Off the prompt "cuddles."

Fandom, niqaeli would like me to tell you about the van.

Okay, so who here watched Roswell? A handful of alien teenagers and a handful of human teenagers variously hooked up and hid from the government and some other aliens with the aid of Snapple for three seasons? That Roswell. Right. Okay. So in the finale of Roswell, all of the kids graduate high school and decide to flee their enemies in an old VW microbus.

Um, look. For real, I am not making this shit up.

No, wait, but the best part is, then they get married. Okay, mostly the show meant that Max and Liz get married but the gang's all there and the honeymoon is in the van, with everyone else so I DO NOT THINK I AM IN ANY WAY WRONG FOR SHIPPING PUPPY PILE.

Anyway, I have a fairly thorough map in my head of who sleeps with who in the Roswell group marriage. And while we were watching Utena, I had the terrible mental image of if all the duellists and Anshi managed to escape the Hotel California Ohtori Academy together in a van, what would all the relationships be?

So far I have determined that Touga sleeps with Saionji and also Miki. (Not related to sexing but as a now-our-mental-canon-in-pretty-much-any-scenario-ever, Utena keeps a rolled newspaper to thwap Touga on the nose whenever he tries to be her prince, and Touga has a permanent ink smudge on his face.) Utena and Anshi are a thing but they manage to get through Juri's barriers eventually and drag her into lesbian threesome. After Juri has unbent a little she makes an overture towards Nanami and Nanami gets on her high horse and announces she does not lay eggs like girls. Miki and Utena reassure Juri that it's not homophobia or even a personal rejection--she's just not Touga. (Miki and Utena might be the only remotely sane het pairing in that van.) Nanami is totally the snooty one who doesn't sleep with anyone but they never quite kick her out, in part because do they really want to expose the rest of the world to her insanity? Given that she canonically has the makings of s serial killer. Occasionally they go around the van checking if anyone is willing to throw themselves on that grenade to a chorus of "No" and "Hell, no" and Touga's "Perhaps--" which is cut off by "OH GOD NO."

niqaeli says they should totally take Wakaba in the van with them, it's like taking Kyle! She is more right than she knows; she hasn't seen any Black Rose arc yet.

I don't know why I'm telling you all this. It's not like I'm going to write it. And I'm pretty sure the crossover between the Roswell and Utena audiences in my readership is like, two people. But it makes niqaeli happy. So here you go.

j_crew_guy linked me to a thread containing, among other things, a theory on how the Utena movie could be interpreted as a sequel to the Utena series (rather than a retelling).

One of the other things is a discussion of Anthy, the evil witch, we hates her, precious. People talking about getting enjoyment out of the million swords of human hatred scene, and how she deserved it when Saionji hit her because she just stood there and took it, and how Saionji must have been right to do so because he was so honorable in other areas of his life.

That's what inspired the title of this post.

( side note about Saionji )

To me, if you see Anthy as an evil witch, you've missed the point of the series. You've missed the revolution.

Anthy is called a witch because in the societal trap they're in, any woman who has any independence or exercises any power (ie, is not a victim or "princess") must be a witch. Anthy-the-witch and Anthy-the-victim are perceptions, based on restrictive gender roles, and the revolution is about overthrowing the rules that say that's all she could be.

Utena starts the process of subverting the gender roles by becoming a prince (actually, it could be argued that Juri is the first step of this subversion, masculinizing herself in kind of a "lesbian = man in a woman's body" way, and Utena progresses by desexualizing the definition of prince; a prince as a strong human being as opposed to a straight-man-or-a-lesbian). However, changing the rules so that a woman can be a prince (or a man could be a victim or witch, though why would they want to be?) is not enough.

The key is that Utena cannot save Anthy, and in the end Anthy saves herself. It's not enough for Utena to be a prince; she's not really saving Anthy as long as Anthy is still a princess. You have to toss out the entire paradigm: no more princesses, no more witches, no more princes, because princes are the counterpoint to princesses. If you don't victimize people, you don't need people to save them.

And that's the fucking revolution.