Character Spotlight: Utena Tenjou from Revolutionary Girl Utena – Part 1

This post is by guest writer Liam O’Loghlen.

Adolescence Apocalypse

“Even if I dream, even if I cry, even if I get hurt
Reality keeps on coming, recklessly…”

To put it very simply, a lot has been said about Kunihiko Ikuhara’s magnum opus Revolutionary Girl Utena. It’s been called the Evangelion of shoujo. It’s been called a feminist masterpiece. It’s been hailed as an extravagant and vivid reflection on adolescent identity from a vast array of perspectives, loaded to the brim with bizarre symbolism and unreal stage play stylings and screwball humor and all sorts of ambiguities. And at the center of it all is our main character, Utena Tenjou.

At the very beginning of the series, we’re given a fable-like tale of a girl whose parents have died who meets a prince in a fateful encounter. The prince empowers her with the will to keep pushing forward, and so from this encounter she decides from then on that her dream is to become a prince herself. The girl in question, in case you haven’t already guessed so far, is Utena.

Utena’s character is defiant of everything we understand as a society about gender.

“Is that really such a good idea?” says the narrator. After all, everyone knows that princes are men and princesses are women. But that doesn’t really mean a whole lot to our adolescent protagonist, brimming with dreams a thousand times larger than life. She doesn’t quite understand the weight of her own convictions, and they manifest themselves as simplistic and even childish, but they’re a defiant gesture nonetheless — defiant of everything we understand as a society about gender.

Her one hope of making her dream a reality is to bring revolution to the world. It’s a tall order for anyone, let alone a 14 year old, but she’s giving it a shot. Her dreams will be challenged, they’ll be crushed, they’ll be rebuilt, and they’ll be re-evaluated. This is Utena’s quest for revolution.

Before we continue, it’s worth giving some context on director Kunihiko Ikuhara. Prior to the creation of Utena, Ikuhara made a name for himself as the director for later seasons of the renowned original Sailor Moon anime. Ikuhara had big plans for a film starring the characters of Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus. It should be noted that these two characters are a couple, and also that Sailor Uranus wears a boys’ uniform and speaks with masculine Japanese pronouns.

Ikuhara’s planned film is relevant as it demonstrates his prior interest in characters whose performances of gender and sexual identity were a challenge to social norms. Unfortunately, one complication led to another and this project never came to fruition. In response, Ikuhara walked out on the final season of Sailor Moon and formed the collaborative group known as Be-Papas, who went on to create Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Given all this, it’s probably no surprise that the main character of this project performs her identity in rather ambiguous ways. Just like Sailor Uranus, Utena too wears the boys’ uniform, but she wears that uniform in her own way. But compared to the character of Sailor Uranus, Utena seems to be slightly more comfortable with what we traditionally define as femininity. She can beat all her male peers at sports, but she has no interest in playing competitively. Moreover, she firmly asserts that she’s a girl in many scenes of the series where her ambiguous performance of gender is taken into question.

Utena doesn’t seek to defy femininity in itself. In fact, she openly embraces certain aspects of what society deems “what it means to be a girl.” She just wants to think a little more broadly about what femininity means, especially what it means to her personally. From here we can see that maybe what Utena wants isn’t really to become a prince, or a princess for that matter. What Utena wants is to become herself.

“I wanna find my own place, the value of being
The person I’ve been until now…”

Utena unwittingly finds herself caught up in a series of duels for the right to wed the Rose Bride, Anthy Himemiya, who will grant the groom the power to bring revolution to the world. Even with her abstract goals, Utena has no initial interest in being a part of these duels. It’s something much bigger than herself that she doesn’t really understand, let alone care for. But she ultimately finds herself caught up in the fighting when defending her friend Wakaba from Saionji, the initial bearer of the Rose Bride’s power.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Saionji is an embodiment of patriarchal attitudes. Saionji is jealousy. Saionji is possession. Saionji is physical and emotional manipulation of women. He’s more than willing to casually exploit Wakaba’s feelings by putting her love letter on display for other male students to jeer, and he’s quick to strike Anthy whenever he feels the insecure need to instil dominance over her. But Utena isn’t thinking about fighting for liberation from these attitudes; she’s simply fighting for her friend. It’s this simple gesture that emphasizes Utena’s selfless instincts right from the beginning.

The duels are where we see the ideals of the characters laid bare, clashing directly with one another. Given this, Saionji’s duelling style is forceful, aggressively controlling the pace and exerting dominance over his opponents. By contrast, Utena’s style is very straightforward and amateurish, but has an overpowering persistence. That persistence is enough for Utena to overcome the domineering presence of Saionji, gaining her comeuppance by defeating him. Initially unbeknownst to her, this has gained her the right to wed Anthy, and the two begin living together.

Anthy is a strong counterpoint to Utena, a pure image of passive femininity whose individual will has been crushed and who follows the will of her groom absolutely. In the arms of Saionji she’s nothing more than that passive bride, but through her relationship with Utena some of her individuality shines through the cracks. Through the interactions between Utena and Anthy we learn that Anthy is oddly playful, and deeply insecure about the idea of being watched by others. There’s still a whole lot we don’t know about Anthy, but we still get the understanding that Utena and Anthy are important to one another. Initially she isn’t readily willing to admit this as a submissive tool of the elusive End of the World, and so Utena is left to unwittingly coast along with her.

