The Palace Perspective: Nanami Kiryuu at the Heart of the World

A series of essays on sibling incest in Revolutionary Girl Utena

This series has been four months in the making, and I’m excited to present it in its complete form. It has taken me nearly a third of my lifetime worth of obsessing over this show to get to the point where I’ve been able to write this.

This series of essays aims to get to the bottom of what the point of sibling incest is in Utena; why it has been chosen as such a central and deliberate theme, what it tells us about how Ohtori works, and what it means for us back in the real world. Utena posits a shockingly radical and shockingly compelling argument not only for what predation and abuse are, but for what gender and romance themselves are, and understanding its ideal of the sibling relationship is crucial to understanding anything else it says.

This entire discussion would be an incoherent and unsolvable puzzle without Nanami. Her story, told parallel to and intertwined with Utena’s “main” narrative, is the final and most crucial key to both understanding and destroying Ohtori. Nanami is the confluence of all forces in Utena, and tracing each of these forces back to its source allows us to plot the mechanism of Ohtori in whole – and in plotting it, we are able to recognize, dismantle, and prevent places like it.

I expect this to be a difficult read. It is long, detailed, and in places very explicit. Please be cautious while making your way through these – but don’t shy away. This subject is so important in no small part because it is so difficult to talk about.

Thank you for reading.

Prologue: The Tale of the Rose

The skies were changing; darkening and storming more and more often. Her life was changing; the prince was not as close as he once had been and would not speak of it. The world was changing – the citizenry increasingly resentful of the palace, and their faceless scorn mounting. Her body was changing as well, and she understood none of it.

Part One: Tennen Douhou

If I were to come up with a single phrase for what I think the full story is; the thesis of Utena if you will, it would be this: “gender as a structure reproduces itself violently: especially through romance and sex, especially against children, especially within families – and, at its core, all three of these at once.”

Part Two: Painting with Blood

Nanami must have felt like a cruel joke. Like watching a mockery of herself that happened to be a living, breathing, profoundly naïve girl. Anthy watches Nanami make all of her own old mistakes. Anthy watches her pose in caricatures of her own movements. It is a brutal reminder. “This is where I came from? This is what I was once like?” As if… as if…

Part Three: Deer in the Works

There are two opposed models of the princess that must win out against the other to prove that they are worthy of the position. Each are told that they are the princess and that the other is the witch, forming a feedback cycle of guilt, blame, and desperation which can only be escaped by recognizing it as a rigged system.
There are, after all, two ways to be a princess. Either be a prince’s sister, or marry him.

Interlude: The Eve of Autumn

Something in Touga snapped, more fear than anger. “Because the world demands it! The world screams for it! We’re out of time! There must be the supports, or the entire structure collapses!”
“Why… why her, then? Why her?” All he had left that night were his stupid questions.
“Do you only object because you actually care about this one? Blinded by your dreamy, blind chivalry? We don’t have the luxury to believe in love any longer, Saionji!”

Part Four: Hatching Nanami

Utena is about breaking from the narratives of abuse. It is about breaking from the miserable modes of existing that the world insists are the only ones available to you, and building something else. It is about coming into the fullness of your self – on your own terms, and independently from all those who would control and hurt you. Utena is about building a space where this is possible.
This can only be done when we know everything of the world, and turn away from it nonetheless
#utena studies
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What's your Revolutionary Girl Utena duel song?

uquiz.com

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that scene in the comic is from revolutionary girl utena, but for some reason wakaba is there and she has a knife

Thank you.

The reason Wakaba is there is because a tumblr user named Gogol requested that the artist draw Wakaba and Anthy hanging out, “possibly with murder”.  Gogol is a cool person who followed me at one point, I think via my Utena liveblog - here’s that, if you haven’t seen it, the music video my roommates and I made about Nanami’s Egg is a highlight - and then unfollowed me after I cosigned a gender-essentialist reading of Hannibal fandom and then responded to an attempt to correct my bad opinion rudely.  It remains one of my great tumblr regrets.

Now we both know - the rest of the story.

I keep hearing IAMX's The Great Shipwreck of Life as being clearly a Revolutionary Girl Utena song. Is this accurate, or perhaps too obvious/going for the low-hanging fruit?

Either you sent me this specific question months ago or someone agrees with you

Revolutionary Girl Utena

Do you remember the bit where Utena eats the cookie anyway, do you remember that

Do you remember the way the light came in through the windows in the music room, and the way it was different from the light in Wakaba’s house, or the light that settled on Shiori’s shoulder as she stood beneath the window

Do you remember the way that a game of badminton was like an armistice and like an act of defiance against everything that had made them what they were

Do you remember the way your ex-girlfriend absolutely would not stop singing the “watashi no tamago” song

(probably not)

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