Some Thoughts on Penacony
The point here isn’t to do a straightforward character breakdown, but to look at some of the literary and thematic DNA that seems to inform Sunday as a character. I’m not claiming to have identified all of it. There’s no way I could, and perhaps not even the writers themselves could name every influence that made its way into the story. My frame of reference is nowhere near broad enough for that. Instead, I want to focus on two connections that strike me as particularly compelling.
The first is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Penacony can be read surprisingly well through the lens of this play, both in its use of dreamlike scenarios and in the way it examines the relationship between harmony and control. I’ll assume whoever is reading this may not be completely familiar with the play. Fair warning: what follows is a rough summary, just enough to establish the parallels I want to draw. Feel free to call me out if I skim over something important (although Theseus and Hippolyta, whose relationship opens the play, aren’t really what I want to focus on here).
The play opens in Athens, where Duke Theseus is preparing to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Against that plot, a nobleman named Egeus brings his daughter Hermia before the duke because she refuses to marry Demetrius, the man he has chosen for her. Hermia loves another man called Lysander, who loves her in return. Demetrius, meanwhile, once courted another woman, Helena, before abandoning her in favor of Hermia. The romantic entanglement is already out of balance here even before the fantasy elements enter the picture. Nobody’s desires align neatly with the social order surrounding them: Hermia wants Lysander, Egeus wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, Demetrius wants Hermia, and Helena wants Demetrius. The emotional geometry here is distorted (and purposefully confuse) from the outset. Theseus then, representing Athenian law and its rigid social hierarchy, gives Hermia three choices: marry Demetrius, face death, or spend the rest of her life in chastity. So Hermia and Lysander decide to flee Athens and elope in a forest outside the city. Hermia tells Helena about their plan, trusting her as a friend, but Helena is so desperate to regain Demetrius’s affection that she immediately snitches on them where the lovers are headed, hoping he’ll appreciate her loyalty. Instead, Demetrius storms into the forest after Hermia, with Helena following close behind.
The forest here functions almost as a psychological and symbolic inversion of Athens. The city represents hierarchy, law, reason, and obligation, while in the forest, those structures lose their immediate grip, only to be replaced by instability, illusion, and a capricious magical force of their own. The lovers flee to a place where the ordinary rules of civic life dissolves, allowing buried feelings and social contradictions to surface. The forest isn’t a world without rules so much as a world governed by different, less predictable ones. The forest and Penacony’s Dreamscape occupy similar thematic roles here: both are spaces of escape, set apart from ordinary social life. Hermia and Lysander flee into the forest to escape the suffocating structures of Athenian society, while Penacony’s visitors retreat into the Dreamscape to escape reality itself. Throughout Penacony, we encounter people exhausted by life, crushed by grief, trying to outrun old age, or living with bodies that no longer allow them to do what they wish. The Dreamscape can offer experiences that waking life denies them. Many of its inhabitants are trying to anesthetize some unbearable strain between themselves and reality, and Sunday is the most extreme expression of that impulse. Both works explore the tension between order and chaos, dream and reality, without making either side wholly virtuous or wholly corrupt. The point isn’t that the two poles are interchangeable, but that each becomes legible in relation to the other. Absolute order turns into repression, and absolute chaos dissolves meaning. You cannot understand harmony without understanding what threatens it, or understand disorder without some sense of the order to be disrupted. Neither work, however, suggests that escape should become permanent. Fantasy can reveal truths, but when it replaces reality altogether, it risks becoming something even more destructive than the world it was meant to help us endure.
That brings us to the fairy plot in Act 2, Scene 1: Oberon and Titania’s quarrel over the changeling boy. Titania has taken in the child of one of her mortal followers, who died in childbirth. She is raising him out of grief, affection, and loyalty to his mother’s memory, but Oberon demands the boy as a page, apparently convinced that he has as much right to him as Titania does since they’re husband-and-wife. She refuses outright and, in considerably more elegant Elizabethan language, tells him to fuck off. Oberon of course grows resentful, treating her refusal as a personal affront and insisting that his claim should prevail. Their quarrel becomes so severe that Titania says she will avoid his company until they reconcile. What matters here is that the play presents their conflict as destabilizing. Titania describes nature itself falling out of balance under the weight of their quarrel: the seasons bleed into one another, storms rage, rivers flood, and crops rot in the fields. Their broken harmony spreads outward, disturbing the world around them. This is more than a lovers’ spat. Within the play’s symbolic logic, the discord between its fairy rulers has consequences for the natural order.
