-"僕は女子" OK. AWESOME. in general i already find the way that gender is being approached very very interesting perhaps to the surprise of no one on the planet. the way that utena receives very little pushback towards her non-conformity is fascinating to me... girls crush on her, boys reach out to invite her to the basketball team, sanoji makes snide little remarks about her fighting well for a girl but otherwise lets the duel proceed...? even the teacher at the very beginning doesn't seem to have any power to enforce her distaste for utena's crossdressing. "crossdresssing?" idk i'm excited to see if/how that changes as the series progresses.
-very interested also in utena's idolization of masculinity as the way to save people... she has to become a prince to fill that role. that scene where wakaba's love letter is put up to be mocked and utena shouts that real men wouldn't have read it.... well ok! personally i'm wondering if maybe real men read it and realer men put it up in order to enforce. patriarchy. but idk (pretty sure this will be explored? exciting.)
-cannot express just how mortifying it is to get to world = eggshell bit and have my first thought be gintama. in my defense i have been conditioned by. the 玉 of it all. still mortifying.
-the sword used in the duel being drawn from anthy... that and also. the rose imagery. that is starting to appear. i don't think the comparison to sexual assault it invokes is accidental? i think it's a very interesting use of visual language for this sort of thing in the like. how mundane it is. i like that. will there be something to be said about the sword explicitly coming from anthy...? well i don't know but i feel like i wouldn't be surprised if there was. anyways the moral of the story is that marriage is evil (remembers that's actually lowkey the moral of this story) ok this thing rocks
-10 million billion mental gymnastics tryna figure out how real anthy's smile is at any given moment. i'm guessing not very on account of the torments? which is so so awesome btw she's like if a nothinggirl was real <- as in sometimes there are girls in stories who are props and have no thoughts or feelings and it's your job to intuit what they could have been based off the tiny differences in their faces. except literally this is what's happening here.
-taking a break from the duels for a dance is like. this too is duels? or is it the other way around. idk. ummm also it's interesting to watch utena fumble around doing things that i'm pretty sure are equivalent to stabbing anthy a million times with swords. maybe we could have passed on the dance... well i'm still having a lot of fun with it. is IS so cool to see frameworks i have seen in other media. being traced back to their roots. like ohhhhhh i get it now the world is an egg
