Ah, a martial arts-themed episode. It follows a kid and his younger brother who are practicing Kungfu. At first I feared a boring training-arc (after all, the previous episode did show Tsubomi and Erika losing pretty badly). But this episode actually broke a ton of martial-arts cliches and stereotypes in the process.
What I loved about this episode was that it did not overestimate the powers of kungfu. Sure, when you master such a martial art, you can do some pretty neat stuff. However, it takes years before you’ll be able to understand it, and even more years before you’ll end up fully mastering it, especially as a kid. Most of these martial-arts arcs are very shallow, in the way of “ZOMG, I knowz kungfu now I iz awezome fighterzzz”. While in fact, a weak kid who knows a few years of kungfu still remains a weak kid.
This episode avoided making the mistake in having the episode end with the kid, taking revenge on his bullies by kicking their ass. In fact, his problems were perfectly normal: he stood out with his new hobby, and suddenly everyone expects him to be able to fight really good. Even though there’s no way that he’s going to be able to Judo away such a big kid. Instead, the creators had him take on one of those weak minions from the bad guys; you know, the things that anyone could take on. A clever way to show that he does have some guts when it counts. The entire episode also was not about him learning to fight and beat all bullies: the tensions between him and his classmates still exist at the end of the episodes and there was nothing like that “ah, I see you’re a good fighter now. Let’s all be friends and forget that we ever bullied you”-crap. Instead, this episode was all about that little brother who looked up to someone.
It’s because of these small twists that I love even the uneventful episodes of this series. You can really see that the creators put thoughts into how to make this work best, while not upsetting the already established fan-base of the Precure franchise by keeping true to mahou shoujo formula. In return, Tsubomi’s ideas of how kung fu works were a bit stupid. But can you blame her?
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Yeah it was nice that the big brother didn’t suddenly become powerful by the end of the episode.But Tsubomi sudden spider senses is a bit ^^;
And its nice to see more special attacks from the precures.Though I still don’t get what’s the prerequisite for the Precures to data drain the Dessertarian using their Tacts.It seems sometimes they need to beat up the Dessertarian 1st but sometimes they can just do their Tact attack on the go after they figure out the problem troubling the victim??
Oh and I’m pleasantly suprised at how fast the episdoe get subbed 🙂
@c160 It’s the thing that mahou shoujo usually do. That’s all.
I like the climax in this ep too. they’re really make episodic story very well.Although I think in this show.It didn’t have true episodic story by far.(Because It’s always concern with main story. That’s very good thing.)
Looking forward to next ep.