rymenhild

This post started out as a comment that I intend to post on Mark Watches later today, when Mark and his commenters discuss Princess Tutu episode 17 (Crime and Punishment).

I tracked down the source of a page of German text on a book Fakir reads in Ep. 17. Drosselmeyer didn't write it. Neither did the Princess Tutu screenwriters. ( Evidence is behind the cut, along with awful Google Translate German translations that I'd love help with. )

I thought I knew how metatextual Princess Tutu could get. I was wrong.

This is a repost from the first time I watched Princess Tutu. I am backdating it so all of the music links aren't immediately visible from the top of the page. I have made some modifications to the original post and (with skygiants's help) added several songs since the first round, but it's more or less complete.

Between Monday and Wednesday [December 2008 -ed.], which I spent mostly with the delightful skygiants and equally delightful gramarye1971, I have seen the entire anime series Princess Tutu.

Let me tell you about Princess Tutu. Once upon a time, in a never-never gingerbread-castle German town where all the stained glass windows depict luminous swans, there was a school full of dancers, who...

No, that's not what Princess Tutu is about at all. It's about two boys and two girls: Ahiru, a duck who is a girl who is a dancer, Mytho, a dancer who is a boy who is a prince, Rue, a prima ballerina who is a number of other things besides, and Fakir, a boy who is bitchy and wonderfully angsty and whom I adore. It's about how Ahiru and Rue and Fakir and Mytho love and hate each other, and...

No, that's not what Princess Tutu is about at all. It's about an old man sitting in a rocking chair in a world of gears and marionette wires, telling a story about a gingerbread-castle German town...

No, that's not what Princess Tutu is about at at all. It's about stories, and Story, and narrative itself, and I love it so much that four hours after watching the last episode I'd started designing a playlist.

Yes, I am a nerd, and I am not ashamed.

( Not That Kind Of Story: A Princess Tutu fanmix (Act 1) )

( Act 2 )

( Epilogues (because happily ever after is never quite after) )