Princess Tutu – 21/22 – Throwback Thursday

Ladies and Gentleman, this is the time when Princess Tutu starts to get weird. As this week we upend almost the entire story. Who is the main antagonist now? Protagonist? Are we even in the same story anymore? And the best part is, I still love it, so lets dive right in.

Right off the bat, before we get to far into the details, I want to say that things got weird. Princess Tutu turned the whole story on its head this week, all by simply changing the main antagonist. I am of course talking about Drosselmeyer and the Raven. You see, while Drosselmeyer has never exactly been a good force in Princess Tutu, he has never really hindered them either. All he wanted was a good story, a tragic one, and that coincided with Ahiru’s desire to save Mytho. So for the longest time he was this vaguely threatening neutral party, with the Raven being the main evil force. This week though, and Princess Tutu has built up to this well, he takes center stage and the Raven doesn’t even show up at all. Had there not been such a focus on fairy tale stories, i’d be annoyed. Instead, i’m excited.

So first up, episode 21, The Spinners. As far as overarching themes go, this was a weird one for Princess Tutu. As instead of being about love or self confidence or any of that, it was about authorship. About people, their stories, and their place in those stories. A big example of that is of course Autor, which probably sounded more clever in Japanese. You see, Autor has claimed and believes himself to be the main character of the story. We know this isn’t true, he has been a literal background character for weeks. Yet Princess Tutu shows him as arrogant and haughty, as if he is all knowing while knowing even less than our leads do. It helps that he even believes he has the power to make stories real, considering he is within a story right now. The layers just keep piling on for this metaphore.

Contrast this to Fakir who actually does have everything Autor claims. Fakir does have the ability to write stories, he is a main character, and yet he hesitates to use it. Whether it because of his inner struggles as to his role or his fear over his power, he doesn’t want the leading role. Fakir, afraid of the consequences of his power and his options, is literally paralyzed by choice. He has more control of the story, more authorship over his role, than anyone else. Of course being Drosselmeyer’s descendant probably helps, and isn’t that just a whole can of worms. I am actually not sure how I feel about this, as it ties the ability of authorship specifically to a family line, rather than the characters. Meanwhile though everyone else is running around fulfilling their roles like dutiful little characters.

For example we have Ahiru, the titular character of Princess Tutu, struggling between Autor and Fakir’s two extremes. From the beginning the has simply accepted her role as Princess Tutu. Sure, she tried to deny it at certain points, but her end goal never changed. Ahiru has always desired to make Mytho’s heart whole and to save him. Of course, this is exactly what Drosselmeyer, the author of the story, wants as well. For all her bluster, little arguments and conflicts, Ahiru has dutifully fallen in line with Drosselmeyer’s expectations for the story. So it makes sense now that Tutu’s role is done, she feels aimless. She hasn’t ever had to set her own goal, only ever following what Drosselmeyer put in front of her. So now that Fakir can fix it all, she has relegated herself back to being “just a duck”, and that this was never her story.

What really caught me off guard here though, was that Princess Tutu acknowledged this from the most unexpected source. Cat-Sensei has long been a thorn in my side, I detest his marriage jokes, and generally find him unfunny. But across these two episodes we see him once again take a legitimate teaching role. Noticing Ahiru’s lack of motivation, holding her back from the Pointe lessons, something “all ballerina dream of”, effectively closing off the “lead role” from him. He has directly challenged her, basically telling Ahiru that she isn’t acting like a lead. She isn’t proactively doing or helping Mytho/Fakir with anything, rather waiting for them or Rue to act first. So when Cat-Sensei points this out, he is basically telling her she lacks the motivation and drive to be a lead character. Both as a ballerina and in the story of Princess Tutu.

To be frank, I loved how Princess Tutu handled this. As was said above, from the beginning she hasn’t really fought against Drosselmeyer’s story. She has assumed from the beginning that she would disappear in the end, that she would never get her love, that Mytho was her prince. So as the story has changed, as she has grown close to Fakir and Mytho has been corrupted, she resigned herself to that. Resigned herself to failure in another persons story. I would almost prefer we not have Fakir’s authorship fiasco going on at the same time. Because this idea that of writing things and having them come true circumvents Ahiru’s own journey here. The only way I see these two reconciling is if it becomes something like “They never really became real”. Sort of like a placebo effect, people believed they became real through magic instead of their own work.

All in all though, I think it makes for some really interesting subject matter. Princess Tutu has framed itself like a ballet from the beginning, like a stage play. As something written by someone else, with a predetermined end already decided. So to tackle the characters literally taking control of their own story, within an actual story, could be a great time. It reminds me of a more recent anime, Re:Creators, in a way. I don’t remember it all that well, nor to fondly to be honest, but the core idea is there. The only snag really is Princess Tutu itself being a finished anime, but like always a degree of suspension goes a long way. Regardless, I am looking forward to these last 4 episodes. If they are anything like the first cour finale, I am going to enjoy them a lot.

