The art is pretty bad and the writing is worse. I admit I'm more familiar with early 2000s shoujo, and my primary experiences of shoujo from this time period were "Sailor Moon" (which is older), "Magic Knight Rayearth", "Fruits Basket", "D.N.Angel", the "Cardcaptor Sakura" anime, the "Ayashi no Ceres" anime, and the little bit I've read of "Fuushigi Yugi", but this is just... meh. I'd rather just rewatch the show and film. ( )

The whole thing is way too complicated for its own good, but Utena is a wonderful main character. I want to see where she goes even though I find the internal mythology of the story excessive and thus boring. CW for this story: one of the main female characters gets hit several times by her boyfriend. I understand avenging this is part of Utena's motivation but it still feels really gross. ( )