The Gals!! I Can't Wait To Start Drawing Them For Dracula Daily

Watching Utena I really like how in every episode Utena's like. Anthy can you please just cheat on me I don't have time to duel I need to pass my 8th grade geometry test

it is ironic but i think an rgu fan's openness to talking about akio is a good gauge of how they're engaging with the show's themes. because he's much easier to digest if you keep him at arm's length, an abstraction of a concept rather than another person inside ohtori who is suffering because of patriarchy. i've seen this fan reactionarism that assumes any acknowledgement of this is inherently apologism, so yes, it's true that akio does hold and grossly misuse power by virtue of him being an adult who surrounds himself with easily manipulated children. it's also true that rgu is a show where just about every character does heinous and fucked-up things to other characters, oftentimes the characters they purport to care the most deeply for.

rgu is about the deceit of binaries, the princes and the princesses, the abusers and the abused, how all of these are assigned to the concepts of gender we encounter under patriarchy, and how this blurs what we can even define as 'abuse'. sure, it's easy when we see saionji and nanami hitting anthy, but does that change after the positions they later find themselves in because of touga? does shiori's manipulation of juri cancel out juri's impossible idealization of her? what about what miki and kozue do to each other? what anthy does to utena? how much sympathy you feel for any of them is probably subjective based on your own experiences, but you're just not gonna have a good time with this show if you need to sort every character into a category of 'abuser' or 'victim' - and i would in fact argue that you've missed the point if you are.

so is akio, then, a victim of anything? anthy calls it out in the end, that he as well has chosen suicide by pursuit of eternity. his sunlit garden of princehood, the devil who could not be a prince, who set up a game nobody can win without ever realizing that he is included in 'nobody'. this entire system is structured to mirror him in its every reproduction and he still can't be satisfied, because he's also just playing a role that's not what he truly wishes to be. you don't arrive at that fascinating a dissection of how patriarchy functions if you're just saying 'akio bad' and calling it a day. i think it's very relevant that akio is only the acting chairman of ohtori. we never meet the actual chairman of ohtori.

y'all think anthy and utena shit like this

Anthy Himemiya + the alt Saito palette

I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don't have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a "known cause of persistent clinical depression" kind of way.

that one episode

Oh no, he got hot!

AITA for trying to eat my landlord's fancy takeout?

So my [523 F] sisters [498 F/492 F]and I are fully stay-at-home, and our landlord [530 M] brings us most of our groceries. Now things have been tight recently and so we only have grocery runs about once a month, and last night was one of these. Our house has a pretty clearly delineated men's half and women's half, so when we saw the food [21M] in our rooms we assumed it had been left there for us. But then our landlord burst in with our groceries and started screaming and shouting and getting really violent about the idea that we would touch his special treat after he'd forbidden it and just carrying on and told us to get out (this was our room, keep in mind). And I guess I had known that he had ordered fancy takeout, but it wasn't like it was labeled or anything, and it's not like there wasn't plenty to go around. His reaction just seemed really uncalled for. AITA?