>Short pause while I try to (briefly) stop laughing from reading some
>of these notes...

The Notes field was the best part. Collating useful data is all well and good, but opportunities for offhanded snarkiness come along rarely in such endeavors. :)

>Couldn't help noticing that bit about Anthy's age -- am I right in
>remembering she'd been trapped in the cycle of Akio's failed
>Tournament for a very long time? I have vague memories of reading a
>bit about this, but I can't find the reference now.

That's true, although it may be more appropriate to say that - at least at Ohtori Academy - time was trapped in the cycle of Akio's tournament for a very long time. That school year may have happened again and again and again inside those walls, with different students on each run, like a video game whose setting and certain critical NPCs don't change even though the player characters do - while in the outside world, some deeply-buried instinct prompted observers (parents, alumni, anyone no longer inside the area of effect) not to look too closely, lest they learn something that the untrained mortal mind cannot take on board.

That is to say, from the perspective of the outside world, I don't think the crisis actually began sometime in the Cephirean equivalent of the 2100s, but if you stood where Anthy was and counted back, you would reach the inescapable conclusion that it must have, even though it couldn't. Wibbly wobbly, etc.

(Or consider the case of Raven, whose age is even less certain. As far as she knows she's in her mid-teens, so the tournament loop had been running for at least that long - but the other hand, she grew up in a mystic enclave hidden from the world of mortal men, so she's hardly a reliable basis on which to be making calculations.)

Ultimately, when the time came to do the paperwork, they decided on 2392 for Anthy's birth year because it's got a February 29 in it and more or less matches her apparent age. She wasn't that much younger than Utena when they met - she'd have been about ten, which would rather change the complexion of the thing - but by the time they were both in high school it didn't matter as much, and now that they're young adults it doesn't make any practical difference. (And she's half-elven, which probably throws everything off again anyway.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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