I admit I'm not as up on my Jung as I'd like to be -- thank you for educating me!  I'd somehow gotten the idea that there's a fairly small fixed set of Jungian archetypes: the shadow, the maiden/mother/crone, the hero, and so on.  But what you're saying, I think, is that the idea of a Jungian archetype is actually very flexible and abstract.  That gives me a new way of talking about symbols in SKU: if Miki is stuck on the archetype of eternal innocence with his sister, then playing with his stopwatch is a manifestation of that archetype, and so is his dueling for possession of Anthy.  They're part of the same complex.  I'm digging your paper, too.  It's striking how thoroughly you manage to sustain Jungian interpretations for just about all of SKU's key plot points and symbols.  I especially enjoy the part (pages 11-12) where you forcefully argue that Utena must be alive in the outside world, because all that the swords destroyed was the conception of Utena as a prince, the archetypal manifestation that had been restraining her, and not Utena herself.  I don't think I've heard that one before.  [Edit: I'm wrong, Levi had broached an idea like this before.]  I like it!  I've been saying that Utena never became a prince for years, but I think your explanation is at least as persuasive as any of the ones I've come up with.

Also, you have a section entitled "Revolutions About The Same Axis," which makes you the coolest kid in school as far as I'm concerned.  That is hilarious and also a perfect summary of SKU's characters' struggles, even though that's not quite the point of that section.

There are a couple questions I guess I'd like to ask you.  First, you say in your post that SKU is "a celebration of change that nonetheless acknowledges the legitimacy of longing for the past."  The celebration of change I get.  In what sense do you think SKU paints longing for the past as legitimate?  There is certainly an acknowledgment in the show that we can't escape from our pasts, that our pasts will color us, even that our pasts can be a source of strength, but it seems like longing for the past is only ever a weakness.  People in SKU sabotage themselves and treat each other cruelly principally out of an impossible desire to make everything like they imagine it used to be.  For most of them, "revolution" really means the other kind of revolution, a return to where they started.

And question two -- this comes from your paper -- is, do you think art that celebrates necessary change is always avant-garde art?  Your thesis and conclusion both suggest that you believe this, but almost any story that follows the basic Hero's Journey framework is a story that celebrates necessary change.  I like Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" as much as anyone, with its protagonist who learns that to grow up he has to leave the graveyard, but it isn't avant-garde, is it?  So what makes SKU avant-garde?  This might be beyond the scope of this thread, though

Meanwhile, inside satyr's brain: "Let's see, should I read this link?... Oh, the file name is Lesbians!.docx, guess I'm reading it then!" Rofl, let's not even get into the gender politics of that one.

Last edited by satyreyes (08-12-2013 11:14:29 AM)

I accidentally sent the essay to my prof with that file name intact, and I swear I wanted to die when he commented on it orz

In response to your points, I think my wording wasn't the best for what I wanted to say - what I meant in saying "the legitimacy of longing for the past," I was referring to the driving forces that cause the characters to long for it. For example, Miki (since he's an easy target, I think I'll pick on him for a bit longer) fixates on his childhood with Kozue because he wants to be close to her. The childhood, then, could be seen as the archetypal image of the archetype, which is his desire for sibling love, and longing for the past could be then seen as analogous to getting stuck on an archetypal image. However, while the archetypal image may need to be replaced, the archetype itself is still legitimate - Miki can't return to the past, but he can have a closer relationship with Kozue (see: the end of the series, where he seems to be doing quite well).

Actually, scratch what I said about my wording not being the best - in hindsight, it was kind of atrocious, but that's what I get for staying up too late and not proof-reading :/

Poor explanation skills aside, what I was essentially responding to was the view I'd seen before that Utena had to completely reject everything associated with being a prince. What I argue instead is that, yes, the prince role is problematic and Utena shouldn't try to be one, but the motivations that led her to become a prince are nonetheless still legitimate and can hide outlet in any other form. Once again, the difference between archetypal image and archetype, and the idea of evolution as opposed to pure rejection. Hopefully this explanation makes more sense - Jung might be a bit kooky (but then again, the guy used to carve totem poles into his school supplies, so you know ), but he's super-fascinating nonetheless, even if he's hella difficult to understand at times.

