We found it…the worst Utena take

[erinptah]

Never actually watched any James Somerton videos before the big callouts dropped. (If you missed them, and have some time to kill: Hbomberguy’s 4-hour video about plagiarism where half of it is just Somerton, and Todd in the Shadows’ 2-hour video about the sheer amount of blatant lies he told about queer history and media.)

But the other night I ended up watching this streamed commentary/breakdown of Somerton’s Utena video:
 

Watch on YouTube

 

2/3 of the way through, it’s mostly a sludge of reading off Wikipedia interspersed with lukewarm takes. Then, around 1:54:25, a line that made me stop cold and rewind to make sure I heard it right:

“…which I feel gives a lot of undue complexity to a work that is otherwise meant to just be straightforward.”

UNDUE COMPLEXITY. Utena!

Meant to just be straightforward! UTENA?!

I just

Wh

(For the sake of not spending an hour on this post, I am restraining myself from getting into the weeds about more specific stupid takes that the streamers didn’t call out already, but I can’t leave this out: He also goes on this big tangent about how Miley Cyrus doesn’t indicate anywhere in the music video for “Wrecking Ball” that the construction imagery is supposed to be symbolic? The song where, if you only know one thing about it, it’s the line about how the wrecking ball is a symbol)

Comments

[muccamukk]

Maybe it's just because I'm only getting a distillation of his worst takes, but his lack of media literacy is really quite impressive.

[erinptah]

I know, right??

(In some cases it has to be the lack-of-media-literacy of the other writers he's plagiarizing from, but the fact that he doesn't notice takes this bad while he's *reading* them is...a lot!)

[shamanicshaymin]

Straightforward. Utena.

About the show where a girl literally turns into a cow.

That's not even scraping the bottom of the barrel, we're tearing right through the floor.

[erinptah]

And that definitely doesn't have any symbolic or allegorical meaning! It's just the completely normal, mundane way that people sometimes turn into cows. If that was supposed to convey anything deep about the characters' inner lives or social dynamics, surely one of the characters would have turned to the camera and explained to us that they're deep?

[lb_lee]

I thought she turned into a car???

[erinptah]

The character who turns into a car -- or rather, the several characters who do that -- are from a separate incident than the one where a character turns into a cow!

The car situation is from the movie. The cow situation is from an episode of the TV show. There's also a cow in the movie, but I don't remember if she has a "used to be a girl" backstory in that continuity, or if she was a cow the whole time.

Utena is just...Like That.

[genarti]

WHAT.

[makamu]

Has the guy ever seen even a midge of an episode of that show?

[atamascolily]

I only know of the drama tangentially, but my take-away has been that apparently you can just say anything on YouTube and people will follow you? Wild.

[erinptah]

That sure does seem to be the takeaway, yes D:

[lb_lee]

My equivalent of that was when he conflated Noh and Kabuki, which are RADICALLY different styles of theater and even I fucking know that having never seen any of EITHER.

Like, literally the only things I knew about them was "Kabuki: big flashy loud" and "Noh: nobody understands it except people who are really, REALLY into it" but that was enough!