We open Princess Tutu’s nineteenth episode with a familiar story, one this show seems to have been telling all along. As we peer over blooming flowers towards an eternally closed window, our narrator tells us that “once upon a time, there was a maiden in love. ‘I want to tell my beloved how I feel, but my love might be over the moment I say it.’ Every day she suffered, agonizing this way. She took no meals, and she was unable to even sleep. And finally, she died without ever having been able to communicate her feelings. But the man she loved married another woman and lived happily ever after, without ever even knowing the maiden had existed.”
There is a great deal to be drawn from this sad tale, beyond its direct application to Ahiru’s own story. The idea of fearing love’s end so much that you never seek love’s fruition is a feeling most young people can probably relate to. Sometimes we don’t want the clarity of a definitive answer – sometimes our feelings of longing, even if they’re hidden or one-sided, are so precious to us that we can’t risk losing them. Sometimes it’s the longing itself that we treasure, a feeling that lifts us up, instilling our lives with a sense of wonder and purpose. Perhaps we know our love would reject us, and so this one-sided romance is the closest to them we might ever feel. For someone who can move past their love, it is probably best to reveal it – but for those who truly live and die in the shadow of another, a life of longing can seem far gentler than a single moment of decisive despair.
Loving in secret also means we are never forced to engage with the actual feelings of our object of affection. It is a way of maintaining authorship of their story, something Princess Tutu has emphasized all throughout. To the maiden in love, this man was a key figure in her story, the tragic idol she could never attain. To him, the maiden didn’t exist at all – and the bridging of these two narratives may well have brought more pain than joy. We all see others in the context of how they interact with our own life story; people who are antagonistic to our desires are villains, while those who accommodate us are clearly righteous souls. To admit your love is to share your story with another, and hope they see something beautiful in it as well. To admit your love is to relinquish sole authorship of your story, and let another help or harm you in the most intimate possible way.
Ahiru is still recovering from her dance with the spectral knight as we enter the episode proper, bandaged and adorably tucked into Fakir’s bed. But before she can speak to Fakir, Drosselmeyer appears, and congratulates her on her victory. Apparently, Ahiru has successfully restored all the shards hidden in other’s hearts – but, he is quick to add, “that wasn’t all the shards.” Apparently some of Mytho’s heart is still being used to imprison the raven itself, because… well, because that’s convenient to Drosselmeyer.
In the world of Princess Tutu, Drosselmeyer is essentially the only person who doesn’t have to engage with the stories of others. This is his world, and so if he wants something to be true, he writes it so. He is free to add asterisks and revisions to all of his proclamations – and when Ahiru succeeds in one task, he is happy to move the goalposts much further away. Drosselmeyer’s taunting here reeks of desperation, and underlines how impossible it is to achieve victory in someone else’s story. Truly connecting with someone else and actually changing their mind requires a willing party; if someone doesn’t like how new information conflicts with their existing story, they will often just choose not to accept it. Though Ahiru can try her best (and she sure does, desperately shouting key questions like “where are the other shards” and “how do I stop his heart being dyed by the raven’s blood”), Drosselmeyer can always just choose not to help her. And so he does, ending on a goodbye that’s half prophecy (“we will meet again”) and half taunt (“when I feel like it”).
Upon returning to Fakir, Ahiru relays their new task, which he responds to with characteristic brusqueness. “So what? That just means that when the final shards are returned, the fight will begin. If you’re not prepared for that, then stop being Princess Tutu.” Fakir almost certainly doesn’t mean to be cold; he’s both trying to demonstrate his own strength, and also genuinely concerned for Ahiru’s safety. His awkward show of support is then mirrored by Ahiru, who protests that she’d rather see him fight with books than with a sword. To Fakir, who has built his self-image around being the knight from the story, this statement reads as “you’re not qualified to be a knight” – after all, in his story, the assumption of a brave knight using a sword to defend Mytho is unquestionable. But Ahiru has no attachment to that part of the story; all she’s concerned for is her friend Fakir, who she doesn’t want to see hurt.
The distance between the stories these two are telling thus prompts a minor fight, even though each of them were ultimately speaking out of concern for the other. Ahiru meant her comment kindly, but Fakir’s self-image and his current mental state don’t allow him to take it but anything as an insult. Ahiru couldn’t know that Fakir is currently suffering through deep insecurity regarding his worthiness, and would be further surprised to learn that much of Fakir’s pain comes from the shame of not being able to protect Ahiru herself. It’s a conflict that underlines the implications of the opening fable; we love and cherish our individual narratives, but if we don’t reach out to others and genuinely communicate our feelings, we will always be trapped in conflicting personal narratives, waiting for a love that doesn’t even know we’re there.
