>>19239
>should I watch Utena
I watched the show a few months ago, haven't watched the movie, yet, but I will soon watch it. There is an anime, movie and manga, which from what I heard differ a lot in plot point, and are treated as their own seperate universes, but enjoyed if you watched the previous mediums, so the movie is best enjoyed after watching the show, even if it's a retelling of the events, it expects you to have watched the show. So start with the show.
From a visual standpoint, Utena is great, it has some beautiful and creative visuals, however you have to get used to the fact that this is a shoujo anime, so all the guys look like girls. The music, I liked a lot, every duel has it's own unique theme and you can spend a lot of time deciphering what they mean(more on this later). The animation, is ok, the duels aren't that great, but the story and characters do carry them. Now we come to the story, and this is the hardest part to describe, but first you should understand that before they made Utena, the studio just made run of the mill mahou shoujo, including Sailor Moon, so when they made Utena, they had complete creative freedom, so they decided to make a deconstruction(I know this term has a negative connotation nowadays, but I am not using it as an insult) of the genre, it also helped that the director was friends with Anno, known for Evanghelion. The story can be summed up as, girl gets saved by a prince, she loved him so much that she now became a prince herself(though she identifies as a girl), and fights the student council in order to find her prince, and brings the world revolution, but it's more than that, everything about the show, the visuals, the music, the characters, the story are all chuck fulled of metaphors, and you can write articles trying to piece together what it all means. Even the color of the Student Council members' hair is symbolic to a type of rose and what it means. You have episodes like Nanamy's egg, which you can only fully understand if you are a girl
I am still not sure if it's about a girl's first period, or miscarriage, speaking of Nanami she had the weirdest episodes, but that is besides the point. The show has 39 episodes and it can be divided into three or four arcs, with one arc being considered "filler", however a thing with this show, is that not only does it have critically plot important stuff in it's filler arc, it has plot important stuff revealed in the recap episodes, the fucking RECAP EPISODES, so you can't skip anything, you have to watch all of it. The weakest part of the show is how repetitive it is, Utena basically fights everyone in the student council at least three times, before she gets to the final boss, but some can argue it is intentional, and the world becomes more and more distorted as she fights those duels, almost as if reality is breaking apart, so you kinda have to drudge through everything.
I guess I should talk about the elephant in the room, and please don't let what I am about to say discourage you from watching the show. Utena deals with sex and relationships, and when it came out it was very liberal, you have lesbian couples(one of which gets cucked by a man), not one but three brother and sister relationships, bisexuals, and nowadays trannies will try to claim that Utena is a trans symbol, because she dresses in a boy's uniform, even though she never identified as a girl, and fell in love with a man, she was just a tomboy. What I am trying to say, is that there is a part of the audience that is extremely leftist and interpret the show from an LGBT view, especially Roberta Sugar, which credited this show as an inspiration for Steven Universe. With that said you can perfectly enjoy this show as a more conservative individual.
>tl;dr if you want to watch a show with interesting visuals and good songs watch it, then yes, but you have to watch every episode to understand what is happening, even the recap ones and have to drudge through the repetitive content of the stories