Next year Utena turns 30 and I haven’t seen it since it aired. Might be time for a rewatch!

• studio was founded to get away from the ‘manga-to-anime’ pipeline and have more control
• was meant to be a standard children’s show
• nah, fuck that.

Same studio, but is it the same devs?

… If you’re someone who doesn’t speak Japanese.

Ah-ni-meh if you speak Japanese.

My simplest explanation is that Russia’s powerful wanted to be in charge and look out for themselves, just extracting weath from the other union members who they tried to keep in line with violence. Democracy was a farce and there were no plans to transfer power to the proletariat. This lead to separatist movements in many countries, violent and peaceful.

The Chernobyl incident seems to be the nail in the coffin, bankrupting the state if they didn’t get outside money. The Russian elite then shut the whole thing down, rigging the sell off of state assets (aka the whole economy) to create the oligarchy and an ultra capitalist Russia, and the reinvigoratation of the church and conservatism, undoing social progress too.

I’m sure there other big factors too but they’re the main ones that stuck with me, after going to dozens of museums throughout eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Russia.

Not a requirement, just an accepted norm. There’s plenty of counter-examples on supermarket shelves, too (and why they all have 写真はイメージです (photo is an illustration only) on the box).