Moving on we come to episode 22, Crown of Stone, and it’s all about our new author focused conflict. The opening story lays it out pretty well, though they usually do. What is actually going to happen if Fakir and Ahiru beat Drosselmeyer? What happens after the story ends, if they try to leave their carefully curated home? After all Drosselmeyer hasn’t written anything outside of their story, their town. As we saw when Ahiru herself checked, nothing even exists out there, its just a wall. The gates don’t even open, people just show up and are seamlessly fit into the town itself. This explains things like Hanz and Raetsel showing up out of nowhere, but it also severely limits out leads. If they don’t finish the story how Drosselmeyer wants… what happens to Gold Crown Town?

Meta questions about Princess Tutu’s setting aside, there is some good stuff here. We already talked about Cat-Sensei’s conversations with Ahiru and how it drove her to be more proactive in the story. However what I also enjoyed were the after effects of this choice. Up until now, Ahiru has had a tendency to be in the right place at the right time to catch/stop Mytho and Rue. She has followed her role to a T. So I love how when she finally goes off on her own, finally becomes proactive… she misses it. Ahiru isn’t there to stop Rue, she isn’t there for our standard weekly “confrontation”. Running around on her own, trying to reclaim the authorship of her own story, she almost fails and causes the whole thing to come crashing down. It’s only by virtue of Rue rejecting her place with the Raven that it’s avoided.

On Rue herself, her struggle seems to be coming to a head as well. Princess Tutu has made it clear for awhile now that she is unhappy in her role. Similar to Fakir, she is/was rejecting it, though maybe not consciously, but she doesn’t have Ahiru to support her. Instead she has Mytho, her prince, and even he is rejecting her at this point. Claiming her as his princess only because that is all she has, rather than any actual affection. So when someone else is able to love her, she pushes them away. Once again the Raven and Mytho’s action backfire on them. As by perpetually teaching her no one else can love her, the one time someone does in Autor, she rejects it. Whether its out of fear, misunderstanding or a conscious rejection of her role as Kraehe I don’t know. But it generally works.

My thoughts here are simple: Rue is having a crisis of identity in my eyes. Throughout the series she has made a clear delineation between “Rue” and “Kraehe”. “Rue” is the popular beautiful girl Mytho love’s, who is Ahiru’s friend and who deserves to be happy. “Kraehe” on the other hand is the perpetually put down, ugly, unloved crow that can’t even get a heart for her father. We see it during her conversation with Ahiru atop the school. How Ahiru refuses to call her Kraehe, while Rue refuses to accept any other name. There is also the mystery of Uzura, who knows her as Rue and who she has never met before, but for now that only drives home Rue’s division even more. So when Autor says he loves Rue, she is rejecting it because she doesn’t see herself as Rue. Only Kraehe, and no one could love Kraehe.

Beyond inner character trauma, we also meet the people ripping endings out of books, the Book-men! I thought that these guys were going to be much more important, much more threatening. But turns out they are really only relevant for these two episodes it seems. Because of that, sadly I don’t think they really add much. Yes they are ripping out the endings of stories, preventing them from completing but… why? If they know all this they must know they can’t leave the town, that they are effectively living in a mishmash of hundreds of incomplete stories. They are forever stagnating in a town without change, no doubt knowing they themselves are already a part of Drosselmeyer’s stories. It just doesn’t make much sense to me that they would attack the only people who could possibly stop Drosselmeyer’s stories, rather than say… convince them to their side.

Yes their existence lead to some nice mystery, such as Fakir and his visions of stories ending like the knight. And yes it also gave us a nice scene where everyone else sees Tutu as a Swan, and only Fakir sees Ahiru. But overall they don’t really feel like they add much to the story. Nothing that couldn’t have existed with say… the Raven being aware he is in a story and trying to break it. Maybe it is to early to tell, maybe they come back en force later on. For now though they are just this vaguely threatening group, trying to do something so extreme we knew from the start it wouldn’t work. But hey, they got Drosselmeyer to step in and kidnap Tutu! So at least it kick-started what is no doubt going to be our finale. Let me know what you think of them down below!

So with that, all in all, how was Princess Tutu this week? As a whole I quite enjoyed it, Princess Tutu just has a special craftsmanship to it that makes it distinct and fun. Even when I find aspects I don’t like intellectually, like the Book-men, when watching they barely bother me at all. It’s only on retrospect when I am writing these posts that these issues become apparent, when I start nitpicking a 25 minute long episode. So it feels wrong to really mark Princess Tutu down for things that simply don’t matter when watching the show. The simple fact is that I am excited for the ending, and excited for these last 4 episodes. And while it looks like we are gearing up for a happy ending, I have hope i’ll get my dash of tragedy by the end.