This is the first in a coming series of three posts reflecting on the various roles of Utena Tenjou, the titular character of Revolutionary Girl Utena. These posts are adapted from an academic paper I wrote in Fall 2014. These posts assume the reader has completed the anime and thus contain spoilers. Citations will be noted in footnotes at the bottom of the piece.
By way of introduction, the thesis of my paper was, in essence, that the character of Utena deconstructs a trio of archetypes and reinterprets each of them in her own identity. This is from the first section of the paper, which details my thoughts on Utena’s narrative role as the protagonist of the story.
Mage in a Barrel 