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narcasseI may well be reiterating a point that everyone else has known for ages but for the longest time I really didn’t understand the Prince’s change from being good and noble Dios to manipulative and cruel Akio. I just took it as a given part of the story framework and never looked into it further. Because of that I never really understood Utena’s leaving Ohtori Academy in the context of her transcending the prince archetype either. It wasn’t that Utena failed at being a prince but rather that she gave up a fight she couldn’t win and didn’t in fact need to engage with at all. She didn’t need to divide the world up into princes and villains with victims thrown in in between even if she was pushed to that revelation forcibly by failing at an impossible task.
The Utena story being strange as it is I’d never given too much though to the business of Dios falling ill and had only ever seen it in the context of all the sexual allegory floating round. But if Dios had truly been trying to save all those helpless damsels and had finally run out of strength to do so it might not necessarily be the case that he’d come back to the only person he couldn’t save but rather that Anthy was the only person who he didn’t need to save. Maybe she was the only person who didn’t cry out for salvation so she became the witch who is self-sufficient and willingly joins in Akio’s later schemes. As the witch it may very well be that Anthy is one of the few people the Prince has met who have their own agency and isn’t waiting for someone else to come along to save them. What Anthy does with that agency aside, though she does follow her own direction the entire way along, it stands to reason that in contrast the Prince hasn’t been possessed of his own agency. He’s been reacting by rescuing all those who turned to him for salvation and in the end that’s worn him out to the point of collapse. And it is sometimes during that period of forced inactivity that he makes the transition from Dios to Akio.
Akio emerges as a particularly manipulative individual with a callous regard for those he uses and this, at first glance, stands in stark contrast with the behaviour of Dios. But what Aiko’s behaviour may be in reaction to may be the enforced behaviour of Dios. Dios saves everyone or at least princesses and yet all this does is result in him running himself ragged. So while he’s forced into inactivity because he simply can’t do anymore it’s likely he’s actually had to sit with his own thoughts for a change. He has the opportunity to think through his preceding actions that have led to this point and analyse and evaluate them. And, so I’d theorise, he finds himself questioning the validity of his continual heroism. He probably wonders at first how he’s ever going to manage to save all those helpless damsels, then he starts to wonder why he’s obligated to, then he starts to realise that he’s reacting to their helpless cries for salvation and then maybe, just maybe, he starts to wonder why they won’t do anything to save themselves. And to top it all off if he wants an example of a female in close proximity who applies her own agency in her choice of actions he has his sister who actively shields him from the mob who want to know where the Prince has gone and when he’s going to come back and save everyone. Suddenly all the helpless damsels don’t look like people he wants to save anymore.
The sudden revelation that he’s not obligated to save anyone is probably enough of a shock to Dios’ central beliefs about himself and the world to make him revaluate his position drastically. And once he accomplishes that all the good deeds he once did, all the maidens he saved start to look like a rather large waste of time. In essence he’s spent his entire life saving people he wasn’t obligated to save and who started to take his heroism for granted. As a result with a new angrier outlook on life in place he becomes the manipulative Akio who is not only out to accomplish his own ends but doesn’t see how it could hurt to punish some of those week and needy damsels along the way. He’s probably not striking out at them in an attempt to correct their behaviour at all by this point but rather in a punitive fashion because these helpless individuals who wait around for him to save them are just the same as all the ones he saved before. These then are the people who used up all his time, energy and emotion to the point of exhaustion and the moment he stopped saving them they regressed and needed saving all over again. They’re not people who needed help at some stage and were willing to then continue to work to save themselves; they’re people who’ve been sitting around stubbornly waiting for the Prince to fix and continue to fix everything. So understandably Akio gets cross with the entire seemingly fruitless task of playing Prince to all these damsels.
Of course by this stage it’s, to his mind, their own fault if they fall for his manipulations. They’re not even trying and more or less revelling in their inability to save themselves which may or may not be an accurate perception of their situations anyway. And helpless damsels come in all forms, even ones who are trying so hard to be princes. Touga for instance seems to buy in to the idea of being a prince but still remains an easy target for Akio’s manipulations, Juri allows Shiori to manipulate her just as Akio manipulates Touga and of course Utena, initially at least, allows herself to become the damsel as soon as Aiko comes along. Funnily enough Ruka of all of the nascent princes may well be the one who first succeeds in accomplishing his aims because he never seems to aim to become the prince archetype consciously, instead he lets his choices lead him down that path subconsciously so it could be argued that he doesn’t fit alongside the other three anyway.
The entire point being that the prince simply can’t win. He can’t save all the damsels and he certainly can’t do it forever. The prince unlike the damsels in the story is a finite resource. And on a personal level if he just keeps giving and giving constantly there will be an imbalance that will eventually cause some kind of equalising reaction, which in Dios/Akio’s case becomes that transformation into someone who then uses the remaining damsels who go to him to seek salvation. The equalising reaction wouldn’t necessarily have to be as extreme as Akio’s but considering the implied extent of his princely duties as Dios it certainly does make an awful lot of sense. And who knows? Maybe Akio’s revolution would be a world where all those damsels have to face up to their own responsibility to themselves, a world where he’d be freed from the prince archetype entirely. And while he might not be pursuing said revolution for their sakes but rather his own, the end result would be more or less the same anyway: the creation of a world where individual responsibility replaces dysfunctional fairytales.
