About three years ago, I did Utena reviews for the Mark Watches community and crossposted them here. I went through each episode and explained my take on its symbolism and themes, armed with my years of Utena research and geekery. Though it was just my take, many said it helped them understand the show a little better, which I was super glad to hear. In fact, the reviews were surprisingly popular. Some people even seemed to love them!
So recently, I decided to go back and clean them up a little. I fixed broken links, replaced dead photobucket images and even updated some the analysis with new text/slight edits (most notably the movie post). (I donāt think I updated everything, so thereās probably some phrasing I donāt completely stand by today somewhere in there, but I think most of itās all right).
And then I decided to do a masterpost. Though you can find all the reviews in chronological order in this tag, masterposts are handy too.
I should note also went back and added an link to the Rot13 descrambler to nearly every post. See, one feature of these posts that confused a lot of people is the fact that because the Mark Watches community was spoiler free, all spoilers were garbled using Rot13. So basically, some parts of the episode reviews look like gibberish, but if you run the text through the rot13 website, it unscrambles to reveal my spoiler-y parts on how this episode relates to future episodes or the series a whole. Otherwise, these reviews are totally newbie friendly.
But! If youāve seen the series and donāt want to go through the trouble of running the spoilers through a descrambler, I have reposted fully descrambled versions of most of the posts that feature lots of spoiler text. These posts are also listed below, marked asĀ āungarbled with spoilersā.
Utena is an incredible series full of great storytelling and pointed critiques of misogyny, rape culure, the cultural narrative, etc. But itās important to be wary of heavy content warnings for this series- thereās discussion of rape, sexual assault, abuse, incest and homophobia in these reviews.
And a big thank you to @utena-tflnā whose incredibly funny mashups I constantly used to break up the text in the reviews. I also remember trawling the forums and website of ohtori.nu to get facts, resources, and read different peopleās interpretations so I could better form my own.
This is a series that means a lot to me, so Iām glad I got to share some love for it. Enjoy! (Iāve linked the first few reviews above the cut and the rest are below it).
Episode 1- The Rose Bride
Episode 2- For Whom the Rose Smiles
Episode 2- For Whom the Rose Smiles (Ungarbled with spoilers)
Episode 3: The Night of the Ball
Episode 3- The Night of the Ball (Ungarbled with Spoilers)
Episode 3 (In Defense of Anthyās Social Anxiety Reblog w/ spoilers)
Episode 4- The Sunlit Garden-Prelude
Episode 5- The Sunlit Garden-Finale
Episode 6-Ā āTake Care, Miss Nanami!ā
Episode 6-Ā āTake Care, Miss Nanami!ā (Ungarbled with spoilers)
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