Utena: Main

[branchandroot]

Welcome to my Utena pages.

Utena is one of those stories that tends to make people somewhat uncomfortable. Either that or it makes them squeal wildly and fly off into mad raptures of symbolic analysis. Both responses are quite understandable. Utena offers us an extremely, one might even say excessively, classic fairy tale story. Princes and princesses and duels with swords, battles between Good and Evil, and a setting of glass and marble strewn with roses. It's romance in capital letters and italics.

People who watch only the first arc may be forgiven for not realizing the strangeness of it, or not understanding if they do notice. Hence the complaints you can find in a some places, about the senseless repetition, in the duel scenes, and how annoying it is.

As the story goes on, though, the nature of the repetition changes, skews out of the parameters of the typical transformation sequence and becomes more deeply inflected with visuals that are clearly metaphors for something.

Whether the story is a metaphor for gender socialization, for growing up, for a disordered or traumatized mind, for religion, or, most likely, all of the above...

Well, that's where the mad raptures come in.

The pages on this site include Symbol Sets, which details the archetypes and symbols in the story, Repetitions, which deals specifically with the repeating imagery, Agency and Choice, which examines who has power and what power is in the world of Utena, and Variations, which compares the TV version with the movie and, to a lesser extent, with the manga.

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Links

Good Utena sites are hard to find. I have occasionally thought that this could be because Empty Movement has all the bases covered so well already.

If you want lyrics for the duel songs, Project Ein has them.