take my revolution / let’s start a revolution

Oh no. It has come to my attention that someone has put Utena and Young Royals against one another in a poll and people think they are polar (poll-ar?) opposites who should fight. Do they not see that such combat itself is a tool of the patriarchy?

The world is NOT READY for the story of how my unhinged love of Utena as a middle schooler actually laid the groundwork for my love of Young Royals. Young Royals and Utena are not enemies. Utena is the butch (gruff, yet comforting) art teacher with pink hair and Young Royals is the newly out high school student who is always eating lunch in her art room and asking her what it was like to live in New York before gentrification.

THEY ARE SUPPORTING ONE ANOTHER IN THIS BLEAK WORLD. Do not hurt them by making them a false choice.

But is being a prince really such a good idea? Utena and Young Royals as companion texts

When I was thirteen years old, I got adopted by the anime kids at my school. They started me out not on Ranma 1/2 or Sailor Moon, as was common in the 1990s, or even Fushigi Yugi, which still less common but still something that happened if you were in a friends circle particularly gifted in fansubs. Instead, I sat down one day on my living room floor (my parents weren’t home yet) and began watching a loaned VHS copy of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Watching that opening sequence felt like getting away with something. I took in the fairy tale imagery and the colorful spinning roses, recognizing the word “revolution” in an otherwise Japanese theme song, and suddenly realized… I was watching a show about girls in love with one another. My friends and I may not have called Utena and Anthy “lesbians” out loud when we discussed the show (and we didn’t even have the word sapphic in our vocabulary at that point) but somehow I knew, in my gut, that this was their love story. I had a vague sense of my own queer identity that I felt too scared to voice at the time, but watching Utena let me feel it, at least.

Since that first day with Utena so long ago, it has become one of my forever fandoms and remains highly influential to me in my creative life. It was the first piece of fiction I remember that introduced me to Audre Lorde’s idea that you could not dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Most of the books and cartoons I grew up with offered female protagonists, but claimed that giving a girl pants and/or a weapon and making her “not like the other girls” was enough to make her empowered. Utena was the first time I remember a story that questioned that idea while still asserting that Utena’s gender non-conformity was right for her. In addition, Utena was one of the first works that helped me appreciate weirdness and surrealism, and led me to believe that heavy themes are absolutely worth tackling in the fiction I write.

Flash forward to 2021 when I first watched Young Royals, a Swedish teen drama I did not expect to take over my life. You can pitch Young Royals to someone by stating the plot points—boy meets prince, they fall in love, monarchy is now in jeopardy—but that won’t tell you everything about the careful way the show comments on adolescence, privilege, the class system, gender, neurotype, and so many other relevant topics. YR is written and acted intelligently, and it gives its audience a lot of room to think. As I fell deeply in love with the world of YR, I kept thinking to myself, wow, this show reminds me of Utena. I knew my love of Utena was feeding into my love of YR, and helping me to interpret what I saw onscreen.

So without blathering on too much longer, I thought I’d break down some of the similarities and differences between the two shows, which will hopefully make the case as to why every fan who can should watch both:

