rpanons | Cry baby bunting

Cry baby bunting

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

CONCERNS | RESOURCES

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

other futari-watching anon! what episode are you on now? how are you liking it so far?

anon who said they'll give smile a go, i'll be happy if you post your opinions here once you've done so!

i'm just really excited to have other precure anons to chat with, ok :c

DA here (actually the one who posted the history lesson at the end of the last thread) but I'd love to have more Precure anons to talk to as well!

I'LL TALK TO YOU ALL DAY LONG KNOWLEDGE-ANON, bestow me with your endless precure wisdom!!

Thanks! I'll be happy to try and answer any questions you have about the series! It's great to see new people enjoying it!

i don't really know what information i'm missing (like the heartcatch thing) so it's hard to ask anything of the sort! tell me about your precure experience instead c: what's your favorite/least favorite season, character, etc? do you rp from it?

It was more if you had any wonderings while you were watching!

(This is going to make my anon-ing so paper-thin to some people but whatever.)

I started with Futari wa too, back when it was actually airing on television and making waves for being a different kind of magical girl show. It might seem weird now (because shows like Madoka or Nanoha are the norm) but it was one of the first magical girl shows with something for adults as well as little kids, and one of the first where the main characters actually beat up the bad guys with fisticuffs and saved the magical attacks for the finishing blow. The fact that Futari wa did a lot of other things really well (story, characterisation, fight choreography, etc.) helped it out tons too.

Favourite season is probably Heartcatch Precure. You'll find that this will be a popular opinion (because of some of the reasons I mentioned last time) but I also think that Heartcatch by itself did a lot of really basic things well. Magical girl shows don't have to be high art but there's something to be said for the basics: character arcs, runners (ongoing storylines), battles with stakes and consequences, that kind of thing. Heartcatch is one of the best examples of this done well in Pretty Cure, and you've also got elements like Cure Moonlight (an older Pretty Cure with a suitably more mature storyline) to hook in the older fans too.

My least favourite... is probably Smile Precure. It's a series that was deliberately designed to be "simple" (quote from the director) so it's very slice-of-life with few real ongoing plots or character development. They do have a lot of fun with the show and there a lot of funny and cute moments in it. But without a proper plot to get invested in, it struggled to hold my interest and got a bit repetitive after a while. That's just my opinion though, and I've had conversations with fans who fell in love with the characters and really enjoyed it on an episode-to-episode basis. So I think you should still give it a try to see if you like it too!

And yes, I did RP from it before going on a bit of a hiatus from the hobby. If you're looking for casts, the two big ones (at the moment) are at

dramadramaduck and

mallowhallow.

ooh you've been into it from the very start, that's cool! :D and that's good to know about futari, i've heard about precure being new/different a lot but i could never really see how, not just because there have been so many other mg shows like it since, but also because precure itself is pretty unchanged from its original formula and it's hard to keep in mind that stuff was fresh ten years ago. how would you say it has something for adults, though? do you just mean that because it's more intelligently written than the average mg show at the time, it could be enjoyed by older audiences too?

haha, i've seen smile and it's actually my favorite so far. i can see why it could be hard to get invested in for people whose tastes don't accommodate for more 'kiddy' stuff, though!

it's a shame you don't rp from it anymore. i know about those casts, but ddd is really not my type of game, and mh still gives off 'dying any day now' vibes to me, so. :c

Glad to hear you're enjoying Smile! That's the good thing about a series being on for as long as Pretty Cure has, everyone will have a favourite!

Right, to explain why Futari wa Pretty Cure was so different, I'll take you back to 2004. The last really big "magical girls fighting evil" franchise (Sailor Moon) had ended its run seven years previously. There had been a few moderately successful ones in-between but they mostly copied the Sailor Moon formula with their own twist (e.g. Tokyo Mew Mew) or were the non-violent kind of magical girl show (e.g. Ojamajo Doremi). So that's roughly seven years (in addition to Sailor Moon's actual run) of the same formula.

