app history

One can't really say that the prince's story began “once upon a time,” because that would imply a time in reality (at least the series' version of reality, not even going to go into how meta things can get).  His story began as one written; it was to be an author's great masterpiece, the story of a valiant Prince and his battle with a monstrous Raven. The Prince was kind and noble; he would do anything to protect his people. He loved them all dearly and was loved in return, while the Raven sought to turn that love against the prince.

Sadly, before the story could be finished, the author died. The Prince and the Raven were trapped in an endless battle, and after a time, the Raven fled from the story and into the real world. The Prince pursued him, and in the end, he gave up everything to best his foe and save the people. With his own sword, he pierced his heart and sealed the Raven away, and the fragments of his heart were scattered. The Prince himself was left to wander as an empty being, incapable of feeling. All that was left to him was his ability to dance and a compulsion to protect those weaker than himself.

It was during those long wanderings that he met two children, and both would help to shape the rest of his story. The first was Princess Kraehe, who called herself Rue when she met him and who believed herself to be the daughter of the Raven. The prince gave Rue her first taste of kindness when he saved her from her father's own crows, and she began to fall in love with him. The Raven himself compacted this, telling her that one day, she would marry the prince, and that the prince was the only person who would ever be able to love her, aside from the monster that she shared blood with. The second child was Fakir; he and his adopted father, Charon, found the prince unconscious and wounded from his journey and his battles with the crows. Charon recognized the prince as the very one from <i>The Prince and the Raven</i>, while Fakir carried a birthmark that showed him to be the reincarnation of the prince's knight from the story. That knight was supposed to have protected the prince, and Fakir decided to do just that. He renamed the prince “Mytho,” because of his origin, and spent a great deal of time with him. However, Mytho's persistent instinct to protect others would often drive him to take great risks, and Fakir became increasingly controlling in order to stop the prince from hurting himself. Indeed, the young knight began to actively forbid Mytho from doing anything, and without any will of his own, he often complied. He also, however, continued to meet with Rue. He instructed her in ballet, and she vigorously sought his approval. More than that, she wished for him to love her, but he was entirely incapable of love; so she too began to command him. “Tell me that you love me,” she would say. He would tell her that he did, and though the words were empty, she continued to demand it of him.

Time passed, and the prince never aged. Without his heart, it seems that he was entirely incapable of developing- mentally, emotionally, and even physically. To keep Mytho occupied, Fakir enrolled them both in the ballet division of the Gold Crown Academy of Fine Arts. He continued controlling Mytho, trying to force him to stay in his room between classes and giving him books to read. Of course, he wasn't to read anything other than what Fakir gave him. But much to the knight's irritation, he was not the only one Mytho would listen to. Rue had enrolled in the school at the same time, on her father's orders. She ultimately sealed her memories of Kraehe away to better avoid discovery, but she continued loving the prince nonetheless. Still, just as she had been so easily been able to tell the prince to offer her words of love, so she was able to make him act as her boyfriend. They were also dance partners, and quickly became legends within the school; Mytho was the school “heartthrob,” a  thing of quiet and mysterious beauty, and Rue was the prima ballerina envied by all.

There was really only one person discontent with the situation; for despite the occasional strain between Fakir and Rue, times were peaceful, and from beyond the grave, Drosselmeyer watched with disapproval. Drosselmeyer, the author of The Prince and the Raven did not like how his story and its characters were stagnating. The author wanted to continue the prince's story, for he planned to lead the hero into a terrible tragedy, something he couldn't do if the hero couldn't even feel sadness. Drosselmeyer had his chance to fix this when he came upon a little duckling as she watched the prince dance. She saw the prince's “lonely eyes,” and decided she wanted nothing more than to see him smile again. Drosselmeyer took advantage of this desire, giving her a pendant which allowed her to become both the clumsy ballet student, Duck, and the magical ballerina Princess Tutu. Princess Tutu, impossibly beautiful and graceful, who could give the prince his heart back, and who was fated to turn into a speck of light and vanish if she ever confessed her love. When Fakir was little, and he had read <i>The Prince and the Raven</i> to Mytho, the young man always wished to hear more of the princess, though she had only a few lines in the story.

As he began to receive the scattered shards of his heart from Princess Tutu, Mytho found himself confused and often hurt by the feelings she returned to him: sorrow, loneliness, and fear. Yet along with these came more pleasant emotions, such as affection. All of these heart shards had wandered themselves, and were freed from the hearts they had found rest in by Princess Tutu's dance. She found opposition in returning these pieces, however; Fakir was determined to keep the prince's heart from being restored, as it would mean the revival of the Raven. That would cause the prince suffering, as well as lead to Fakir's death. Like Tutu, the Knight had a tragic role in the story, to be torn in two by the Raven's talons when he tried to protect the prince. As for Rue, she was doubly threatened by the return of the prince's heart, and her pain woke Princess Kraehe once again. She so terribly feared losing the prince, and if he regained his will, she could only see him choosing Princess Tutu over her. After all, “a prince did not need two princesses.”

