princess tutu, again
rrrrrrr reading jetwolf’s tutu liveblog and it just annoys me so much
like, in some of jet’s liveblogs, her takes are perfect and flawless (THE OWL HOUSE), but this one? this one runs right into my PET PEEVE
something that Tutu does which FOR EXAMPLE UTENA WHICH I DISLIKE doesn’t really is that it doesn’t ever let out of its sight that in addition to the mystical supernatural lives the characters are also leading mundane-ish lives as ballet students
note that this version of their life is not ACTUALLY mundane in any way. it’s deeply intertwined with the supernatural part (like Mytho’s entire unexplained presence and presumably lack of aging, however Rue and Akiru appeared there, the whole animal people thing) and it’s also kind of batshit in its own unique way (the CAT MARRIAGE)
and while the “main narrative” centers on just Rue, Mytho, Akiru and Fakir, with victims of the week coming and going, with Fakir’s father and Edel and her kid and the Raven and Clockula in supplementary roles, the “school narrative” involves SO MANY CHARACTERS, who have their own drama going on non-stop
Ahiru’s friends who are LIVING FOR THE DRAMA. They are not the “out of unvierse” audience or stand-ins for it! They are certainly PARALLEL to it though because they are... teenage girls who are very into things? Like, this is happening in-universe, and in-universe it’s important TO THEM. Ahiru lives very much on the periphery of the school narrative, for all that they don’t really need her to actually do much of anything to write a PASSIONATE TORRID ROMANCE NARRATIVE about her and Fakir and Mytho and whatnot in their own heads. This is different from your regular superhero / magical girl secret identity scenario, where the mundane life tends to also end up with the main character in the center of events, be it because they’re a snoopy assertive queen as their personality (early Usagi, Cornelia and Irma in WITCH, etc), because they are just an interesting person things tend to happen around (Marinette, Hay Lin in WITCH) or quite despite their best efforts (Peter Parker if I’m remembering right, Usagi when Chibiusa first appears). Ahiru periodically ends up somewhere close to the center of mundane events, like when Rue chose her for a dance partner early on to show off how good she is, but for the most part the mundane drama exists entirely independent of her.
This is important not because it symbolizes something about the main narrative, about the in-universe understanding of a “story” that Mytho is a prince in. No, it establishes the outer layer - that that “story” is a story in a world that is, in itself, also interesting. That the people TELLING the story and HEARING it also have their own shit going on, and that shit is no less fascinating, and frankly MORE interesting, given Jet is completely not wrong about Mytho being a particularly flavorless graham cracker.
The story-story and related events (all the Raven drama) playing out is important not so much in itself as by how much it impacts the actual people living in this world. Lily, Pike, Anteaterina, Cat-sensei, the dance troupe with the electric eel leader, Freya, Femio, everyone - the people who do not come from Drosselmeyer’s stories, who have their own stories going on but who get drawn into this one, pulled into it, derailed because of how much bullshit is being, quite artificially, stirred up by it.
From this flows the understanding that Fakir, Ahiru, Rue, hypothetically in their imagination also Mytho - they are, in this context, ‘real people’ too, and the story-story again matters not so much for its own sake as for how it impacts THEM. Fakir was the only one who cared about the story’s own premise - that the prince’s heart being broken is what seals the raven - but even that was abandoned when the going got good. The story-story is completely unrelated to their goals and motivations: Ahiru wants to be someone who saves the prince, and also to meet the imaginary prince she has drawn up in her imagination (quite possibly not without good reason, but still for herself and for her own sake); Fakir wants to prove he’s a good person, to have a duty, to be the knight, but also to not die and to be able to fix things; Rue wants... a lot of things on different levels and on different levels of awareness which is a fascinating thing with her, but for one thing I’d very much call out that as Kraehe in the first half she very much doesn’t want her father to get unsealed.
None of this is in any way related to the original plot - we don’t even find out what the Raven did that pitted him against Mytho, I don’t think. Right now he’s the bad guy because he’s opposing the protagonists’ CURRENT motivations - because he’s trying to corrupt Mytho, because he’s being abusive towards Rue, neither of which has any point of reference in the original narrative where there’s no ballet school and no crow princess.
Drosselmeyer only cares about the ballet school narrative to the degree that it’s relevant to the ‘main’ narrative. He’s not getting distracted by asking what the fuck is Femio’s deal, he has zero interest in Cat-sensei or Lily and Pike, he seems to have entirely failed to pick up on Ahiru’s crush on Rue. This is a limitation in his perspective - he doesn’t care about the characters as much as the show’s audience is being pushed to, he doesn’t see as much of them, and he doesn’t really follow all the... supplementary motivations and opportunities they have. Fakir’s struggle as a beginning writer and his descendant exists on the ballet school level, and so for a while Drosselmeyer fails to pick up on it entirely.
The ballet school level is, to get back to what annoys me about Jet’s analysis, also the level on which Uzura appears. Jet asks about her like Fakir’s father making her has to tie in to the main narrative, but it doesn’t!