And Oberon responds in the best way imaginable: manipulation. He sends his servant Puck, a trickster sprite, to retrieve a magical flower whose juice makes a sleeping person fall in love with the first creature they see upon waking. Oberon intends to use it on Titania so that she’ll fall in love with some grotesque creature, humiliating her and giving him leverage to claim the changeling boy over her. At the same time, Oberon overhears Helena begging Demetrius to return her love, and on a whim, he decides to intervene on her behalf, too, ordering Puck to enchant Demetrius so that he will reciprocate Helena’s feelings. The irony is that Oberon tries to correct one imbalance through the same coercive magic that creates another. Basically, everyone makes everything worse. Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius and enchants the wrong man, so Lysander wakes up and falls in love with Helena instead. Oberon later has Demetrius enchanted as well, leaving both men pursuing Helena and Hermia feeling abandoned and betrayed. Helena becomes convinced that the others are mocking her, while the men grow increasingly aggressive toward each other. Meanwhile, Puck finds a group of amateur actors rehearsing a play nearby and gives one of them, Bottom, a donkey’s head. Titania then wakes under the flower’s spell and falls madly in love with him. See, Oberon is fascinating here not because he’s secretly benevolent, but because he believes his aims justify the humiliation and coercion he inflicts. He wants to regain control over Titania and obtain the boy, and he’s also willing to manipulate the lovers in the name of setting things right. His interventions escalate the very disorder he claims to be correcting.
Sunday can be read as a kind of Oberon figure, but not as a one-to-one equivalent. Both characters are driven by an ideal of harmony that curdles into control. Yet their motives differ: Oberon is openly possessive and punitive, whereas Sunday frames his authoritarianism as care. Sunday’s worldview seems to come more from terror than sadism. Terror of suffering, of helplessness, and of watching people he loves be crushed by a reality he cannot protect them from. The parallel is strongest in the way both characters respond to a world they cannot bear to leave beyond their control. Even the Dreamscape mirrors Shakespeare’s forest in an inverted way. The forest initially appears chaotic, but its confusions are eventually folded into a comic resolution that sends the characters back to Athens. Penacony, by contrast, initially appears comforting, then gradually reveals the stagnation beneath its surface. The forest’s apparent disorder gives way to change, while the Dreamscape’s reassuring order threatens to make change impossible. But if Sunday is an Oberon-like figure, who plays Titania? At first glance, the immediate answer might seem to be Firefly. The fairy imagery is obvious in her design, and Glamoth’s central AI wasliterally named Titania. The visual and literary connection is hard to miss. But I think that parallel is mostly aesthetic. The question we are concernered here is which character performs Titania’s thematic role in the story.
Titania’s significance isn’t simply that she’s the fairy queen. She is the other half of a relationship whose breakdown disrupts the larger balance of the forest. Her refusal to surrender the changeling boy exposes a conflict over attachment vs authority, and the damage spreads well beyond just she and Oberon. That’s why I think Robin fills a comparable role. Not because she’s Sunday’s wife or romantic counterpart in any level, but because she represents an emotional counterweight that once kept Sunday connected to a more humane understanding of the world. And just for the sake of making things crystal clear: no, this isn’t an argument that Sunday and Robin form some kind of incestuous Oberon-and-Titania pairing. The point here is not literal but functional. Robin’s independence and compassion challenge Sunday’s desire to protect people by deciding their lives for them. The fracture in their relationship begins when she sets off Penacony to travel the cosmos. And mind you, there’s no great fight between them like we had with Oberon and Titania, but the separation itself creates a rift. Sunday loses the person who most deeply understood both his kindness and his fear, and he retreats further into the Oak Family’s ideology of imposed Order after being left alone. And when Robin returns, her voice has faded, which she eventually recognizes as one sign that the Sweet Dream is already crumbling away.