Despite the confusion and pain his heart shards caused him in the beginning, and despite the insistence of Fakir and Rue (even before she remembered herself as Kraehe) that he did not need a heart, he came to want it. When he regained his ability to fear, what he feared most of all was losing Princess Tutu, losing the chance to have his heart restored and perhaps losing a person he would be able to love, as well. He had gained enough of an awareness of himself to feel how hollow he was, and to be curious about the flickers of memory that had begun to return. He resisted all of Fakir's efforts to stop him from regaining his heart with Tutu's help; even when the knight tried to shatter his heart once more, and almost convinced Mytho to do it himself, the prince was reminded of who he wanted to be by Tutu's pleas. In the end, Fakir's loyalty to the prince led  him to accept Mytho's decision, however reluctantly. Mytho was able to turn his growing will to becoming himself again. Or he would have been, had he not still been faced with Kraehe's advances. Mytho was unaware of both Kraehe's identity as Rue and Duck's identity as Tutu, and so he found nothing strange about either of their behavior around him. But when it came to encounters surrounding his heart, he found himself in the center of their conflict over <i>him</i>. He still felt drawn to Tutu, while he did not understand Kraehe or why she was so determined to claim him as her own, even if it meant that he was to remain little more than a doll. He could also see that Kraehe was suffering, and yet he could not determine what caused her pain. It wouldn't be long, however, before he gained a deeper understanding of that pain than either of them would have wished.

When Tutu tried to return the heart shard of love to the prince, Kraehe appeared and stole it. Violently. She literally pulled the shard out of his chest, and it seemed that the trauma of it forced the rest of his emotions into dormancy. He was reduced to less than he had been with his heart simply gone. She hid him away as Duck and Fakir searched for him, and eventually, Princess Tutu and Fakir confronted Kraehe. She manipulated Mytho and almost made him use his own sword to crush the heart shard of love beyond repair, an action that led to Fakir breaking the prince's sword. When Fakir was defeated by Kraehe's crows, she tried to force Tutu to confess her love in order to make her disappear. Tutu found a way around that, however, when she decided to express her feelings through dance instead of speaking words of love. The mindless prince and the very embodiment of his love both watched the two princesses dance, and though the heart shard chose Kraehe, it was Tutu who woke the rest of the his emotions from their slumber and so drew the true prince to dance by her side.


But the prince's heart was not yet complete, and the return of his heart shard of love did not bring the happiness it was supposed to. Princess Kraehe had laid a trap; at the bidding of her father, she soaked the prince's heart shard in the blood of the Raven, and so the prince was corrupted just as he finally began to show his true self. The blood poisoned his heart, spreading through it slowly and twisting his personality: the gentle, loving prince became cruel and desperate only to be loved. He against the influence of the Raven's blood, fighting against the “other him inside of him,” and yet he did not yet have enough of himself to truly resist. He became the Prince of the Ravens, a pawn of his own greatest enemy, trying to steal the heart of a girl as a sacrifice to the monster to show his gratitude for “awakening him.” Kraehe had believed this would make the prince belong only to her, but as Mytho was changed by the blood staining his heart, he lost the kindness that had truly made her love him. Indeed, he had once been so kind  even without a heart that he had shown a girl who thought herself unlovable how to love, and the more that blood affected him, the more he merely demanded that she give him love as he insulted her.

The feeling of pride being returned to the prince only made his suffering worse: he was thrown into terrible confusion, refusing to yield and yet too corrupted to truly resist. He wanted to be the Prince Who Loves Everyone, and yet he could do nothing but demand love from others. As this struggle tore him apart,  he began to show very clear signs of madness. He had been able to call bird to him in the past, but not even they would come near him anymore, leaving him truly without company aside from the crows. Fully under the sway of the Raven's blood, he resolved that when his heart was restored, he would sacrifice it to the Raven.

The effects of the blood culminated in his full transformation into a crow, and when that transformation was complete, he became more pitiful than actively cruel. The change itself had pained him physically, and he suffered emotionally from a bitter loneliness and an literally aching need for love, as well. If he was not dancing, then that loneliness stung him with particular cruelty. Kraehe danced with him, still in love and devastated by guilt for what her actions had brought him, but it seemed that nothing was enough. Even Duck was scared of this Mytho when she saw him, but it seemed that there was only one thing that might restore the prince to his true self: returning the final heart shards. These shards had settled not within the hearts of others, but in the gates of Gold Crown Town, and Princess Tutu was able to call them forth and return them. She also prepared to return her pendant, which was revealed to be the very last shard of the prince's heart. Though Kraehe tries to stop her from returning the heart shards (now fearing for the prince, because she knew he would give his heart to the Raven), Duck used the pendant as evidence that the prince's own will was to have his heart restored. She returned the shards from the gates to him, and while that was enough to free the Raven, it does not free Mytho from the curse of the Raven's blood. Kraehe rejects her “father” (she discovered earlier that she was not truly the Raven's daughter), and refuses to bring the prince's heart to him, but the Raven simply calls the prince to him, and he is too much in the monster's power to resist. Kraehe- or rather, Rue- then makes a decision: she declares for love for him and begs the Raven to take her heart instead.

That love is what restores the prince to his true self. He had come to understand the pain of the Raven's blood and the burden that Rue carried, and so he resolved to protect that love. He intended to save Rue from the Raven and make her his princess, because he admired her strength, the way she had clung to her love no matter how lonely she was or how much it had hurt her. He came to love her in return, because he could appreciate the depth of how she had suffered, and he wanted to offer her happiness at last. When the final heart shard was at last returned to him, he resumed his true form as Prince Siegfried, and battled fiercely to defeat the Raven. He never considered permanent surrender; he would have preferred to shatter his heart again, even if it meant that he would lose Rue. He actually considered truly killing himself later and “joining his princess in heaven,” before he would have willingly accepted defeat. But with Duck (who had given up the pendant to fully restore him) encouraging him to push forward, he was able to find inspiration and new strength. He rescued Rue, and with her by his side, they destroyed the Raven together.

So the tale was brought to its end, and Siegfried returned to his storybook kingdom with Rue as his princess. Though Raven's blood still runs in both of them, Siegfried was determined not to let it best either of them again. His will was solid, and they had each others' love.

He had finally earned his “happily ever after.”