08.21
Pity it was only one ball.
As the show has previously shown, Nanami is the school bitch. She has her own posse, makes plans to humiliate Anthy, and really wants to get in the most popular guy’s pants. She’s like Libby from Sabrina, but with 20% more incest. Even in moments of seeming kindness, Nanami makes a point to ruin it within a second, and this episode is her moment to shine in that regard. Sure, the school bitch trope has become a tired cliché in fiction. Every work of fiction that involves school-aged characters will have some popular girl who reads off smug putdowns that have been passed down from MySpace to FaceBook and beyond, with no real character other than to serve as an easy excuse to introduce an antagonist. Only recently is backlash towards this archetype becoming more prominent with criticism towards Pacifica from Gravity Falls and a huge sigh of relief that Lottie from Princess and the Frog wasn’t one.
But this wouldn’t be Utena if Nanami could only be described with a couple words. A few glimpses of her personality are revealed here, with her intense paranoia that Touga’s out to kill her based on him talking about pest control. You could take that as her own realization of her personality. While she might believe herself to be “stylish and cute and popular”, there’s an implication running deep when she thinks everything’s trying to kill her. Does she believe that others will treat her the same she treats them? In fact, you could possibly chalk up her abrasiveness as a form of emotional insecurity. For the supposed school queen, she could be much less proud of her position than previously thought.
And that could possibly be why of all the men who could be run to her defense, it has to be an elementary school kid. She’s unable to handle a relationship with men her own age, so her abilities are limited to manipulating a kid who can barely reach four feet. I would love to see how this relationship progresses in the show so I can make a random thesis about pedophilic Oedipal complexes, but at this point, that’s trying to make an abstract painting out of a can of tomato paste. Instead, the kid Tsuwabuki has the simple dream of wanting to be a big brother, someone who can protect others with his charm and strength. After all, a brother would never do anything cruel to their little sisters, could they?
This episode sets up the theme of the brother complex that will run throughout the show, where the pressures of reality challenge the ideals of supposedly strong men. And through Tsuwabuki’s fight with a trio of confused suitors, the show wants to discuss the worth of being someone who could protect others. In being pummeled by men twice his age, he didn’t gain Nanami’s respect or anything that will benefit him in the long run. He served primarily as a shield, and nobody looks at that armament with the honor that a sword offers. In that scene, the show makes us ponder on the value of a thankless effort, where your benefactors take and never give for one’s hard work. But as always, whoever heard of equivalent exchange in a fairy tale?