if you can't break the egg's shell...

[mikogalatea]

That feeling when I watch what's ostensibly a comedy episode, yet the analysis notes I write down for it wind up going to incredibly depressing places. :(

Utena's comedy episodes are odd beasts, because when you rewatch them with knowledge of the whole show, they turn out to have a fair amount of unhappy subtext and/or foreshadowing that makes them hard to laugh at in hindsight. That said, I don't agree with the implicit notion that the show has no genuine comedy and that every single thing is actually secretly horrifying; then again, it's mostly little moments that I find funny, like the endings of some Shadow Girl plays or Juri wanting a turn in a massage chair Nanami was sitting in.

Next up for me is eps 28-29, which I'm not looking forward to all that much because ugh, Ruka. It's possible that I might end up not hating him as much as before, but I don't exactly expect my opinion on him to do a 180, and just seeing him in the episode preview had me cringing already. ~.~

I'll do it for Shiori, though! And for everything that comes after these episodes!

Comments

[sarajayechan]

The show does have genuine comedy! I love Utena interacting with the Shadow Girls in the Black Rose arc, and the "my ball" scene with Juri and Nanami.

I'll do it for Shiori, though! And for everything that comes after these episodes!

I skipped episode 29 entirely because I could NOT deal with Ruka even if I muted the whole episode and didn't look at the screen until Juri's duel.

[mikogalatea]

Of course it does! Just because the cow episode has disturbing implications and I felt bad for Nanami freaking out over a metaphor for her first period here in the egg episode, among other unhappy things in the comedy eps, it doesn't make stuff like Utena's snarky responses to C-ko or that Juri/Nanami scene disappear or stop being funny!

(I can see why you ship that. Not only was a lot of the conversation essentially about Juri's boobs, with Nanami looking like she was checking them out while struggling to hold her big heavy bowling ball bag, but she came across as having a budding gay crush on her by the end. At this point I'm more into the idea of Utena/Nanami myself, though; I really liked that moment in ep 23 where Nanami proposed that the student council should try teaming up with Utena to find out what was going on, with her showing herself willing to put aside her dislike of her for it. I'm looking forward to seeing a certain scene in ep 37 again, too.)

Heh, I don't blame you for skipping ep 29 entirely. I think it helps that those eps are fairly self-contained, so you don't miss too much that's crucial to the wider story.

[sarajayechan]

YEP. Nanami's episodes may be disturbing metaphors cloaked in humor, but Ikuhara knew where to lighten up!

(Oh, I ship Utena/Nanami too, especially in the later episodes. But Juri/Nanami is one of those "they don't get a ton of super meaningful interaction but the scenes they get aren't exactly 'they're just standing next to each other'.)

Yep. The most important part of ep 29 was the duel and Utena breaking the locket, so.