"Meanwhile the President’s wife (who is also Akio’s mother-in-law) already had a sexual relationship with him, and was so enslaved to him that she followed Akio’s instructions to poison the President’s food. Kanae, not knowing the relationship between Akio and her mother, occupied herself with her father who has fallen ill."



Thank you for providing this link!

Riri-kins wrote:

Akio is "of common origin" in the series? Wow. So much for my personal canon about them being demigods. This is sooo cool!

I think he only meant to say Akio wasn't the Prince of Siam or something.

This makes me happy and squishy!! Will offer more useful feedback, but right now I'm just wallowing in the awesome.

Touga dealing with sexual abuse by appearing to enjoy it is so...him. Makes Akio all the more a dick for letting Touga get into a similar situation again.

Edit: SWEET CHRIST IF SAIONJI KNEW TOUGA BEFORE HE SWITCHED PARENTS:

- Touga gets 'adopted' by a presumably richer, more powerful family
- He is then showered with expensive things and tasty food
- Saionji wonders why he can't have nice things and no one will adopt him isn't he good enough why does Touga have to get everything
- MEANWHILE SEXUAL ABUSE



So when does Saionji figure it out? I could see that realization, that his jealousy began with circumstances so horrible, being part of his huge attitude change near the end of the show. As well as his joining Touga for his meetings for Akio. Like an attempt to protect him by presence.

Giovanna wrote:

Yasha and I have been barking back and forth about this for like two hours now. The funny thing is, this doesn't change literally anything about our basic interpretations of the characters, but it gives us background to back things up and make the analysis more dynamic. I kinda of tried not to account for Touga being sexually abused because it didn't happen in the show, but if God himself says the events in the movie there were meant to say what happened to kid Touga in the show, well. I believe it.

Man. Poor Touga. No wonder...everything.

Until it happens in the series, it didn't happen. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is, at least for me. The series and the film are utterly separate. Film Touga and Series Touga will always be two different people with different motivations. It's hard for me to accept that THIS piece of film is relevant to series, but say, Juri nearly drowning is actually just a play on something she said in the series. Or that Makio is supposed to accurately represent Akio. "Here is Touga as he REALLY was, but the rest of this is just symbolism and and a different way of looking at the story..." After all, Nanami was a cow in the second film...protecting a cow from the abuse of his adopted parents doesn't seem to have the same weight. I understand that the passage was meant to be referendum on the real Nanami and not the cow Nanami, but once you start picking and choosing what from the film directly relates to the series and what isn't, things start to blur.

The fact that Enokido says this means nothing to me. It's about the same as having Thomas Harris write that Hannibal Lecter cannot be distilled down to a singular trauma, and then having it suddenly revealed several books later that his sister was cannibalized right in front of him by a bunch of soldiers.

It smacks of retcon and revisionism. My $.02.

But who knows.

As you say, Gio, it doesn't really alter my feelings on Touga even if he was abused as youth. If the author wants me to accept that the poor serial killer was an abused child and that's why he's so messed up, he can. I think it damages the character to give him that trauma as an explanation or justification for his actions. It's better to think that his behavior is simply the way he is without having to pin it on a trauma which, in the eyes of some, would be a reason to excuse him for his behavior.

It's the same thing with Nakago from Fushigi Yuugi. I honestly don't care about the trauma in his past. It doesn't make him any more endearing or sympathetic. He's still a monster, and still deserves his fate, regardless of how he came to be that way.

EDIT: Actually, it feels a bit more like reading The Vampire Lestat after reading Interview with a Vampire. The author is expecting me to accept that the events of the first novel weren't really what happened, I should trust the second novel instead. It always felt like Anne Rice decided she liked Lestat and wanted to focus on him but didn't know how to make the readers sympathize with him after the events of the first novel, and so changed things a bit in the second novel. I can see Enokido being this way with Touga, deciding to focus on him a bit and flesh him out a bit more than he was. In the process, Touga is given this backstory which Enokido envisions should have been part of Touga's past the whole time, but yet, during the creation of the series, was never even a glimmer in anyone's head.

Last edited by Ashnod (02-26-2012 04:04:15 PM)

I think the "death of the author" principle is good to apply in cases like this. These notes are interesting to read because they show that the creators of Utena were thinking along a lot of the same lines as the fans, but the 'correct' interpretation of a work isn't something the creator can dictate.

Touga's character in the TV series is a lot better without the revelation of a traumatic past. I kind of thought that the scene in the movie where he tells Shiori about his childhood was meant to show the kind of parasitic and destructive personality she has. She wanted to bed the prince, but when she had him she was compelled to debase him by making him recall his painful memories. Makes sense for the movie, where Touga embodies an ideal that can never be realized, but not the show.

He said he was discussing the TV series and using the movie as an opportunity to add that scene for Touga. The part about the Ohtori family was entirely discussing the series.

