A wizard did it.

Ohtori Academy is a four-dimensional projection of the revenge/power fantasy of a bullied junior member of a spacefaring race so advanced that their tech seems like magic to puny humans, even the crappy stuff that one of their children would regard as a toy.

Anthy and Akio are corrupted supercomputers, of the insane 'And I Must Scream' model. Their hardware and software is corrupted; when Anthy's hardware was damaged, the damage affected her software. The software corruption spread to Akio. Even though Anthy's capacity and capabilities are much, much greater than Akio's, the damage to her circuits makes her unable to access more than a fraction of her former self and she's effectively slaved to Akio. Because of the sophistication of their programming and engineering, they're close to impossible to repair. And because Anthy is in such constant pain and is very close to insane, she will not allow anyone to repair her hardware.

Enter a constant stream of programmers. As each straps themselves in to persuade Anthy to accept repairs via virtual reality, they end up with their minds wiped and in a bizarre dream world thought up by Anthy and Akio, and as a result, hallucinate that they're in a kind of school. They fall under the complete control of the sibling computers. The duelling game was thought up by Akio and is a mindfuck under the guise of a competition for the programmers to prove themselves worthy and able enough to repair Anthy. Akio rather enjoys being the powerful one in the network, so he subtly sabotages each attempt at repairs.

The genius programmer Utena arrives. Instead of being drawn unwillingly into the Otori Academy virtual reality, she embraces it. She's ultimately able to convince Anthy to allow access to the damaged boards and cicuits. After Utena leaves, Anthy finally breaks the programming loop with Akio and becomes aware of the outside world once more.

I've read your fic, gorgeous. Pretty good. Will give a reread.

In fact, when I made the OP, I thought about your fic.

crystalwren wrote:

Enter a constant stream of programmers. As each straps themselves in to persuade Anthy to accept repairs via virtual reality, they end up with their minds wiped and in a bizarre dream world thought up by Anthy and Akio, and as a result, hallucinate that they're in a kind of school. They fall under the complete control of the sibling computers. The duelling game was thought up by Akio and is a mindfuck under the guise of a competition for the programmers to prove themselves worthy and able enough to repair Anthy. Akio rather enjoys being the powerful one in the network, so he subtly sabotages each attempt at repairs.

The genius programmer Utena arrives. Instead of being drawn unwillingly into the Otori Academy virtual reality, she embraces it. She's ultimately able to convince Anthy to allow access to the damaged boards and cicuits. After Utena leaves, Anthy finally breaks the programming loop with Akio and becomes aware of the outside world once more.

+1 for Revolutionary Tech Support Staffmember Utena.

Here is a very strange science fiction story.  Two brothers were born in very modest circumstances, but their father worked at a chemical plant and sometimes brought some solvents home for the boys to play with.  As they grew up, the boys became chemists, and made an astounding discovery: by combining plant matter with a couple readily available organic molecules, they could synthesize sheets of pliant, transparent material that could take and hold dyes more vibrantly and stably than any substance ever discovered before.

Independently, an illusionist accidentally rediscovered an ancient, discarded secret of the human mind, namely that the mind cannot perceive motion per se.  Instead, confronted with similar images subsequent to each other in time, the gullible mind manufactures the perception of motion between the images -- even if nothing has actually moved.  The illusionist took advantage of the mind's gullibility to project a succession of pictures on a wall which appeared, to their viewers, as though the figures in them were moving.

Follow-on innovators quickly discovered the illusionist's secret and did him one better.  These innovators used dyes to draw directly onto cutouts of the chemist brothers' special tape, and with the illusionist's trick they made their drawings move.  Suddenly anything an artist could draw could be brought to life -- not only in color, but also in sound, adapting a technique first invented by a New Jersey industrialist for capturing sounds as though in amber to be heard again later.  It was the most rapid development of technology in human history up to that point.  Some of those involved would have been called witches by their own grandparents.  At first dismissed as vulgar, this new artistic medium went on to transform popular culture.  The venues for its performance became social gathering places.  People used the new art as a metaphor for memory and for imagination.  The best and most widely seen works of art became cultural touchstones and attracted new artists to the field, artists who pushed the limitations of the technology farther and farther, using it to tell stories that could never have been portrayed on a stage, stories about impossible places and phantasmagoria, stories about wooden men who could walk, children who could fly, psychics who could transcend reality.

Decades later, a team of creators decided to use the medium to tell a story about a girl with pink hair who wanted to be a prince.  They did their best to make their story amazing, but they hardly stopped at all to think about how amazing their story already was.  They had grown up in a world where it was taken for granted that the contents of an imagination could be turned into moving pictures and voices, communicated to other people, and discussed as art.  And what they made was indeed discussed as art, and it brought people together who otherwise would have been strangers.  This story is for them.

"Alright, try to bear with me. There are these things which are like gods—they're not gods, though—and they used to be humans, but they took advantages of the archetypes living in the collective unconscious of humanity and became something more. You know their names: the Mother, the Warrior, the True King, the Demagogue, the Flying Woman...the Prince and the Rose Bride.

"But these titles aren't permanent. You can lose them, if someone shows up who fulfills the role better than you, or if you go against the core of the archetype. If that happens, they get all the power and the glory, and you end up on the street without any of your old power.

"Oh, and I forgot to mention. Once you become a good enough manifestation of the role, you ascend. That is, you vanish in a puff of light, and join a council of these avatars up in the heavens above. But they're only waiting until they number three hundred thirty-three, and then, with all their powers, they'll reboot the world. It starts over again, based on the wills of those in the council at the time.

"So, a few decades back, there was an intelligent young man. He figured out the whole truth behind this archetype business, figured it out himself, and he decided to start acting out the role of the Prince. He started out small, but soon he became powerful enough that he could have ascended. He could have, if not for one spanner in the works. He had a sister, you see, and she didn't want him to ascend without her. So she tied him down and raped him, her own brother, just like that.

"Sure, he was pissed. But he was, as I say, damn clever, and he decided to start over again from scratch—and to make sure things weren't fouled up this time, he offered his sister a place at his side, fulfilling the role of the Rose Bride.

"But after a few decades of trying that, and failing, they got tired of it. Sure, they weren't aging, but they were nowhere near ascension. So the brother got an idea. Instead of working his way up to becoming the Prince, he'd turn someone else into a Prince, then unseat them. The first few attempts...didn't go so well. But he kept trying, and this time—this time—he's sure he'll make it work.

"So, do you get what I'm saying?"

Utena shook her head. "Don't quit your day job," she said. Then she turned and walked away.

C-Ko sighed. "No one understands an artist."

At its core, SKU isn't a science fiction or fantasy in the same way that, say, Evangelion or Lain are. Fantastic things happen not because of some force nonexistent in the real world, but because the literal truth of the series is subservient to the emotional truth.

Why doesn't Akio age? Is it because Anthy has used magic? Not really—it's just a way of showing that he's perpetually trapped in a single state of mind.

What is Dios and when did he live? Irrelevant—he saved people at the cost of his own safety because he was a prince, and that's what princes do.

How do the Black Rose Duelists pull swords out of people? It's because they're so attached to these people that their emotions lead them to fight: their passion is their weapon.

It's not so much a "magical girl" anime as it is a "magical realism girl" anime.