In the main narrative, Edel was a literal plot device who then went out of control, developed her own agency and ended up saving Fakir and guiding Ahiru and Mytho to him at the end of the first season.
In the ballet school narrative, Edel was a person who was a friend and then died / sacrificed herself for Fakir, but she was a construct, so maybe she can be rebuilt?... She sacrificed herself to save Fakir, OF COURSE his father is going to try to fix her! For reasons completely unrelated to anything Drosselmeyer is interested in, it’s just a... human with emotions thing to do.
Note that the main narrative doesn’t feature humans with emotions, not really. The crow princess is just an inexplicable antagonist opposing Tutu even though her goals should technically align (the whole heart shard dance shows this well with how much Kraehe flip flops on what she’s actually doing there - her conflicted feelings about the Raven explain a lot of it, but those belong much more on the ballet school level, Drosselmeyer never acknolwedges those in his own commentary), Fakir is a knight protecting the prince from whatever would be the most dramatic for him to throw himself at (first Tutu, then Kraehe when she establishes herself as a force capable of opposing Tutu and the knight both), Tutu is supposed to confess her love and vanish into a speck of light - we never really find out what her context in the original narrative even was, we just know she was a minor side character, and we know Ahiru’s motivations go far beyond Tutu’s motivations (see also: her crush on Rue). Mytho is barely more than a doll, but that’s not special: ALL of their roles are exactly as cardboard. The only thing that makes Mytho special is that he doesn’t get an actual person who grew up in the regular world to “play” him, he stars as himself. Fakir might be a “reincarnation” of the knight but he was born in Ballettown as a regular kid; Rue was literally kidnapped into the story; Ahiru was a duck of all things before getting recruited to be Tutu. Mytho though, Mytho comes directly from the myth.
His ballet school level identity is a cardboard cutout, and that does 0 to stop drama springing around him, and that’s also important: much like how Rue’s and Ahiru’s and Fakir’s motivations are ultimately about themselves as they exist on the ballet school level (Fakir the ballet school student wants to be a hero, Rue the ballet school student wants to continue her ordinary life with as little shenanigans as possible, Ahiru the ballet school student wants to be a hero and to dance with the prince), the ballet school exclusive cast’s motivations are about themselves too. It doesn’t matter to them that Mytho is cardboard any more than it matters to them that Fakir has the whole knight thing going on or that Ahiru is a duck. They have no way of even knowing those things about them. All they have is the public persona, and that’s perfectly enough for them to incorporate Mytho and entourage into their own personal stories. Pike wanted to rescue Mytho from the tragic story she told inside her own head; Lily wants fuel for the bloodthirsty drama non-stop broadcast on her personal gossip channel; other characters want... a variety of things, often confusing and nonsensical, and all those things exist utterly independently of other people even as they incorporate them.
To try to fold the ballet school narrative into the main narrative the way Jet is trying to do is missing the point quite a bit. That level is SEPARATE and DOESN’T MAP and that’s THE POINT. That the role of the prince fits other people better than Mytho does not mean Mytho is not the prince in the “main” narrative because that is the story Drosselmeyer is telling and he DOESN’T CARE that other stories also exist and are going on. That they are still going on regardless is an important part of what the show is doing!
Like, the reason Drosselmeyer is a villain is BECAUSE he’s pushing his own story, his own interest, on all these people whose lives outside of it he cares not one whit for. He’s engaged with Tutu’s suffering; the death of Fakir’s parents goes completely beneath his radar. He’s not evil because he’s a writer who enjoys tragedy, but because he’s a writer who’s pushing his tragedy onto people who do actually exist and have lives independent of his fiction.
That’s why the ballet school is so weird and dramatic: for all the cardboard nature of Drosselmeyer’s story, it’s still intriguing and ignites imagination, so it takes Anteaterina, Cat-sensei and Femio to really meaningfully compete. A more mundane setting would have 0 chance to actually catch the audience’s attention, and catching the audience’s attention is important here, getting them to pay attention to and have emotions (even if those emotions are mostly confusion) about things Drosselmeyer DOESN’T.
Jet is wrong )=
P.S. it’s worth noting that the ballet school narrative not only has its own fantasy/supernatural elements, but that it’s also a false/inserted one for Ahiru: she is originally a duck, being a human tween attending a ballet school is as artifical for her as it is for Mytho. And still the ballet school feels so much more real than Drosselmeyer’s story - because it doesn’t have a dictating overarching narrative, it’s just comprised of lots of people bringing their own personal drama to the potluck
P.P.S. Jet points out how everyone in the ‘main’ story is never called out by name, but only by their designations - “the prince in the story” etc. Jet thinks it might be because the narrative is playing silly buggers with who is who, and I think that’s because of the ballet school vs Drosselmeyer’s story separation. The prince in Drosselmeyer’s story is not named Mytho, he is not named anything. Mytho is the name he gets when he drops into Ballettown and is found by tiny Fakir, and he is an emotionless husk of a person but he’s still a person and gets a name, unlike the story, in which he might have a whole heroic personality that-we-are-just-not-currently-privy-to but the whole thing is held together by snot, shoelaces and Drosselmeyer’s bad writing.
