sees it: as beautiful. The sequence in question in episode 33 is long, meticulously animated, and makes Utena look more feminine than she looks at any point prior. There’s a massive disconnect between how sexual she’s drawn, and how she behaves. And we know why.
This isn’t an easy topic to discuss. Revolutionary Girl Utena isn’t an easy show to watch. And this isn’t an easy thing to ignore, and shouldn’t be. The show cares not for what experiences we’ve had going on. Whether we recognize Utena’s position immediately, or have to extrapolate from the information given. Whether we know or not how she feels, we’re forced to watch it with all the cards already on the table. We’re forced to watch Akio, knowing it’s his goal, before watching from his perspective the culmination of his efforts.
The experience is an assault of its own. The meticulous cultivating of Utena’s willingness and our dread occur simultaneously, so that when we’re finally put in that hotel room, only her face in frame, we’re as trapped in the moment as she is. Even if we look away, we’ve already seen everything leading up to it, a turning of talent and skill to horrifying ends. Our heroine’s trust is gained and abused. Her youth and her innocence is preyed on. And by the vantage point we’re given, and the force with which we’re made accomplices, we’re preyed on as well. The small comfort experiencing it alongside her would have given our peace of mind is denied to us. We’re forced in horror into Akio’s point of view instead, knowing acutely how much it pleases him. Because of course we are. Haven’t we been watching all along, knowing what he was doing? Peeking through squinted eyes at each step closer, expecting, dreading, but anticipating the same thing he has?
It’s not hard to imagine that Akio, aware of his audience, would be pleased to an excess with what’s done to us. And I wonder…perhaps that is the point of the care and cruelty with which his seduction is portrayed by be-Papas. It’s not just righteous anger on Utena’s behalf that we feel, but righteous anger on our own as well. He is an absolute abuser, and every character he meets is a target of that. Perhaps it only makes sense that us, viewers from a great distance divided by reality, manage still to be his victims also.
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