Princess Tutu: Do It For Him

III

To her, it seems right to seek to consume him utterly.

Bathe his heart in blood, let it run as red as her leotard or her lips or her lies; red as the rose petals that gleam with velvet simplicity, as pure as love itself should be.

Red as the gleam in the monster raven’s eye, or—

The gleam at Tutu’s throat.

Rue; or Kraehe… Does she know Tutu wears the final shard of lovely Mytho’s heart as a mere pendant – a charm to change her from duck to girl to the other princess?

Rue knows what it is to be consumed – by hatred, and by love. She’s never loved anyone as much as she loves Mytho, it’s not her fault, it’s not something anyone can blame her for because she was always told that he was the only one who would ever love her ugly human form, isn’t that right, Daddy Dearest…?

After all, Tutu’s the pure little girl, the heroine of an unfinished, tragic tale; Tutu was never written to be flawed, pen leaving her untainted by the selfish desires that consume Rue, make her act to have Mytho as hers and hers alone, with or without his heart.

Kraehe… She can’t be as selfless as Tutu – she’s simply not written that way.

Her true reason, though? Kraehe isn’t the villainess – Kraehe is the victim as much as the poor heartless prince or the shredded knight or the princess doomed to fade away to light should she utter a token of her love; she doesn’t want to suffer any more than she already has.

She wants a Happy Ever After.

That’s only fair, after all, right?

And so, if nothing else, it’s fear that feeds the flames of her cruelty, those actions that strike up such frustration in poor little Tutu – fear that, should Mytho regain the ability to love and to regret, he too would reject her.

Better to have him heartless – or tainted – than to not have him at all.

That’s why she does it, in the end; the reason she causes him such pain.

She does it for him.

—

II

The pen is mightier than the sword.

It’s a saying that Fakir knows the truth of – one he’s suppressed belief in for this long, unready to live and die by it.

This gift he has, it’s dangerous. People get hurt. People get killed. Fakir knows that, he’s seen it, after all…

He’s descended from Drosselmeyer, but he knows better than that careless old man; and not “careless” to mean clumsy, but “careless” meant in caring little for the lives he winds up and allows to run, sometimes to destruction. Story-telling is a dangerous thing, it requires the ability to act like a god and pass judgement on characters, give them their endings, it’s not something that can be started and then left to fester, unfinished…

Things have a way of finishing themselves, as they all know by now.

Leave them unattended and they start to get dangerous.

Ahiru, she thinks it’s that simple, to just write a happy ending for Mytho – to just give him his whole heart back in a sentence or two. It’s not like. Fakir might as well write it in blood for all the pain it causes.

He’s not a coward. He’s afraid of death, of course, it’s a natural human thing, to fear death – it’s what keeps humans alive a lot of the time, that constant running, but he isn’t a coward.

He’s a knight, and he’ll stand and protect his prince, no matter what it takes; rent in twain, he has the past-life scar over his chest to prove it, but he’ll stand again, and yet—

It makes sense for him to take up a sword to step in front of his prince; Mytho, whom he promised to protect no matter what.

That’s partly why it doesn’t feel right to take up a pen instead.

And it’s fear – fear of the unknown. For all the talk of “artistic temperament”, authors and novelists who sit and moan to each other how they spend months and years and decades on manuscripts, tweaking and rethinking and redrafting…

Fakir just doesn’t know what’s going to come spilling from the tip of his pen the moment he lays it to paper, and he’s more afraid of that than he is of being torn in half.

After all, Mytho is a storybook character; a fairytale prince, and in that, Fakir has not only the power to save him, but to surely destroy him also.

But if Princess Tutu will stand and fight for Mytho, then he, as the prince’s knight, must stand for the sake of him too; and so, pen – mightier than the sword – goes down to paper—

And he does it for him.

—

I

She’s not Princess Tutu; not that glowing figure of pure grace, dancing en Pointe with utmost ease, treading on water and twirling on air—

She’s not even a girl.

She’s just a duck. She’s Ahiru and ahiru means ‘duck’ and that’s exactly right because that’s all she is.

But then again… what is Princess Tutu anyway? Who is she? If Ahiru is not truly her, then who is?

Ah, that’s the truth indeed. Nobody is Princess Tutu, and Princess Tutu is nobody – she’s not real, just the wistful fiction-dream of a dead writer, a beautiful and tragic dancing princess, doomed to die on utterance of her heart’s desire.

And Ahiru is the duck-come-girl granted to play the part of the lovely lead role, Princess Tutu, in this fast-unfolding tale—

Oh, but Tutu… Pretty Little Princess Tutu… You are not the lead role, are you? No, indeed.

She was only a character written in briefly, then written out again, disappearing in a flash of brilliant light; no, the character in question here is the poor little prince, sacrificing his own heart to seal away a monstrous raven – Tutu is nothing but a narrative tool.

Perhaps Kraehe is right – maybe Tutu is nothing but a pretty, pious little goody-goody, prancing about returning shards of shattered heart that are not hers to return, but that’s how Tutu was written.

Tutu remains ever untainted because she was written as untaintable.

And maybe Drosselmeyer intended her as nothing more than a mere deus ex machina – a princess who suddenly appears from nowhere, the only one with the power to magically restore and return Prince Mytho’s heart to him so that he may defeat the raven once and for all.

In the end, maybe that’s the only reason for Princess Tutu’s glorious self-sacrifice, caring nothing for herself as long as she can see Mytho smile – that’s simply the way Drosselmeyer wrote her, and she can be nothing else.

She’s a servant to the prince; a missionary assigned with the task of piecing together his heart so that he may love and laugh again, and she does so with a song in her heart and a flawless grace in her step.

“Will you dance with me?” is all she ever asks, even of those who stand ready to destroy her.

She does it for him—

Because that’s how the story goes.

END

Oh, Princess Tutu...

Such a good series. I was pleasantly surprised by how wrong I was about it. It's wonderful.

That is all. :)