Finished the TV show. This might just be the boldest, most impressive TV anime I've ever seen. I mean, 39 episodes of cocktowers and moist roses and swords being polished, all executed with earnest single-mindedness (C.A.P. described this general attitude the show has really well a few pages back). The series fully commits itself into doing what it does and sticks with it, and I just have to wonder how much Ikuhara and co. had to battle against censors and marketing department zombies to keep the crazy train going. Or were the ratings always really good so they had free rein to do whatever they wanted? At this point I've only superficially glanced at the liner notes and other info dumps in this thread, so I don't yet have a grasp of its production history.
I'm obviously not part of the intended target audience, being a more standard-narrative tits-and-robots type of idort, so while I enjoyed playing spot the penis, this level or artsiness isn't my cup of tea. It was the same thing when I watched
Angel's Egg. I thought "oh wow, this is some impressive weirdness", but it didn't engage me on a deep personal level. Hence my purely subjective score of merely "good"; it's not assessing the objective quality of Utena as a cultural artefact, and this needs to be pointed out before Xard stabs me through my mail slot. The show made me repeatedly
laugh out loud and utter "what" out loud, which means it pushed a lot of my buttons, and while I won't be revisiting it any time soon because of its length, I'm kind of looking forward to rewatching it ten years later or so because I can tell repeat viewings are going to be totally different experiences. After all, I went in blissfylly blind. I had heard the "shoujo Evangelion" description and seen a minute-long video tutorial on appreciating the repeating rose motif, and that's about it. In fact, I have a feeling that the eventual second viewing is going to be a much bigger mindfuck for me when I start spotting all the things that flew completely past me the first time around.
Also, the finale made an admirable job of resolving the best gril issue:
That is some fabulous skewering.