thinking about kanae and her relationship with her parents and akio and his relationship with her parents and just like…. ideas about patriarchs and fathers and family in utena. and incest obviously. you know there’s something so horrifying about kanae’s situation, beyond the obvious fact that she’s not yet graduated high school and she’s being married off to a child predator who is using their relationship to levy more power over more children. and her mum. and the fact that we don’t ever SEE her dad. fathers in utena have, shall we say, the worst track record in the book. i have so many things that i want to say about representations of Adult Men in rgu and specifically representations of fathers but it all circles back to their absence and imitation.
like, okay. i think the only (non-silhouetted, ie Actual Flesh) father we see is miki’s, and even then we don’t see his face. similarly we don’t see kanae’s mum’ face though she too is a Flesh Parent. don’t even get me started on how the only two visual representation of utena’s parents are their coffins and graves. also don’t get me started on that One shot from episode 10 that i use in all of my amvs of the silhouetted kiryuu parents because as you can probably tell from my heavy use of it in my amvs, i find it a deeply fascinating shot. swagever. all of this is to say, dads are not In The Flesh in utena.
im excluding the movie from this discussion bc whilst im a diehard aou lover and would never normally eclipse it from my analysis like this, the choices it makes in representing touga’s father break with rgu’s typical stylistic choices in a way that i honestly think is less effective. that whole sequence is incredibly visually rich in every other way and includes symbology that is some of the most compelling in all of rgu, imho, but it’s like. gahhh. i know it’s an active choice to represent him as Just A Guy, and you could argue ‘well akio’s Just A Guy’ but it’s. it just irritates me. i don’t think it’s meaningful in the way that utena likes to be meaningful. id argue that seeing his face doesn’t contribute anything, but idk maybe i just don’t like looking at his horrible face. it’s probably just that but also im right it’s a lacking stylistic choice
rambling side note aside, i get to my actual point that i technically already alluded to: akio. akio’s not a dad but akio is positioned as a (pseudo?)father figure to (checks notes) anthy, utena, kanae (hey remember she’s what started this post lol), touga, id throw nanami in, you could probably make a tangential argument for miki and kozue, ruka’s an interesting one, and mikage (maybe??). this is for a couple of reasons. he’s the (acting) chairman of the school that all the characters i just listed attend, he’s the guardian/caregiver for three or four of them, and, fundamentally, he guides and governs their lives to the best of his ability (not in the sense that he’s trying really hard to raise these kids, in the sense that he’s trying to control them. lol). BUT. crucially. he is an approximation of a father, an imitation of the patriarch, even and especially to anthy.
why does this matter? well, funnily(?) enough it circles back to why i dislike aou’s choice to portray touga’s father as A Guy. the powerful men in ohtori— and when i say ‘powerful’ here, i specifically mean men who are not marginalised, men who are not racialised, men who come from money and have never had to reach the top of the tower, rather always resided at its summit— are not seen by us. akio is the acting chairman, the acting father, the stand-in who stood up for something that is altogether worse than him, that made him who he is in such an insidious way. and i just think that’s really fucking interesting to think about wrt his status as a brown man, being racialised, being The Thing That We See when everything else— the inappropriate vice principal, miki’s piano teacher, mr ohtori, mr kiryuu (anime version), even off-hand dialogue from shadow girls about adult men in positions of power like mr judge (papa! daddy! god!!)— is obfuscated and implied. and i don’t want to suggest that that’s an intentional commentary on the racist mythologising of brown and black men as innately sexually violent, because. It’s Not. and utena massively drops the ball wrt race, but because of that lack of explicit, intentional commentary, it creates this strange dynamic between akio, the only racialised man in the show, and Every Other Guy. and that’s a very long-winded way of saying ‘maybe poisoning mr ohtori was a good thing actually’