But, like Oberon, Sunday convinces himself that his actions are justified by the outcome he wants. He believes he’s protecting the vulnerable, including the people Robin represents in his mind. But their differences matter. Oberon’s possessiveness is tied to a wounded pride and a desire to punish Titania, while Sunday’s is filtered through martyrdom and a conviction that someone must bear responsibility for humanity. Structurally, however, they occupy a similar position: they’re so frightened by a world that will not obey their wishes that they make it more destructive in their attempt to control it. Both stories are preoccupied with the crash between fantasy and reality. And beneath that veer, they ask a deeper question: how far will people reshape the world to protect themselves from truths they cannot emotionally bear? Dreams are seductive because reality requires us to coexist with uncertainty, contradiction, suffering, and other people’s autonomy. Oberon cannot accept a world that moves independently of his will , and Sunday fails for a related reason, even if his motivation is somewhat more paternalistic. The divergence is that A Midsummer Night’s Dream largely lets Oberon off the hook. The play restores a workable harmony, and the lovers are paired off neatly, without requiring Oberon to confront the consequences of his manipulations. That resolution is also morally uneasy, as Demetrius’s love for Helena remains the product of enchantment. The comedy makes the outcome feel settled, even though the mechanisms that produced it would be horrifying outside the play’s whimsical framework. Sunday, by contrast, eventually has to confront the consequences of his worldview. The difference reflects not only the stories’ different genres, but also their different investments in what it means to resolve a conflict. Both stories are, after all, after completely different things despite their similarities.
And the second most evident influence I see in Penacony is Utena.
Get Junnamoonlight’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The most obvious connection between Penacony and Revolutionary Girl Utena is also probably the easiest to overlook, precisely because it looks like an ordinary reference. Sunday’s final boss form is called “Embryo of Philosophy,” corresponding to the exact Japanese term (哲学の胎児) in “Virtual Star Hasseigaku,” one of Utena’s ending themes. On its own, that could be an elaborate Easter egg. I initially took it that way, too. But the more closely you look at the song’s imagery, the harder it becomes to treat the name as an isolated reference.
Antiquity, perfection, alone in the desert
Atmosphere, atom, a star of causality
Yes, the child of earth
Is conceived
The embryo of philosophy
Egg, perfection, an origin in a nest
Stamen, pistil, a single seed
Yes, the child of earth
Grows up
The child of philosophy
And then
The sphere of the moon, the sphere of Mercury, the sphere of Venus
The sphere of the sun, the sphere of Mars, the sphere of Jupiter
The sphere of Saturn, the sphere of fixed stars, the sphere of mobile stars
The torus continues into eternity, endlessly
A single organic engine
A single perpetual motion device
Ah, it is empty motion
Yes, it is empty motion
And then
The sphere of the moon, the sphere of Mercury, the sphere of Venus
The sphere of the sun, the sphere of Mars, the sphere of Jupiter
The sphere of Saturn, the sphere of fixed stars, the sphere of mobile stars
The torus continues into eternity, endlessly
A single organic engine
A single perpetual motion device
Ah, it is empty motion
Yes, it is empty motion, motion
The lyrics move from conception and the “embryo of philosophy” toward images of perfection, circularity, organic machinery, and a perpetual-motion machine. In one influential English translation, the sequence culminates in “empty movement.” That translation is not the only possible rendering of the Japanese, but the lyrics in Japanese have a clear imagery it want to convey: a philosophical idea about how humanity ought to live gradually expands into a total system of reality, until the perfect world one hopes to construct becomes a machine that can continue forever without actually going anywhere. Think of Ohtori Academy, or Sunday’s Dream of the Order, in this case. In that sense, the Embryo of Philosophy doesn’t just name Sunday’s final form, but it also describes the process by which his ideal becomes a self-perpetuating system.
