#rgu 32

[pdaliceliveblogs]

...lovely. Just lovely.

/s

[pdaliceliveblogs]

“Thank you for describing me as separate from this horrible person in even a small way!”

[pdaliceliveblogs]

It’s okay, Nanami. We’re all just people. I know how hard it is to acknowledge that, but once you do it’ll be easier to go on.

[pdaliceliveblogs]

I was trying to get a screencap of this pose so I could talk about how much it hurts to see them standing together, knowing Utena thinks she’s protecting Anthy and knowing how utterly she is failing to do so

but I accidentally got this one with a rose petal covering Anthy’s face and I think that says it better than I could.

[pdaliceliveblogs]

It’s so fucking routine.

“It’s time for your drive.” Like this is some fucking rite of passage, rather than your active cruelty. Akio, Satan who thinks he’s a god, who thinks he knows best, who thinks he can twist everyone to his own image.

[pdaliceliveblogs]

jesus fucking christ is she comatose

[pdaliceliveblogs]

And no one picks up, and we just keep going.

This was a hell of a painful episode. It really speaks to how invested I’ve gotten in Nanami that it doesn’t feel like a waste of time to focus on her reaction to the revelation, even though it hurts to be doing anything but getting Anthy the fuck out of there. I knew we were in the final lap, but I didn’t realize how quickly everything would ramp up to fever-pitch; the stakes keep rising and everyone’s pain is so incredibly immediate.

For a long while I’ve been bugged by How Much Incest is in this show, but the further we go the more it makes sense. I do respect this show for using it solely for horror; there’s a lot of shows (not only anime, even) that use implication of incest in a sort of “look how edgy we are” way, or even for outright titillation, and I was afraid that was where we were going with this, but even the scene where Nanami walked in on Akio and Anthy was framed purely as upsetting. It’s not just because it was somewhat censored, which could be attributed to the show’s rating-- the quick cuts, Anthy’s dead eyes, the angle of her arm hanging over the side of the sofa, it very much felt like a crime scene, not in flagrante delicto.

The more we go on, the more I start to wonder if how Touga warped his sister’s mind, how Kozue’s warped her own, are somehow affected by Akio and his cruelty. He does seem to be in charge of his little bubble. Is he... leaking?

I haven’t seen my screener online today, but even if he gets any asks to me tonight I probably won’t be able to answer them until tomorrow. It’s been a long day and I think I need to read some Moomins and go to bed.

So I’ll watch the next-time-on preview, and then see y’all another day with any asks, then next weekend for episode thirty-three.

[pdaliceliveblogs]

You can do it, Nanami. Come to the realization. You’re more than him; you don’t have to beat Utena for that. You’ll still be more than him when she beats you in a minute.