everlasting true love, i am yours

aoi. any pronouns. ⚢. +18

[thewitchofwonders]

filter #umineko spoilers

[thewitchofwonders]

revolutionary girl utena + sunrise by the ocean - vladimir kush

[nonakasketch]

Mexican Miku x chapulín Colorado

[cihuiwugao]

I tried making something by hand.

[elbiotipo]

El mundo nos sigue negando un mundial Brargentina

[astillaz]

MÉXICO KILL EUROPE AND MY HEART IS YOURS

[faerieconsort]

mas pelo menos ninguém vira penta esse ano

[harrenhalyuri]

Brasil tinha a faca e o queijo e enfiou os dois no cu

[titiadocigarro]

[tetrafelino]

isso é mau olhado

[noonesstuff73]

COMO Q PERDE ESSA, jogo eliminatório não é pra perder gol assim

[kfgdnjfbhg-deactivated20250424]

good-for-nothing

[myimaginationplain]

I was just thinking about the "sunlit garden" metaphor; how it represents an idealized time or person or memory that a person wishes to return to and make last forever, and how each of the duelists have something like this in one way or another. Then I realized—Touga doesn't have one.

Now, I know that the real world explanation for this is that Touga's voice actor wasn't available for the majority of the Black Rose arc, so Be-Papas didn't get to explore his backstory in the series the way they originally intended to (which in turn is why it was included in Adolescence.) But looking at the anime on it's own terms, I think that the apparent absence of any precious memories can still say interesting things about Touga as a character. Especially when every other person involved in the dueling games is at least partially motivated by their own precious memories.

[horse-girl-anthy]

...Touga accepted in silence the sexual abuse from his new parents. His personality changed while he made a magnanimous show of enjoying the abuses in order to prevent his personality from splitting. The change took place in a spot so deep in his mind, that even those closest to him did not notice. Saionji and Nanami never noticed out of their innocence. And Touga never told his secret to anyone. It is said that a human being gains whatever he lost in exchange. So what did Touga gain in exchange at that point in time? It was the sense of alienation from being abused every night and seeing his innocent friend and sister during the day. The alienated self.

And it is out of this awareness of alienation that you come to obtain a higher humanity and sexual self-awareness. In the TV series, Saionji always felt that he was one step behind Touga. Although the two are more or less equal in terms of ability, what Saionji lacked was that sense of alienation.

Enokido

Touga and Anthy are quite similar characters. if there’s anything precious to them in their pasts, they’ve long stopped believing in it. they look at the kids around them, still clinging on to ideals and dreams, from a far distance. that distance, that knowledge, makes them alluring and powerful in their own ways. their arcs conclude with an awakening, a blossoming into their buried childhood desires; desire for the prince, desire to be the prince.

the mental change that Enokido describes must have happened before the events of episode 9, and yet that incident stayed with Touga. like Anthy, he seems to have a resigned quality to him. Utena insisting she will stay in the coffin until she joins her parents resonates with him, but he leaves her there. it’s not a sunlit garden moment, but Touga’s motivation for obeying Akio is rooted in Akio’s apparent power to save people from their cozy coffins. he’s been alienated for so long that people mean nothing to him, but something in him wants to break free--wants it for himself and others.

[myimaginationplain]

the mental change that Enokido describes must have happened before the events of episode 9,...

This might be a bit of a tangent, but I want to say something because I've thought about this before. If we take movie Touga's line about his hair being grown out because it was what the "customer" wanted as canon for the series as well, then we might be able to pin down a general time frame in which the abuse began.

Like you said, the change must of happened before the coffin, as his hair was already long and he's already acting...the way we know him to act.

But in Nanami's Precious Thing and in Her Tragedy, we see Touga depicted with short hair (and yeah I know that flashbacks in RGU have a tendency to be very unreliable but this flashback is backed up by the physical photos we see, so I'll take it as true.)

And Nanami does have flashbacks and photos that include Touga with long hair, so we know it's not just her perspective coloring what the audience sees.

So the abuse may have began anywhere after the cat and before the coffin.

[helvediqa]

sayoz and beatoz

[marypickfords]

The God Crippled With One Leg (Jun Kurosawa, 1994)

[postergirlfornothing]

[nephilot]

the thing is that rape is eroticized and romanticized allll the time in big ways and small thru all sorts of media - books, movies, erotica - but instead of treating this like something that should be seriously examined, it's treated like something that must be excised. as tho we can abolish rape by banishing certain reactions to rape. it's like ppl don't even want to question why bodice rippers were so popular or why dark romance is so big or why so much of what has been considered consensual sex in so much media is now (i think in many cases rightfully) considered rape (by which i mean we now understand certain circumstances - such as a sober person having sex with someone too drunk to remember anything - as having the potential to cause quite a lot of pain). they want to say, "well, it's bad bc it's romanticized. and when rape is seen as anything other than horrible it's wrong." but ofc rape has not been seen as horrible and is not seen as horrible in so many situations. this is something that rape victims have always had to live with; the situation of their pain not being taken seriously bc in many cases it is not even seen as rape. marital rape, for example, was legal in the us until the 1970s and wasn't illegal nationwide until the 90s! rape is embedded in structure of our societies, so much a part of the substrate that it is often invisible to ppl. when the idea that certain ppl can be forced to have sex is so popular, so old, and so crucial to sexual politics then ofc it is a notion that becomes romanticized and eroticized. and yet it somehow becomes unspeakable to be too explicit abt this. it becomes "contributing to rape culture" to write a work that finds rape hot or romantic or in any way anything but a grueling, dismal, disgusting thing to talk abt. i don't think it's giving in to rape culture to "allow" works that engage with rape on levels beyond pure aversion. i think it actually threatens our ability to earnestly fight back against sexual violence to pretend there is one believable way to respond to sexual violence. as if victims are entirely cut off from the eroticization that is in the tap water! and you can say the way we talk abt rape in general is bad (i agree), but i just don't agree with acting like victims can't have these feelings... when the conditions feel or are inescapable, sometimes the answer is to find those conditions hot.