I have held back no water in its season

Otome really does repeat Hime in a different register.

Again, the dancing maidens are the sacrifice; this is reinforced by the similarity the grave markers of the Otome who have fallen in battle bear to the pillars that appear for the defeated HiME and their MIPs. They are the few given up to destruction for the sake of the many; in order to control destructive technologies, the power is confined to the Otome, who are then indoctrinated as weapons that serve and act on the decisions of rulers rather than their own will. The people in power all have technology, in the person of their Otome, yet it is still limited. The only ones who fight and die with and of that technology are the Otome themselves and (in a little grace note of cosmic justice) their rulers, if the contest is to the death.

The repetition is not precise when it comes to evil, though. There are two loci of concentration for something that should, instead, be distributed: the harmonium and the Otome themselves. The harmonium parallels the Obsidian Prince as a center of destructive power and grief, but there is also a lot of plot that problematizes Guarderobe’s own concentration of technology. The Founder’s despair and her decision to centralize technology in the Otome are both strongly associated with the Harmonium. This, I think, is the change necessitated by playing the story out in the register of human, rather than mystical, evil. The Otome are, themselves, the creation of despair–that concentration of sacrifice and power, both, is one of the humanly evil acts that comes to a head in this story.

As if the symbolism of using the dead body of a virgin-mother as the source of power wasn’t enough of a brick over the head to tell us that. Of course, given that she produces all the GEMs, it’s pretty clear that she parallels the Crystal HiME.

The human basis of the Otome and their power is emphasized by their symbol. Instead of the stylized HiME star, the symbol of the Otome, seen on the floor of the Founder’s hall and on Guarderobe tents and banners, is the same one that we see on the Orphans that Alyssa calls for Searrs, in Mai HiME. Indeed, Arika, who seems to be of Alyssa’s bloodline, is the one with the greatest affinity for the Otome powers. The only one who still has the HiME symbol is Mikoto, and she is explicitly identified as not human–and, by implication, as the last HiME.

*blinks* Oh, of course. It makes perfect sense.

HiME/OTOME SPOILERS

At the end of HiME, the comet/Obsidian Prince/Miroku were dispersed. Not banished but dispersed. From that point, rather than the tri-century sacrifice of twelve HiME, it would be the actions of all people, every day, that kept darkness and despair in check.

The despair/hatred/fear that the Prince/comet embodied was then everywhere… but nowhere so concentrated that only the sacrifice of the Crystal Princess could stem it.

In Otome, Nagi says it himself. The Harmonium was built out of despair, fear and hatred, the same thing that stained the Pure White Diamond into the Ultimate Black Diamond. The darkness that was dispersed to be either defeated or succumbed to by humans was concentrated again in those two things. Not to the extent that the Prince concentrated it, but enough that the Otome who was possessed of/by both manifested Miroku as her elemental.

*thoughtful* You know, I think the one technical complaint I have about Otome is that they didn’t change the storytelling style enough to suit the new medium. HiME was about mystical stuff. As such, the viewers were willing to suspend a lot of disbelief and accept a lot of un-tied-up mysteries.

But Otome is about just-people. It has to be, precisely because it comes after HiME, and that was the whole point of the first season. To make matters a human, rather than mystical thing.

But just-human stories require a bit more in the way of detail and explanations, otherwise the audience get jarred out of the story. For example, the moment when Natsuki tells Arika all their hope is riding on her, I had a moment of “wait, what? But this is Clueless Girl. Okay, hang on while I winch my disbelief up a few more turns…” But all it would have taken was a single sentence, Natsuki saying that Arika and Mashiro are the only Otome-Master pair who can reach each other right now, there’s no choice, it has to be them. That would have smoothed everything nicely.

But they didn’t do that. *sighs*

And there are some blanks that a thoughtful viewer can fill in for herself. For example, why does Mashiro order Arika, as her Master, to destroy Rena’s body, when Mashiro has just finished making a big speech about how Otome need to think for themselves and not view themselves and only tools and weapons? Well, because this is Arika’s mother we’re talking about! Mashiro is offering to take the responsibility, the guilt, on herself and leave Arika’s hands clean. You note that Arika seems to understand this, and thanks Mashiro for it before she refuses.

Some are simply the sort of background mysteries that are typical of the Mai stories. For example, why does the harmonium need a song, a conductor and a protector? And where is the protector, anyway? My personal theory is that this was a safeguard. If we take the ’song’ as a person, then the song, the Windbloom ruler, must authorize use of the harmonium, and the ruler’s Otome must be willing to use it, to be the conductor. By this reading, there should have been a protector, such as Makoto perhaps; someone who knows the dangers of using the Harmonium and can/will stop the conductor before she’s in danger of being consumed by the Harmonium. But the protector was not, of course, present, and so Nina was taken over. Alternatively, if the song represents the knowledge or authorization of the ruling line, then the conductor is the ruler and the Otome is the protector. We don’t really find out which is correct. I’m actually fine with this kind of thing, because it is typical of Mai, and I kind of like putting the puzzle together.

Some mysteries, like how the Black Valley moves around are also typical of Mai. We never do find out what’s up when HiME-Mashiro’s doll-body transforms into that ass-kicking babe form either. I’m not as happy with these gaps, but at least knew to expect one or two. How/why members of Aswad can call and use a Child is never answered either.

…though I suppose we can assume that Searrs and their spiritual brethren, being into the whole reproduction of mystical powers via technology, may have come up with those little ring-ball things used to call the Child. After all, Smith repeatedly says that “our ancestors” created the Otome, who are basically HiME without Child and with a contractually designated Most Important Person. This would be very much in keeping with the globalization of what was once extremely concentrated. It also seems likely that the Administar was located in lunar orbit, right where the HiME star was seen approaching when it existed, as a remembrance/reference/imitation of the HiME.

At any rate, all in all I quite liked Otome, though the oversight of leaving the story-telling mode stuck on mystical means it wasn’t quite as good as HiME, and the pervy-voyeur overtones made me twitch.

Interesting parallels between Otome and Hime.

One, of course, is the Crystal Hime. In MH, the Crystal Hime was the winner and the sacrifice. She entered the Otherworld and became its power source, the ordering principle in the chaos, and thus closed off the Otherworld from her own world.

In Otome we have Fumi and Rena who are sacrificed and turned into the source of Otome crystals. And Otome are, in this world, the source of order, and are themselves the sacrifices who must fight each other.

We also have the aspect of the wish. The Crystal Hime has the power to make her wishes true. So, apparently, does the Harmonium.

There’s also the extra. And extra Hime, which was, in the end, absolutely vital to the plot. The extra heir/otome, in the trio of Arika, Mashiro and Nina.

Given that the end of MH dispersed evil into something individuals had to each deal with for themselves, rather than one conglomeration that required the Hime power and sacrifice to contain, I wonder whether the end of MO won’t be the dismantling of the Otome to let the nations once again hash out their affairs without using that power and sacrifice.