Princess Tutu’s twelfth opening fable doesn’t require much interpretation to connect it to the show’s narrative: presented as a sort of setting of the stage for the first half finale, it portrays Rue (or Kraehe)’s current actions as bluntly as possible. “Once upon a time, there was a handsome slave. What bound him were not heavy chains, but the princess’s love. Every day, every night, the princess whispers her love to the slave, and the slave responds in kind. Bound body. Bound emotions. The slave or the princess? Which of them is really the one who cannot move?”
Accompanied by images of puppets on strings, this story clearly echoes Rue’s abduction of Mytho, and her determination to make him love her no matter what. Beyond overt violence or other forms of cruelty, the idea of “owning another” seems like the greatest crime in the world of Tutu. Drosselmeyer’s position as puppet master makes him the true foe of all of Tutu’s heroes, and within the story he has constructed, the villain Rue expresses her villainy through more acts of ownership and control. But that last line offers a question, and accompanied by the image of both black and white swan floating towards the sword, it implies a symmetry between Rue and Ahiru’s positions. All of these characters are ultimately trapped within their roles; Rue is separated from the others not by any fundamental lack of will, but because she has the misfortune of being assigned a role she can’t happily carry out.
Our first meeting with Rue this episode follows through on that question, while also granting more significance to the mirror motif Rue is often tied to. Basking with her prize Mytho in some lonely cave, she tells him that “you can forget everything. And you can just fill every void you have with me.” Her words are obviously relevant to a Mytho who’s returned to his initial emptiness, but they’re also relevant to Rue herself. As she later admits, “if you hadn’t started to regain your heart, everything would have gone well, and I wouldn’t have had to remember I’m a crow.” Fakir and Ahiru have the luxury of glamorous secret identities – in contrast, Rue’s true nature only brings her grief, and she would have been happier to truly forget everything, and center her life around Rue’s love of Mytho. While Rue tells Mytho to embrace emptiness, it is she that covets the emptiness of forgetting her identity. And while Rue physically chains Mytho to her bed, she is just as trapped as he, clinging to a happiness that never truly existed.
Perhaps aware of the cruel irony of her position, Rue turns from Mytho and does something no other character has done: address Drosselmeyer directly, knowing he is the true master of this story. It makes sense that Rue would be the first to break through this barrier; after all, along with being far less straightforward in her worldview than Fakir and Ahiru, she’s also the only one who can’t even imagine a happy ending for her own character. Rue has been forced to grapple with the futility of pursuing happiness as a villain ever since she remembered her identity, and at last she’s found a solution: discover who’s writing this story, and convince them to give you a juicier part.
Apparently well aware that Drosselmeyer is both omnipotent and extremely childish, Rue tells him that “the best story ever must have the best ending ever, and also the greatest stage.” Rue knows she has no physical power over Drosselmeyer, but it seems she also knows that his lust for stories makes him predictable and easy to manipulate. And so, using the only tool at her disposal (“let me show you the greatest dance yet”), the puppet actually twists the puppet master’s hands, guiding Drosselmeyer towards the ending she desires.
Rue’s actual pursuit of this final battle reflects her understanding of this narrative artifice. When she goes to confront our heroes, she doesn’t taunt them for their current failures – she taunts them for their narrative uselessness, for how the knight in the story fell in a single strike, and how Princess Tutu was only mentioned for a few lines. When she talks of Tutu’s “miserable, unwanted existence,” it’s clear she’s reflecting on her own unhappy role; but Rue never breaks character, and through taunting her enemies, she cleverly leads them towards an ending that might just conclude happily for the raven princess. Rue deserves a happier role than this, but I’m still impressed with how successfully she’s fighting with the limited tools at hand.
Meanwhile, while Rue spends this entire episode alternately despairing at and embracing the role of villain, Ahiru and Fakir go on an adorable bonding adventure. Ahiru and Fakir have each individually been marvelous characters all through this series, and their few shared moments have been a delight, but I still wasn’t ready for just how charming a dedicated episode of “we gotta find Mytho!” would be. These two kids are perfect together.
Their journey starts off with a prone Fakir being dragged back to the dorms by Tutu, where he wakes to find she’s still hanging around to make sure he’s okay. Fakir has had plenty of reasons to stop distrusting Tutu at this point, but they’ve generally been accompanied by big dramatic climaxes – “Tutu gallantly rescues Mytho,” “Tutu demonstrates she cares about Fakir’s pain,” etcetera. All of that stuff is very exciting, but doesn’t necessarily achieve the same low-key, conversational sense of trust and concern shared by actual real life friends. Epic stories often cut out these quiet moments, scenes where characters like these two bicker and share space and bond a bit over their failings. Drosselmeyer would be bored to tears by this stuff – but it’s these scenes that make dramatic artifice into lived experience, that turn heroes and villains into people worth loving.
Walking side by side as they search for Mytho, Fakir and Ahiru bond naturally all throughout this incredibly charming episode. Though these scenes contain few overt narrative beats, and could theoretically be dismissed as arbitrary “they don’t find Mytho until the plot decides they should” time filler, they’re also absolutely brimming with tiny comic beats and offhand exchanges that make Fakir and Ahiru’s growing mutual concern feel not just believable, but almost inevitable. Scenes of Fakir doing things like noticing Cat-sensei can see Ahiru’s ahoge aren’t just funny, they naturally thaw the dramatic ice separating these two. Emotional changes don’t need to be accompanied by huge dramatic beats, and often are better served simply by time and space. Fakir started this episode “knowing” Tutu wasn’t a bad person in an intellectual sense, but it takes a full episode of clumsy misadventures and mutual support for him to understand Ahiru is a fundamentally kind and emotionally generous person who doesn’t just deserve his respect, but who he’d be honored to consider a friend.
After an unreasonably hilarious sequence where Ahiru finally reveals the truth about her duck-nature, Fakir responds to both this expression of trust and Ahiru’s overarching compassion by revealing a secret of his own. “Back when I read the fable to Mytho,” he confesses, “the character he cared about most was neither the prince nor the raven, but Princess Tutu, who so little was written about.” Fakir’s words are a profound gesture of compassion for the stiff-lipped knight, but they also echo Princess Tutu’s overarching compassion: a sympathy for fictional characters, who are often assigned thankless roles or abandoned or forced to lose the people they love, but who through their fragility and strength inspire readers to compassion, ambition, and hope. Mytho loved Tutu before Tutu could even love, just as Ahiru loves Edel, and just as Fakir is coming to care for Ahiru. Princess Tutu’s great love for its characters, and for the idea of loving characters, makes its reverence for the power of fiction clear even as Drosselmeyer heartlessly moves his actors into place.
In the sunlit cradle far beneath the earth, Fakir and Ahiru emerge to see Mytho, still bound by Kraehe’s power. Stepping forward, Rue embraces the role of Kraehe, performing to satisfy Drosselmeyer and perhaps earn just a sliver of happiness for herself. Having directed the story all the way here, she confidently announces the nature of their final battle, making manifest the war she’s been waging all this time. Kraehe and Tutu will each tell their own stories now; and to the greatest tale of love and loss, glory and woe, go the prince and that long-sought happy ending.
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