it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing

[esmenet]

Now that I (technically) have time again, I am doing what I said I would and borrowing makeste's super-excellent meme!

1. My favorite character.
2. ANOTHER favorite character!!
3. My favorite character relationship, and by "relationship" I don't necessarily mean pairing and certainly not OTP, but on the other hand, depending on the fandom MAYBE I DO!
4. The moment/character/THING/WHATEVER that first hooked me on the fandom.
5. One of my favorite moments.
6. A song or track that reminds me of this fandom.
7. One miscellaneous awesome thing about the fandom.
8. One completely random thought I have regarding this fandom.
9. One fic/essay rec, fanart, or fanvid that depending on the fandom I either had lovingly bookmarked or saved onto my hard drive, or only just now found during a two-minute Google search.

Comments

[salinea]

Utena!

[esmenet]

1. Anthy! Anthy Anthy Anthy. At first I had no opinion on her at all, and then the Black Rose Arc happened and I was like whoa this is creepy, I like it and then the end just made me really, really happy for her. Her life has been an uncomfortable complicated tangle of love and hatred and obligation and pain for so long, and if you can't be a princess you have to be a witch and all girls are like the Rose Bride, and then she realizes that she can leave. She realizes it's okay to leave her brother alone with his schemes, and it's all right to go and look for happiness on her own.

I think I really started liking her after the movie, though. Even though the movie timeline is super compressed and most of the details are different, you get things like Anthy being the coolest racecar driver ever and friendship actually saving the day.

2. Nanami. She's meant to be a parallel to Anthy, in her relationship with her older brother and maybe in other ways as well. But she realizes early on, I think, that Ohtori is a bastion of weirdness and messed-up relationships and creepy background music. And in the end, like Anthy, she wants to get out. But unlike Anthy, she ends up preserving her relationship with her brother, even if it has rather different undertones than it did at the beginning. And I think Anthy was trying, in part, to help her with that. (I also think Anthy kind of hated her, in the way you hate younger versions of yourself who are making the same stupid mistakes.)

3. Goodness, there are so many! Mikage and Utena, I think. This is another case of parallels, except it's Utena who hates Mikage; he manipulates people into hurting others in an attempt to get something he thinks he wants, that's basically all he does, and Utena calls him a monster. Actually, she calls him right out on his shit and punches him, which I think was a good life decision for her. I would have liked to see them interact more, especially in the context of the whole prince/princess/witch framework and outside the duels. He would know just what to say to get to her, and she would always be able to call him out on his manipulative and harmful shit.

4. The MUSIC. I actually heard Shiori's duel song first, I think, and then I went and downloaded all the soundtracks, and then I started watching the show. I need to start listening to those soundtracks more often again.

5. The 'Tale of the Rose' play. I love that they sit you down and explain everything in such a metafiction format, and that by then you know exactly what they are explaining, and that it still doesn't tell you how everything is going to go. And the play itself is pretty fabulous too.

6. Isagiyuku, kakkoyoku, ikite yukou~ But for songs not from the soundtracks, Poe's Hey Pretty takes the cake, purely because of this video.

7. So much postmodernist meta! In everything. It's beautiful.

8. Needs more Gokusen crossovers.

9. Stage Props, about Nanami and her thoughts on Ohtori.

I also kind of want to mention my own fic, history of the rose, because that was me trying to do the Postmodern Meta Thing that I love so much.

[salinea]

♥ I AGREE SO MUCH WITH EVERYTHING IN THIS