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Then go to town in a golden gown and have my fortune told
So, there will be con report. I have also just finished Sarah Monette's Mélusine, and I have some thoughts about that. But first there's Princess Tutu. Cut for the usual; spoilers, rambling.
We just finished the ninth episode, "The Black Shoes: Bilder einer Ausstellung: Alten Schloss," and I can state without hesitation that in the last few episodes this show has become astronomically weirder. And I love it.
I am starting to be reminded of Alan Garner's The Owl Service, in which a myth inexorably forces those who come into contact with it into its own shape—and destroys them, unless someone can break the cycle of retelling. I'm also amused and intrigued by the fracture between the town and the rest of the planet: it's no surprise that the leader of a ballet troupe is an electric eel who powers the stage lights, when no one bats an eye at an iguana in the changing room or a goat in love, but it is remarkable that he does not seem to have been an eel before they arrived in Kinkan Town. The husband-and-wife team that head the troupe are philosophic—saves on the electric bills this way. And they cease to remark on the fact. Once in town, he has always been an eel. Once out of town, I imagine he will turn back to himself and no one will remember him otherwise. So Duck has an entire history as a student at Kinkan Academy, when she has been human for perhaps two months now, and no one finds it strange that she doesn't know even the oldest traditions of the town, like the Fire Festival. The mundane and the fantastic seem to have smashed and crazed and not quite settled out; there's narrative dissonance all over the place. I'm waiting to see if it will ever be resolved.
I was pleased to see that I had almost diagnosed Rue correctly. Like Duck, she too has an alter ego out of the unfinished tale: Princess Kraehe; the Crow Princess. (It is my current bet that she is not the raven herself, but the raven's daughter, as Odile is the daughter of the magician Von Rothbart. At the very least, she is advised by them. And by Drosselmeyer, as well.) The catch is that, as is not the case for any other figure in this story, neither half of her character seems aware of the other. As Rue, she cannot understand how an inquisitive shard of the prince's heart has come to reside in her underwear drawer, and the question drives her out of her room in a panic; as Princess Kraehe, in confrontation with Princess Tutu and Mytho, she repeats over and over again that she is Kraehe, she is Kraehe, as though the name alone will provide her motivation. Their romantic triangle is rapidly framing itself as a tragic one—on all sides, frankly. Princess Tutu loves her prince, but at the moment she restores his heart, she herself will turn into a spark and disappear. Rue loves Mytho, but cannot fail to notice that as he regains emotion, he has started to fall in love with Princess Tutu. And if Kraehe cannot have her man, then perhaps no one will. Unlike every character who held a heart shard before her, she rejected Tutu's offer of kindness; she dances alone.
The contrasts between her and Tutu are sharp and curious. As befits a black swan, whose purpose is to seduce a prince away from his love, Kraehe is clearly a more sexual figure than Tutu: her costume is a slashed black skirt, split petals of a bodice that barely cover her breasts, the requisite ballet shoes, and eyeshadow as violet as a bruise; the only touch of color about her, beyond her dark-red eyes. Her voice is huskier than Rue's; she addresses Mytho like a lover, possessive and assured, contemptuous of Tutu's straightforward yearning to do whatever is best for the prince. But her transformation is brutal. When Duck becomes Princess Tutu, she is whirled up in a glittering flurry into a golden egg that turns water-translucent and shatters liquidly, to reveal the princess who gracefully unfolds her arms and steps free: birth, rebirth, renewal. When Rue slips her feet into the black ballet shoes into which two ravens have transformed (and which both the episode's title and the opening narrative have explicitly identified with the red shoes of the fairy tale, that once put on cannot be so easily taken off again), their ribbons weave up around her calves of their own accord—to become black-thorned vines that wrap around her naked skin, bind and lash her in a storm of dark feathers, and she screams in pain. Only when the metamorphosis has finished is she cool, arrogant, unafraid to raise stormwinds or call down ravens to steal what's left of the prince's heart. I wonder how well Kraehe remembers Rue, or the pains of transformation. I am waiting to see whether she will revert to Rue in the next episode. I have my suspicions that she may not.
