I just watched a very emotional Utena episode
Spoilers abound. Do not read farther if you do not want to know what happens. Admittedly, I’m in the first season, but still.
Let’s talk about Creepy Ginger, whose real name is Touga and will be referred to thusly because it’s shorter.
He’s progressed from being just creepy (which it should be said, I occasionally find charming - not in him, just in general) to evil. A fucking chorus of alarm bells but in a “this will make you sad” kind of way, which is worse.
He comes to fight a duel with Utena but ends up with Anthy/Himemiya first in her greenhouse and says the following: “I plan to make this birdcage my domain. And I would never let you out - ever.” Now, Anthy is already totally fucked. She’s engaged, she’s this submissive occasionally vapid captive girl with serious Stockholm Syndrome or some such. She needs to serve whomever she is engaged to (which sometimes shows up as whomever owns her) and abide by their wishes. As far as people go, Utena’s not that bad. Abusive Ponytail Guy was abusive, Miki… actually, if Miki won, I’d be kind of okay with it. But he does see Anthy as his “shining thing” which is pretty clearly not a person.
In the little cracking-the-Earth’s-shell sequence, Touga also says “It’s a matter of time before your strong feelings betray you.” He seems not to believe in feelings. We’ve seen this before - he betrays his best friend, and it’s quite clear that he’s manipulating Utena’s maybe-belief that he is her prince to let him win this duel (and win he does). It becomes clear at the Student Council’s special balcony/card-playing hideout that he manipulated his sister’s feelings, too - she was obviously going to lose, he let her, etc. Nanami has Strong Feelings about her brother and these have played a pretty central role twice now. But it’s also clear from the Nanami episode that he can be a brother, too. He protects her. He likes kitties. He was a kid once. But when we see him manipulating Utena’s feelings this episode, I can’t help but believe he’s doing the same to his sister. And that rouses something dark and knotted and mean inside me. Because that’s fucking with family, and that’s not okay. Admittedly, Nanami’s feelings are almost romantic, and I do not understand their relationship. But this is someone who seems to hold nothing sacred - he’s doing this almost to just see what the Power of Dios does to Utena - and someone who regards everything with dispassionate interest like it’s an experiment worries me.
Utena loses, and it’s because of her compassion that she does. But then Touga goes on - to tell her to forget the friend she’s made in Anthy because Anthy is basically not a person. She exists to be projected onto, is what Touga says (in not so many words). And the fact that he regards the people he spends time with as an experiment, as puppets to project on to, makes me worry about him. Because that’s got to be alienating. And alienated people with issues I don’t know how to make heads or tails of are dangerous.
