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Subject: "(S25) Tower Shrouded in Frost"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
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Gryphonadmin
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Dec-13-06, 12:16 PM (EDT)
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"(S25) Tower Shrouded in Frost"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Apr-02-10 AT 01:47 PM (EDT)
 
1 Though they're common features of other UF stories, pre-credits sequences like this one are rare in the Symphonies. No real reason for that, it's just the way things went.

8 More or less what happened at the end of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

13 Akio used to say something like this every time he forced himself (psychologically, not through violence, but still) on Anthy, back in the bad old days.

23 You'll note the rose has turned silver. Corwin's not the only one with frustratingly vague prophetic dreams. ALC

34 Bits of this dream will reappear before much longer...

93 She'd like to be, Anthy, she just hasn't quite figured out how. ALC

154 If Anthy had actually been able to get into the Tower, she'd've been able to tell both Zagato and Emeraude. ALC

180 Ahh, Alcyione. Thus, she is established as being a really dimwitted bad guy. In Magic Knight Rayearth, she was smitten with Zagato. Here, it's Akio, but the net result is the same. ALC

228 Anthy's no stranger to pain, and can bear with a great deal, but the initial shock of something pointy hitting flesh is something that will disrupt all but the most practiced mage's concentration. And Anthy hasn't had time to rise to the ranks of "most practiced mage" yet. ALC

230 The Million Swords are something of an enigma to Cephiran mage-scholars. Some believe they are a manifestation of the world's hatred, unleashed upon those who incur what a Midgardian philosopher would call massive karmic debt. Others claim that they're merely a defense mechanism triggered by certain dire world conditions and make no particular judgments on those they attack. Still others think they can be commanded with the right tools - but no one has any idea what those tools might be, and no one who has actually seen the Million Swords has either lived or cared to tell about it.

245 "The End of the World" is both a title and a Working, the former that of a high official under the Duelists' Code, the latter an obsolete piece of that Code. In the days before the invention of the Rose Seal, Duelists of the Order of the Pillar, as it was then known, had to undergo an initiation ordeal in which they were "shown the End of the World". The Order was overhauled dozens of Pillars' reigns ago, long enough ago that knowledge of its structure and function before it became the Order of the Rose is known only to the most dedicated of arcane scholars, and the "End of the World" initiation was abandoned. It is a measure of both Akio's obsession with seizing the Prince's power and the perversion of his Lost Tournament that he was able to revive this ancient, abandoned annex to the Code and twist it to the purpose of breaking his enemies' will, transforming them into his thralls.

In MKR, this was the result of Zagato's tampering. Akio's a much more satisfactory villain - and we've already seen that he has this power on screen. It's apparent that it's Duelists' Code-level magic, too, or he couldn't have used it on Lafarga; the Pillar's protection renders him immune to any lesser magic. ALC

262 A much-feared svartelven spell, not native to Cephiro. The Death of Dreams does pretty much what it says on the tin: traps the victim in a sort of terrified fugue state in which all her hopes and dreams turn - repeatedly, horribly, eternally - to ashes. It's an illusion, but it's the mother of all black illusions and it can cause permanent harm.

I'm glad Gryph knows what the effect of this spell is - when I wrote it, I just knew that Anthy had lost her control over her anger and was in the process of making Alcyione's life very bad. ALC

282 Akio has no right to be wearing these clothes. Unfortunately, Utena's not around to deny him. ALC

354 Anthy's absolutely done with being ladylike here. Touga recovers better (at least here) than Akio will, but then, he's interacted with Anthy around Utena more than Akio has. ALC

370 Zagato knows what Akio is - but Akio never admits it. I don't think he's actually capable of admitting that he's merely a flawed, diminished copy of Dios. ALC

400 This is pretty much exactly the same aftermath to what happened in MKR, except that the Knights killed Zagato there. Right now, Emeraude would dearly love to kill Akio... Really, the man has a list as long as I am tall of people who want him dead. That takes talent. ALC

420 Apart from the bit tying it into the Rose Tournament structure of UF-Cephiro, this is pretty much straight from Magic Knight Rayearth. Emeraude, the Pillar, and Zagato, her designated protector, fell in love, and their love caused them to neglect their duties - causing Cephiro to begin an inexorable slide toward chaos and destruction.

Suddenly, everything Anthy's been wondering about for all this time snaps into horrifying focus.

464 Emeraude is actually very old indeed, but she stopped aging when she was invested as Pillar. The Pillar serves until he or she can no longer shoulder the burden, but the coming of that day has nothing to do with age.

472 And now we know why the Tower was completely flat in Knights II. ALC

477 I wasn't as happy with this particular shadow play as with the others, but it was a story set entirely in Cephiro, so we needed to have one (at least in my mind.) It did at least cover the usual Revolutionary Girl Utena shadow play material, that being what was going on in people's heads. ALC

510 Trains! Again! Cephiro has a really good railway system. ALC

522 She settles for the truth - but not all of it. ALC

541 She's pretty sure Touga, at least, is listening for her to try to escape, but he gets bored easily. Hence, waiting a bit. ALC

557 D&D players should have little trouble recognizing this old favorite: knock, second-level sorcerer/wizard spell.

566 Anthy has always had courage, it just wasn't trained toward this kind of heroics. She just endured, which is a different kind of courage. ALC

582 Nope, Akio isn't coping as well as Touga with this change in Anthy, is he? ALC

601 For my money, this is the most powerful moment in this very powerful story - the moment when Anthy has finally and definitively Had Enough. She hasn't the strength to back up her fury yet, but she's no longer going to deny it - and though thanks to the circumstances she may still be a victim for the moment, she will never be a willing one again.