There are more interviews which say that the back story of Touga being adopted/bought to be sexually abused was planned from the start, intended to be shown towards the end of the anime series (at some point after you find out Touga and Nanami were adopted), but left out of the series for... whatever reason. It wasn't just an afterthought to flesh out the character. They put it in the movie because it was left out of the anime. Even though that scene doesn't really add that much to the movie. It had originally been intended to be in the anime from the start. One interview says, the movie isn't so much offering an explanation for Touga, but rather going back to the initial character plan for him. It also says that Saionji and Touga were close friends before Touga was adopted. And Touga became very cold toward Saionji after the adoption. Probably if they had first met after the adoption, they would not have become friends at all.


But yeah, since it wasn't shown in the series, it's about like Rowling saying, "Dumbledore is gay," when she should have just directly indicated it in the books if she wanted everyone to interpret him that way. Take it or leave it.


There are a lot of back stories, side stories, and in depth information created about fictional characters in nearly every published work that is never used, never directly stated, or else gets scrapped later, but still went into the story planning and character personality designs. Either the creators feel it is a distraction, or a publisher/editor/censor didn't like it and wanted it cut.

I guess it's about time I offered my own commentry on this...

One thing that's put me off the idea of series!Touga being a rape victim before is the question of where Nanami would fit into the equation. (Would she really have no idea about it? Wouldn't she have been at risk of being abused as well? And so on...) I still have other doubts about it, but these notes at least fill in that Nanami-related gap in a way that's believable to me. It would certainly have added a tragic touch to what's otherwise a pretty rage-inducing relationship - though frankly, it would have made the relationship more rage-inducing in some ways, because in that case he's pulling a whole load of bullshit on the very sister he'd originally been trying to protect. Makes me wonder if a part of him came to resent poor Nanami and blame her for what happened to him.

Ultimately, I think it was for the best that this backstory got cut out of the series - both for reasons already mentioned, and because it would've been hard to pull off without making him into, say, another Nakago. I know Watase has said she chose to reveal Nakago's backstory as late as possible on purpose, but in execution it just felt like a last-minute bid for sympathy that frustrated a lot of fans; I'd imagine Be-PaPas didn't want to make that kind of mistake with Touga.

(Still, I agree that it would be wonderful fodder for fanfiction. I'd love to see a realistically-done fic where Saionji finds out about the abuse, even though I'm sure it would tear my heart to pieces.)

There's also something better about the fact that it's the nicer Touga that got the traumatic backstory, as weird as it sounds. I feel like there's this tendency for male examples of rape-as-backstory (outside of BL, that is) to be evil more often than not, so at least movie!Touga goes against that particular trend.

Moving away from Touga for a change... the comment that Shiori would never return Juri's feelings saddens me, because I really thought their relationship in the series had more hope for it than that. I could tell myself that it's referring to their movie versions, but that would be self-servingly selective reading on my part which would totally invalidate these notes for myself - which is a shame, because I do find them very intriguing and enlightening.

Love wrote:

There are more interviews which say that the back story of Touga being adopted/bought to be sexually abused was planned from the start, intended to be shown towards the end of the anime series (at some point after you find out Touga and Nanami were adopted), but left out of the series for... whatever reason. It wasn't just an afterthought to flesh out the character. They put it in the movie because it was left out of the anime. Even though that scene doesn't really add that much to the movie. It had originally been intended to be in the anime from the start. One interview says, the movie isn't so much offering an explanation for Touga, but rather going back to the initial character plan for him. It also says that Saionji and Touga were close friends before Touga was adopted. And Touga became very cold toward Saionji after the adoption. Probably if they had first met after the adoption, they would not have become friends at all.

That's interesting. Are those interviews from the same blog that had the privacy notes in Japanese? And if so, do those interviews have any other tidbits worth noting? I'm curious to know.

Aw, crud, the site with the translated privacy notes seems to have died. Did anyone get the full text of it down? I'd hate to lose it...

gorgeousshutin wrote:

I myself have wondered if Touga was a rape victim since back before the movie; cause frankly, when I see a teenage boy of 17 being promiscuous with both sexes, AND using his own body as a sexual bait to lure older men WITH PRACTICED EASE (he loved Utena, but still used regular sex with Akio to make himself think he is somewhat in control of that dangerous being of power), I just cannot help but think that there must be something non-ordinary about his sexual history as a young child.

If nothing else, his sexual relationship with Akio strikes me as incredibly unhealthy and age-inappropriate. It would be one thing if he were an adult, but for a 17-year-old highschooler (and one who would otherwise have the world believe he's totally straight, at that) to offer his body to an older male authority figure in his quest for power is... something else.

While I do think the idea of series!Touga being a rape victim is very believable based on his general relationship with sex (plus how cynical he already seemed as a kid in the coffin scene) the thing that still holds me back is that the other Student Council members are duelling for what are essentially fairly daft reasons, so for him to have such serious trauma at the root of his motivations doesn't quite jive. Then again, Utena herself had the serious trauma of losing her parents and witnessing Anthy's pain, and that whole thing with the kitten was serious trauma for Nanami, so maybe it still adds up.

gorgeousshutin wrote:

the other Student Council members are duelling for what are essentially fairly daft reasons

I see the members duelling for reasons that can make them desperate on the arena, that's enough for Akio to use them as pawns to horn his true target's (Utena) soul sword for his eventual taking.  Plus, Miki and Nanami are dueling so their borderline incestuous (thus society-forbidden) desires - ones they can't even face directly - can be sated/soothed, while Juri is dueling to deny/escape her own (in Japan, forbidden) lesbian desires towards a malevolent childhood crush; I don't see those as daft reasons at all.

