dead-dove-moment:

so in your OTP

who’s the driver and who’s the car

Thanks for asking, @booksong​! Especially since a fair number of people who aren’t even familiar with Utena seem to have happened upon this post, I think I might as well get into that a bit.

As I see it, the six word, spoiler-free summary is: “The car facilitates the driver’s departure.”

But to fully explain what that’s supposed to mean exactly, I have to make a digression about Revolutionary Girl Utena’s structure in general.

The Utena TV series is about - among other things - digging into the mythological image of “a prince on a white horse”, saving Rapunzel from the tower and carrying her away.

And - among other things - it comes to the conclusion that this mythological image falls apart, for at least three reasons:

1. It frames the prince as the one with agency in the princess’s story.
2. It overlooks the existence of “towers” that can only be breached from the inside.
3. What if the prince’s destination is just another tower in his own castle?

The Utena TV show was followed by the movie. Among other things, the movie explores this follow-up question: “if not a prince, then what?”

And it offers, in contrast to the image of a prince, the image of a car - something (someone) whose presence and efforts facilitate the princess’s departure from the tower, while allowing her to retain the “driver’s seat” of the story and make her own decisions about where she’s going.

Or, as I’ve put it before: to be not her liberator, but rather, the instrument of her liberation.