This Happened To My Buddy Eric Who Is Also Me

a take on if trotsky was a saber clone in FGO and lizette (oc) , both requests for my very good friend @fisheatingowntail ! Happy birthday!!

1710 Unknown artist - Portrait of an elderly woman from Konstanz, probaby Katharina Werh, née Büttner, wife of the mayor of Konstanz, Jakob Georg Werh

(Badisches Landesmuseum)

nah this is what adam looks like

no more tiktok tonight i think

Art idea: give Battler a witch outfit? He deserves better than his normal clothes plus a cape (a dress would be neat but whatever you think fits his style)

Here you go! You have no idea how psyched I was to take a stab at this LOL

ty to @fisheatingowntail for suggestions/ideas on brainstorming this!

Shri devi (Palden Lhamo), Central Tibet, circa 1750-1850.

happy birthday to some guy

this bot that just followed me is making me absolutely fucking lose it

Mild hot take but I don't think a Gnostic or Buddhist or Kabbalistic reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena is necessarily incorrect. I'm used to people dismissing readings based on those assumptions out of hand but I don't think that's quite fair.

Not that this layer cancels out the more obvious and central stuff about gender and fairy tales of course, especially given how heavily gendered Gnostic and especially Kabbalistic symbolism is.

(A thorough reading of Utena from a Kabbalistic symbolism lens sounds interesting but very much beyond me at least, lol. Maybe if I ever read Wolfson and Idel.)

Still while I'm confident the show does flirt with more esoteric and mystical ideas I don't think it views organizations built around those ideas very fondly. Most esotericism is premised on exclusiveness coming from possession of secret knowledge and the groups which position themselves on that ground (the Black Rose society and to a lesser extent the Student Council itself) are portrayed as cults, more or less.

this just makes it sound like akio is the demiurge. which. you know. probably

I dont know how to phrase this thought i just had but this picture of ohtori school reminds me a lot of a church, and also that gothic churches were built that tall to represent how powerful and big god was, making people feel small there.

Also in some latim-derived languages like spanish Dios mean God, which makes sense when he falls from the castle in the sky and "bless" utena with strenght because of her 'faith' in him (as she sees him as a hero and is her biggest inspiration) and that makes me think of the religious (catholic i believe) symbolism of utena.

Dios is God, as he falls from heaven to bless the faithful. He comes from a castle on the sky that promises miracles such as the eternity of your happiness and innocence. Ohtori academy is the church, as everyone there is a small thing compared to the creator of everything: Akio. The students are children, Akio is an adult there conditioning them in following his schemes (like the boys are powerful princes and girls are helpless princesses and if they refuse that theyre witches), which would make him the God of his own illusions.

The students are just believers, Akio controls them in his own mysterious ways as the end of the world, but them when someone is defying him he has to take the matters in his own hands.

Akio could truly believe he is a God, shaping students as he wishes in his endless timeless illusion, but he isn't. Dios, the real Prince, God, doesn't exists. Akio just thinks they are the same, but in reality, Akio means Lucifer, and his Godly version of himself is only what the people who blindly loved him (anthy, utena) saw

"Asvatthama Fires the Narayana Weapon at the Pandavas", from a Razmnama, 1616-1617. The Razmnama was a Persian translation of the Mahabharata commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar as part of his project of translation of various Sanskrit texts into Persian.