>Though part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop when the
>villains of said shows appear and start some kind of convoluted
>tournament-to-the-death-of-loved-ones.

On top of what Phil said below, it's worth noting that so far, everyone has either been Otome-exclusive, or where the names have differed, has used their Otome name in preference Hime name. Shizuru Viola, not Fujino. Natsuki Kruger, not Kuga. Nao Zhang, not Yuuki.

This implies something, at least to me. Mai-Otome was about romantic, dramatic adventure on a distant world between patriotic badasses engaged in a struggle against shadowy manipulators. There was a hell of a lot of drama, but it was fundamentally a very upbeat series.

Mai-Hime, despite the contrived happy ending, wasn't like that at all despite the presence of the world's deadliest game of Pokemon. It was about dealing with alienation from the world and coping with responsibility too weighty for your shoulders, and many if not most of the people in it were fundamentally broken. Shizuru was an emotionally manipulative stalker (who eventually turned violent) whose refined exterior concealed the fact she was largely dead inside, for example, and she was just the tip of the iceberg. And she was one of the protagonists.

Now, which of those sounds more like something that would fit neatly into UF? UF has incorporated weird, depressing series with a lot of existentialism and deeply fucked-up characters in them before, of course, but generally speaking it's had to do a lot of spade work in order to bring them "up to code" for the universe. Utena is of course the best example of that; you'll notice that Symphony 1 largely consisted of "let's get almost everyone we intend to salvage from the wreck of Akio's empire the fuck away from him for awhile so we can rebuild them into functioning human beings" and not "everyone will continue to wallow in their issues and be barely functional."

Given all that, and given the fact that they're supporting characters for the moment, it seems reasonable to expect more Otome and less Hime.

-Merc
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