Both Penacony and Utena are interested in closed systems that present themselves as solutions to human suffering. In Utena, Ohtori Academy is a self-contained symbolic world governed by rituals, hierarchies, assigned roles, duels, and promises of “revolution.” The characters are drawn toward the promise of a final revelation in the inverted castle above the academy, as though reaching it will grant them some sort of transcendence to finally let their “mudane” problems behind. Yet the system continually reproduces the very conditions that keep them trapped. The series’ ending makes that contradiction especially clear as Anthy leaves Ohtori to search for Utena in the wider world, while the academy itself does not simply vanish with her departure. The Ohtori will never fade, all you can do is let go of it. Penacony works in a remarkably similar way. Its Dreamscape offers an escape from ordinary reality, but the more complete that escape becomes, the less capable its inhabitants are of changing their circumstances. The Dreamscape can offer relief from pain, preserve memories, and provide seemingly endless gratification, but Sunday’s ideal would eliminate the need for change along with the suffering that makes change necessary. The Golden Hour eternally poised around the boundary of midnight becomes an almost too perfect visual metaphor for a celebration that can go on forever without ever allowing tomorrow to arrive. That distinction matters because the real opposition in Penacony isn’t simply dream versus reality. It’s closer to change versus permanence. The dream is dangerous not because dreams are inherently false, but because an eternal dream can become a world in which nothing genuinely changes. Life requires change; that’s but the most fundamental principle of nature. For a character to escape the idyllic control of either Ohtori Academy or the Dreamscape, there must be a rupture in the system’s apparent equilibrium — in other words, a revolution.
In Utena, revolution have a ton of different meanings. It can mean overthrowing the established order, as Utena attempts to do, but it can also mean feeding the system that already exists. The characters speak of breaking out of the world’s egg, yet they are often afraid to face the exposed, uncertain life waiting beyond it. That fear is exactly what Akio exploits. A system can advertise itself as revolutionary while merely reproducing itself indefinitely. Sunday does something similar. He wants to transform the world so completely that the cosmos as we know it will never need to change again. He wants to create a paradise in which suffering, uncertainty, conflict, and failure are permanently abolished, but the consequence is a world in which free will is abolished as well. His revolution is therefore an anti-revolution: he changes everything in order to make change impossible. The perpetual-motion image in Utena’s ending makes this contradiction especially vivid here. Such a machine promises endless movement without genuine transformation, and Sunday’s paradise offers the human equivalent: endless happiness without the risk, uncertainty, loss, or becoming that give human experience its meaning. People can remain occupied forever without ever getting anywhere. The very same basic contradiction suggested by the Virtual Star Hasseigaku’s empty movement. Motion without progress, activity without transformation and existence without becoming. The Dreamscape’s inhabitants and Ohtori’s students are all trapped in versions of this same loop.
Sunday, meanwhile, has a much deeper relationship to Akio than simply being both final bosses, in a sense. Both occupy the position of someone who believes they can resolve everyone else’s problems from above. Akio is involved with the mythology of the prince, the fantasy that an exceptional person can transcend ordinary limitations and grant someone else salvation. In an interview, Ikuhara described the prince as an illusion sustained by the complementary roles of prince and princess, and characterized Akio as an adult who has seen the End of the World, but fell into despair the moment he understood its true system. Sunday’s version of this fantasy becomes a bit more theological if you ask me. He doesn’t merely want to save one person, but mankind as a whole. He sees suffering as proof that ordinary human autonomy is inadequate and concludes that someone must decide what’s best for humanity. But once he assumes takes that stance, saving people becomes indistinguishable from deciding how they are allowed to live. Both characters are also, in different ways, unable to grow beyond the worlds that have made them powerful. Akio maintains Ohtori’s closed system rather than genuinely confronting the outside world and its limitations; being the adult who controls the academy lets him preserve an artificial world of arrested adolescence, where he can remain powerful as the only adult. Remember what Ikuhara said about him seeing the End of the World? That’s what Akio saw. He simply saw the real world, but being unable to accept reality he decided to become, in the simplest terms possible, an eternal manchild. But Sunday’s problem comes from a different direction. He’s the product of a controlling upbringing, taught to understand what’s right and wrong through The Family’s rigid framework rather than learning how to think outside it, or how to develop his own ideas. When he reaches a position from which he can glimpse the wider world, he has no healthy model for living in it. The people who were supposed to prepare him for that world instead taught him to fear it. His wings were clipped off. In a sense you can say that Akio is the exact type of person that would generate Sunday, and there’s some argument to be made here about cycles repeated by families, but it’s not exactly something I know much about.