And ah, let's see what I remember from Literary Avant-Gardes...

Basically, an idea of lot of the avant-garde artists and writers shared was that current forms of art (novels, short stories, etc) weren't up to the task of expressing the sentiments of the current generation. Tolstoy might have been good for the 19th century, but this is the 20th century, forgodssake - the youth of today need new, more energetic ways of self-expression! Hence, the doing away of any of many "obsolete" traditions - chronological order, "logical" sense, and such trifling things like grammar. Hence, stuff like the Waiting for Godot or Altazor, where the last chapter is essentially aaaa eeee dog iiiewri. Imo, the difference between "regular" art and the avant-garde is basically form - does the work try to push the boundaries of the medium? If so, it's avant-garde. Basically, my argument at the end was that by being a feminist work AND a surrealist one, Utena was in the position to challenge the misogyny that ironically exists in many avant-garde movements. In terms of form, Utena uses a lot of surrealist tropes and certainly challenges some of the expectations of the anime medium, but I don't know if I would consider it completely avant-garde, either - it's certainly experimental, yes, but how much so? Could it be considered avant-garde in the larger art world?

Honestly, though? I picked SKU to write on because I just didn't want to write my final paper on something I didn't care about

It's been a loooong time since I wrote that essay, so I'm sorry for any confusion unclearness in my wording or writing! I'm also not completely set on anything I wrote, so you're all free to try to persuade otherwise!  

Also, slightly off-topic, but I was reading up on Gnosticism a while earlier, and apparently they had the idea that the world we exist in is an illusionary version of the "true reality," which struck as kind of cool and sort of relevant to SKU? Like woah, man, all the angles you can analyze this anime from. Like woah

Kita:
If I remember correctly, the original Jungian archetypes really were quite fixed, because Jung believed that they were all transmitted through a psychic connection between all people to the collective unconscious.

Ah, so I was pretty certain on the psychic passing-down part, but I'm fairly disappointed I had to use Wikipedia to double-check the part about archetypes...

From Wikipedia, it says that "strictly speaking Jungian archetypes refer to nuclear underlying forms or the archetypes-as-such from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster and the flood amongst others"

and

"Jung was fond of comparing the form of the archetype to the axial system of a crystal, which preforms the crystalline structure of the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own."

Strictly speaking, it's possible that Jung might have started out with the idea of fixed archetypes, but the way his ideas were now codified is a more flexible interpretation of the idea He's a really tricky, obtuse guy in terms of ideas though, so yeah :/ And please don't feel the need to read through the essay! - it's only there just in case anyone is interested in much I can BS my way through a final paper and still get an A

Yasha:
Another slightly related angle I've always wanted to explore is how to view SKU through Christian mythology. There's a hell of a lot to draw from there.

Ooh, SKU through Christian mythology would be wonderful - someone else would have to do it, but it would be definitely interesting

Needs more Jungian analysis. The beast is not yet sated!

Also, avant-garde is always good stuff

I remember learning about the anima and animus in a class on mythology.  I don't think I really understood it then and I still don't understand it now.

So there's this:

There's the idea of animus and anima - the "inner male" and "inner female" for women and men, respectively.

But then there's this:

They refer to how men and women view each other.

I've run into this problem before: these terms seem to have one meaning that applies to the self, and a different meaning that applies to the other.  So which is it?  It seems odd to characterize the Eve stage of anima development as the male object of desire if the anima is a part of the self, yet Jung is insistent that these are a part of one's own unconscious.

As far as applying this to Utena, there is definitely something there, but I don't understand the animus or anima well enough to apply them.  I know that Utena is torn between wanting to find a prince and wanting to be a prince, and that exploring and resolving or deconstructing this tension is the main object of her character development from the first scene of SKU to the last.  How do you put that in Jungian terms?  Her animus is stuck in stage 2, a naive view of man as the dashing Prince, and this has taken on an overgrown role in her identity?  Or is that too simplistic and/or completely off base?

I understand the shadow better.  I think Utena actually confronts her shadow in the last few episodes of the show, roughly between the moment she sees Anthy and Akio together and the moment she rescues Anthy from suicide.  Her behavior in the interim, catty and passive-aggressive and completely unlike Utena as we know her, seems to be her grappling with a part of herself she has repressed and doesn't know how to cope with.  She comes out much stronger for it.

