If you saw this thread and your first thought was "I wonder if the main writer for 90s cult hit girls' TV anime Revolutionary Girl Utena ever wrote an essaylet vaguely relating to this topic? Man, if he did I hope somebody would copypasta it into this thread", then wow are you in luck!
http://www.gwern.net/docs/1997-utena#the-sunlit-garden---étude
Series Structure Yoji Enokido – [BE-PAPAS]
So what is this show’s scenario driving at?
Aw, come on, don’t ask me that. I’ll blush. The cage may be one that you can slip out of one day without even knowing. However, the moment comes when, quite by chance, you notice the existence of that “labyrinth.” There comes a time when you realize you’ve lost sight of the path you must take, and now you’re lost. Maybe it’s when you happen to visit an old building, and you see the light filtering in through its skylight. Or maybe it’s when you hear a cicada chirping in the woods one summer at dusk. There comes a time when you feel something the word “nostalgia” alone can’t encompass; something heartrending that you feel throughout your whole body. “Ah, that’s right, I remember this sensation. It’s nice, isn’t it…” It’s not like you want to board a time machine and go back to your past, but you do long to savor past pleasures one more time, to experience them vicariously. No, that’s not right. What I want to say here isn’t that there are moments when you wish for something like that; it’s that the yearning to vicariously re-experience those times from your past is present in all humans on a fundamental level. That there are moments when you become aware of that fact. Our philosophy of love, our ideal of the future - I wonder if those things aren’t largely rooted in that “yearning for vicarious experience”; if that yearning isn’t another factor besides the genetic information coded into us from birth. Setting aside the question of whether that’s most properly called a learned motive, a desire for the sense of omnipotence we once had, or something we can write off more simply with the word “sentiment,” the point is that there comes a time when it’s brought home to you that the “yearning for vicarious experience” is something you have within your own heart as well - a force almost like gravity. “The same tone as my little sister’s…” Miki blurts in a whisper. “That sunlit garden… I’ve found it. My ‘shining thing.’” And we instinctively know that it’s dangerous. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sentimentality, of course. Sentimentality is a tool that can, and should, be used. However, because humans are fundamentally beings which live into the future, if we are ruled by sentiment, we lose the momentum to keep flowing forward and become stagnant. That’s why we this a “labyrinth.” By the way, labyrinths are symbols of growth and death. After being hurt emotionally, people often set off on journeys into a labyrinth-esque device. The labyrinth of the mind has no physical form, so it’s hard to grasp with the senses. And so you “solve” the problem by synchronizing your mental labyrinth with a visible one: you wander across a physical distance or through a physical course, and if your wound heals you’ve reached the center. But when a man arrives at the center of a labyrinth, he is no longer the man he was before he entered. Growth means the death of the person you were up until that point. The labyrinth called “life” has no physical form, either. Our “way of life,” known as “creation,” can perhaps be thought of as the formalization of the unseen into the easily understood.
So what is it you want to portray, exactly?
Miki’s lament of “Why can’t I find someone to be my ‘shining thing’?” Miki Kaoru’s “shining thing” symbolizes the desire for vicarious experience, of course. The white house on the hill, the greener grass on the other side the hill, and the castle in the sky. It’s not just limited to the desire for vicarious experience - the motif of “the happiness on the other side” comes up over and over again in Revolutionary Girl Utena. For some reason, we almost never depict a “sample” of happiness itself. Even the “Utena” in the title isn’t the flower itself: it’s the calyx on which the flower rests.
The “shining thing”, the desire to vicariously re-experience times past. I don’t wish to gainsay that. (That sunlit garden is too beautiful for me to gainsay it all.) I don’t wish to merely show off its beauty either, though. (If you’re simply ruled by sentimentality, you can’t even maintain the capacity to truly experience beauty.) Perhaps all I’ve really done here is to briefly point out the theme within the story of “The Sunlit Garden”, and this whole piece of writing has been nothing but an étude I’m playing in preparation for a story I have yet to write. The sight of someone who is aware that he is being ruled by sentimentality toward the past even as it is ruling him, and who in time matures into effectively wielding such sentiment as a tool in his arsenal, and the framework of this world, which is set up to let that happen - I’m sure that’s what I want to portray. It’s what I feel I should portray. The fact that we’re loved by the world. The fact that that we can still love the world. Because when you get right down to it, I think what I ought to convey through this form called screenwriting is a love letter. (Actually, I think all creative works should be love letters.) And the “most important thing” about a love letter isn’t its style of expression, so we mustn’t commit the folly of striving for technical superiority to the exclusion of all else. (Technique alone won’t make you eloquent. You need passion! Passion!) Not that anybody ever kindly tells me “Your lack of perfection is your strength.” (laughs)
