Magic: the Gathering and the Seitokai
From UtenaWiki
This article is an opinion piece, rooted in subjective analysis rather than in the objective facts of the series.
Like much of the Shoujo Kakumei Utena fandom, I'm a nerd. My nerdiness is far-reaching, ranging from anime to video games to role-playing games and beyond. So when the opportunity arose on In the Rose Garden to overanalyze various characters' places in the Magic: the Gathering color pie, naturally I jumped at the chance. This article presents my conclusions about where the members of the Seitokai belong on Magic's five-piece color pie.
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The color pie
For those who don't speak Nerd, Magic: the Gathering is a collectible card game -- the father of all modern CCGs, in fact. Most Magic cards are assigned to one of five colors depending on what they do and how they are flavored. A card that represents a zombie, for example, is likely to be black; dragons are red, angels white, and so forth. The five colors are white, blue, black, red, and green. Each has a distinct and very complex personality. I'll be summarizing the colors as we go, but here's the ultra-condensed rundown: white is about justice, blue is about reason, black is about power, red is about chaos, and green is about instinct.
Notice that there are five colors and five Student Council members. If possible, we'd like to find a one-to-one mapping: one Seitokai member per color. This turns out to be possible, perhaps even in a few different ways, but we'll have to stretch a little to do it.
Blue
We'll start with blue, because it's the easiest. Blue believes in reason and intellect, the power of the mind to overcome obstacles. If you need to solve a problem, the first step is to learn about it. Think of Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter books, or Merlin from Arthurian legend; both characters are notable for knowing a lot and defining themselves by their knowledge. On the color wheel, blue is adjacent to black, and like black, blue can be sneaky and manipulative; but it is also adjacent to white, and like white, blue can bend its talents to the greater good.
No one on the Student Council is a perfect fit for blue, but one character fits much better than the rest: Kaoru Miki. He's the only character on the Council who's defined by his genius; even his first duel was called "reason." Our introduction to him comes during a study session. Like blue, Miki subordinates his passions to his better judgment -- if he didn't, Kozue would be murdered by now -- and like blue, Miki always wants to be in control. Miki's decision to stay out of the Mikage Seminar because he didn't know what he was getting into and was intimidated by Mikage was a very blue decision.
In spite of these traits (and his hair color), Miki is not perfectly blue. He is a warm friend and has a moral center, traits usually associated more with white or green than with blue. But he is a fairly good fit -- certainly much better than any other member of the Seitokai.
Green
With blue sorted out, we move across the color pie to green. Green is Magic's color of nature. It is animalistic, rejecting planning in favor of doing what feels right at the time. Sometimes this means that green is a hippie, a spiritual being in commune with nature and in desperate need of a shower. But other times, this makes green a very angry grizzly bear. To find a green character, you find a character who doesn't believe in analysis, scheming, or manipulation -- someone who knows what they want and does it, to hell with the consequences.
Only one character on the Student Council fits this mold: Saionji Kyouichi. The other four spend too much time thinking or scheming; Saionji alone has embraced his inner grizzly bear. Look at how he reacts when people get between him and his cubs, as when Utena comes between him and Anthy in the first two episodes. Look at his total lack of guile, his frothing naivete that leaves him open to Touga's and Akio's manipulation. Paradigm green.
The only problem with placing Saionji in green is that the argument for doing so mostly stems from his rage, and rage can be a red trait as well as a green one. On balance, though, his anger is more feral (green) than passionate (red), and he is probably greener than any other Student Council member.
Black
The final three colors will be trickier than the first two. Black is next up. Given the color's usual symbolic connotations, it should come as no surprise that black is the amoral, power-hungry bastard color of Magic. Sometimes black is actively evil -- Judas Iscariot would have been a black card -- or sadistic -- Eric Cartman is black. Other times, though, it's characterized simply by a total lack of concern for anyone who gets in its way on its road to power. At its extreme, black is happy to kill, torture, or rape to fulfill its schemes for power.
