Interviewer: How did you feel about episode 33, “The Prince Who Runs Through the Night”, in which the relationship between Utena and Anthy greatly changed?
Nasu: Oh, “The Prince Who Runs Through the Night”. It depicts Akio-san on a highway at night, talking on the phone. You think “what’s going on with this direction?” as it drags on for an almost tedious twenty minutes. And then the shocking two minutes at the end. I remember dropping my jaw and thinking “What’s going to happen next week?”. Since I’m a man, the fact of the heroine who had protected her chastity up until that point suddenly having sex with Akio-san—didn’t inspire much of an unpleasant feeling in me, actually.
Interviewer: That’s unexpected. I had thought it might be more shocking for men.
Nasu: Well, that kind of thing was a staple of Yamada Fuutarou and Kikuchi Hideyuki’s supernatural stories, you see… Actually, I thought “Of course you’re gonna get preyed upon if you go for a nighttime drive with a dangerous monster like that!”. But for such a seemingly inviolable heroine who practically had purity as a main theme to fall like that made me prepared, made me think “Ah, they aren’t going to go easy on anyone,” and straighten up to take things more seriously. This was something I watched for evening entertainment, but it was stepping into literary territory.
Part of the definition of a “story” is that the characters develop, right? In that sense, Utena didn’t develop so much as shed her skin. Her mask comes off over the course of the story whether she wants it to or not. If she didn’t fall to Akio-san at that time, Utena might not have lost to the story. But then she would have been unable to touch on Anthy’s darkness, and Akio-san’s fun story would have never ended. Because she lost the protagonistic attribute of purity and became an “extra”, she was freed from the bias of the story and was able to put an end to the dream of the prince however indirectly… that’s what I thought at the time.
Rather than victim blaming, I took it to mean that he was aware of the tropes being invoked in Utena's seduction by Akio. It does show a certain "heartlessness" in how he thinks of fictional characters, though - not Urobuchi levels but still closer than one might expect.