618 Touga echoes the way Anthy used to describe herself back when she bought into the trappings of Akio's Lost Tournament.

622 Why, Touga, might you be -afraid- of meek little Anthy? Perhaps your sister was right after all. ALC

646 R.E.M.'s "Maps and Legends" (Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985):

Maybe he's caught in the legend
Maybe he's caught in the mood
Maybe these maps and legends
Have been misunderstood

656 And so now Cephiro doesn't even have the pretense of having a Prince. Things are now even more unbalanced than before. (As if Emeraude falling apart wasn't bad enough.) ALC

673 Rayearth's gift. ALC

693 At least one woman will have cause to be grateful for this quirk of Akio's personality later.

699 Except, of course, that Saionji will never hurt Anthy again, and will go through Hell and high water to make sure that nobody else does either. Anthy, of course, doesn't know that yet, but neither does Akio. ALC

718 Wait for it, a little, Akio. You're jumping the gun here. ALC

751 This was, perhaps, the hardest part of Tower to write. Compared to Crown of Roses, it is a much better story, because I wasn't just taking the story that somebody else had written (MKR) and twisting it slightly, I was creating something new. But writing what had been done to Nanami was like tearing out a chunk of my guts and cooking them.

Originally, I'd had her see the End of the World, but Truss pointed out that that really diminished Nanami's gift to Anthy. And for that gift, Nanami would not have just had her mind wrapped in cotton wool. Something more would have been done to her... and we knew what that was.

It's always astonishing how much suffering I can put the characters I write through, when I know that in the real world, I would never do that kind of thing to anyone, and that I probably wouldn't be able to cope with it either. It makes me examine the inside of my head, and wonder where all that vile spew comes- from. ALC

773 In the final episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena; it's his way of announcing that he's given up on turning her to his cause and now intends to kill her.

781 Take note of this: it will be important a little later. We'll come back to it.

803 "You will know pain; and you will know fear; and then you will die." Ambassador G'Kar to Narn assassin Tu'Pari, Babylon 5 episode 108, "The Parliament of Dreams"

821 Toward the end of the Utena TV series, Utena grabs Anthy by the wrist one night late at night when Anthy has given up and is trying to throw herself off the parapet. ALC

857 "Because sometimes what we think we want really isn't, and by the time we find out how wrong we are it's too fucking late." Utena Tenjou to Vigdis Brightblade, Year's End Confrontation Blues

For much of the Revolutionary Girl Utena TV series, Nanami is convinced that she's in love with her elder brother Touga. She only sheds this idea very late in the series, after Touga and Akio play a cruel joke on her that involves convincing her that she's adopted (and so, effectively, free to pursue her long-unfulfilled dream). At about that same time, while staying for a short time in the White Tower, she stumbles across Akio having one of his, er, sessions with Anthy, and is horrified by the reality of what she's fantasized about all her life. Now we see what living that experience herself has reduced her to - and how low Touga will stoop to satisfy his and his master's ever-more-warped whims.

885 Anthy, unlike most of the Symphony characters, usually doesn't have anyone to fall back on to help her. She has to hold herself up, because nobody will do it for her. I think that's part of why she's so strong - she's had to grow up under the crushing weight of everything with nobody else to take up the slack. It's one of the reasons I love writing her, and why I felt this piece and Crown of Roses really needed to be written. She'd earned them. ALC

887 This is, to me, one of the most crushing pieces in all the Symphony, and doubly so because it happens in such close proximity to Interlude at the Hotel Monolith. The contrast between the way Monolith/Confrontation Blues and Tower leave their heroines - Utena deeply shaken but almost whole again, daring to hope; Anthy stronger than she's ever been but nearly shattered, her hope almost extinguished - is, I think, particularly powerful. I was gutshot when I read Anne's draft of Tower... and that's how I knew it was right.

I also knew I was in trouble, because I had to come up with a resolution that was somehow worthy of all this fantastic build-up.

889 This musical cue is all Truss's fault. He handed me Songs in Red and Grey and said, "Isn't this song all about Anthy?" So, we had our closing credits before I even wrote the story. ALC


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Berk
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Dec-20-06, 08:10 AM (EDT)
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1. "RE: Annotations: Tower Shrouded in Frost"
In response to message #0
 
   This story is very nearly as hard to read as it was to write, I imagine. The prevailing theme of FI is one of uplift, fixing the things that went terribly wrong during the Exile arc.

At least, that's the way I see it.

To see something going horribly wrong like this in FI with only the vague knowledge in the narrative that the people doing this WILL Get Theirs eventually is hard.

And I utterly love it when I can FEEL a good, solid gut punch from writing.

- Berk Watkins
Student of Quantum Bogodynamics


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