Alright, while I admit I haven’t watched Utena in like five years and am quite fuzzy on most of the plot by now, I do remember from my 1st play through of Umineko that I was finding a lot of the plot points and what not eerily similar to RGU.
So basically, I’m wondering if there are any other fans of RGU here that can recognize the similarities between Umineko and Ikuhara’s masterpiece-Revolutionary Girl Utena. Perhaps this will generate an interesting discussion.
Utena is my favorite anime of all time so I’m always super inclined to talk about it. This whole thread is certainly going to have major spoilers for both series, so I’m not going to put spoiler tags but, disclaimer: spoilers for the entire Utena anime, Umineko series, and possibly the Utena movie.
Yeah, they have some major similarities. They have a similar surreal and meta tendencies, similar idealistic protagonists, and similar horrifying themes. The most obvious of those being themes: both Utena and Umineko deal with gender, gender roles, abuse, sexuality, societal norms, unhealthy family dynamics, incest, arrested development, familial and romantic love, and the transition from adolescence to adulthood. They show how victims become abusers. And both series show exactly how people become stuck in the past and the danger of stagnation and shows how cycles of abuse are created and, to a certain extent, how they are stopped.
The differences between these shows (other than the plots, which are very different) are in why these themes are explored. Utena explores these themes in order to show how people grow up. It presents a series of children from ages 13 to 17 and shows their struggles and the complications in their life and how each of them want a perfect cure for their issues. Miki wants to reconnect with his sister and maintain the innocence of his childhood, Juri wants to either be freed from her feelings of the girl she’s in love with or else have said girl love her back, Saionji wants acceptance and unconditional love, Nanami wants…the same thing as Miki, and Touga wants to have actual power and control over his life. And all of these children believe that they can gain what they want through some miracle cure, the power to revolutionize the world and once they receive this power their dreams will be fulfilled and their problems solved. A lot like how magic is portrayed in Umineko.
Now, the hero, Utena, has purer motives than any of them, but her dream to be a hero is just as childish and unattainable as any of the above. It’s only after she learns how to love Anthy (who is…too complicated for me to talk about here) that she is actual able to help her and, even then, she’s not able to “save” Anthy, only to help her. Anthy helps herself, in the end, and the main villain, Akio is stuck in his school, unable to grow up, while Anthy and Utena are able to leave. Utena treats the problems above as aspects of its characters lives that they have to accept or overcome and it is mostly able to end happily, with most of its characters on a road to self-actualization and acceptance, with a feeling that they will one day be able to grow up and deal with the horrible things that had happened to them and eventually be able to leave their terrible school.
Umineko…does not end as cheery. Umineko shows how the themes above destroy a person and it does this through a series wide reflection on how cycles of abuse absolutely destroy a family. While Utena focuses on sibling relationships, Umineko focuses on parent-child relationships, specifically, really unhealthy parent child relationships that range from distant to smothering to abusive to straight up incestuous and, while Utena has each of these in their sibling relationships, Umineko’s parent child dynamics are never treated as something that could ever be overcame, they are all consuming and they eventually destroy those involved in them. These abusive relationships lead to almost all of the character’s problems and they force these problems on the generation below.
In Utena, the characters are each trying to “revolutionize the world” in order to make the world more to their liking. Magic is the same in Umineko. Magic allows the characters to change the world to their liking but magic doesn’t work, not the way the characters want it to work, magic doesn’t take away the pain. Neither do Anthy’s powers, but the characters in Utena are eventually able to accept and understand that. Ange eventually does understand this in Umineko, but magic was the only thing that Sayo ever had and, after a certain point, it became not enough. Attempting to possess Anthy was something that the student council members attempted and eventually stopped because they realized there were better ways to solve their problems. Sayo never had any recourse, magic was her last escape from society’s pressure, from her family and her history. She could never change the world and neither could anyone who came before her. She couldn’t change how she was brought into the world, or her body, or the Ushiromiya family or what the Ushiomiya family did to one another, or what happened to her mother or…any of it. And, because she couldn’t change any of that, she gave up hope completely. No one stopped the cycle in Umineko.
I think Umineko’s ultimately a more cynical series, but that might be because of genre. Umineko’s a tragedy and Utena…isn’t, which I think is the main difference between them, except for that Umineko’s backdrop is a mystery fantasty And Then There Were None style story and Utena’s backdrop is a genre-busting Shojo series. Utena wants to talk about gender roles and abuse and what society wants from people and how that is overcome by people while they grow up. Umineko wants to show how all of the above absolutely destroys a person.