#brightest as we/they deserve. pink & yellow a fantastic combination as we/they deserve.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

also another thing to say about staring at this "suddenly seymour" image and holding it so gently in my hands

their Pink & Yellow 😭💖

[precuredaily]

Precure Day 147

Episode: Futari wa Precure Splash Star 48 - “The Final Battle! The Stolen Land of Greenery!” Date watched: 28 July 2019 Original air date: 21 January 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/XoatG4O Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

I’ve got bad news

This episode has it all: a fantastic fight, huge stakes, crippling defeat, near-death experiences, the destruction of the world.... wait that doesn’t sound good at all. Hmm.

The Plot

Gohyaan has destroyed Akudaikaan, revealed himself as the creator of Dark Fall, and brought everyone to the Land of Greenery to find and destroy the Fountain of the Sun. Naturally, the girls don’t really want that to happen and they fight back with everything they have. They pull out all the stops but ultimately Gohyaan is not deterred. He’s about to torture the girls when Princess Filia, still possessing Korone, shows up to stop him. In a freak series of events the Fairy Carafe ends up in the water and begins to glow. It is revealed that Earth’s oceans itself are the Fountain of the Sun.

Visually it’s not very interesting, just the ocean with a yellow glow, but I guess it would have been difficult to live up to the hype. Having found his objective, Gohyaan charges an attack that resembles a black hole, sucking in all life and spirits. Bright and Windy try to stop him with Spiral Star Splash but he blocks the attack, and with the spirits of Earth getting sucked up, they exhaust their spirit energy and detransform. The black hole continues to suck all life from Earth, leaving the entire planet as a dry and barren wasteland.

Gohyaan turns his attention back to the four girls and prepares to destroy them as well, but Michiru and Kaoru block his attack. He reminds them that with Akudaikaan’s life flame gone, their own power and lives are finite, but the pair don’t abandon their friends. They use the last of their energy to flee Gohyaan and land under the dried up Tree of Life, where the Kiryuus collapse, seemingly dead.

Saki and Mai cry while Flappi, Choppi, Moop, Foop, and Korone watch with sadness. However, some keen spotting by Flappi leads to the realization that the soil is not dead, the air is still breatheable, and the moon and wind are still out there. There’s still room for life, and all things have life. Saki and Mai reflect on their families and friends, wishing to see them again, and they pray to all the spirits left on the planet, within all things, to give them strength. The Tree of Life flashes as spirit energy gathers, and restores strength and power to all four girls. As the light fades, they emerge: Saki as Cure Bloom, Mai as Cure Egret, and Michiru and Kaoru have been given the powers of the Moon and Wind respectively. Gohyaan appears and scowls at this latest development, and the credits roll.

Well. It’s about damn time.

The Analysis

I think my favorite part of these finales is wondering how they’re going to fill 3-4 episodes and then being pleasantly surprised by the result. Episode 46: They enter Dark Fall, engage with Akudaikaan in ideology, and show him they’re strong enough to counter him. Ep 47: They truly battle, again exchanging words as much as blows, and with the power of spirits they manage to defeat him. Gohyaan reveals himself. Now episode 48: The girls express how important life, their friends, the spirits, and the planet are to them, they fight, they lose, but their resolve creates a miracle. When I write it out, it sounds a bit silly, but when you actually watch it, it works. There are shows where I take issue with the pacing of the story, but this isn’t one. This battle has been perfectly paced, each episode ending on a cliffhanger for the girls, and then in the subsequent episode, paying it off. Now that Michiru and Kaoru have been given Cure-like powers, things are looking up. The cliffhanger this time is a more positive one. In moments of deepest darkness, the cures’ spirits shine the brightest. Even when the odds are stacked against them, they never give up. And I’m here for it.

The emotional journey through this episode is tense. Even if you kind of know things will work out in the end, seeing Saki and Mai get pushed to their limits is sad, and then seeing Michiru and Kaoru pretty much sacrifice their lives to buy them a few extra minutes is just gut-wrenching. They’ve always gotten a raw deal, they don’t deserve to suffer the way they have, and now that they’re caught between worlds, either side’s defeat could kill them. Yet, they do fight, and they do sacrifice themselves, because they care so much about the two who taught them the value of life. Even if their supposed death only lasts a few minutes before they’re rejuvenated with the Moon and Wind powers, it’s still tragic. Saki and Mai’s resulting anguish at the loss of their friends is also deeply moving.

The fight scene towards the beginning of this episode is fantastic, almost movie quality. Words don’t do it justice, so here’s the video.

It is well-animated, well-choreographed, well-blocked, well-paced. The camera moves around and they don’t hover on still drawings for longer than they have to. Almost as soon as someone lands a blow and Gohyaan shoves them away, someone is ready from a different direction with their own attack he isn’t anticipating. Then that dramatic combination at the end, where the Kiryuus trap him in their energy sphere while Windy crushes him with wind, before Bright bounces up and charges the biggest damn light beam you’ve ever seen, I love every minute of it. This is a Precure fight scene to remember.

Speaking of animation, I want to give special consideration to the detransformation scenes. This is something we rarely see in magical girl anime to begin with, and in Precure it’s exceedingly rare. Usually their whole bodies glow as their outfit dissipates, but here their faces stay normally lit and they subtly blend frames to show their hair and accessories disappearing. It’s really neat, and considering even the movie fudged the detransformation, it’s impressive to see it done on the show.

The one thing that bothers me is the extreme of the raised stakes in these finales. In all three shows so far, the villain has essentially destroyed the world and all the people in it, leaving only themselves and the Precures. When they win, the world is magically restored as though nothing ever happened. It’s the logical extreme of how buildings and scenery mend themselves after their normal battles. I’m willing to overlook that, but when you get to this degree, to the point of destroying the global population, if you can undo that in a snap then how is there any threat at all? At what point do the powers that be say “this is too much, we can’t restore normalcy”? Is it predicated on the Cures winning? I think I questioned this in the FW and Max Heart finales as well, and I don’t think I’ll ever have a satisfactory answer. I’m definitely overthinking it.

Just a minor point of note, this is the only episode in the series to feature Saki and Mai transformed into both Bright and Windy as well as Bloom and Egret. The movie did it but otherwise it’s only ever been one transformation per episode. Technically it still is, they transformed into Bright and Windy two episodes ago and are only now being forced out of it, but it’s still a neat little tidbit.

Next time on Precure Daily, it’s the long-awaited, long overdue Splash Star finale! Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: The title of the next episode is literally "Zekkouchou nari! Eien no Hoshizora no Nakamatachi!" Titles are a gray area but it’s been so long without one that I’ll count it as 1.

I’ll hopefully be back in ~10 hours with the last review. I do NOT want to push it to Tuesday for personal reasons.