Hey peeps! Just a heads up that I’ll be tagging along as @casejackal dives into the Hiveswap Friendsim for the first time, later tonight at 6PM CST. Feel free to join us if you wanna watch some furries shoot the shit, talk about classpects and whatnot.
All I can really say in terms of assurance is that the POC who’s “content to be servile” is one of the most complex and nuanced characters in fiction imo, and most of those other characters don’t slack far behind.
My friend recommends ep. 4 as the beat that got him hooked. I’d say give it til 7 because that’s where my favorite character arc comes into focus for the first time.
That said, I know I talk Utena up a lot here and I am completely genuine about it but I also feel a certain obligation to make something clear.
I can’t promise you’re gonna like Utena, because Utena’s not a show for everyone. It happens to speak to my sense of aesthetic visually, so it’s got one up on me that might not work for you at all. But thematically and content-wise it just really, really is not for everyone.
Because Utena deals almost exclusively with themes of abuse–social abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. It’s a show about fucked up people hurting each other in fucked up ways. It explores the complexities of incest and incestual abuse quite a lot.
As an incest survivor that’s always been interested in archetypes, apocalyptic imagery and stories about abuse’s effects on human psychology-largely due to personal reasons-all of that naturally proves pretty resonant to me. It might be absolutely horrific to some other folks, and just kinda boring for others.
I think the way its handled puts it on about the same level as Homestuck, in some ways. But Homestuck focuses on more systemic and physical/fantastical violence, in a lot of ways. It’s rarer that it gets into more explicitly sexual territory.
Utena, on the other hand, is visually a lot cleaner-it’s pure shoujo, no blood or gore to be had, most of its conflict rendered symbolically and through character performance.
But the subject matter it deals in is just closer to social, grounded reality, and the kinds of violence it deals in are I think more likely to be…personally triggering? So I really can’t be sure everyone will enjoy the experience. I just know I’m a big fan, processing stuff through it did me a lot of good, and the story gets better the more it adds to the layers of interpersonal drama and symbolic meaning.
probably not, it doesn’t really feel right anymore. I’m planning a whole evolution to the channel experience in a bunch of ways so this’ll just be another change
Flying through Storytelling 