All this heavy paradox of perspective stuff is fortunately dashed aside by the next scene, where Pike and Lilly are gleefully back on their bullshit. Crowing about Ahiru’s apparent love for Fakir, they tell her to write a letter, and that “Bottom” will deliver it. Apparently, Bottom understands the feelings of people in love, and has been using her power to deliver love letters between the students. But it’s not the love letter part that interests Ahiru; it’s the “understanding feelings” part, a gift that she feels might help them unlock Mytho’s heart. And so she heads off to meet Bottom, and meets a girl wearing a donkey mask whose true identity is the upperclassmen Hermia.
Incidentally, both Bottom and Hermia are characters taken from this episode’s title work, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a great choice of reference for an episode all about the muddled incompatibility of our feelings, as the play’s drama is basically all about young lovers pledging their love, getting muddled up by love potions courtesy of the fairy court, and perpetually misinterpreting each other’s feelings. In the play, Nick Bottom is a buffoonish worker who ends up having his head actually transformed into that of a donkey, while Hermia is a young woman who wants to marry Lysander, but is pledged to Demetrius. Princess Tutu’s own Hermia is held back from her love by a force far more appropriate for this episode – her own lack of confidence.
Hermia might not be able to confess her love, but as Ahiru talks with her, we learn she’s a pretty wonderful person in her own right. As a tall girl, she’s always stood in the back of stage productions, and so she “came to see the love on everyone’s back.” By observing others, she learned how their love was reflected in their every movement; how their feelings brought both joy and suffering in equal measure. And now she hopes to ease that suffering, by delivering letters and facilitating the fruition of their love. Hermia doesn’t have any unique magical power; she’s simply sensitive and compassionate, and has learned to love engaging with and supporting the personal stories of others.
Just before we reach our climax, Rue makes one more attempt to regain Mytho’s affection. In a sequence livened through dynamic angles and cast against a somber horn melody, Rue dances for Mytho’s love. This scene doesn’t feel like more machinations by Rue’s father – this feels like Rue herself fearfully expressing her feelings, in a direct reprise of the show’s first half finale. Her entreaties aren’t forceful, they’re desperate; she reaches out to Mytho by saying that “you have raven’s blood coursing through your veins, just like I do. No one can erase it. No one can stop it.” In her attempts to seduce Mytho, Rue only reveals how fully she herself has been beaten down by the people directing her story. And when Mytho rejects her advances, she is left alone with the jeering ravens, a gallery that has shifted from appearing like her grim harbingers to standing as her mocking jailers.
Though the return of his pride has brought him great inner turmoil, Mytho ultimately submits once more to the raven’s blood coursing within him. And so episode nineteen ends on a final seduction, as Mytho calls out to Hermia in a courtship framed as a refutation of all that she stands for. “The reason you deliver other’s letters is so you can forget that you yourself don’t have the courage to confess your love,” he says, returning us to the fable of the cold open. “Everyone else is using you too. So from now on, you can think only about yourself. Love only me, and regard everyone else with hatred.”
Mytho’s entreaties reflect one of the easiest ways to escape the pain, discord, and eternal cycles of contrasting personal narratives. If you simply treat everyone else as a villain, and imagine any of their deviations from what you expect as a failing on their part, you’ll always be right. If others’ refusal to embrace your story simply reflects their cruelty and selfishness, suddenly everything becomes much, much simpler. No need to agonize over moral intent or the contrasting feelings of others; after all, you are the hero of this story. The moral complexity and hardship of attempting to relate to other’s stories can always be defeated by embracing one value: absolute self-interest.
This philosophy is the exact opposite of Hermia’s gift, her ability to find joy in witnessing and facilitating the personal stories of others. And beyond that, it’s also a denial of her own love; something Princess Tutu urges her to remember, and to embrace as valid. Rising to defend her friend, Princess Tutu does something crucially important: she relates to Hermia’s story. Looking at Hermia’s honest tale, she sees her own love for Mytho paralleled in Hermia’s feelings for Lysander, and voices her sympathy for Hermia’s pain. Our stories may often contradict each other and will always spark friction, but it is desperately important to seek out these points of common feeling. We cannot just embrace self-interest or perpetual isolation; we must share our stories and be willing to reach out in turn, always seeking the human commonalities that unite us all.
The raven’s avatar cannot understand this instinct; rising in fury, he states that “if this love is false, then all the love in the world is false love.” The raven can only offer love as solipsism, an invitation to join him in his own story. His great defense is that he only needs to care about his own feelings, but that also means he can’t acknowledge or even really recognize any feelings outside of his own. But there is more to the world than our own feelings, and there is so much to be gained in sharing our stories with the world. Whether our confessions end in sorrow or joy, their very telling is a noble charge. Be brave in the telling of your tale, and be kind to those who trust you with their own.
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