24 Highway 17 is named for the California state highway running between Santa Cruz and San Jose, which was once the subject of a very amusing website called "The Highway 17 Page of Shame".

64 Prisoner's Base is named for the 1952 Rex Stout novel of the same name. The book, in turn, is named for a children's game in which players must run from one base to another without being tagged - none of which has anything to do with the name of the town.

67 The cabin is based on one that stands by Millinocket Lake, not far from my home, which I almost bought a few years ago and now wish I had.

69 The Clemens Mountains are named for Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens, whose descriptions of the Lake Tahoe, Nevada area in his 1872 travel memoir Roughing It provided much of the inspiration for this part of Avalon County.

92 Quite a small lake, really. By Maine standards it'd probably be called a pond.

99 Vortigern's Lake takes its name from the fictional lake in the Doctor Who serial "Battlefield". In that episode, it's said to mean "Lake of the High King", and indeed, there are some historians who contend that Vortigern was an ancient British title for a king; but most authorities today agree that Vortigern was, in fact, the name of a specific king, and not a very good one at that. Ah, well. Place names are often only tangentially related to reality.

101 The aforementioned Lake Tahoe and the Katahdin region of Maine. In the 25th century, Tahoe has been rendered unrecognizable by development and the effects of the previous centuries' World Wars. I don't think anything's really happened to Katahdin, so it's possible that by calling it a place that "isn't there any more," Gryphon was just making wistful reference to the fact that his boyhood in Katahdin's shadow was a long, long time ago.

148 Twain claims that Tahoe was like this in the days when almost nobody knew about it and you had to hike through miles of nowhere to get to it, and I see no reason to doubt him.

182 As we will see presently, this part of the dream isn't even a metaphor for anything. It's all fairly straightforward.

188 This part... not so much.

261 At this exact moment, in Cephiro, Akio wished Anthy a happy birthday.

383 I started on this story once, but it never developed any momentum. However, since it was the shortest fragment in the SOS working directory with the SOS-format opening credits on it, that draft was almost always used as the seed file for new Symphony pieces - all it required was changing the Symphony number and title, adjusting the author credits, and fixing the date, then deleting the few lines of text below.

393 I want to say this was inspired by a scene somewhere during Revolutionary Girl Utena, but I can't think of the specific reference and I might be misremembering entirely.

499 Tecumseh (ca. 1768-1813) was a Shawnee leader who tried to rally Native Americans to a common cause (fighting the United States) and is credited with preventing a U.S. invasion of Canada during the War of 1812. Interestingly, given our topic, he was described by his American opposite number, General (later President) William H. Harrison, as "one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things."

506 Of course, this means in order to maintain the balance of the universe, Juri will have to dress up as a Valkyrie for Halloween one year. I wonder how Kate would react to that? PJM

515 I didn't have this outcome in mind when I wrote Year's End Confrontation Blues, but when I got here it seemed like the natural thing to do, somehow.

552 How Vigdis made it up to Gudrun is strictly between the two of them. PJM

Nothing to raise an eyebrow over. Gudrun had some things she needed translated; Vigdis is a cunning linguist. --G.

586 And so Utena learns of one of her inexplicable powers, that's almost a prerequisite to becoming the Prince of the Tenth World: the power to Revolutionize a person's life just by being herself. PJM

653 This hearkens back to the chorus of "In a Big Country", the Big Country song (from their 1983 debut The Crossing) that more or less became my mental Utena theme when I realized how appropriate the bridge was to her situation at the end of Revolutionary Girl Utena/beginning of the Symphonies:

So take that look out of here, it doesn't fit you
Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded
Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming
Cry out for everything you ever might've wanted
I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered

"Stay alive!" was also Big Country frontman Stuart Adamson's traditional signoff to the audience at the end of live shows.

752 Rayearth fans were sure to know what was coming next after this bit of foreshadowing.

786 796 : Illustrating this scene is one of the more rewarding pictures I've ever done. PJM

797 Phil told me at the time that his illustration of this scene was the first full-on screen kiss he'd drawn. I've always had a soft spot for this particular Dios scene, just because it illustrates so much if you look into the layers. For instance: If Dios and Utena are almost the same being now, and he kisses her as a lover, then that means she's nearly healed: having overcome the shame and bitter sense of failure that nearly crushed her in Hotel Monolith, she can fully love herself again.