Similarities

• Both shows use school settings as a commentary on society at large. YR primarily takes place within the insular boarding school world of Hillerska, and all the action of Utena all occurs within the sprawling (but stifling) campus of Ohtori Academy. I love educational settings as a microcosm! Each school has a hierarchy accentuated by class and gender, wherein certain students are elevated and others are put down. While adults are more present onscreen in YR, the presence of the adult world is still felt in both fictional worlds and puts additional pressure on the teenage characters to behave in certain ways.
• Both have incredibly complex characters. I would elaborate here but it would just be a long list of me gushing about absolutely every character on both shows and what makes them unique. Instead, let me just say this—there are so many characters in both shows who lean into messy decision making. And yet you understand where each character comes from, and the more their backstory unfolds, the more compelling they become.
• Both shows dive into gender roles, feminine and masculine, and how they can be used to constrict us. Utena is about more than a girl who fights with a sword and calls herself a prince, and Young Royals is about more than a boy who expresses tender feelings. Each show examines the negative impact of patriarchy on people of all genders, showing how girls are often held to impossible madonna/whore standards while boys are often socialized into behaviors involving sexual aggression and violence. Both shows make the case that it is worth fighting back against these currents in our societies.
• Both do not ignore sex and sexuality as a part of adolescence. And both shows get misinterpreted and have been criticized (unfairly) because of it. YR is slightly more likely, in my opinion, to show teens having positive sexual experiences alongside more negative and neutral ones. But I also feel like that might be related to the time periods in which they were written.
• Both deal with themes of abuse within families. Many of the characters in both shows have dealt with abuse, which then impacts how they move through their relationships at school. In YR, for instance,we know for sure that the Eriksson siblings have grown up in an abusive home, and that this affects how Sara and Simon move through life. Utena, as a series, is fairly open about confronting CSA and incest as forms of abuse, which is something YR doesn’t do as much. However, I don’t get the sense that YR is ignoring these realities, just choosing not to focus on them in their more limited episode time.
• Both (as of now) suggest that contests and false choices perpetuate systems of oppression. Who is worthy of being engaged to the Rose Bride? Should Wilhelm or August get the throne? Get too caught up in that debate and you’re prevented from asking whether the monarchy or the dueling system should exist in the first place. You’re also distracted from the physical toll and threats our heroic characters have to endure as they attempt to reform or challenge these systems. Utena tries to put herself on top of the dueling system to protect Anthy, the Rose Bride, and let her be a normal girl, but that system is ultimately intent on destroying them both to keep patriarchy going. Wilhelm and Simon could theoretically become king and prince consort, but what toll would that take on their relationship or their plans for the future? Now admittedly, YR still has a season 3, so we don’t know what the status of Wilhelm being king is, and whether he’ll choose to leave it behind. But the show has frequently called attention to the challenges of reforming the monarchy from within and how it stays entrenched by its old traditions. I’m willing to revise my thoughts here depending on the show plays out!
• Both play on the idea that fairy tales are darker at their core. Want to fall in love with a prince, or be a prince? There’s a cost to that. Both shows play with the idea of the prince as a persona and then proceed to deconstruct that persona. Both Utena and Wilhelm end up as princes in a moment of deep traumatic grief, even though Utena becomes a “prince” by choice and Wilhelm becomes one by birth. Yet the prince role and the power that comes with it is not what gives them the opportunity to heal from that grief. At times they are both compelled to “rescue” those they love, but the narrative cautions them about how that act of “rescue” can involve seizing power within a corrupt system and having that backfire.
• Both have an epic queer love story at their heart. I mean, come on. Utena and Anthy? Wilhelm and Simon? Both worth sobbing into one’s hands over. And both of these pairings emphasize choosing what is true and authentic over what is fake, and walking away from the people and systems that would harm us.

Differences

• YR is has a main mlm couple, Utena has a main wlw couple. Admittedly, both of them engage with queerness beyond the love story between their primary power couples. I bring this up mostly because people carry different assumptions about mlm shows vs wlw ones, and this may need to be unpacked in a future meta.
• Utena is surreal, YR is realistic. The shows have completely different ways of delivering their message. Every episode of Utena is interrupted by a theatre troop of moralizing shadow puppet girls, offering metaphor-laden commentary. You’re likely to see episodes where characters switch bodies or someone turns into a cow. Young Royals, meanwhile, has the texture of real life. The teenage characters have acne, and their rooms are cluttered. Characters re-wear favorite items of clothing and put ketchup on their spaghetti. Both of these approaches pack an emotional punch—YR because the world feels lived in, Utena because it’s like something you’ve dreamed and just woken up from—but they look so different in practice that it’s easy to miss everything Utena and YR have in common.
• Utena handles triggering material differently than YR does. This is probably because it was an animated show created in the mid 1990s whereas YR is a Netflix series written now. Standards were/are different for what you do and don’t show onscreen. For this reason, I can absolutely respect someone’s decision not to engage with either show, based on how each show engages with various triggers. One show of the two might be too much for some people and that’s fine.
• The shows come from different cultural contexts, presented to an international audience who might not grasp the nuances of each without additional explanation. Obviously, Sweden and Japan are different countries with different social codes. A Swedish production and a Japanese production are going to address different cultural values and questions of the moment. So obviously when you get into the details, there’s some important differences between the works for that reason alone.
• They have seemingly different fanbases? Seemingly. But I feel like there’s room for nuance here, and I think they have more in common at first glance than you’d think. (Disclaimer: I do not believe either of the stereotypes I’m going to discuss, I’m just trying to tease something out.) The stereotype of Utena fans is that we are mean pretentious art school symbolism junkies, and the stereotype of YR fans is that we are… I’m not sure. Milquetoast uwu tenderqueers who just wanna see cute boys in love? These stereotypes in turn affect people’s perceptions of the shows in question, and deeply unfairly, too. But, look. As an Utena fan, my heart has so often melted over the love Utena and Anthy have for one another, complicated and painful as it may be at times. I absolutely ship it. And as a YR fan, I have absolutely engaged in my pretentious art school side, because the are miles and miles of symbolism and complex writing for people to chew on. Those curtains are blue and they are also meaningful. I really do think we have more in common than we don’t.

Anyway… remember when I talked about false choices, like Wilhelm vs August, or who gets to be engaged to the Rose Bride? Utena versus Young Royals is a false choice of its own.

The internet is inevitably going to turn this into a Flint vs Stede battle, because the internet was a mistake. I hope I have proven by now that Utena and YR fans should watch one another’s shows together, and discuss them, and then plot the revolution together. The word “revolution” shows up in key songs for both shows, anyway. Maybe we should take it as a message.