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opalescentegg · 6 years ago

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‘Princess Tutu’ and the Absent Fish: An Informal Essay

Anyone familiar with Princess Tutu will recognize and appreciate its masterful melding of diverse fairytale and sometimes mythic elements --- may the record show that I’m no different. Nevertheless, there is one particular sequence in Ahiru’s heart-shard-hunting quest that never felt quite right: the heart-shard of Curiosity (alternatively, the Desire for Knowledge). Or, more precisely, it’s the River that always bothered me.

As a one-off magical narrative conceit there’s really nothing wrong with the River having the heart-shard. Thanks to the episode regarding the heart-shard of Affection, it was already established by that point that non-human(oid) entities could become bearers of pieces of the Prince’s heart. So the River as heart-shard-holder was at least consistent within the narrative’s internal logic. What I think I was recognizing through my dissatisfaction with the River, though without even fully comprehending it, was instead a sudden break with what I will term the “chain of motif.” To put it another way: every other heart-shard, up until the final five from the town gates, is connected is some way to a recognizable fairytale motif and/or structure; all except for the heart-shard of Curiosity.

For an illustration of heart-shards and their associated motifs, with the specific elements that identify the motifs (where sources give different translations for the known heart-shard emotions I will provide both), I present the following:

1. Disappointment/Bitterness -- Swan Lake: admittedly, this is mostly in the music and “set design” of the episode which, along with the short-lived (one-sided) dancing rivalry between Anteaterina and Rue, are probably mostly meant to serve as a introducing the central motif of the show. Additional possible foreshadowing of the thematic conflict between Ahiru/Tutu and Rue/Kraehe later on, though this claim is much more tentative.

2. Loneliness -- Hansel and Gretel: a house in the woods, a story revolving around food, fear (though here ultimately unfounded) of being eaten

3. Sorrow/Sadness -- Giselle: taken directly from the ballet, which itself draws from the folklore of willis/vilas that, depending on the tradition, are variously described as ghosts, fairies, nymphs, etc. I’d also like to point out that the design of the willis fulfills the visual requirements of the White Lady of so many European (and Euro-influenced) countries.

4. Affection -- Not a single tale-type, but calls upon a conglomeration of magical light folklore, i.e. will-o’-the-wisps (leading people astray, as the Lamp’s riddles led Ahiru not so much astray, but certainly to where the spirit wanted her), the genie in the (oil) lamp, etc. (I also recall someone once posting about an Andersen tale in which an old street lamp reminisces on all the things it’s seen in its life, much like the Lamp-spirit. However, while a strong argument can certainly be made for this story being the inspiration for the Lamp, it’s a pretty obscure one from HCA’s repertoire, so I believe the strength of the lamp motif comes mostly from the examples I have highlighted.)

5. Fear -- Sleeping Beauty: for obvious reasons. (There are also shades of the Grimms’ “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” but that’s a real stretch to fully justify, even for me.)

6. Curiosity/Desire for Knowledge -- ??????

7. Devotion -- “The Red Shoes,” Andersen: since the magical black pointe shoes Rue slips into seem to have a similar unsettling degree of autonomy to Andersen’s eponymous footwear. The fact that they cause a transformation that slashes at Rue with thorny vines is also a nearly sadistic inversion (intentional or not, who can say?) of the Anderson story, wherein the sinful girl is at last relieved of her suffering when an angel, carrying a branch blooming with roses, finally grants her mercy and takes her up to Heaven. I can also see possible shades of Pygmalion in Malen’s obsession with drawing Rue, though her fixation may be argued as serving more to highlight the themes of lack of control and destructive self-sacrifice implicit in the HCA tale, which I still see as the overriding motif here.

8. Regret -- Cinderella: the episode musical motif, plus the element of the “ball,” or at least a gathering of multiple people (and crow demons?) in a single location. Charon even plays the part of, first, the “step-parent” who refuses to let his ward attend that event, but eventually transitions into the role “fairy godmother” who furnishes the ward with the physical necessities he needs to go out and do what he wants. (Amusingly, this makes Ahiru either a bait-and-switch/red herring Cinderella, OR makes her and Fakir a kind of composite Cinderella, each one fulfilling different aspects of the motif -- possible foreshadowing for later partnership, courage described as “two hearts as one,” etc.)

9. Love -- The title of the episode introducing this heart-shard is “La Sylphide,” though it doesn’t have much in common with the eponymous ballet. What it does have is the first very recognizable instance of full-on witchcraft in the show, which is undeniably a strong and instantly identifiable fairytale element. The curse Rue places on this shard also positions her as the “false bride,” from such tales where one woman either kills, curses, or brings low and supplants a “true bride” in order to take that woman’s lover for herself.

10. Pride -- The Flying Dutchman: In which a man is punished for his sins usually implied, and sometimes outright stated, to be a slight against God performed in a bout of hubris; and cursed to wander and/or continue their mortal duties without rest for all eternity. Whether they were cursed with immortality or simply exist as spirits unable to enter Heaven or Hell varies between tellings, but the framework is essentially the same. (This is almost certainly a later variant of a story type I would prefer not to call by name, but involves “Wandering”; though since that protagonist is always cursed with immortality and never becomes a spirit, it’s a tale-type that is at best tangentially related to the motif I’ve chosen anyway.)

