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UTENA

                                                 May 11, 2021
                                                  
                                                  
  "Revolutionary Girl Utena" (1997)               
                                                  
  The main character Utena seems like a white girl.
  The character Anthy seems like a black girl.    
  The racial background of anime characters             JAPANESE_RACISM
  are often fuzzy, but I defy anyone to watch     
  the first two dozen episodes of the Utena       
  anime and not come away thinking "okay, this    
  is a white girl and a black girl".              
                                                  
  I wouldn't think anyone could miss this point,  
  but there's an exception: anime fans.           
  I just read through a dozen different fan       
  commentaries I could find on the web and         Even with search terms
  there's very little awareness of this.           like "racial", "black girl",
                                                   "slave", and so on, I can't
  Here's why this matters:                         find many remarks on the
                                                   subject.
  This show is remarkably murky in it's           
  intent, and that murkiness is one of                  Commentary about the
  the things that's interesting about it.               feminism angles, and
                                                        the lesbian romance
  Utena is a girl who was once saved by a prince        elements are pretty
  who has adopted that prince as her role model.        common, however.
  She wants to be "a revolutionary girl who saves 
  the prince".  She attends her-- alternate       
  reality, vaugely European-- high school wearing 
  a boy's uniform, and she finds herself embroiled
  in a series of strange cosmic duels, where the  
  winner of the duel recieves control of "The Rose
  Bride": Anthy.                                  
                                                  
  Resolving the mystery of Anthy's character      
  is more than half of the drive behind this      
  show: throughout she behaves as a passive       
  recipient of her fate, willing to put up        
  with whatever abuse her current owner wants     
  to inflict on her.                              
                                                  
  There are a number of other oddities here:      
  during the cosmic duels Anthy recites something 
  about "the power of Dios that rests within me"--
  she arches her back, and a sword is drawn from         Damian Conway calls
  her breast.  She is a *sword sheath*, a bearer         his latest perl OOP
  of power who never wields it herself.                  framework "dios".
                                                  
                                                           Larry Wall commented
                                                           once that Utena is
    It could be that she's intended as a kind-of           "postmodern"--
    counterpoint character to Utena: Utena is a 
    revolutionary who insists on forging her own              For Larry Wall,
    identity and Anthy is a passive slave of                  that means it's
    destiny.                                                  not dominated by
                                                              one single point
    There's another layer added to this, though,              of view, there's
    by making Anthy a *black girl*.  The allusion             no one correct
    to American slavery seems really strong, Anthy            reading of the
    registers as some sort of House Nigger-- is               material.
    she really a willing player here, or can she  
    just not imagine anything else?                   
                                                      
                                                      

                                                      
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