Last edited by satyreyes (08-16-2013 02:59:26 PM)

So there's this:

There's the idea of animus and anima - the "inner male" and "inner female" for women and men, respectively.

But then there's this:

They refer to how men and women view each other.

I've run into this problem before: these terms seem to have one meaning that applies to the self, and a different meaning that applies to the other.  So which is it?  It seems odd to characterize the Eve stage of anima development as the male object of desire if the anima is a part of the self, yet Jung is insistent that these are a part of one's own unconscious.

If I remember well my classes (it was 2 years ago ok?) , they can represent both, it's because people have their respective "inners" that they have a view of how men and women  should be (obviously in an unconscious manner) and thus they also define how they relate to the opposite sex, either love, hate, lust etc. etc.  As for the self,  let's remember than even though Jung's archetypes are so extended nowadays that it would be hard to find someone who doesn't think that women can have "manly characteristics" (animus) and viceversa (female "anima" characteristics in men), even just a little bit, are rare, back in his day the idea had no precendent (even Freud didn't agree with them fully) and as it was nearly groundbreaking and yet Jung as a product of his time didn't believe that women and men could have a natural disposition for what traditionally is expected for the other sex, he tough that ANY "manly" or "femenine" behaviour on women and men respectively came strictly from the their "inners".
In fact Jung adviced that while the way of negating the influence our anima-animus has on how we relate to people is awareness of them and then dismissal, for him, the ideal was to find a middle ground were a woman could be well... a woman who with the help of her animus was able to be assertive, tell her mind, be creative and at the same time being comfortable with being a woman, instead of lethin your "inner" consume your ...um let's call it "original self" (because Jung still saw the born sex as the original) and negate its influence altogether, hence become a women who negate any "femenine" characteristic of her wheter is expected or not from her, my teacher described this as "the woman or men feeling trapped in a men's or woman's body".

Also the Eve stage is not just the "male object of desire" but also the biological and impulsive woman, infact this stage it's also called "Tierra" (earth) precisely on the basis of Eve being nothing but "something fertile meant ot be fecunded and be a mother"

Ah, thanks to everyone who's been putting this stuff into better terms than I have! I've mostly picked up what I know from books, so it's always good to get my facts straightened out a little ;

Dafne:
the ideal was to find a middle ground were a woman could be well... a woman who with the help of her animus was able to be assertive

Hence some of the focus on androgyny, which is essentially a balance between the two elements. There's also something I remember reading about Jung's conception of masculinity/femininity, in which - in a rather un-PC manner reminiscent of the yin-yang split in Taoism (which, again, I haven't been formally trained on, only picked up pieces of from history classes and being Chinese) - masculinity is aligned to acting to affect change and femininity is aligned to more of self-reflection and whatnot. While different halves, a good balance of the two is needed: neither solely acting without reflecting nor solely reflecting without acting is exactly an ideal situation, after all. I don't exactly have my notes on this book at hand, though, so feel free to correct me?

Satyreyes:
I know that Utena is torn between wanting to find a prince and wanting to be a prince, and that exploring and resolving or deconstructing this tension is the main object of her character development from the first scene of SKU to the last.  How do you put that in Jungian terms?  Her animus is stuck in stage 2, a naive view of man as the dashing Prince, and this has taken on an overgrown role in her identity?  Or is that too simplistic and/or completely off base?

Ah, I think what I was trying to get at was talking about Utena chooses to affect change throughout the series? Somehow, my explanation skills don't seem to be working too well today, but I kind of thought that Utena may have used models of all four representations throughout the series: physical skills = strength in the 1st stage, her princely actions = the initiative and capacity for planned action found in stage two, trying to talk Anthy out of suicide = the use of word in the third stage, and her rescue of Anthy and destruction of the castle = the discovery of spiritual meaning found in the final stage. Of course, they are only the main animus images, and plenty more exist (especially since Jung very interestingly said the female animus was more complex and varied than the male one), but basically the question I wanted to raise was about how the female characters view men in SKU. There's been a lot written about how the men in SKU view women, so something in the other direction could be potentially interesting territory to cover as well