Kyouichi Saionji is the Vice President of the Student Council at Ohtori Academy. He is in the eleventh grade, the same age as Touga. At the beginning of the series, he is the victor of the duels and is engaged to Anthy. Saionji is, shall we say, not the nicest person on earth. He slaps Anthy around a lot which gets him in trouble with the other members of the Student Council. He is openly arrogant and obviously popular with all the girls (not as much as Touga, though). However, he seems to pretty much ignore them because he is deeply in love with Anthy. Or at least, he thinks he is... This becomes very clear when he loses the duel to Utena and with it, his engagement to Anthy. A couple of days later, he comes to Utena and Anthy's dorm to ask Anthy why she won't obey him anymore (duh...). Anyway, Saionji is possibly my favorite character (God help me) because, even though he may be insane, he's insane for a somewhat good reason. Out of everyone in the series, excepting maybe Nanami, Saionji is definately the most deranged. That is, until the end... but I'll get to that. He challanges Utena to another duel and loses it because of the power of Dios that Utena can apparently command. If she had not had this power on her side, and if Saionji had not been so... how shall I put it kindly? So clouded by emotion, he probably would have won, seeing that he is an extremely talented kendo artist and Utena knows next to nothing about swordfighting. It is actually this way with most of the battles Utena fights. Anyway, after he loses the duel, he refuses to come out of the kendo room (*finds that absolutely hysterical*). We don't see a lot of our green-haired happy boy until episode nine, where a lot is revealed about his past. He and Touga were best friends when they were young, and they practiced kendo together a lot. One day as they were coming home from practice, they saw a funeral going on inside a church. A couple of men came up to them and asked if they had seen a girl around their age anywhere. This little girl had reportedly lost her parents that day. They hadn't, and the two men left, wondering if the girl had been "kidnapped". Saionji followed Touga into the church, where the latter said he had seen three coffins, not two as the men implied. Touga began opening the third coffin, much to the objection of the frightened young Saionji (I don't blame him...), and he found a little pink-haired girl lying inside on a bed of roses. *A gasp goes up in the audience as we recongize just who that little girl looks like...* Anyway, Saionji kept up his "let's get the heck out of here" mentality while Touga tried to charm the little girl in the coffin by telling her that he's very chivalrous. They asked the little girl why she was hiding there and she replied that there was no point in living because everyone was going to die someday. "There is no such thing as something eternal," she told them. Saionji finally got Touga to leave, and the next day they saw the little girl outside. Saionji noticed something "different" about her, and came to the conclusion that Touga "did something to her", which he denied. For the rest of his life, Saionji doesn't believe him, and thinks that he showed the girl something "eternal". He tells all of this to Utena at one point, by way of explaining why he wants Anthy back, and tells her that once Anthy told him that she wanted to go to the castle that spins above the dueling arena because it held something "eternal". On this day, Saionji receives a letter from End of the World telling him that the castle is going to come down that night. He then kidnaps Anthy and brings her to the Rose Gates, but before he can open them, he gets knocked over the head and almost drowned (*points incriminatingly at Touga, who smirks walks off with his little fan club*). Anyway, Utena finds him and wakes him up and together, they go up to the dueling arena to find Anthy. I really like this part, because it sort of shows you that people who despise each other can be civil if there's someone else in danger who they both care about greatly. After all, I believe that Saionji is truely in love with Anthy. His problem is that he doesn't know how to deal with his emotions... love, hate, jealousy. And speaking of jealousy, Saionji is almost pathologically jealous of Touga. He has vowed that he will one day come out on top, but Touga always seems to find a way to appear better than his "friend". As Saionji said to Utena, "I won't lose to the likes of him." Ever since they met that little girl and Saionji suspected Touga of showing her something "eternal", he has wanted to do the same for anyone he has loved (namely, Anthy). Unfortunately, he has never been able to get past his worse problem: the inability to control his anger. In the episode where all of this past history is revealed, he and Utena find Anthy up in the dueling arena, lying in a coffin filled with roses. While Saionji is distracted by the castle falling and almost impaling him (or at least a vision thereof), Utena comes to Anthy's rescue like any good prince would. Saionji is so enraged that he wasn't the one to rescue Anthy ("I was supposed to rescue her this time!") that he attacks Utena, wounding Touga in the process when everyone's favorite Seitokaichou jumps in front of his sword. So, it ends up that Touga saves the girl again, much to the rage of poor demented Saionji. Anahway, after this, he just sort of gives up... well, it didn't help that he got expelled for hurting Touga, but... So, Saionji is out of the picture for a little while, but he returns somewhere in the middle of the Black Rose Saga so that Wakaba can pull a sword out of him. Yeah. He has noplace else to go, so Wakaba sneaks him into her dorm and he lives with her for a while. Surprisingly, he is really very nice to her. Until, that is, Mikage comes to him and tells him that he can get him back into the Academy if he gives him a hair clip that he was carving as a present for Wakaba. Saionji does, of course, being the strangely naive soul that he is, and gets back into the school. After a while, he sort of rekindles his friendship with Touga, even though Saionji keeps stressing that he would never trust anyone like him. They begin to hang around with each other a lot more, and after Akio "shows him the Ends of the World" and he duels Utena again (and loses), they are almost always seen together. It's actually kind of nice, because Saionji is getting back what he and Touga had lost. They even ride a bike together again :) It's really very strange, actually, because, by the end, Saionji seems to be a lot more reasonable than Touga. At one point, Touga says that he wants to be like Akio and have Akio's power. Saionji asks him if he's really sure about that, giving us the impression that Saionji "gets it" a lot better than Touga does.



Pictures I've got a lot of pictures of Saionji. More than of anyone else. I wonder why ;)

Looking a little pale there,Saionji... he's so intense ;)

Intense is right... Geez, break the window...

Doesn't look like he's about to smack her, does he?

*cringes* NOT a happy camper...

He thinks he's sooo hot... well... not without reason.

Hubba hubba... Those boys really like to bare the ol' skin, don't they?

Woww... He's pretty... Saionji says to Touga, "Are you so sure?"

Not just pretty, he's downright beautiful...

Awww... he was so young and innocent... What the heck happened?

*goes into uncontrollable giggles*


Ohhh, he's so cute! This is the only one that
isn't a screen capture, and I got it
from The Observatory, a really neat Utena site.

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