Princess Tutu

Episode 13-14

Of all of the many scenes that I love in Princess Tutu, my absolute favorite is in episode thirteen, the season finale, when she dances a pas de deux by herself. The very name of the dance means “duet,” and in ballet mixed-gender versions often involve the male dancer lifting the female or supporting her so that she can achieve a more impressive arch to her body or extension of her leg, so this means that Tutu is dancing while supporting herself, which seems to me to be the very essence of the magical girl: she has enough strength within her to make even that which should be impossible alone possible. Of course it's better if she doesn't have to go it alone, but if you look back at classic magical girl stories, you'll see that more often than not, she has to go into the final battle with no one but herself to rely upon. With Kraehe dancing with the heart shard, Mytho under a spell, and Fakir potentially bleeding out at the bottom of the lake, Tutu has to carry on alone.

To do so requires her to fully accept her three-fold transformation: she is a duck, she is Duck, and she is Tutu all at the same time. Tutu has the dance skills and magic, Duck has the heart of gold, and the duckling has the wings to facilitate flight—all things that are necessary for her to pull off the solo lifts and supports, but also all required for her to be the person she is. No one is made up of only one personality or physical trait, and by accepting hers, she truly becomes the heroine of the story, saves the prince, defeats the villain, and sets her feet on the path to happily ever after.

But.

Is Kraehe really the villain? Or is that Drosselmeyer?

Is the Prince really saved? Or does he still have lingering results from Kraehe's doctoring of his heart shard?

And is Tutu the heroine who sacrifices everything for Happily Ever After, or is that Edel, who burns herself up to save Tutu, Mytho, and Fakir?

What is “happily ever after, anyway?

Episode fourteen, the start of the second cour, is where things really start to change, and that starts with challenging the idea of “happily ever after.” In most folktales that use the stock phrase, it means the guy gets the girl and we end with them being married. It's a formula that's bled over into much fiction both Eastern and Western (look at shoujo Romance (manga), and it's an easy way of just brushing past the idea that there's still work to be done after the day is saved. Loose ends are rarely so obliging as to just go away. Sleeping Beauty will have trouble adjusting to a world 100 years in the future from when she went to sleep? Cinderella will be uncomfortable being waited on hand and foot after she did the same for others for most of her life? Who cares? They married princes; the rest can just take care of itself.

That's the idea that Princess Tutu emphatically rejects as it embarks on its second half, and it builds on themes laid down in the previous episodes. Most recently, in episode thirteen, Drosselmeyer and Kraehe brush off the idea of variants, slightly different versions of a tale that exist in other places. Variants are central to the scholarship of folklore, and by eschewing their existence, Kraehe and Drosselmeyer are basically pushing the idea of their preferred variant as the “true” one, something we often see when people insist that the versions of fairy tales recorded by the Grimms are the “real” or “original” ones. (They're just the best known thanks to Wilhelm Grimm's amazing marketing skills.) When Edel—whose name is old German for “noble,” you may recall—kills herself so that Tutu can live, she activates a variant of The Prince and the Raven, as does Tutu when she speaks of her love with movements rather than words. Most notable in this version is the fact that neither the Knight nor the Raven die, meaning that the threat to the Prince is still active—and that the Knight's role isn't yet finished. That means that the story is still moving, negating the idea of ending with a simple “happily ever after.”

It is at this point that we begin to see evidence of Hans Christian Andersen's 1847 literary fairy-tale The Shadow. In this piece, a man's shadow slowly takes over his life until he and the shadow switch places; the man becomes less real as the shadow becomes more human. That's what's going on with Mytho now that the tainted heart shard is firmly planted inside of him. It begins to turn him into a shadow-self; his true, kind, and princely nature is buried as a darker, crueler version surfaces. That means that the new role Tutu and Fakir must play is to save the Prince from himself.

And with Edel already gone, there may not be a safe way out this time. The Shadow, after all, does not have a happy ending.

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