Then we have Fakir, who has particularly taken my interest. As closed, brusque, and occasionally violent as he has been up to this point—not only has he threatened Duck, he struck Mytho when he realized that his roommate would no longer obey him—he too turns out to have a place in the original story, as the prince's friend and faithful knight. Moreover, he seems to be the only character who has been conscious of the double layers of story all along. He may not yet know that Duck is Princess Tutu (or, for that matter, that she is a duck), but he knows that Tutu is the cause of the Mytho's reawakening, and in the catacombs beneath the clock-tower he has stored away the sword that once shattered the prince's heart; prepared to do the same a second time, if the prince ever regains its pieces. On the one hand, it's a relief that he's not the raven or the raven's proxy, since that level of obviousness would have annoyed me. On the other, all of his motives are now cast into another kind of suspicion. Does he truly want to protect the prince from the pain of human emotion, or does he only fear the death that awaits him at the raven's claws if the story continues on its proper course?
Which brings me to Drosselmeyer, who is making me happy on all cylinders. I love that he pitches a fit when Duck decides to throw the gem he gave her (that allows her to transform both from a duck into a girl and from a girl into Princess Tutu) into the river and give up her quest to restore the prince—in effect, to stop the story. And all of a sudden, the storyteller is no longer all-knowing, all-seeing, with powers over space and time and the human heart. He's an old man in a clockwork season, freaking out because reality is not so easily manipulated as words on the page. His confrontation with Duck is a hilarious misfire. He walks out of a door in the blank air, into a moment of stopped time where a waterdrop has frozen like a Harold Edgerton photograph, because he is dead and cannot interact with normal time: and Duck is not impressed. Instead she demands to know why he chose her, out of all the people in the world, and the storyteller unguardedly answers with the truth: "Because it would be fun." His gleeful smile freezes; Duck's expression does not change. Quickly he adds, "And because you were the only one who could do it . . ." His marionettes are all starting to unravel their strings.
I wondered before about his connection with the clock-tower; I'm even more curious now. Wherever he exists, it is not properly within the time of this world—since he is dead, he can enter the world only through a grandfather clock (shades of The Last Unicorn and The Nutcracker) and stay only briefly—and I have noticed that the mechanical figures are a dancing couple, a knight with a sword, and a swan. Is he living on the borrowed time of the story? Or is this more of a traditional ghost frame: can he not properly die until his unfinished tale is told? I hadn't considered this before, but what if he, too, is trapped in its plot somehow?
I still don't even know how to start with Edel. I love the gems she sells, particularly the gem of "author's convenience." But in her most recent appearance to Fakir in the bookstore, she disappears like a puppet being drawn up into the wings. Perhaps she is not Drosselmeyer's opposite after all.
I have no answers. But I can't wait to find out what questions to ask next.
We just finished the ninth episode, "The Black Shoes: Bilder einer Ausstellung: Alten Schloss," and I can state without hesitation that in the last few episodes this show has become astronomically weirder. And I love it.
I am starting to be reminded of Alan Garner's The Owl Service, in which a myth inexorably forces those who come into contact with it into its own shape—and destroys them, unless someone can break the cycle of retelling. I'm also amused and intrigued by the fracture between the town and the rest of the planet: it's no surprise that the leader of a ballet troupe is an electric eel who powers the stage lights, when no one bats an eye at an iguana in the changing room or a goat in love, but it is remarkable that he does not seem to have been an eel before they arrived in Kinkan Town. The husband-and-wife team that head the troupe are philosophic—saves on the electric bills this way. And they cease to remark on the fact. Once in town, he has always been an eel. Once out of town, I imagine he will turn back to himself and no one will remember him otherwise. So Duck has an entire history as a student at Kinkan Academy, when she has been human for perhaps two months now, and no one finds it strange that she doesn't know even the oldest traditions of the town, like the Fire Festival. The mundane and the fantastic seem to have smashed and crazed and not quite settled out; there's narrative dissonance all over the place. I'm waiting to see if it will ever be resolved.
I was pleased to see that I had almost diagnosed Rue correctly. Like Duck, she too has an alter ego out of the unfinished tale: Princess Kraehe; the Crow Princess. (It is my current bet that she is not the raven herself, but the raven's daughter, as Odile is the daughter of the magician Von Rothbart. At the very least, she is advised by them. And by Drosselmeyer, as well.) The catch is that, as is not the case for any other figure in this story, neither half of her character seems aware of the other. As Rue, she cannot understand how an inquisitive shard of the prince's heart has come to reside in her underwear drawer, and the question drives her out of her room in a panic; as Princess Kraehe, in confrontation with Princess Tutu and Mytho, she repeats over and over again that she is Kraehe, she is Kraehe, as though the name alone will provide her motivation. Their romantic triangle is rapidly framing itself as a tragic one—on all sides, frankly. Princess Tutu loves her prince, but at the moment she restores his heart, she herself will turn into a spark and disappear. Rue loves Mytho, but cannot fail to notice that as he regains emotion, he has started to fall in love with Princess Tutu. And if Kraehe cannot have her man, then perhaps no one will. Unlike every character who held a heart shard before her, she rejected Tutu's offer of kindness; she dances alone.