11. Hope -- Swan Lake; The Little Mermaid; The Ugly Duckling; etc.: for obvious reasons again.

Fairy tales and folklore rely heavily on patterns. In adopting and adapting these stories to craft its own narrative, PT also inherits those formulas. But the heart-shard of Curiosity does not fit the pattern --- in fact, it seems not to have parallels with any recognizable tale pattern at all.

What is particularly strange is the presence in the episode of many of the building blocks of a very famous folklore motif, and one made all the more conspicuous by its absence from the narrative. That is: the motif of the ring in the fish.

As far as age is concerned this motif goes back a long way, along one of two variant branches. One: the ring that is lost, despaired of, and miraculously returned to great joy (and often used as a token of recognition). Two: the ring that is the catalyst, lynchpin, etc. of some undesirable future event, which the owner tries to throw away in an attempt to dodge destiny and which inevitably comes back to him, the ring here being a tangible reminder of the inescapability of fate.

Of these variants the first is by far the most common. Arguably the most internationally famous tales of this variant is that of Solomon’s ring, which provides the basic structure many later tales of the branch: King Solomon’s (magic) signet ring was stolen by a demon and cast into the ocean, whereupon it was swallowed by a fish. Years later, a fisherman caught a fish which was then cooked and served to Solomon, who cut it open to find his ring in its belly. (The ring here also acts as an indisputable identifier of the true Solomon, who had been reduced to a pauper by the aforementioned demon after losing his ring, since the demon could shapeshift and had assumed the king’s form. The retrieval of the ring restored Solomon to his true form, allowed him to vanquish the demon, and retake his rightful place as king. Many ring-in-fish stories conclude with the ring acting as absolute proof of a character’s identity, often in a “recognition” or “reveal” scene.)

In contrast to this story is that of Polycrates and his ring. On the advice (and possibly prophecy) of the king of Egypt, Polycrates the tyrant of Samos is told to cast away that possession which he values post, lest his overabundance of success raise the ire of the gods and cause them strike him down. Polycrates attempted to do so, casting into the sea his prized emerald ring, which caused him much grief. However, not long after a fisherman brought a fish as tribute to the tyrant; when Polycrates had it gutted his ring was found in its belly, proof that he could not escape his disastrous fate (indeed, he was eventually overthrown and assassinated, possibly by being impaled and his corpse then crucified).

The object cast into the water (typically a piece of jewelry) varies depending on a story: a ring, a necklace, a bracelet, and anklet, etc., though I think the particular emphasis on encircling jewelry is an important detail. Sometimes the object is simply a gemstone --- also important in this discussion, given the curiously jewel-like appearance of the heart-shards.

In any case, the basic plot of “[thing] in water - [thing] in fish - capture of fish - [thing] back in hand” (or, even more simplistically: a valuable object lost in water and found later in an unexpected place), is found in sources ranging from Sanskrit dramas to Irish mythology. Even Hans Christian Andersen famously refurbished it in his “Steadfast Tin Soldier.” And speaking of Irish mythology, the Fenian cycle famously includes a tale about culture hero Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Salmon of Knowledge.

(For the uninitiated: A salmon ate nine hazelnuts that fell into the Well of Wisdom, gaining all the world’s knowledge, and the first person to eat of its flesh would likewise gain that knowledge. The poet Finegas/Finn Eces, to whom Fionn was then a servant, caught the fish after many years and told Fionn to cook it while he attended to other matters, but not to eat it. Fionn (surprisingly) followed this directive, until he poked at the fish to check its doneness and burned his finger in the hot fat --- a finger which he immediately stuck into his mouth to soothe, only to thereby ingest the drop of the salmon’s fat and gain the knowledge contained therein. Upon learning of this, Finegas gave Fionn the rest of the fish to eat, and Fionn gained all the world’s knowledge.)

The motif of a fish associated with great knowledge lends itself well as a base element for a hypothetical holder of the heart-shard of Curiosity, especially when combined with that of the ring in the fish/returning ring. The latter motif is essentially part of the episode anyway. After all, there’s a clear instance of jewelry being cast into water --- when Ahiru throws her pendant (an encircling necklace) into the River so that she’ll no longer have to act as Princess Tutu and bring pain to Mytho. While her necklace is never miraculously returned to her, she nevertheless recovers it, and so fulfills the bare-bones conditions of the tale type.

The fact that this outcome was exactly what Drosselmeyer wanted would have paralleled the theme of inescapable fate we find in the story of Polycrates’ ring. In doing so, it would have raised the stakes of one of PT’s central conflicts (do these people even have free will, and if they do can they exercise it successfully to escape tragedy?), making the push and pull that much more dynamic and the tension even more taut. Because the returned ring motif would have (seemingly) implied an early answer: No. The “ring” always returns, and the fate it symbolizes is therefore set in stone. It’s a pattern we’re all familiar with, even if our recognition of it isn’t always conscious. But therein lies the problem. For seemingly no reason, in this episode PT decides to disrupt the pattern.

