Post reblogged from eyes of wood with 51 notes
Snippets from “Shoujo Kakumei Utena” Privacy Files 1 – 3 by Enokido Youji
I think the word “prince” is the greatest pitfall for any young woman. In the show, Akio is not the prince of some country; he is of common origins (most likely). However, precisely because of that, there is significant meaning in the fact that he calls himself and is called a prince, because it is closer to what the word “prince” has come to mean in the popular parlance.
Of course, it is not that the Utena staff wants to negate the idea of “prince”. It’s just that somehow it turned out that we ended up questioning the idea of “prince” in our work. It was not our motivation to begin with. In the beginning, we quite simply only wanted to depict sensual pleasure. But the more we pondered on what passes for sensual pleasure in the world nowadays, the imagery of prince somehow became something like Akio. It just turned out that way. Why? Because we were annoyed with such an obvious value. A cool prince appears out of nowhere, marries the heroine and they live happily ever after. We thought there is nothing convincing about this. If that is all it takes to be a prince, then it is too easy.
And such easy sensual pleasure based on dependency is made by Akio into a selling point with which to control people. There is something brave about Utena who doesn’t buy into this shit. There is something attractive about this because she is for “real”. The happiness of prince and princess seems to lack this “for real”-ness.
What I want to say is – people who are in love for real would not be chasing after the image of a prince.
Source: iwanihana.info