The contrasts between her and Tutu are sharp and curious. As befits a black swan, whose purpose is to seduce a prince away from his love, Kraehe is clearly a more sexual figure than Tutu: her costume is a slashed black skirt, split petals of a bodice that barely cover her breasts, the requisite ballet shoes, and eyeshadow as violet as a bruise; the only touch of color about her, beyond her dark-red eyes. Her voice is huskier than Rue's; she addresses Mytho like a lover, possessive and assured, contemptuous of Tutu's straightforward yearning to do whatever is best for the prince. But her transformation is brutal. When Duck becomes Princess Tutu, she is whirled up in a glittering flurry into a golden egg that turns water-translucent and shatters liquidly, to reveal the princess who gracefully unfolds her arms and steps free: birth, rebirth, renewal. When Rue slips her feet into the black ballet shoes into which two ravens have transformed (and which both the episode's title and the opening narrative have explicitly identified with the red shoes of the fairy tale, that once put on cannot be so easily taken off again), their ribbons weave up around her calves of their own accord—to become black-thorned vines that wrap around her naked skin, bind and lash her in a storm of dark feathers, and she screams in pain. Only when the metamorphosis has finished is she cool, arrogant, unafraid to raise stormwinds or call down ravens to steal what's left of the prince's heart. I wonder how well Kraehe remembers Rue, or the pains of transformation. I am waiting to see whether she will revert to Rue in the next episode. I have my suspicions that she may not.
Then we have Fakir, who has particularly taken my interest. As closed, brusque, and occasionally violent as he has been up to this point—not only has he threatened Duck, he struck Mytho when he realized that his roommate would no longer obey him—he too turns out to have a place in the original story, as the prince's friend and faithful knight. Moreover, he seems to be the only character who has been conscious of the double layers of story all along. He may not yet know that Duck is Princess Tutu (or, for that matter, that she is a duck), but he knows that Tutu is the cause of the Mytho's reawakening, and in the catacombs beneath the clock-tower he has stored away the sword that once shattered the prince's heart; prepared to do the same a second time, if the prince ever regains its pieces. On the one hand, it's a relief that he's not the raven or the raven's proxy, since that level of obviousness would have annoyed me. On the other, all of his motives are now cast into another kind of suspicion. Does he truly want to protect the prince from the pain of human emotion, or does he only fear the death that awaits him at the raven's claws if the story continues on its proper course?
Which brings me to Drosselmeyer, who is making me happy on all cylinders. I love that he pitches a fit when Duck decides to throw the gem he gave her (that allows her to transform both from a duck into a girl and from a girl into Princess Tutu) into the river and give up her quest to restore the prince—in effect, to stop the story. And all of a sudden, the storyteller is no longer all-knowing, all-seeing, with powers over space and time and the human heart. He's an old man in a clockwork season, freaking out because reality is not so easily manipulated as words on the page. His confrontation with Duck is a hilarious misfire. He walks out of a door in the blank air, into a moment of stopped time where a waterdrop has frozen like a Harold Edgerton photograph, because he is dead and cannot interact with normal time: and Duck is not impressed. Instead she demands to know why he chose her, out of all the people in the world, and the storyteller unguardedly answers with the truth: "Because it would be fun." His gleeful smile freezes; Duck's expression does not change. Quickly he adds, "And because you were the only one who could do it . . ." His marionettes are all starting to unravel their strings.
I wondered before about his connection with the clock-tower; I'm even more curious now. Wherever he exists, it is not properly within the time of this world—since he is dead, he can enter the world only through a grandfather clock (shades of The Last Unicorn and The Nutcracker) and stay only briefly—and I have noticed that the mechanical figures are a dancing couple, a knight with a sword, and a swan. Is he living on the borrowed time of the story? Or is this more of a traditional ghost frame: can he not properly die until his unfinished tale is told? I hadn't considered this before, but what if he, too, is trapped in its plot somehow?