Pretty Cure shook that up straight away. Instead of a team of five, you had a team of two who essentially acted as a single character. Instead of primarily using magical attacks, they relied on fisticuffs and hand-to-hand fighting while saving their single magical attack as a finishing move. Instead of having a klutzy but lovable idiot as the main character (e.g. Usagi, Doremi, Ichigo) you had the sporty Nagisa and the intelligent Honoka. Now admittedly, Pretty Cure played some things absolutely straight (Monsters of the Week, the general set-up of the plot and villains) but in a genre that had become pretty stale, it was a welcome change to see someone try something different.

Speaking of formula, Pretty Cure joked around a lot with the expectations of the genre. Characters that couldn't control their sudden new agility and involuntary catchphrases ("What did I just say?" blurts Nagisa in disbelief as she reels off a perfectly composed catchphrase in auto-pilot) were just two examples from the first episode. A cute critter that acts as more of an annoyance than a partner-in-harmony. Stock plots (oh no, the villains have created evil Pretty Cures by brainwashing their friends) given new twists (the "evil" Pretty Cures are just regular humans in costumes, so Cure Black and White have to avoid crippling them with their super strength). Nagisa was the perpetual straight woman to the madness of the magical girl genre, moaning "I don't believe it!" when confronted with the latest absurdity. Then you have the moments where the villains take advantage of this genre subversion too, composing genuinely clever plans that take specific advantage of the restrictions and weaknesses of the two-hero set-up.

Let's zoom in on the fighting I mentioned. Most magical girl shows before this had a bit of close-quarters combat, but mostly relied on magical attacks. Pretty Cure was the first to really invert the formula and feature fights you would expect out of something like Dragonball Z or any other Shounen Fightin' Anime. Fun fact: Daisuke Nishio, the director of Pretty Cure, was actually the director for Dragonball Z as well. So not only were the fights very physical, they were also choreographed really well by someone who knew what they were doing. This is also key to understanding why Pretty Cure was pitched not only at the traditional magical girl market (young/teen girls) but at young boys (who would love the high-octane fight sequences) and adult males (who are just boys with disposable income). Pretty Cure was the proof that you could sell a show with magical girls to a male audience, which (a mere eight months later) led to the creation of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: essentially "Super Robots, If They Were Magical Girls" and the series that really codified the "magical girls for adults" trend that continued for the rest of the decade and has since evolved into things like Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

So between the references and subversions of older magical girl shows, and the super-brutal and exciting battle sequences, you hopefully have an idea of how Pretty Cure could appeal to the adult market. Just to seal the deal, Toei also inserted some sly (uh) "subtext" between Nagisa and Honoka. Of the kind that adult viewers could pick up on and interpret any way they liked. That... was a factor in its popularity in the adult market as well.

On top of all that, it was intelligently written. Not from a technobabble standpoint, but in that: everything made sense, characters (mostly) acted in-character and in a sensible manner, the show kept to its own internal logic, there were character arcs and stakes and consequences and the show was not afraid to have Pretty Cure lose at the end of an episode to build up for a greater payoff down the line. A simple, clean and effectively-written show: that's a formula for a success no matter what age your audience.

Now having read this, you might be watching a newer Pretty Cure series and thinking, "Okay, there's a bit of fist-fighting but the fights aren't that brutal." or "But Miyuki is kind of a ditz main character." And the simple fact is... Pretty Cure has changed over the years. It's certainly become more homogenized, while retaining some of the elements that made it stand out in the first place: the close-combat fighting, the running gag of "new Pretty Cure can't control her power", the sly in-jokes at the expense of the genre, and so forth. It really depends on the series: Yes! Precure 5 was almost an experiment to see how "old-school formula" they could make it, while Fresh Precure experimented with a three (plus one) setup.

There's a few reasons for this. Toei have sort of settled into a comfort zone with Pretty Cure: while the original series was a radical experiment, newer series play it safe more often to secure that vital young girls market. There's also the moral guardians of Japan to consider: during the first series of Futari wa, there were a lot of complaints about the brutality of the battles and elements like Cure Black's exposed stomach. Note that in the second season, Cure Black gets a redesign to cover her tummy (which has become her "standard" outfit) and in the third season, the Splash Star duo fight primarily with non-contact aura attacks.

