Episode 12: For Friendship, Perhaps

Utena tries to be normal, and is no good at it.  She duels Touga again, winning back Himemiya and her own self-esteem.

This is a summary of episode 12 of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena.  You are welcome to link to it, but not to repost it elsewhere.  For more information, and other episode summaries, see the index.

Utena is absent from school.  Wakaba visits the dorm and finds her still in her pajamas, staring glumly out the window.  She's not ill; she's just depressed over losing the duel and Himemiya, who has moved out, presumably to go live with Touga.  Wakaba finds Utena's uniform, with a hole slashed in it by Touga's sword; she offers to fix it, but Utena says don't worry about that, I have another uniform.

Her other uniform turns out to be a girl's uniform.  When she shows up at school wearing it, most of the other girls swoon over how cute she looks in it - which she does - and Wakaba is annoyed and tells her off, saying it doesn't suit her - which is also true.  They encounter Himemiya, who treats them as polite strangers.

Wakaba becomes more and more impatient with Utena, who seems to be numb and dazed, not interested in anything but being "normal." When Touga shows up to ask Utena for a date, fondles her, and she doesn't react at all, Wakaba tries to throw a drink in his face, misses and hits Himemiya instead, and when she says it's Himemiya's own fault for not paying attention and getting out of the way, Utena exchanges slaps with her.  Before storming off, Wakaba says she's glad that Utena can at least still react to something.

Touga has tea with Himemiya, but completely ignores her - he's talking on a cellular phone to someone else the whole time he's there, and then he leaves in the middle, telling her to wait.  While he's gone, she apparently is thinking about Utena.  Meanwhile, Utena seeks out Wakaba and they have a heart-to-heart, Wakaba saying that she doesn't understand what has happened to turn Utena into a coward, but she hates it, and she wants the old Utena back.  Utena comes to an internal decision, thanks Wakaba for the insight, kisses her on the forehead, and goes off to challenge Touga to an immediate duel.  She finds him in the rose garden, kissing a random unidentified girl right in front of Himemiya.

Jury gives Utena a sword - the same one she used in her own duel against Utena - and the Duellists face off.  But Touga has a trick up his sleeve:  he orders Himemiya, "Bride of the Rose!  Abandon your body and protect the sword!" and she kneels and lingeringly kisses the end of the blade in a ceremony that has no sexual subtext whatsoever.  The sword begins to glow with blinding red light.  When they start fighting, he is virtually unbeatable, and quickly cuts right through the blade of the sword Utena got from Jury.  He also removes a fair bit of Utena's uniform.  Nonetheless, at the last second, aided by the Power of Dios and possibly also by Himemiya's feelings, Utena manages to overcome the magic of the sword, and wins the duel, cutting off Touga's rose with the stub of the broken sword.  Himemiya moves back into Utena's dorm.

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