Swords and Gods in Utena and Hitherby

Hi everyone! This seems like a neat place, might at least save the people I know some blank nodding.

The claim I want to make here is that heart swords in Revolutionary Girl Utena and gods in Hitherby Dragons are more or less the same metaphor.

Content warning for child abuse, since that's a significant theme of both works, not to mention spoilers for both of course.

Let's start with Utena. It's sometimes said that swords in Utena represent relationships, but I'm not convinced* - for instance, it's difficult to see under that reading what would be so special about Utena using her own heart sword rather than Anthy's later in the series. As I see it, the key to understanding the heart swords is from episode 15 (The World Framed By Kozue, the first black rose duel with a student council member). Near the beginning, we have the following exchange between Mikage and (Anthy-)Mamiya (my emphasis):

Which is to say, as I understand it, that heart swords represent something like motivation, reason to care or the set of things someone cares about. It's difficult to purposefully direct your own heart, but someone with a "hold over your heart" can do it for you - whether you want it or not.

So why is it that the student council in particular have these swords? In the context of Utena, it's because they're duelists - people who aim to revolutionise the world because they can't accept the way it is. Why it is that the experiences that create a duelist that make their 'ways of caring' interesting will hopefully become clear.

Conveniently**, Jenna Moran has written a few times fairly clearly in Hitherby letters columns about gods. In particular (my emphasis):

I read things like that as saying that when someone's model of the world becomes totally untenable and collapses, they create a new one. In the hitherbyverse, the new model/approach/whatever is embodied as a god, which is why the Monster tortures children*** - he breaks survival strategies, and worldviews that say 'the world is basically safe (as long as...)', to benefit from the gods created to replace them.

So, to spell out the connection:

A heart sword/god represents an approach to or understanding of reality, with respect to what matters.

They're created when a traumatic experience forces someone to abandon an older one (although in Utena characters often cling to their previous understanding). They may be created in other circumstances as well, but that's the route that both stories focus on.

Abusers deliberately drive the process to take the results for their own benefit. It's unclear to me whether this has a real-world parallel, since approaches to reality don't in real life tend to manifest physically as theological weaponry or even sharp metal sticks.

Nonetheless, it can be healthy under the right circumstances (maybe debatable in Utena)

Hopefully that makes some sense (at least to people familiar with both stories)!

* though it could be both, multivalent symbolism and all that

** for me at least, since with no firsthand experience I'd never unpick the metaphor on my own

*** apart from just enjoying it