There will never be another character like Anthy Himemiya

(Intro)

A mini-essay I wrote about the impacts of Anthy Himemiya's character on RGU, and on my life. (Written in Feb.)

Part 1: Overture

In April of 1997, a show called “Revolutionary Girl Utena” aired for the very first time.

The show’s premise was deceivingly simple. There is a girl, the titular “Utena”, who wants to be a prince.

Of course, the show’s actual text is much more complicated than that.

However, at the center of the show, one character stands out among the rest. Her name is Anthy Himemiya.

Part 2: The Rose Bride

Anthy Himemiya is a normal, teenage girl. She is quiet, sweet, docile. All the things people expect a “true woman” to be. She maintains the roses of Ohtori Academy. She is ever obedient, ever silent, and always blending into the background.

Anthy Himemiya is The Rose Bride.

A stand-in for the role of the woman, Anthy is as much a character as she is a myth. In her, she carries the pain of hundreds before her. Her brother, the male myth of Ohtori, never allows her to forget this. To him, and to all of Ohtori, Anthy is whatever you want her to be.

A wife.

A sister.

A puppet.

But truthfully, they’re only really saying one thing.

A witch.

Part 3: The Witch

Anthy Himemiya is not an innocent person. She isn’t the ideal of victimhood that most writers of a story like hers fawn over. She is messy. She pushes, tricks, and hurts the people she loves.

The last time she tried to get people to understand, she was punished for her courage with hate.

Forever

And ever.

And ever.

Eternity is different for girls.

Anthy is, at her core, the “witch” of this world. A girl who was so “selfish”, all for wanting her dear brother to be safe. For trusting in the world to treat her kindly.

A mistake I, too, have made one too many times.

In 2024, I watched Utena for the very first time. I cannot understate how much it impacted me. That year was one of the worst of my entire life. After a lifetime of trials and tribulations, I truly believed I’d reached my absolute limit. Some of the worst things to have ever happened to me, happened. I didn’t know how to go on.

Neither did Anthy.

Eternity is different for girls, because it is carried by an undercurrent of suffering. In Ohtori, to be eternal is to never change. To be Crucified. Fixated. Held down and told that this life was exactly what you deserve.

If you cannot escape an “eternity” where you are doomed to the same cycle of abuse forever, why go on? Why keep living?

This question was what I grappled with during this time, and it was the same question Anthy faced in the final episodes of the show.

Poison, betrayal, wickedness. Anthy was a wicked person. She had to be. Or else why would any of how Ohtori worked make any sense? How could this system exist without someone to blame? Without a role to shove thousands into, time and time again. To recycle the same fairytale narrative with the bait of “change”.

True change, in Ohtori, was never offered to anyone. Let alone to someone like Anthy.

“The Rose Bride” can never change. She wishes to be this way. She was born this way. This is who she is.

But not everyone plays by Ohtori’s rules.

Part 4: Utena! Someday, Together…

At the same point where Anthy is at her lowest, her most vulnerable, Utena, too had been scarred. Abused and horrifically violated by the same figure she idealized her entire life, Utena’s ideas of who she was, what being a “prince” meant, or even if she could be loved was thrown into question. In face of this, however, she didn’t freeze.

She looked to Anthy, not as a competitor, not as a prize, not even as princess, but a person. As someone deeply flawed, deeply hurt, and deeply human all the same.

Utena, kicking and fighting her way to the ends of the world, ripped it open. The so-called “prince” stayed behind. Dios and Akio, two splits of the same ideal, watched as Utena embodied the real value of nobility. The pristine, glowing, clean “prince” people had come to expect was replaced by a girl who was bruised, bleeding, and falling to her knees. Giving up every ounce of her lifeforce, of her energy, just to reach out her hand and scream:

Take my hand!

Take my hand. Come with me. Please, to a world where we can both be happy. To a place where in ten years, we can have tea together someday.

I never believed such a world could be possible before this show.

So often, in media, when portraying abuse, there is not really a sense of agency attributed to the experience of abuse. Every victim must be saved. “Saved” however, carries a horrid connotation. “Saving” removes the freedom to choose. Once again, you fall into the same patterns you were trying to escape. A revolution occurs, and the loop begins again, and again. There is no choice in being “saved”, and most aren’t offered the chance to choose their life on their own terms.

But Anthy is. Utena reaches her hand, asking to go together to this new world, and she takes it.

They touch, and Ohtori has changed. Eternity had ended. A new day, finally, had dawned.

Part 5: The Roads We Pave

However, the story doesn’t end there, of course. Anthy leaves, she’s seen a world where she can be happy, where she is something other than a bride. Utena “disappears”. She, too, has left.

Utena doesn’t give you a storybook ending. It doesn’t hold your hand and tell you “See! Everything that they suffered is gone now!” Characters like Anthy, are often either erased of their agency, erased from existence, or erased of their pain entirely. Characters like Anthy, don’t get to be hurt, and still get to live happily. Characters like Anthy, don’t have a “someday, together”.

“The Rose Bride” could never be free, but Anthy is. That someday is now. And the revolution is coming recklessly, faster than anyone could ever anticipate.

…The world is cruel. It hurts, bruises, and scares those who try to forge a life of non-conformity in it. But since when has “conformity” mattered to them anyways?

They’ll pave their own roads, their own way. Build a life where both of them can truly be able to love.

I have spent a lot of time since then, searching for a character who captured this sentiment. That for every person scarred by life circumstances, there is always a path out. Copycat “Rose Bride” characters are common, yet I fear they almost always miss the exact point that Anthy’s arc got across. To me, Anthy is special because she is perfect imperfection. She is the ideal, and the worst thing you can be. She is everything, all at once.

But she is a child. A teenage girl with too much placed on her all at once. She is still in her adolescence. And she has so much more left to go.

There will never be another character like Anthy Himemiya, because she still has so much life left to live.

And if she can escape, and find a world where she can be happy, maybe all of us can do the same.