There’s  a great deal of material to cover with Princess Tutu, especially since it spans two seasons. Two, very well developed seasons. This means that the plot for both Chapter of the Egg and Chapter of the Fledgling will need to be covered separately plot wise. I won't be delving too much into the characters, but looking at it more from a broad perspective. Every character makes their own contributions and growth, so I feel it's important to cover them seperately.

PLOT

Chapter of the Egg

As the first installment of the Tutu plotline, Chapter of the Egg starts off like almost every transforming girl story: girl granted power, girl transforms for some great cause, girl saves boy she’s in love with. Even with these basic plot pieces intact, though, it still manages to bring a great bit more to the table. There are several key points in this arc that are dropped later on, or at least become largely ignored.

In the first chapter we see a girl fall in love with a boy, or rather, a duck fall in love with a prince. This is a new take on an old favorite, but definitely brings to mind the story of swan Lake almost immediately. In that story the prince goes hunting in the woods and almost shoots the princess who has been turned into a swan. In Tutu we instead of a lonely duck watching an even lonelier prince and immediately asks the question why. It is thanks to this curiosity that she is rewarded with humanity, something that comes only because a plot device is needed. In this case I am not using plot device in a mean way. Duck is for all intents and purposes a plot device written in by Drosselmyer.

Chapter of the Fledgling

This chapter is where the metaphorical s41t hits the fan. This is also where Princess Tutu proves itself as being much more than the standard mahout shoujo anime. While Duck certainly continues to fulfill her heroes quest, it is the emergence of the true villain, or rather what appears to be the true villain through Princess Kraehe. The incorporation of a singular evil focus means that the grounds are laid for an at times convoluted plot. I will discuss how this affects specific characters in the section on characters.

This chapter suffers some of the same problems the first did in the way several things are arranged for plot convenience. While Drosselmyer does act as a convenient tool to sneak in plot occurrences, which becomes especially apparent when the move to stop his control over the town begins, they are still occurrence I would call necessary. Of course to counter this Fakir also undergoes some changes through personality and is given the same sort of abilities to control the world around him as Drosselmyer. As can be expected there is quite a bit of a tension leading to the finale, which concludes the story for both Mytho and Fakir. However, Duck’s side of the story is only resolved in the sense that she achieves her goal of restoring Mytho’s heart and comes into herself.