So who's the power-hungry bastard on the Student Council? It's gotta be either Kiryuu Touga or Kiryuu Nanami. Nanami, though, isn't power-hungry so much as petty. She's often mean, and she's intensely status-conscious, but the worst we ever see her do is plot to embarrass Anthy with an octopus -- not exactly on the level of Judas. Touga's schemes, on the other hand, are far from petty. To attain revolution he will throw Saionji to the wolves, seduce and destroy Utena, sleep with Akio -- whatever it takes. That's core black.
Could Touga be another color? Yeah. Overlying the black, Touga has a layer of white. It manifests itself in chivalry, a love of beauty, and a certain misguided nobility that seem more white than black, especially late in the series. You could put Touga in white. But his fundamental ego and selfishness militate towards calling this Kiryuu black.
White
So if Touga's not white, then who is? Well, traditionally, white is the color of the good guys. It's the color of civilization, of morality, of law and order. White is very big on justice, rewarding the virtuous and punishing evildoers in pursuit of a paradigm society. In excess that can be a bad thing -- fascism would be white if it were a Magic card -- but in general, white's desire to make the world a better place is a net positive. A Santa Claus Magic card would be white, and so would King Arthur.
We're down to Arisugawa Juri and Kiryuu Nanami as our unassigned council members, and of the two, the better choice is clearly Juri. Juri has a clear moral center -- it's at least half of what makes her stick up for Shiori against Ruka -- and she is highly disciplined, a trait you only tend to find in white and blue. Leading a fencing club is also a heavily white activity; fencing is a sport of learned maneuver and intense concentration, and leadership is white in any case. Add in her desire to believe in miracles, which ties into white's fondness of religion, and we've found our white council member.
A perfect fit? On the face of it, no. Juri also has some characteristics we'd like to put in red. For someone so disciplined, Juri snaps a lot, and when she does, we see a repressed, violent inner fury. But in a way, the fact that she feels the need to repress her passionate side makes her all the more white. White can't abide such open displays of chaotic emotion.
Red
The final color on the wheel is red, and by now you've inferred what red is like. Red is about freedom -- not the philosophical Lockeian kind, but the wild abandon of a rock concert or the might-makes-right chaos of a brutocracy. Like adjacent green, red knows what it wants and plows after it, but like adjacent black, red lacks special respect for life; red is Homer Simpson, or a fraternity, or Iraq.
Kiryuu Nanami fits tolerably well in red -- and a good thing, too, since she's the last character left! She is consigned here partly by her petty scheming; green doesn't scheme, black isn't petty, and she's certainly not blue or white. Further, Nanami is guided by impulse in her interactions with other students, and she's not held back by the moral implications of employing an elementary schooler as a bodyguard. And oh, how she enjoys sowing chaos among her numerous imaginary rivals, from Utena to Anthy to Keiko!
In spite of her scheming and penchant for causing chaos, however, Nanami could almost be green. The Nanami's Egg episode paints her as a surprisingly maternal figure (motherhood is green), and you could interpret her relationship with her minions as a pack dynamic that calls back to green's animalism. We also saw Nanami as a candidate for black. She is probably the most color-flexible character on the Student Council.
Alternatives
So when all is said and done, we've managed to come up with a clear mapping of Student Council members to colors:
Are there other ways to do it? Sure. For one thing, you could switch Nanami and Saionji. Nanami is green enough, and Saionji red enough, that switching them wouldn't raise many eyebrows. Alternatively, you could rotate Touga into white, Juri into red, and Nanami into black; this setup makes different assumptions about the characters' most basic impulses, but it's not implausible.
In a group of characters this complex, settling on a single color for each of them is difficult! But if we want a Student Council member for each color, the arrangement above is the most grounded in each character's way of living.
Acknowledgements
This article sprang out of a couple discussions on In the Rose Garden, here and here. I'm indebted to Frosty for the idea of assigning colors to the Seitokai and to CMK for the idea of making them a "cycle;" he also came up with the same character/color assignments as I did above. Others whose thoughts influenced this piece included Giovanna, Ragnarok, and ShatteredMirror -- and of course Mark Rosewater, who is not (as far as I know) an IRG member but whose articles about the color pie on magicthegathering.com are seminal. Finally, I am indebted to Tokenas for discussing the color assignments with me and pointing out the rotated cycle I mention under "Alternatives."