Anyway, that makes Robin a particularly interesting inversion of Anthy too. Of course, just like Titania, she isn’t Anthy in the literal sense. After all, unlike Anthy, she isn’t trapped inside her sibling’s system. Rather, Robin articulates the principle that loving someone does not give you ownership over their freedom. Robin is, without doubt, the greatest oppositor of Sunday’s philosophy despite being the one who love him the most (and here there also lies the argument that unlike Sunday who thinks care stem from alienating people of pain, Robin understands love as helping people to go through it). This is one of Utena’s central concerns, too. The fantasy of the prince looks benevolent because the prince rescues the princess, but the story gradually exposes the danger hidden in that fantasy. To be “saved” by someone else in these contexts can also mean being defined by that person, assigned a role through the Rose Bride system, and denied the right to choose your own path. Sunday’s paradise reproduces the same contradiction but on a cosmic scale. His logic amounts to that people suffer, therefore he must create a world in which they cannot suffer. He knows what happiness looks like, therefore he must decide what happiness means for everyone else. Robin’s answer is that care without freedom is not care in any meaningful sense. You only truly care about someone when you want them to face reality, because you know it’s what they need.
Acheron plays an important role here, even though she never directly interacts with Sunday or Robin in the way this parallel might suggest. Her refusal to act as a conventional savior is crucial here, much like Utena does in Utena. She explicitly argues that the goal isn’t to convince everyone to choose the correct path, but to inspire them to save themselves. She tells the Trailblazer to guide Penacony’s people not as a savior, but as a Nameless among them. That stands in contrast to Sunday’s belief that humanity must be protected from its own weakness by an external authority. Acheron’s position is that people must retain the agency to respond to their own circumstances, even when the choices available to them are painful. In Utena’s terms, this comes close to rejecting the prince fantasy itself. The answer is not to find a better prince, but to escape the structure that insists a prince is needed in the first place. The recurring language of roles, performance, and masks makes the parallel even more interesting. Utena is full of characters confined by identities assigned to them by a symbolic system. Princes, princesses, the Rose Bride, duelists, members of the student council, and so on. Penacony uses a different symbolic vocabulary, but its inhabitants also become performers, dreamers, guests, heroes, villains, actors, avatars, and masks. The Dreamscape is a giant stage (its core literally IS a theater stage, anyway), and its most dangerous illusion isn’t necessarily that everything onstage is fake, but that the roles people play can become so convincing that they start treating those roles as their only possible way to exist. Sunday is “the protector,” Robin “the songstress,” Firefly “AR-26710,” and Penacony’s visitors become people who belong entirely to the Dreamscape. The question here isn’t simply whether a mask is false, but whether a person can still choose who to become once the mask feels as real as the self beneath it. This is also an argument to advocate that Planarcadia is the true thematic sucessor of Penacony, but that’s a subject for another day. I won’t dive much about her here too, but you can clearly see why Sparkle, in specific, is so prevalent as a key character in all Penacony’s important moments.
This is also where Firefly enters the picture. One of her defining struggles is that she was created to serve as an identityless soldier. She was given a body designed for warfare, a destiny centered around combat, and a role whose fulfillment was meant to end in her death. Once she was no longer needed for that role, she was not supposed to have a life beyond it. Firefly’s desire to become an ordinary girl isn’t merely a commonplace wish for happiness, but a genuine attempt to discover whether she can exist as something other than the role assigned to her. Utena asks a similar question about whether a person can exist beyond the social script written for them, particularly through the Student Council members and their assigned roles. The difference is that Firefly’s script is imposed in the language of literal destiny, whereas Utena’s is framed through roles and identities. In both cases though, the individual has to discover whether a life can genuinely belong to them when the world has already decided what they are supposed to be.
