zushi's place

Theme spoiler warning: Revolutionary Girl Utena

Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of my personal favorite shows, and without spoiling the story content, one of the many interesting ways to read the theme of the show is how it suggests that the predominant thinking in society has been replaced from “kindness towards each other” to the toxic idea that “if you are stronger than others, then you will get your happily ever after”, whether that happily-ever after is through romance, reverting to an environment of idyllic childhood, or some other unfulfilled wish.

Though I have not considered that idea before, some of it resonates pretty deeply with me, I was reminded of this article about how ultra-rich people in the U.S. behave:

One thing Shteyngart noticed after spending time with this crowd was how competitive they were. “They’d compete against one another on their Bloomberg terminals all day and then at the end of the day they would play competitive poker with each other,” he says; this spirit of one-upmanship pervaded even the donations they made to charities. Shteyngart speculates that underneath this competitiveness is a need to seem smarter and more capable than their peers...

Shteyngart also witnessed the hedge funders making the sort of social comparisons that Norton and Harrington described, treating money as a “scorecard.” He remembers one of them saying something along the lines of “We don’t have best-seller lists and book awards. What we have is this—the number at the end of the day.”

It feels like there's this hedonic treadmill of status that people can't help but climb.

Looking at any form of mass media and studying any form of advertisements, it's really hard to escape the messaging that “success will bring you what you want” and that, if you are a girl, “attractiveness will bring you what you want”. While these certainly played a role even among other primate species, I suspect that their importance got severely exaggerated. The unfortunate part is that there may be a feedback loop – the more people are led to believe these things are important, the more people actually consider these things important, and now the chase for success or beauty can be rather suffocating.

Observing all of these phenomena, I definitely feel that this part of Utena's message have real-world applicability.

On the other hand, what about the show's proposed solution to the issue? The show's solution seems to just be “be kind and be genuine”, which, though both are things I try to be intentional about, doesn't feel like the whole answer somehow; though I fully concede that this may be a lack of personal growth in the area, and that the answer is intuitive to a lot of other people.

Somewhere out there, there's another system of emotions and personal values to be solved. Regardless, I really appreciate Utena the show for, among other important things, pointing out important problems like these about modern society.

— Categorized under: #theory, #sociology, #animations