When Saionji challenges Utena to a rematch, Utena initially plans to lose on purpose and be done with the Rose Bride nonsense, but she finds herself defeating him once again. She justifies this later by saying that she was protecting Anthy’s pet monkey Chu-Chu from Saionji, but after witnessing Saionji strike Anthy after their first duel it’s clear that she was doing it for Anthy. Utena does this partly for Anthy’s sake, but mostly for her own sake.

As the series continues on we start to see that Utena has made Anthy the damsel of her princely ideal. She doesn’t do it with possessive malice of Saionji, but simply with a subconscious acceptance that Anthy doesn’t have the will to save herself. Through this we see that the problem with Utena’s dream to become a prince is that she’s simply trying to define herself as masculine, putting herself outside the expectations of traditional femininity rather than opposing them.

Utena holds an unusual place as a protagonist, being the defending champion.

Over the next few episodes we see the individual struggles of Miki, Juri, and Nanami come to grips with Utena in the duelling arena. Utena holds an unusual place as a protagonist as the bearer of the Rose Bride. We typically think of the hero as the challenger, the underdog if you will, but in these duels Utena is the de facto reigning and defending champion. Utena is at the top of the mountain, and it’s the other characters who seek to climb it for their own goals.

These are confused and troubled adolescents, bringing their baggage to these duels and being crushed under it. Miki wants to free Anthy from the rose duels, but the desire to win Anthy’s affection at the core of it ends up being his undoing when he realizes that his own feelings are unrequited. Juri wants to prove that there are no miraculous powers to bring revolution by seizing the Rose Bride, but ends up defeated by the miracles she tries to deny. Nanami simply demonstrates an aggressively childish jealousy towards Anthy and Utena for getting attention from her older brother Touga.

What makes Touga different to them is that he’s more ostensibly in control of his identity and how he presents himself — to such an extent that he can manipulate the perceptions of those around him. In the heightened stage play that is Revolutionary Girl Utena, Touga is one of the few characters aware of his role as an actor in this story, and in his story he plays the prince and Utena plays the damsel.

To create this narrative illusion, Touga tricks Utena into believing that he was the prince she met on that fateful day, effectively lowering her guard by making her believe that this was the end of her quest. Utena knows Touga is a playboy, she knows that Touga is a jerk. But she can’t help but have feelings for her savior in this made-up story she’s been caught in.

We come to believe that the oppressiveness of traditional gender roles manifests itself purely in violence, but these gender roles can also be very alluring. After all, these ideas of what men and women should be wouldn’t be anywhere as persistent if not for some semblance of mutual benefit. Being either the heroic knight in shining armor or the damsel with a savior protecting her from harm is an attractive fantasy, but it’s still just a fantasy. Touga understands this full well, but Utena hasn’t wised up to it, and so Touga preys on that. He even uses his purported best friend Saionji as a scapegoat in this plan, provoking Saionji to attack Utena through an elaborate plan and taking the blow himself to make Utena feel guilty for getting him hurt.

By this point Utena has been completely psychologically manipulated by Touga, and by the time she starts to think about Anthy it’s too late. Although Utena doesn’t want to believe it, Touga convinces her that Anthy doesn’t have a mind of her own. Touga is able to swiftly defeat Utena and take Anthy, who under Touga’s control changes completely. By this point Utena realizes that Touga isn’t her prince, but it’s too little too late. Her sense of self and everything she’s fought for up until now has been systematically crushed.

It’s clear that this “ordinary girl” isn’t Utena.

Without that sense of self and without her dreams, all that’s left is for Utena to be “an ordinary girl,” which she demonstrates in the overt symbolic gesture of adopting the girls’ school uniform. To all her admiring fangirls it doesn’t really make a difference, but to Wakaba it’s clear that this girl isn’t Utena. This becomes resoundingly clear when she sees the defeated look Utena gives when Touga flirts with her. Wakaba may be a starry-eyed goofball when it comes to romance, but she’s not an idiot.

Wakaba struggles to find the right words, but they still hit home with Utena. “Normal for you means being cool,” she cries out through her tears. “And that uniform just isn’t right for you.” Utena’s previous heroic gesture in defense of Wakaba has been reciprocated, and thus Utena rediscovers herself not as a princely savior but as an equal person. The intimate gesture of giving Wakaba a kiss on the forehead emphasizes this, as she vows to her that she’ll take back who she was.

Utena confronts Touga once again in the duelling arena, now taking the role of the challenger who has something to fight for. Despite Touga having the power of the Rose Bride, Utena’s conviction to regain what he took from her prevails. Anthy tells Utena, donning a now tattered and shredded girls’ uniform, that she’s her bride once more, to which Utena responds “Never mind that. Come on, let’s just go home.” Just for that moment, the two of them share an intimate silence, a gesture of understanding towards one another. Just for that moment, there is no Rose Bride and prince. There’s only Anthy and Utena.

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