Orpheus Looked Back

As a fresh Twitter refugee I offer you my Dimension 20 fanart 🤲

My submission for @/rakkutron’s DTIYS on Instagram but they don’t have a tumblr and I’ll post it there tomorrow but for here it’s tumblr tbh who cares what time I post here

ITS THE LAST STAND BABY!!!!!!!!

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.

Ninth Saints

close up on faces cause I like em

idk man but something about Stanley "taught himself extremely advance physics/math/probably many other things while running a relatively successful business" Pines and Stanford "is wanted in almost every dimension with a judicial system of some kind" Pines is sooo fucking funny to me

It'd be interesting to make a chart of various Dracula adaptations and how they deal with certain issues. Things like:

Dr. Seward is:

Lucy's ex

Lucy's father

Lucy AND Mina's father

some rando

non-existent

Renfield is:

Just some guy (old)

Just some guy (young)

Jonathan Harker

Jonathan's employer

Jonathan escapes the castle by:

Dying immediately

Getting killed by the Girlies

Getting turned into a vampire

Becoming Dracula's thrall

He just leaves

He was never in the castle in the first place

This character does not exist

Seriously the options are WILD. I haven't consumed nearly enough adaptations to do it myself but I think it would be a very funny group project

This post by @recycledraccoon made me laugh real hard so i drew it

Michael jumpscare