The characters in Utena are repeatedly promised an ultimate event or revelation that will supposedly justify the structures they inhabit, the “End of the World” associated with the inverted castle. This promise of a final answer helps keep the system intact because everyone continues moving toward a conclusion that will never truly liberates them. The system cannibalizes on itself, and make of people its fuel. Penacony reproduces this structure through its own obsession with finality: the perfect dream, the Charmony Festival, Death, the Stellaron, Nihility, Order, and the promise of an ultimate paradise. Sunday’s ideology is almost eschatological in a sense, he wants to bring history to a point at which the problem of human existence has finally been solved And that’s why the Trailblaze is important here. Because Trailblazing as a whole offers a radically different philosophy: there’s no final state in which we can simply stop becoming. A journey has meaning precisely because it continues beyond the point at which we thought the story would end. Also notice, this is also where the connection to Planarcadia and Asat Pramad begins to emerge. In any case, that’s why the “revolution” at the end of Penacony isn’t the creation of a new, perfect order but the breaking of the old closed system. The characters don’t replace Sunday with a superior ruler or build a better Dreamscape from scratch. They choose to wake up. As in Utena, liberation doesn’t come from discovering the perfect version of the system, but from leaving it. The real revolution isn’t simply to revolutionize the world, but to change oneself. The only real revolution we can even make in our lives is within ourselves. We are our own world, and we decide whether this world will move forward or not. Penacony insists that reality is painful, contradictory, and incomplete, yet the answer is still to return to it. A dream may reveal truths reality conceals, but it can never truly replace it.
This is also where Penacony’s treatment of the prince becomes especially interesting. The Trailblazer is repeatedly placed in situations where they could become a savior, yet Acheron explicitly warns them against taking on that role. Instead, they should remain “a Nameless among those mortals.” This is almost the opposite of the fantasy embodied by Akio and Dios in Utena. Rather than becoming an exceptional figure with the authority to save everyone else, the Trailblazer must remain part of the same imperfect world as everyone else. True Trailblazing isn’t about transcending humanity, but about walking alongside it and finding new paths together. The result is a different conception of hope from the one Penacony initially seems to offer. The Sweet Dream promises hope by promising that nothing ever has to end. Robin and Acheron, by contrast, offer a hope that exists precisely because things do end. Firefly knows she’s created to die. Acheron lives under the shadow of Nihility. The Nameless know that every world they visit is a world they will eventually have to leave behind. None of these characters solves the problem of impermanence, they simply refuse to treat it as proof that life is meaningless. True hope isn’t the absence of difficulty but the decision to keep living through it. The Embryo of Philosophy in Utena and Penacony leads toward the image of an immaculate, self-sustaining mechanism that risks collapsing into empty motion, and Sunday follows a comparable trajectory in narrative terms. He begins with a philosophical proposition about protecting humanity that becomes a theology of Order, which then becomes a cosmological machine, until he has built a paradise in which everyone can remain forever. The supposed solution becomes a closed loop. It does not resolve the problem so much as prevent anyone from confronting it. And in that case, can we truly say something has even been solved at all? Was anyone truly saved?
But here is also where Penacony ultimately diverges from Utena, just like it diverged from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, for these works are not all aiming toward a same endgame. Utena is more skeptical about whether individuals can truly escape the symbolic structures that define them. Its finale gives Utena and Anthy a way out of Ohtori’s closed world, with Anthy leaving the academy to seek Utena, but the broader system doesn’t disappear simply because they have chosen to leave it. Utena is a tale about escaping the constraints that society always attempt to put upon us and that will never end. It’s a never-ending fight against the system and social roles. But Penacony is more optimistic about the possibility of people helping one another wake up. Robin, Acheron, Firefly, Black Swan, the Trailblazer, and the other Nameless don’t arrive at the same answer, but they recover the ability to make their own answers without requiring one person to impose a universal solution on everyone else. Sunday’s alternative is defeated not by a rival absolute ideology, but by the return of plurality. That, I think, is the deepest connection between Revolutionary Girl Utena and Penacony: both are suspicious of salvation when salvation requires the imposition of an utopia. A world in which every role has been assigned, every relationship predetermined, every wound healed, every desire satisfied, and every future secured may look like paradise, but if nobody can evolve, leave, contradict, choose, or become something else, then it has ceased to be a place where people truly live as human beings. The shared image of the Embryo of Philosophy here points to the paradox at the heart of Sunday’s dream, he wants to perfect the world so that humanity will never have to change again, but the moment change becomes impossible, the world he has created stops being alive. It becomes a perpetual-motion machine, performing the same movement forever without actually going or reaching anywhere.
Penacony’s answer is just a bit close to the answer Utena keeps circling: you don’t become free by finding the perfect cage. You become free by learning to leave it. In both stories, awakening is the revolution not because it guarantees a painless future, but because it restores the possibility of choosing one. And despite what lies beyond that dream and what lies beyond at the dream’s end, people will all eventually meet at the same destination one day.