You have a point there, and I suppose I worded my original comment kind of badly, though I have seen their motivations described like that elsewhere. I guess what I mean is, most of the duellists ostensibly fight for grand things like eternity, shining things and what-have-you, when in reality what they want is much simpler than that - like fixing a broken relationship that really shouldn't need anyone to gain fancy powers. There's also the fact that they tend to have quite rosy memories of how those relationships used to be before they went sour, like how Miki recalls his childhood with Kozue.

To steer this back on topic, I find it quite notable that Touga isn't shown to have idealised childhood memories like that; in fact, there aren't even any flashbacks in the series that are specifically from his point of view. Whatever the reason, that's most certainly deliberate.

I'm really, really torn between 'author fanon' and 'pics or it didn't happen'. See, I've always thought that Touga displayed some very glaring signs of sexual abuse; but on the other hand, not having it shown in the series was an extremely good move on the writers' parts. We're able to get a very, very good handle on the lad without it. See the actions and not the excuse, as it were. But from what I gather, quite a bit of Utena was written on the fly so unless it makes it into the series, any sort of background is up in the air.

As for using the movie as background to the series characters:

The movie is an entirely different canon to the series. It has many of the same characters and it's set in the same place and the main themes are the same- but while the similarities between it and the series, and even occasionally the differences, can be used to understand what was happening in the series, it's still not the same thing. movie!Utena is very similar to series!Utena (and also both manga!Utenas, come to think of it) but Akio, Anthy, Touga and Juri are very different animal in every one of the their incarnations. (Literally, in the case of Nanami).

I do agree that series!Touga does have many indications of sexual abuse, but if it ain't shown it ain't done 'appened. And honestly, it's too easy an explanation, for everything about him. He is hypersexualised to an alarming degree, but he's pretty much up there with Akio; he's not within spitting distance of the man, of course, but by the stage the series starts he's run out of excuses. Touga is/was a baby Akio, but Utena did, in fact, revolutionise his world and showed him a very different path.

As for Nanami:

If Touga's been sexually abused, then so has she. Not recently; I'm betting very early on in her life, probably not long after she was out of nappies. And I'm pointing the finger at Touga for doing the deed. She's completely and utterly incapable of expressing affection appropriately, or forming human attachment/emotional bonds with people. And she's also either a victim or a villain to the ones around her, and she's incapable of being on an even level with anyone. Even if the period of sexual abuse was brief and too early to remember, Touga is shown manipulating the living fuck out of her again and again. And it's obvious that he gets off on it. And that he's been at it for a very long time. Nanami is far too screwed up for someone who's just a spoiled little rich girl.

Also another candidate for sexual abuse? Shori. Slap a big red sign on her.

And I'm still sitting her, torn between taking the notes and running for it, and demanding to see the single cel that backs it all up...

but by the stage the series starts he's run out of excuses

Oh, rape or not, I don't think excusing Touga is the writer's point; rather, I think the rape's supposed to show his motivations for wanting to gain power so desperately so young while already seemingly living in unmatched wealth and comfort within his immediate surrounds - a life that most would think should make a person laid-back instead of so desperately, insecured-ly clawing out for more; Touga deceived Saionji into thinking he's the one to have show Utena eternity back when he was still a little kid, and Utena's defeat of him in the first Arc actually sent him catatonic throughout the Black Rose Arc (My interpretation is that the boy might have felt at his wits' end: if even the sword of Dios cannot give him power enough for revolution/changing his rape-victim situation - which could be ongoing into his late teens since Mr. Kiryuu's wealth means he is also powerful).  Just because someone is a victim does not mean he cannot be a monster at the same time - rather, a victimized person often have a very good chance of morphing into a monster that victimizes others.

As for Akio being the monster that he is . . . I always saw the once innocent little Dios who saw his own sister taking the swords the villagers were really threatening HIM with (otherwise why would they be demanding for help carrying weapons to begin with) as being a victim of severe trauma - one that send him on a mad quest (as he fears weakness in himself) for power ever after in his subsequent role as The Ends of the World.  Either way, it makes sense to me (though maybe not for others) that BOTH Akio and Touga once were victimized and traumatized by unfortunate events, and those events, however different, sparked their eventual similar obsessions with gaining power.

Damn, the link really doesn't work anymore. I wanted to double-check something. In the movie, Touga mentioned growing out his hair because his "father" wanted him to, and I remember they mentioned that in the article.

It's not mentioned in the show, but it is interesting how Touga did seem to be nicer back when his hair was short.


...I forgot what else I was going to say. orz

Thanks, Raven Nightshade   These info pages are too crucial to simply let disappear off the NET!