Know in my heart (and get the strong impression from interview material) that if they had made a third season of Princess Tutu there is a 90% chance they would have made Duck a girl again because from a pure marketing and narrative perspective it makes the most sense, but also that if they had done so they wouldn’t revisit Rue and Mytho’s characters at all even though by changing Duck’s ending it would inherently call into question how satisfactory their ending was.
The most obvious direction a third season would have taken would be:
1) Duck-the-duck has to become a magical girl again because this is a magical girl anime for 9 year olds, which would obviously include bringing back Duck-the-girl as well. Also if your protagonist is a literal duck her agency and ability to do anything in the narrative is incredibly limited. And also this is a magical girl anime for 9 year olds.
2) The season would need to have a new thematic thrust. Potentially one that calls into question some of the assumptions made at the end of the original show just as season two attempts to call into question assumptions made in season one.
3) If the season has a new thematic thrust, and lets Duck be a girl again, then it needs to introduce a new conflict which can very easily be related to the notion of having to give up being a girl a second time being difficult, not because she’s afraid of being unlovable or abandonment, but because she genuinely prefers it for herself. (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis…) But just in general I think putting the protagonist through a new narrative and having her end up at the exact same place emotionally as she did at the end of season 2 would be kind of uninteresting.
4) This is a show for 9 year old girls and they would canonize Fakiru as overtly romantic so fucking hard. They know it’s what the 12 year old girlies at home watching this in 2005 want. It’s a bad primary reason to make Duck a girl imo but being a duck being an obstacle to romance would 100% be a factor here.
And if they had made such a thing I’m sure I would have enjoyed it on some level because hell yeaaahhh baby the self is malleable and the culmination of everything we have been up to this point!! The original self and the true self are not necessarily the same!!!
But also I would shake it to death like a chew toy and smack it against a wall because I know Itoh (at least in the mid 2000s she didn’t) doesn’t consider Rue and Mytho characters worth revisiting or reexamination. (Would drive me insane but would also be enrichment in my enclosure)



