So there will probably never be another series like Futari wa Pretty Cure made, and you'll see a lot of fandom debate about this. My opinion: Pretty Cure is a ten-year series. Series with that kind of length need to evolve and change to keep things fresh, and while I have things I like and dislike about the current direction, it's also done plenty to broaden the show horizons and bring in tons of new fans. Would something like Heartcatch Precure, possibly the most important series in the last five years, have been made from strict adherence to the Futari wa formula? Nope. Then there are series like Smile Precure, which fans such as yourself absolutely adore, hooking in a fantastic new fandom who might not have gone for the older formulas. We've got so much variety now in the series, the change can't be seen as anything but good.

In closing, why don't you think that Pretty Cure is as "unique" as the blurb on the back of the box claims? Two main reasons: as the forerunner of the "magical girl shows for boys/adults" trend, most of the uniqueness has been copied. And Pretty Cure as a franchise has become less unique and more homogenised as a result of its longevity. As for whether Pretty Cure still contains something specifically for adults, in my opinion, it does: the character of Yayoi in Smile was Otaku Bait of the highest possible grade, and the Cure Sword plotline in Doki Doki seems to be a more mature storyline pitched at the older viewers. But ultimately, a well-plotted, well-animated and enjoyable storyline can be enjoyed by all age groups: as the late Walt Disney once said,

"You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway."

... and somehow I've written more than 1,300 words on this topic, so I think that's enough of an answer, whoops. I hope that kinda answers it in full!

woah dang
this was a really fascinating post, anon! thank you for this :)

i'm so ??? at the bit about the violence and NAGISA'S STOMACH causing an uproar, though, omg. like....... REALLY??

as for the original formula being tossed out, i don't think that's entirely true -- smile and dokidoki both seem to pertain to the sailor moon-style model of magical girls, yeah, but suite was actually quite close to futari, both in terms of characters, group structure (since most of the show was about hibiki and kanade, with ellen joining around the middle, with ako close to the end) and in general tone. and though i loved smile, i'm actually pretty seriously disappointed with dokidoki so far, so i hope toei continues to mix it up instead of going 'WELL CLEARLY WE'VE STRUCK GOLD HERE LET'S JUST KEEP REPEATING THE EXACT SAME THING OVER AND OVER'.

You're welcome, happy to help. :)

Re: Nagisa, people tend to forget that even though the standards of Japanese television are different from those in countries like America, there are still typical Moral Guardians and Concerned Parents in every culture. So you still get parents complaining that Nagisa's outfit is too skimpy or worrying that their children will copy the violence on television.

You're right about the original formula, and a better way of putting it (the way I should have used) was that every series since then has fallen on a gradient between Futari wa and Sailor Moon. So some years you get something like Suite or Heartcatch that are closer to the former in style, while shows like Smile or Yes! fall on the latter half. When new shows get announced, it's always a point of interest for fans to guess exactly where on the scale it will fall, and (obviously) there are differing opinions on what the "best" point on the scale is.

I'm still forming an opinion on Doki Doki and I think it'll really depend on how the show treats Ai (the baby fairy) over the next few episodes and what they'll do after the introductory arc is over with. They've made some really strange pacing decisions: for example, it took them seven episodes before they explained the main plot (what the villains wanted/why they created Selfish monsters, what the goal of the heroes is, etcetera). Mana is one of those characters where I'm not sure if the point is to de-construct her always-in-helpful-mode persona (perhaps by having her over-exhaust herself) or they're going to play it completely straight; I'd like to see the former (possibly as the second-quarter arc) but my instincts are telling me it'll be the latter. That uncertainty and weirdness is throwing me a little and making it hard to pin down an opinion. I do love the villains though, and I'm hoping that four more are added so we can have representatives for all seven Deadly Sins.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cry baby bunting

PRETTY CURE

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject