rhodrymavelyne

One of the reasons the TV series Witchblade got me were all the little moments of beauty dropped into the landscape or moving with the characters. The statues. The red roses against the snow. The flash of fingers touching from the Sistine Chapel when the Witchblade latches itself to Sara’s arm. The paintings of St. George which appear as Sara rides her motorcycle.

Such moments are all rich in other series I love and obsess over. The TV series Hannibal. The anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. The manga X/1999. Manifestations of roses, antlers, something ordinary becoming something magical. Perhaps this something appears when a character says something simple yet has many layers.

I can’t get enough of these flourishes. This is why I watch or read these series again and again, gleaning inspiration each time I do. Sometimes I write a story or story fragment after viewing. Something it’s just my own impressions or emotional reactions. I feel like I’ve been drinking deep in the symbolism of these stories. For that’s what these moments of beauty seem to be, symbolic. They play into the overall theme and mood of the show, creating an environment in which the characters breathe.

I’ve always had trouble writing description. Description can be cumbersome in prose, so I went the other way, including far too little. Description fascinates me, attracting or repelling me in a moving medium like a TV series, a movie, or an anime. Anytime a little beauty is introduced, I appreciate it. Anytime the beauty plays into the overall theme of the story, I’m fascinated…and inspired.

Thank you to everyone behind the scenes who brought this beauty to me. Thank you for the inspiration.

And I’m so cannibalizing this blog for my Source of Inspiration article this month. :)

There’s a type of boy I’ve seen a lot in manga and anime. He makes hordes of girls blush and swoon. He’s good at sports and has a certain flair which catches everyone’s eye.

Often he’s regarded as more than a boy. He’s a prince.

In Revolutionary Girl Utena, this prince is a girl. Her name is Tenjou Utena.

Utena met a prince once when she was a little girl, who gave her the courage to go on living. Inspired and impressed by his example, she decided to become a prince herself. She wears a boy’s uniform and tries to rescue girls who are in trouble.

Something struck as being very sweet and perfectly natural about Utena’s reaction. Why wouldn’t she wish to be like someone who gave her courage?

There’s more to her wish to save girls in trouble, to be a prince that rescues princesses, a reason she’s forgotten. This is explored when she becomes engaged to Anthy Hinemiya.

Utena’s resolve to save girls in trouble leads her to avenge a friend’s humilation at the hands of a popular school heartthrob. She challenges this young man to a duel, only to find out there’s more to duelling at her school than she ever dreamed of.

Anthy Himemiya is at the heart of it. Whomever emerges from victorious from the duels in the Forest under the castle in the sky (which are the only duels allowed on campus) becomes engaged to Anthy, the Rose Bride. Once Utena defeats the duelling champion, she becomes engaged to the Rose Bride and all duelling challengers come after her.

Utena, along with her readers/audience, doesn’t understand what’s going on, what the purpose of the duelling game is, or how the Rose Bride is involved. At first, she doesn’t want to be engaged to Anthy. Utena still has hopes of being in relationship with a “normal boy” to use her own words, even though she’s chosen not to be a “normal girl” herself. Her attempts to try to be “normal”, like everyone else end in her unhappiness and weakening.

Utena comes to realize what’s normal for her isn’t normal for everyone else. She has to figure out what Anthy means to her, decide if their relationship is worth fighting for. Even if it means abandoning any hope of being normal. Even if it leads her to eventually abandon her dreams of her prince.

Utena’s heroic journey is that of an eccentric, an oddball who dares to follow her heart even if it thumps to a different beat than everyone else’s.

Daring to be different isn’t enough. Not for Utena. Eventually she finds her childish illusions which inspired her and gave her strength can trick and trap her. She’s forced to look beyond them, to face them for that they are.

Sometimes she finds herself fighting the embodiment of those dreams, those who represent her prince himself.

Utena never stops trying to be true to herself. When her dreams, her very memories turn on her, she tries to find what lies beyond them.

No series have ever come closer to doing what I’m trying to achieve in speculative fiction than Revolutionary Girl Utena. Not that my message is exactly the same as that story’s. The idea that there’s an ambiguous reality within an alternative reality, created by the thoughts and dreams of those that inhabit it is a concept I use in Tales of the Navel/The Shadow Forest. The theme that this reality can be beautiful as well as terrible is another concept I channel into my work.

Utena is very close to my own characters in her uncertainty about who and what she is. Like my characters, her reality has been tampered with. How much of what she sees as “normal” is the result of a distortion in perception?

How much of what we see is?

Utena gets me thinking about what we take for granted as being “normal”. Who creates the rules of normalancy? What shapes our perceptions of what is normal and what isn’t?

How much as been contrived and repeated in mindless rituals, much lke the duels in the forest? Just how much odder is Utena truly from other people, who seem normal to her? Just how normal are those people, really?

Utena and her world made think like few stories have ever done before. It made me think about the very nature of reality itself and how it’s constructed.

I’m really grateful to Utena for heading for the dueler’s forest and opening the door. She showed me another perspective through which speculative fiction can be viewed.

This is one of the reasons why she and her story remain especial favorites of mine.