I watched this with someone I consider family, someone I’ve gone through a lot with and loved a lot through. Given how much our relationship has grown, changed, shifted and matured, it’s terribly fitting it was this show in particular she shared with me. Ikuni’s works connect love and revolution, most evidently seen in Revolutionary Girl Utena but that ethos of “the personal is political” similarly runs through Yurikuma Arashi, Sarazanmai, and Mawaru Penguindrum. While each of these incisively comment…

Out of all the things I learned, struggled with, and went through in college, there's a specific moment that changed me the most. It was during my sophomore year when I had failed half my classes from the year before and given one more chance to make it work. I was, of course, depressed and didn't know it, or more accurately I refused to acknowledge it. Acknowledgement meant that there really was something wrong, and that would mean having to…

Constantly calls attention to its being a cinematic construct in a manner that flattens its multitudinous genre mirrorings and its medium/production/audience relationship. An overwhelming amount of pastiche and iconography imbricates its subplots with these callbacks (the jitterbug contest what I feel is a hilariously perverse refraction of The Wizard of Oz) as a certain kind of phenomenological recount of Diane's life through cinema, stitched as if her life has going through editing. Finding a satisfying weight to lend the symbolic…

Jeffrey Beaumont’s first encounter with something simultaneously terrible and beautiful sparks a process of self-transformation, that enigmatic outside object a confrontation as much as what we come to realize is an interior enigmatic. Whether the subject creates alterity or alterity subjectivizes itself within that subject, it’s this encounter of an aesthetics of the terribly beautiful that threatens a certain kind of ego encounter that defamiliarizes and dysregulates us from the usual ways in which we engage with the world. For…

We can't help but feel like the worst person in the world. Not to our friends necessarily, or our families for that matter, or even to the one(s) we share a bed with, but to ourselves. Decisions we made that we can't really call 'self-destructive', that's not quite it, but destroys our lives anyways. Destroys what we've built the last few years of our lives, and with no idea of how we'll survive after. Why do we do this to…

Kids learn fast when they have to. Kids also don't really get the gravity of situations either. Sometimes a distressing situation is that way to all but kids, who come up with their own solutions with stark simplicity. To them every day is a new one, and so when a truly new day happens it feels like any other. As long as they can make it to the next, that's about as much as it matters.

Nobody Knows: the fact…