The Palace Perspective: Nanami Kiryuu at the Heart of the World

A series of essays on sibling incest in Revolutionary Girl Utena

This series has been four months in the making, and I’m excited to present it in its complete form. It has taken me nearly a third of my lifetime worth of obsessing over this show to get to the point where I’ve been able to write this.

This series of essays aims to get to the bottom of what the point of sibling incest is in Utena; why it has been chosen as such a central and deliberate theme, what it tells us about how Ohtori works, and what it means for us back in the real world. Utena posits a shockingly radical and shockingly compelling argument not only for what predation and abuse are, but for what gender and romance themselves are, and understanding its ideal of the sibling relationship is crucial to understanding anything else it says.



This entire discussion would be an incoherent and unsolvable puzzle without Nanami. Her story, told parallel to and intertwined with Utena’s “main” narrative, is the final and most crucial key to both understanding and destroying Ohtori. Nanami is the confluence of all forces in Utena, and tracing each of these forces back to its source allows us to plot the mechanism of Ohtori in whole – and in plotting it, we are able to recognize, dismantle, and prevent places like it.



I expect this to be a difficult read. It is long, detailed, and in places very explicit. Please be cautious while making your way through these – but don’t shy away. This subject is so important in no small part because it is so difficult to talk about.



Thank you for reading.

The skies were changing; darkening and storming more and more often. Her life was changing; the prince was not as close as he once had been and would not speak of it. The world was changing – the citizenry increasingly resentful of the palace, and their faceless scorn mounting. Her body was changing as well, and she understood none of it.



If I were to come up with a single phrase for what I think the full story is; the thesis of Utena if you will, it would be this: “gender as a structure reproduces itself violently: especially through romance and sex, especially against children, especially within families – and, at its core, all three of these at once.”



Nanami must have felt like a cruel joke. Like watching a mockery of herself that happened to be a living, breathing, profoundly naïve girl. Anthy watches Nanami make all of her own old mistakes. Anthy watches her pose in caricatures of her own movements. It is a brutal reminder. “This is where I came from? This is what I was once like?” As if… as if…



There are two opposed models of the princess that must win out against the other to prove that they are worthy of the position. Each are told that they are the princess and that the other is the witch, forming a feedback cycle of guilt, blame, and desperation which can only be escaped by recognizing it as a rigged system. There are, after all, two ways to be a princess. Either be a prince’s sister, or marry him.

Something in Touga snapped, more fear than anger. “Because the world demands it! The world screams for it! We’re out of time! There must be the supports, or the entire structure collapses!” “Why… why her, then? Why her?” All he had left that night were his stupid questions. “Do you only object because you actually care about this one? Blinded by your dreamy, blind chivalry? We don’t have the luxury to believe in love any longer, Saionji!”