Today I saw the “Revolutionary Girl Utena” movie for the first time, having never seen the show. I told my friends that I expected this *kind* of disorientation and confusion, but not this *degree* of it.
Fortunately, having seen some anime, I went into the movie not expecting to understand it.
I’m not, like, an instant super-fan? But apparently the show was based on the book Demian, by Herman Hesse, which is interesting. (It’s been 27 years since I read that and it changed my life. Maybe I should reread it.)
We watched a couple episodes of the show afterwards. I remain bemused.
It did occur to me, in among all this, that anime may have influenced the American queer aesthetic idea of “being nonbinary means you owe the world skinny androgyny.” (Because I couldn’t tell the gender of half those characters, and that’s REALLY INTERESTING.)
I also wondered how much Tamsyn Muir was influenced by the aesthetics of the movie/show in her Gideon the Ninth books, because the cavalier aesthetic is STRONG there. Plus the sword, the chest wound, everything. It’s SO. WEIRD.
This isn’t how it happens
Emilybook 