LAST EDITED ON Aug-06-14 AT 12:25 PM (EDT)
 
>I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree there.

You say that as if there's room for some ambiguity here. This isn't a judgment call. I'm telling you that your assumptions about why that story arc went where it went are wrong. Full stop. You can insist that you aren't feeling it all you like, but that's on you.

(Christ, I think I finally know how Hideaki Anno feels. "Yoouuuu don't understand my aaaaarrrrrt!" :)

>Another part of it is that... well, after
>she explains how she's already in love with someone else, that should've
>been the end of it.

Oh, for - I just - is your life not a process? Because you seem to be operating under the expectation that Utena's, Corwin's, and everybody else's isn't going to be. It's very... pigeonholing. "This is your role. You will remain in it. There will be no adjustments."

There is a certain irony there.

(And, funnily enough, the process is still ongoing, and I'm getting shit about that too, albeit not specifically from you.)

>Instead, what comes after reminds me, in a very
>uncomfortable way, of the implicit, toxic belief held by certain
>groups of people, usually young, geeky males, about certain other
>people, usually women, to whom they have a one-sided romantic and/or
>sexual attraction.

Except that it was never one-sided, which Utena's own ruminations in the course of Bancroft Tower, to say nothing of various subsequent events (Monolith, anyone?) ought to have made pretty plain.

>The belief is that, to the woman,
>the man is a friend (often expressed in such terms as "just a friend"
>or "friend zone" which carry the implicit assumption that anything
>other than a romantic and/or sexual relationship with her is,
>ultimately, an inherently lesser and unworthy thing), but if the man
>continues spending time with her as her friend, he'll eventually have
>turned in enough friendship tokens that she'll suddenly see what a
>wonderful man he is and become thoroughly besotted.

Oh, horseshit. Drawing that conclusion from the evolution of Corwin-and-Utena is like saying that because my couch is covered in slightly wrinkly grey leather, it must be an elephant. You've failed to check your own baggage at the door there, plain and simple.

>One of the reasons that the whole Anthy/Corwin thing re: conceiving
>Utena and Anthy's first child bothers me is because this echoes the
>above to some extent, and it's also predicated upon the belief that a
>child conceived through heterosexual PIV sex is somehow more worthy,
>more real, than one conceived using medical technology.

I know I've been over this in another thread pretty recently, but:

A) She wasn't saying children born from medical intervention are, in and of themselves, Bad and Wrong, just that that kind of thing wasn't for her - she phrased it clumsily because she was under a lot of stress at the time; and

B) She might have been lying. She does that sometimes. ... Quite a lot, actually, when she's trying to accomplish something that she doesn't feel she has time or mental bandwidth to explain to the muggles.

I'm not going to get drawn into the "heteronormative" tar pit, except to note:

>that Anthy refers to Utena as her husband
>(reflecting a heteronormative expectation of butch/femme pairings in
>lesbian relationship), that sort of thing.

Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this one too. Utena is called Anthy's husband because she's a prince. That's part of the source material's gender politics baggage, not some kind of weird attempt at passive-aggressive activism on my part, I mean for fuck's sake.

The relationships in the Symphony stories, and indeed pretty much any story of mine that I can think of, have nothing to do with me having some kind of an agenda. They're driven by the characters and their circumstances. That's it! It's really that simple. Ironically, it would occasionally be way, way easier for me if it wasn't, because then I would just be able to make them do whatever's easiest for me to clean up after, which this obviously wasn't.

I'm trying to be patient and engaged here, I really am, but at this point it's fairly plain that my first instinct was right and I should just have stayed the hell away from this discussion. There are assumptions at work on your end that are so ludicrous as to be sort of tacitly insulting, and besides, the whole problem is that looking-for-meat-in-the-produce-aisle thing again. UF isn't some kind of exercise in metaphor-based social justice advocacy, it's fucking sci-fi-fantasy crossover fanfiction.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.