#ellistxt

[maggiecheungs]

part of the reason the black rose arc is so important and effective is that for the first time in the show, utena has to fight people who are weaker than her, who have less knowledge and agency than her, who haven’t been (actively) complicit in the duelling games and the commodification of the rose bride. so much of utena’s identity prior to this has been based on being the underdog, the ✨self-made prince✨, the hero on a quest to save victims of injustice..… and then all of a sudden she’s fighting literal elementary schoolers and girls whose names she never even bothered to learn and her own heartbroken best friend. and yes, they’ve been turned into tools by mikage and akio, but ultimately utena is the one who has to defeat them and tear the rose from their breast. and she’s gradually starting to become aware of her own complicity and it’s horrifying for her, and the only thing she can do is not think about it, not think about it, not think about it—

#utena #black rose arc #revolutionary girl utena #rgu #ellistxt

[maggiecheungs]

“utena is a bit like a shoujo equivalent of evangelion” = a common and inevitable comparison that is admittedly not a bad elevator pitch, giving an idea of utena's symbolism and the genre tropes it engages without requiring an essay-length summary of its plot and themes

“utena is evangelion for the girlies” = SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UPPPP

#utena #revolutionary girl utena #rgu #shoujo kakumei utena #do NOT girldinnerify utena ffs #the whole show is literally designed to deconstruct the concept of 'the girlies'!!! #also yes it engages with shoujo themes and its main characters are female but it's not exclusively for women??? #utena has a large cult following consisting of people of all genders 😭 #like. i get 'for the girlies' has become a funny tiktok meme or whatever but . #maybe don't apply 'jokey gender essentialist stereotypes' to the 'gender stereotypes are a destructive tool of patriarchal violence' show #neon genesis evangelion #evangelion #ellistxt #hmmmm should i rewatch nge next

[maggiecheungs]

when i say utena is a show with countless different possible interpretations, i don’t just mean it like ‘different people interpret it differently’; i mean it like ‘at any one moment i am interpreting it in about seven different and often mutually exclusive ways, and it deeply enriches my viewing experience’

#utena #revolutionary girl utena #shoujo kakumei utena #rgu #ellistxt #yes i am once again thinking about the nanami egg episode #one of the most blatant and unsubtle metaphors in the whole show and there are still about four different interpretations #all of which are clearly supported by the text #also thinking about episode 37 and also everything that Anthy does in the entire show #wildly differing interpretations galore!!!!

[maggiecheungs]

number of trailers: 14

number of trailers that passed the bechdel test: 3

#1) friendshit forever 2) us the series 3) hide and sis #i could be wrong! i did fast forward through pretty much all the bl trailers so i might have missed an interaction #idk why i even bother to count anymore :/ #ellistxt #Gmmtv 2024

[maggiecheungs]

do you ever think about how every single juri-centric episode comes directly after a nanami episode? because i do. a lot .

#[watching juri get psychosexually tormented by her toxic gay crush ten minutes after nanami animorphs into a cow]: what does it all mean.... #utena #revolutionary girl utena #ellistxt #nanami kiryuu #juri arisugawa #rgu

[maggiecheungs]

“average person reads 12 chapters of ways of survival in their lifetime” factoid actually just statistical error. average person reads two paragraphs of the prologue before giving up. kim dokja, who voluntarily read all 3,149 chapters multiple times in under ten years, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

#omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv #kim dokja #ways of survival #ellistxt #books #ellis reads #he’s so Not Normal im so obsessed with him

[maggiecheungs]

fuck it. utena rewatch

#ellistxt #utena #okay I’ve actually been watching it for the past two hours already #but I am now officially switching gears from ‘casually rewatching early episodes’ to ‘Full Rewatch’ #i will be giffing

[maggiecheungs]

me and my thesis…….. hand in unlovable hand……………..

#academic #gradblr #ellistxt

[maggiecheungs]

my mother, walking past my screen: oh, those little magical penguins are so cute! what’s this anime about?

me, taking a deep breath: um well. okay. uhhh. do you remember the 1995 tokyo subway sarin gas attack…?