These are the fairy tale element building blocks we have to work with in the episode:

Water

Something lost (two somethings, in this case: the necklace and the heart-shard; one is lost purposefully in the water, the other by happenstance)

The return of things lost

Later on (continuing into a couple of the following episodes), we are even given:

A recognition scene, brought about by the thing lost in the water

The heart-shard, once recovered and then stolen by Kraehe, leads to Rue’s eventual “recognition” of herself as Kraehe. It keeps asking her who she is and why she wears black feathers, forcing her into a psychological conflict lasting two episodes. Unlike a returned ring the heart-shard is not itself hard proof of her identity, but it nonetheless forces the question of identity to the forefront of Rue’s consciousness from the depths of her denial --- it is the catalyst of revelation, if not its direct agent.

(This isn’t even touching on Ahiru’s pendant becoming the element by which Fakir later identifies her as Princess Tutu, and which was also retrieved from the water.)

But, curiously, no fish to be found anywhere. Very odd, considering that the fish is most often the narrative element that ties all the others together. It’s the device that keeps the plot from stopping dead after the valuable “something” is lost.

The closest we get is, well, Ahiru herself. She is the one who retrieves her necklace from the River, after all. One could say it’s also when she’s at her most fish-like, since it’s one of the few times we see her fully submerged in water. But I find this an unsatisfying answer for the absence of the fish. If nothing else, it lacks the gestative image of a shining ring (or necklace or jewel) sitting quietly in the cold of a piscine belly, generating all sorts of connotations relating to rebirth, fertility, protection, and so on. While not strictly necessary to the function of a returning ring story, the image nevertheless strikes me as wonderfully evocative and symbolic, which may well account for so many returning ring tales coming down to us as ring-in-fish tales.

No aquatic creature of any type is part of the encounter with the heart-shard of Curiosity. (Unless we again count Ahiru, though her being in her mostly-human Tutu aspect --- the one most removed from her aquatic duck form --- strains this interpretation past the point of credulity in my opinion.) Perhaps the most perplexing thing about this heart-shard is how the River itself is what holds it. Not even a personification of the River, i.e. a nereid, nymph, kelpie, undine, rusalka, or a few dozen other types of aquatic folklore creatures. Other aquatic animals were eschewed as well, though if the writers didn’t want to use a fish is would have still been a good opportunity to include a frog, already associated with retrieving golden balls from wells (speaking of valuable round things lost in the water). And as far as I know, there just aren’t that many stories which feature sentient, non-anthropomorphized bodies of water; the element is obscure at best if it exists at all, certainly isn’t part of any recognizable tale types. It does not fit the pattern presented by the other narrative building blocks.

It’s a conundrum I can’t quite parse. If the writers were already including so many of the elements of a common and well-known tale type, why the glaring omission of the element second in importance only to the lost object itself? The truth is, I don’t have any good answers.

I mean, I can still theorize of course. For example, it’s entirely possible that the heart-shard was swallowed and held by an ordinary fish at some point (the show establishes that regular, non-anthropomorphic animals live in the town as well), but then the fish simply died and the heart-shard then reverted to the River. The only problem with this theory is that there is absolutely nothing within the text of the show to support it, and in no way impacts the story we see play out in the show.

And so, what are we left with? There’s a hole in the story structure with nothing to fill it; a fish story that, like all those tall tales that inspired the idiom, never produces a fish. But perhaps that, itself, is the best conclusion we can draw from this incomplete tale; the definition of the colloquial “fish story”: a great big lie. Whether as intentional foreshadowing or just a glitch of human error, by omitting the fish the show writers tipped their hand. If a ring-in-fish story can so conspicuously become just a variety of “fish story,” then the credibility of all the fairytale structures we see in the show must be called into question. If the fish is missing from its own tale type, what else might be missing? If essential elements are missing from certain established story structures, how are those stories still progressing beyond their natural lifespan? If fairytale plots, with all their adherence to patterns and formulas, are the “truth” of this reality, what might it mean when the pattern is so obviously disrupted?

If Drosselmeyer meant to trap a town in a fairytale for all eternity, he overestimated the sturdiness of traditionally oral story structures. The tales they produce are narrative bricolage, held together with the spit and chewing gum of predictable conventions and the skill of the storyteller. Lose one key element, and unless you can convincingly slot another in post haste the entire fabric of the story will unravel in your hands. Drosselmeyer cast his Story’s net wide and strong, but I suspect even that turned out to be subject to degradation and decomposition. Holes were inevitable. This one was just big enough for a single fish to slip through, and with it the first hint about the truth of the Story, carried like a ring in its belly.

#princess tutu #my writing #meta #folklore #the ring in the fish #the returning ring #trust me by my standards this is almost uncomfortably informal #if i had my way i'd use only the most thorough of scholarly texts for this research #and provide footnotes and an annotated bibliography #instead i churned out 3000 words in a wild bout of insomnia with about twenty wikipedia tabs open #scholarship!#(someone please tell me i was still making sense at the end i was getting kinda loopy)

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grand--queen · 3 years ago

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