I still don't even know how to start with Edel. I love the gems she sells, particularly the gem of "author's convenience." But in her most recent appearance to Fakir in the bookstore, she disappears like a puppet being drawn up into the wings. Perhaps she is not Drosselmeyer's opposite after all.
I have no answers. But I can't wait to find out what questions to ask next.
no subject
Two more weeks till the final installment comes out, he muttered.
---L.
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Two more weeks till the final installment comes out, he muttered.
Prrrrr.
no subject
I can't actually tell whether or not my perception of him is influenced by having read the two volumes of the manga, because I was trying last night to remember what happens in the manga and realized I can't, except in the vaguest way -- and I don't actually remember how it ends. I could go and re-read it, but I think that would be cheating. Clearly, Drosselmeyer wants me to follow the story his way.
My guess at this point is that Edel is one of Drosselmeyer's puppets. She keeps showing up to encourage Ahiru in her plot role, and she gives back the transforming-gem when Ahiru shows herself willing to accept her part in the story again. Which completely wouldn't prevent Edel from having a character and motivations of her own . . . I love how each of the characters has his or her own role in the story and then a set of emotions and motivations besides that -- and how they might decide to refuse their role in the story. It adds to the suspense and makes it harder to tell what Drosselmeyer is actually planning.
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Why?
Edel is one of Drosselmeyer's puppets.
Do you mean that literally or structurally? The former would be peculiarly in keeping with his role in the original Nutcracker, actually, where he's a mysterious dollmaker; the heroine's eccentric godfather. As well, Edel would give him a way to interact more directly with Duck that doesn't cut into what I assume at this point is his limited store of time. (I realize that I'm seeing him rather like Alfred in the Discworld; he's run out of time in this world, so he can exist outside of time and in stopped moments, but he cannot step into the everyday.) I do want to know to what degree she is her own self.
It adds to the suspense and makes it harder to tell what Drosselmeyer is actually planning.
My assumption has been that he's attempting to guide the story toward the end which he would have written if he had not died. I thought at first that Kraehe was an imposition on the original tale, but then I saw that Drosselmeyer (at least once) advises her, and so I imagine that either she was supposed to be there all along or he's since factored her in—because the more the characters suffer, the more fun the story. Drosselmeyer does like his angst. The question is whether this is driving toward a re-enactment of the heart-shattering or some other confrontation entirely, and I've just realized that I'm not sure how far the copy of The Prince and the Raven that Fakir consults can be trusted, because one of its illustrations shows the prince's faithful knight dying on the raven's claws. Clearly, this hasn't happened before. I think even character death would stay permanent in this fractured corner of story. But the event is there, on the page: is it a forecast? Is the book complete? (Is this like the Library of Dreams?) Or is the book unfinished until they write it all?
I wish I knew if I were even asking the right questions.
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---L.
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Have you finished the series, then? Or are you still waiting for the last set of DVDs?
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---L.
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Why?
Er . . . What do you mean, why? I'm supposed to have a rational reason for my obsession?
To me, a bond of liege-loyalty is the most interesting relationship that characters can have. And I admire the loyal retainer type more than I do the Prince -- I always have -- because the Prince is risking his life for his own glory and knows he will have songs sung about him, whereas the retainer is acting out of a noble kind of love and gladly risks his life even if it means he dies in a dark place all alone and no one will ever hear of it. Sometimes the retainer will do the nasty stuff that needs to be done, and sacrifice his own honor to preserve the Prince's purity. Thrud's House of Catiline might be an extreme example of that. The Prince often has an inherent charisma which makes people love him even if he's a right bastard. The retainer is often a bit stiff, a bit stern, a bit too dedicated to duty. He's not likeable. He isn't remembered with bright colors in a blaze of glory. But he does his job, and the Prince would have failed a hundred times without him, even if no one ever notices. When there's a Prince who is humble and as dedicated to his people as the retainer is to the Prince, then I admire him, too. But usually the Prince is a tenor.
Do you mean that literally or structurally?
Both.
My assumption has been that he's attempting to guide the story toward the end which he would have written if he had not died.
That makes sense -- but I'm not sure which elements are part of his plan and which aren't.
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I think that's a perfectly comprehensible set of reasons for liking a character; although it does make me wonder why he does it. (And for the record, I love the House of Catiline; out of the immense cast of the first book, my favorite character is Gibeon.)
no subject