rhodrymavelyne

Something as small as admiring Alice’s frockcoat on Batwoman can provoke a flight of fanciful fandom. I love her costume, but I started thinking about how Alice might look if she wore that coat over breeches while holding a foil in her hand, a rose in her lapel. An image of Alice as a duelist in the Revolutionary Girl Utena universe blossomed in my imagination. Once I did that, I had to visualize Kate Kane as one. I loved the vision of the Kane twins together in contrasting frock coats, holding their foils. This got me to thinking. What if Kate and Alice were both duelists at Ohtori Academy? I got another image of the twins meeting in the dueling forest under the rotating castle in the sky. One could argue after all the trauma both Kate and Alice have had inflicted on them…and inflicted upon each other…both women might crave the “something eternal” Utena and other duelists have sought. Kate is even a little like Utena in having her prince, Bruce Wayne/Batman, a prince she’s striving to emulate. Kate and Alice are definitely as complex as the other pair of twins existing in the Utena universe, Miki and Kaori.

After Kate Kane disappeared, I imagined her seeing that castle, floating in the sky while riding her motorcycle. This scenario came to me while listening to Liz Kay’s Castles in the Sky. To quote her song, why do we build castles in the sky? To rise up from our earthly problems, to escape from something painful, to create something eternal reborn in the form of something precious we’ve lost?

All this got me thinking of Revolutionary Girl Utena, of what makes a duelist, what motives a duelist has for dueling. Both Kate and Alice might have such motives. Either one of them would be able to pull the sword of her sister’s heart from her chest, an act which could be a story in itself.

Curious what associations start coming to me once I begin thinking about it.