Miki Kaoru - Blog Posts
I love it! Thanks for your hard work to bless the fandom with this.
This is by far, my longest animatic to date. Im sorry it took so long and that I havent released art in 4 weeks at all, but it was to work on this! I hope you all enjoy it. I know i usually post evangelion and danganronpa, but im really proud of this one. I enjoyed utena dearly and just really wanted to make something big for it, to show my appreciation! Also, huge thanks to neta for helping me make the shadow girls part! Their tumblr is @strawberry-flavors!
Miki all the way. He’s just so pleasant, but he still has issues like any other Utena caracter.
Fuck myers briggs, reblog and tell me your favorite utena character
AU where Akio drives a minivan
I've recently watched RGU and I wanted to draw a Little something, so I thought that Drawing this duo as a detective duo would have been very fun. I also wanted It to look like something out of an illustrated book so It took a while but I'm really satisfied with the result!
Just like any self-respecting Utena fan, I've latched onto a (semi) minor detail that I just can't find a satisfactory explanation for!
(MASSIVE RGU (series and movie) spoilers ahead!)
As someone who has engaged with RGU supplementary material plenty, it often goes out of its way to point out how Miki's eyes are "like crystals" and similar things. You can see it in the game and in the light novels.
The fan translation is accurate in this case.
So after staring at movie screenshots one too many times, I noticed that his eyes aren't blue there... they're green! And he's the only character whose eyes changed like this.
What does this mean? My first thought was to connect it with the characters who most prominently have green eyes in the series - Anthy, Akio and Dios. The characters who have the most power despite also being the most trapped in the system, with Anthy in particular having the power in the movie and being the only one of the three who is alive - if some theories are to be believed, she was the one who created the world the movie takes place in in the first place. However, she's also the person most trapped in it too.
However, their eyes are definitely not the same shade. More on that later.
An interesting part occurs in the movie during the Touga and Shiori scene - we cut to Miki and Kozue in the bath. It seems Miki has grown since the anime - he accepts that there's no going back to their childhood, and tells Kozue she's still precious to him. In response, Kozue threatens him with a razor and calls him a traitor.
And yet, the next time we see them, Kozue has become a car, and he smiles after she passes by, not sparing her a single glance. What happened? Did she become a sacrifice? She isn't seen individually afterwards unlike Shiori or Wakaba, she becomes just another car in the locust crowd. Perhaps more unsettling is the reason he gives to Juri for being a duelist - "I always wish to obtain more power". Juri responds to him by calling it manly.
That fucking smirk haunts me. Anyway.
Pursuit of power - doesn't this ring a bell? Perhaps like a certain student council president? Of course, in the movie, Touga is dead, so perhaps someone else took his place in the narrative... Miki. The unsettling implications of what happened to Kozue seem to add to this. Not quite as sinister as Touga's relationship with Nanami, and there's no reason to see it as similarly complex, but also I don't see what else it could be.
So even though Miki appears to be pursuing power at the cost of even his sister, potentially, he's unable to get there. His eyes are not the same shade as Anthy or Akio, not even close - they're much brighter. He appears to have shed some of his innocence - no longer wishing to go back to that garden - but he traded it to pursue more power. No wonder he isn't ready to leave Ohtori yet.
An English-speaking person may also be tempted to connect this to the common expression of "green-eyed envy", and yet I'm profoundly unsure if this is the case. He's never shown to be envious of the power possessed by anyone (unlike Touga, he can't look up to Akio, who is also very dead), even if he and Juri see the ghost of Dios inspecting the cars.
However, no matter how much he desires power, in the end, he's one of the people helping Utena and Anthy escape. He tells them how to go to the outside world. He promises the student council will join them eventually. Arguably the most good-natured interaction Anthy has with any of them.
His eyes appear to be showing how much he's changed since we saw him in the anime, and in some ways, perhaps not for the best. However, he's not fully trapped in the hell of Ohtori Academy yet - there is hope for him, even if he's strayed into such a dangerous path.
In the end, I think all of them deserve their revolution, even if the road getting there is bumpy.
...Or maybe they thought it would fit him more to have green eyes idk lol-