The Utena story being strange as it is I’d never given too much though to the business of Dios falling ill and had only ever seen it in the context of all the sexual allegory floating round. But if Dios had truly been trying to save all those helpless damsels and had finally run out of strength to do so it might not necessarily be the case that he’d come back to the only person he couldn’t save but rather that Anthy was the only person who he didn’t need to save. Maybe she was the only person who didn’t cry out for salvation so she became the witch who is self-sufficient and willingly joins in Akio’s later schemes. As the witch it may very well be that Anthy is one of the few people the Prince has met who have their own agency and isn’t waiting for someone else to come along to save them. What Anthy does with that agency aside, though she does follow her own direction the entire way along, it stands to reason that in contrast the Prince hasn’t been possessed of his own agency. He’s been reacting by rescuing all those who turned to him for salvation and in the end that’s worn him out to the point of collapse. And it is sometimes during that period of forced inactivity that he makes the transition from Dios to Akio.
Akio emerges as a particularly manipulative individual with a callous regard for those he uses and this, at first glance, stands in stark contrast with the behaviour of Dios. But what Aiko’s behaviour may be in reaction to may be the enforced behaviour of Dios. Dios saves everyone or at least princesses and yet all this does is result in him running himself ragged. So while he’s forced into inactivity because he simply can’t do anymore it’s likely he’s actually had to sit with his own thoughts for a change. He has the opportunity to think through his preceding actions that have led to this point and analyse and evaluate them. And, so I’d theorise, he finds himself questioning the validity of his continual heroism. He probably wonders at first how he’s ever going to manage to save all those helpless damsels, then he starts to wonder why he’s obligated to, then he starts to realise that he’s reacting to their helpless cries for salvation and then maybe, just maybe, he starts to wonder why they won’t do anything to save themselves. And to top it all off if he wants an example of a female in close proximity who applies her own agency in her choice of actions he has his sister who actively shields him from the mob who want to know where the Prince has gone and when he’s going to come back and save everyone. Suddenly all the helpless damsels don’t look like people he wants to save anymore.
The sudden revelation that he’s not obligated to save anyone is probably enough of a shock to Dios’ central beliefs about himself and the world to make him revaluate his position drastically. And once he accomplishes that all the good deeds he once did, all the maidens he saved start to look like a rather large waste of time. In essence he’s spent his entire life saving people he wasn’t obligated to save and who started to take his heroism for granted. As a result with a new angrier outlook on life in place he becomes the manipulative Akio who is not only out to accomplish his own ends but doesn’t see how it could hurt to punish some of those week and needy damsels along the way. He’s probably not striking out at them in an attempt to correct their behaviour at all by this point but rather in a punitive fashion because these helpless individuals who wait around for him to save them are just the same as all the ones he saved before. These then are the people who used up all his time, energy and emotion to the point of exhaustion and the moment he stopped saving them they regressed and needed saving all over again. They’re not people who needed help at some stage and were willing to then continue to work to save themselves; they’re people who’ve been sitting around stubbornly waiting for the Prince to fix and continue to fix everything. So understandably Akio gets cross with the entire seemingly fruitless task of playing Prince to all these damsels.
Of course by this stage it’s, to his mind, their own fault if they fall for his manipulations. They’re not even trying and more or less revelling in their inability to save themselves which may or may not be an accurate perception of their situations anyway. And helpless damsels come in all forms, even ones who are trying so hard to be princes. Touga for instance seems to buy in to the idea of being a prince but still remains an easy target for Akio’s manipulations, Juri allows Shiori to manipulate her just as Akio manipulates Touga and of course Utena, initially at least, allows herself to become the damsel as soon as Aiko comes along. Funnily enough Ruka of all of the nascent princes may well be the one who first succeeds in accomplishing his aims because he never seems to aim to become the prince archetype consciously, instead he lets his choices lead him down that path subconsciously so it could be argued that he doesn’t fit alongside the other three anyway.
The entire point being that the prince simply can’t win. He can’t save all the damsels and he certainly can’t do it forever. The prince unlike the damsels in the story is a finite resource. And on a personal level if he just keeps giving and giving constantly there will be an imbalance that will eventually cause some kind of equalising reaction, which in Dios/Akio’s case becomes that transformation into someone who then uses the remaining damsels who go to him to seek salvation. The equalising reaction wouldn’t necessarily have to be as extreme as Akio’s but considering the implied extent of his princely duties as Dios it certainly does make an awful lot of sense. And who knows? Maybe Akio’s revolution would be a world where all those damsels have to face up to their own responsibility to themselves, a world where he’d be freed from the prince archetype entirely. And while he might not be pursuing said revolution for their sakes but rather his own, the end result would be more or less the same anyway: the creation of a world where individual responsibility replaces dysfunctional fairytales.
