With Ahiru having triumphed and Kraehe banished to the darkness below, Princess Tutu’s fourteenth episode opens with another strict recounting of the story so far. Opening with the “once upon a time, there was a man who died” we know so well, the narrator quickly shifts to describing Tutu’s own narrative, as “the prince, who had lost his heart, met a duck in a certain town. Because of her love for the prince, the duck turned into a princess and gathered together the lost shards of his heart. The prince gradually regained his feelings, and at long last, he was able to regain even the feeling of love.” This narration ends on Tutu’s inescapable “did they really have a happy ending,” but on the whole, it’s a relatively straightforward summation of our current narrative.

Normally, an opening sequence like this could be dismissed as no more than summary, but nothing is so simple in Princess Tutu. The mere fact that the narrator jumps so naturally from Drosselmeyer’s original tale to Ahiru’s tells us that Ahiru never really escaped the narrative’s frame – regardless of her own intent, her actions ultimately slotted into Drosselmeyer’s existing template, and merely became a fanciful Act Two in his ongoing narrative. The story’s visual illustration emphasizes this entrapment, as we pan backwards through a window that captures Ahiru and all her struggles in one more picture book frame.

Drosselmeyer’s game here is a subtle one, a more surreptitious form of reality sculpting than his usual tricks. As usual, his trickery capitalizes on how stories can dictate truths – in this case, how stories can lend any series of events dramatic coherence. Stories lend a sense of narrative inevitability to potentially disparate or inexplicable events, making not just specific endings, but whole moralities seem like a natural consequence of their bearers’ starting points. Favored characters are blessed with the benefit of a narrative’s moral certainty, while villains are left with the unenviable task of attempting to claim moral superiority in a story where your name is “Villain.”

This might seem like a minor or obvious thing, but the power of stories to assign coherence and moral clarity to disparate events is an incredibly powerful tool for controlling the world around you. It’s a truism that “winners write the history books,” but that cliche can be extended beyond binary conflicts to apply to all the ways we view the world. Our systems of political theater, historical heroes and villains, economic assumptions, cultural beliefs – all of these things are shaped by the stories that we have collectively accepted as “known history.” And beyond individual moral lessons, turning the past into a story also implies an ending. Our natural instinct to seek narrative closure makes us inherently eager to believe that the present is the Eternal Present, the End of History, and that the world as it currently exists is how it Ought to Be.

This power of a binding narrative to imply rightness and coherence applies directly to Princess Tutu, where our heroes have been struggling all season long to escape the inevitability of the story they’ve been assigned. But fortunately, because the ambiguity of authorship is so central to Tutu’s narrative, the fact that Ahiru’s actions have now become a fairy tale of their own is actually a warning sign. One of Princess Tutu’s most unique and laudable messages has been the resounding, consistent “do not trust stories. Stories are designed to trick you.” We hear Tutu’s narrator tell us everything worked out great, and we know it’s all gone terribly wrong.

That contrast of overt peace and underlying menace carries through into the episode proper, as we open with a reprise of the first episode’s very first shots. Once again, we pan in on the lake as our duck heroine admires Mytho’s form. Ahiru realizes she’s a duck, but then finds herself transforming – not into Princess Tutu, but into a normal girl. Ahiru has embraced the role of Princess Tutu, but this is her true dream; this is the story she’d write herself, if she had the power. Instead, she can only embrace it in a dream, until a vision of Fakir’s death jolts her completely awake.

From there, we return to something resembling a new neutral, as familiar sequences of Ahiru prepping for school are embellished with a consistent bird motif, echoing the episode’s “The Raven” title. Both individual shots and full sequences, like Ahiru feeding the local birds, are lifted wholesale from the show’s first episodes, implying either a return to peace or the looping of a natural cycle. The only meaningful shift here is in Ahiru’s thoughts; from her early infatuation with Mytho, it’s now actually Fakir on her mind. This shift makes a great deal of sense; as beautiful as Mytho’s dancing may be, Ahiru doesn’t really know him that well as a person, whereas she’s seen Fakir at his best, his worst, and everything in between. Ahiru knows Fakir’s personal truth, not his storybook role, and she loves the real him.

I frankly can’t blame anyone for falling for Fakir; I mean, the guy really is a gallant knight in human form. As Ahiru runs across Fakir and Mytho on her way to school, Fakir once again proves his nobility, as he sets up a situation to allow Ahiru access to Mytho’s unfiltered thoughts on Princess Tutu. In contrast, while Mytho is obviously much warmer and more vibrant of a person than earlier, he’s still clearly not whole. He responds that his priority right now is getting back the rest of his heart shards, and that he ultimately even wants to return to his original story. Of the whole cast, Mytho seems like the only one who’s genuinely fine with accepting his terrible fate.

Mytho’s declaration is accompanied by the tolling of the clocktower, a structure which has gained clear significance over the course of this story. Its mechanical counting of the hours, complete with clockwork knights in battle and birds in flight, implies a cyclical destiny for all our heroes. The show’s ostensible marker of time’s passage thus actually conveys the opposite: an assurance that time will never move forward, and that these characters will be trapped in mechanical loops for the rest of their days. They might be enjoying peace now, but that’s just another segment of the pattern; as Drosselmeyer gleefully cackles, “these peaceful days won’t last forever. That’s what so great about stories!”

The episode’s second half centers on its own internal narrative, after Cat-sensei regails the class with a story from his own youth. At a year and three months old (“a cheeky youth!”), the young sensei got a chance to meet the renowned Meowzinsky, a ballet star known to be a singular genius. But on the day Cat-sensei met Meowzinsky, all he saw the master perform were the absolute basics. Meozinsky told Cat-sensei that “someone who hasn’t mastered the basics cannot achieve advanced techniques or a noble spirit,” and gifted him a pair of heavily worn ballet shoes. To Cat-sensei, these shoes are an irreplaceable treasure, a sign of how rigorous effort is always rewarded.

Cat-sensei doesn’t get the final word on this story, though. Though he’d like the conclusion to be some kind of celebration of effort, Ahiru’s friend quickly appends this story with “even if you rigorously practice the basics, people who aren’t talented will never succeed.” It’s not an encouraging moral, but it’s far more appropriate for Princess Tutu than Cat-sensei’s idealistic tale. This is a story about people who, in spite of trying their hardest, are simply destined in a narrative sense to never achieve their dreams. And so when Cat-sensei asks Ahiru if she remembered the moral of the story, it’s the revision she recollects, the only version that’s been true to her own life experience.

While Ahiru takes an unhappy personal truth from Cat-sensei’s tale, Mytho seems even more affected by the story. As we soon learn, this isn’t really his fault; the shard of his heart representing love has been soaked in the blood of Kraehe’s “father,” a massive clawed creature that seems to represent the original raven of the fairy tale. Though defeated, Kraehe actually used her thirteenth episode performance to lay the groundwork for her eventual victory, through poisoning Mytho into loving her. Revisions upon revisions, each asserting a definitive conclusion, are now piling against each other, jockeying for space. Though Ahiru plays her heroic role with ever more confidence and grace, if she continues to accept this story’s frame, her ultimate fate will remain Drosselmeyer’s to decide.

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