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Sunday Sunday Sunday
This weekend I watched Revolutionary Girl Utena.
In some ways the story is typical of a magical girl story, with regular formulaic battles and repeated "transformation" scenes, but in a lot of other ways it's completely weird and different from anything else... the secret duelling grounds beneath a spinning, upside-down castle in the sky, the weird operatic rock music that pops up only during the duels, the shadow-girl theater in the middle of every episode that works like a Greek chorus and comments on the plot in a roundabout, indirect manner, and the plot itself, which deals with the mysterious roles of Anthy "The Rose Bride", a mysterious entity known as "End of the World", a stated goal of "Revolutionizing the World", and Utena's personal goal of becoming a Prince, rather than a Princess. Plus lots of other weirdness. It's a very fun show with an unusual amount of depth.
The original two dvd releases covered 13 episodes (the first story arc) out of a total of 48 episodes for the series. I let![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kehf borrow them once, and much later (last summer I think) she asked if there was any more. At the time there was only the movie, which I personally don't like that much, since the whole second half is 100% symbolism and doesn't really tell a story in the normal sense. The visuals were cool, but as a means to tell a story, the movie failed spectacularly, in my opinion.
But since the fall, the rest of the episodes have been coming out in English on dvd, albeit only 3 episodes per disc, which seems pretty cheap to me. I'd been collecting them without watching them, so this weekend I watched episodes 14-26, which took me through the second "Black Rose" story arc and into the third story arc.
Anyway, cool series. I have something to lend tokehf now. ^_^
Sunday I went bike riding withjeffreycornish and geojlc. It was really the first time I used my bike since right after I bought it. We only went about 3.5 to 4 miles, because I'm out of shape and a wimp and was worried that the further we went, the harder it would be going back. It was a great day for biking or just getting out though.
I had dinner with them and hung out a while. That was pretty much it for my Sunday.
In some ways the story is typical of a magical girl story, with regular formulaic battles and repeated "transformation" scenes, but in a lot of other ways it's completely weird and different from anything else... the secret duelling grounds beneath a spinning, upside-down castle in the sky, the weird operatic rock music that pops up only during the duels, the shadow-girl theater in the middle of every episode that works like a Greek chorus and comments on the plot in a roundabout, indirect manner, and the plot itself, which deals with the mysterious roles of Anthy "The Rose Bride", a mysterious entity known as "End of the World", a stated goal of "Revolutionizing the World", and Utena's personal goal of becoming a Prince, rather than a Princess. Plus lots of other weirdness. It's a very fun show with an unusual amount of depth.
The original two dvd releases covered 13 episodes (the first story arc) out of a total of 48 episodes for the series. I let
kehf borrow them once, and much later (last summer I think) she asked if there was any more. At the time there was only the movie, which I personally don't like that much, since the whole second half is 100% symbolism and doesn't really tell a story in the normal sense. The visuals were cool, but as a means to tell a story, the movie failed spectacularly, in my opinion.But since the fall, the rest of the episodes have been coming out in English on dvd, albeit only 3 episodes per disc, which seems pretty cheap to me. I'd been collecting them without watching them, so this weekend I watched episodes 14-26, which took me through the second "Black Rose" story arc and into the third story arc.
Anyway, cool series. I have something to lend to
kehf now. ^_^Sunday I went bike riding with
jeffreycornish and geojlc. It was really the first time I used my bike since right after I bought it. We only went about 3.5 to 4 miles, because I'm out of shape and a wimp and was worried that the further we went, the harder it would be going back. It was a great day for biking or just getting out though.I had dinner with them and hung out a while. That was pretty much it for my Sunday.