#mawaru penguindrum #penguindrum #kunihiko ikuhara #anime #ellistxt #ikuhara is brilliant but his series are impossible to even begin to explain

[maggiecheungs]

obsessed with how apart from kim dokja, nobody else on earth got more than 3.14% of the way through ways of survival

#😭😭😭😭 #omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv #kim dokja #ellistxt #im only 90 chapters in so no spoilers pls

[maggiecheungs]

no i’m sorry but dream of the red chamber makes me legitimately insane,,,,, like what do you MEAN she was a flower in her past life and he gave her water and she promised to pay him back with a lifetime of tears,,,, what do you mean ‘the beast of a thousand legs is a long time dying’,,,, what happened to qin keqing????? where did baoyu’s jade go when it disappeared . these two little girls were taken from their families to become actresses for rich families and fell in love with each other so so deeply and then one of them died and the other one burns money for her even though it’s forbidden on pain of beatings or death. wang xifeng is a functionally illiterate teenager who was suddenly put in charge of running the entire jia estate after marrying into the family, and she somehow manages despite that, and then eventually the whole thing comes crumbling down and she is the first one everyone blames. xiangling was kidnapped and and enslaved and abused but all she ever wanted was to write her poems, and then she dies in childbirth and her long-lost father goes to fetch her soul and lead her to the afterlife. they gaslit baoyu into marrying baochai when his grip on reality is already tenuous and diayu is literally on her deathbed... they didn’t even tell him when she died. yuanyang hangs herself from the rafters of her room right after dowager lady jia dies because she knows she’s lost any semblance of control over her own life with her mistress’ passing. ping’er loves xifeng so so deeply and sincerely. all the girls are going to be married away to men and families that could abuse or neglect or exploit them, and they don’t have any choice in the matter. and baoyu cries when he thinks about it because he loves them all so very much. daiyu would rather spend hours burying petals than watch them rot in the stream. after a childhood spent being mistreated by her uncle, xiangyun marries a good husband who she loves, and then loses him almost immediately. all the young people leave the garden eventually and it gets overgrown with weeds. qiaojie is sold by her uncle but saved by ping’er and granny liu and spirited away from the corruption and rot of the jia estate... maybe there’s hope for the children after all. baoyu and diayu love each other so deeply and know each other so intimately and inevitably that they never even try to put it into words, and even the reader is locked out from the bond they share. the stone just wants to experience the passions and tragedies of the mortal world!!! and cao xueqin loved and admired the women in his life so deeply that he wrote hongloumeng partly so that they would be remembered. like????????

#hong lou meng #dream of the red chamber #ellis reads #ellistxt #books #in case you couldn't tell i reread it recently #in may i think? #but i've literally not been able to stop thinking about it since #i think i loved it even more on the reread #it's just. fuck. wow.

[maggiecheungs]

obsessed with kim dokja and han sooyoung because. there are so many ways in which they’re basically the same person but there are an equal number of ways that they are fundamentally different (writer and reader as two sides of the same coin, facing different directions but inextricably linked and each one unable to exist without the other)… they’re partners and foils and co-conspirators and they tease and trash talk each other all the time, but when push comes to shove kdj will entrust hsy with the fate of everything and everyone he cares about, and even though hsy is a control freak with trust issues and a compulsive need to rewrite other people’s stories, she is willing to follow kdj towards the ending that he wants (even before she knows what that is). and they just… understand each other in a way that nobody else does, because from the moment they meet, they both recognise the same love of stories in each other, and they have a deep appreciation and mutual respect for each other’s craft and intelligence and passion for the narrative, and ultimately they both know that any [■■] they reached wouldn’t ever be complete without the other by their side

#im rambling but . THEY #orv #omniscient reader's viewpoint #hankim #doksoo #han sooyoung #kim dokja #ellistxt #ellis reads

[maggiecheungs]

one day they might even let tu act with another woman 🤩🤩🤩🤩

#ellistxt #excited for this drama though #she’s gonna eat and leave no crumbs

[maggiecheungs]

setting an alarm for 2am so i can take the batteries out of this fucking singing robot while kiddo is asleep

#i am this close to pouring a glass of water over it 😭😭😭 #ellistxt #kiddo tag

[maggiecheungs]

all the ex-nadao artists queuing up outside the gmm grammy building so they can pay their bills next year

#im pretty sure that gmmtv will announce more series in their 2023 lineup than nadao produced in nearly a decade :/ #ellistxt #gmmtv 2023

[maggiecheungs]

you make one (1) typo when searching for an old japanese movie from the 1930s and suddenly your search results are full of hutsune miku genderbent(?) selfcest(?) fanvids….???? 😩 i’m out here fighting for my life fr

#ellistxt #mikio naruse #currently on the hatsunemiku wiki trying to work out if that blue hair dude is meant to be a genderbent version of her or her twin brother #this is not how I pictured spending friday evenings in my 20s. or at any point in my life to be brutally honest.