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Precure Day 161

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 13 - “Rin-chan Decides on a Club!” Date watched: 30 November 2019 Original air date: 29 April 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Skj7Avo Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

Judo, track, volleyball, tennis, kendo, and basketball are all vying for Rin’s skills...but her heart lies elsewhere

There are three very important things in life to Rin: her family, her friends, and sports. In this episode, we get to see 1 and 3 come into conflict within her, and she struggles between her passion and her responsibilities. It’s a great episode.

The Plot

Rin is playing futsal, a small-team, small field variant of soccer, with four other students from the school. They don’t have enough players to make a proper club, and Rin can only play sometimes because she frequently has to babysit her twin siblings, Yuu and Ai.

Yuu on the left, Ai on the right

In fact, Rin helps out at a lot of sports clubs, but can’t join any of them because of her time constraints. The school’s sports festival is coming up and naturally, everyone wants her on their team. Last year she actually was able to compete in all the events, because they were spread out across a few days, but this year they’re going to be all at once to save time, so Rin has to choose a team to play for, and of course all of them are trying to get her. Complicating the matter, the sports festival is the day that the futsal team has scheduled their first proper match, which they can only do with five people, so they really need Rin’s participation. Even Mika won’t leave her alone, trying to find out what team she’s going to join so she can report it to the paper. However, Rin can’t answer, and instead runs off campus after school to practice with the futsal players, which Mika finds suspicious. As she gets to the field, she overhears the team members talking about how they’re out of luck without her, and she feels bad.

The next day, she talks about her conundrum with her friends. Nozomi says she can take care of the kids so Rin can join a proper team, but she already tries to do that and fails, so Rin isn’t confident in her. All four of the other girls try taking care of Yuu and Ai together, but the twins still manage to capture Coco and Nuts, which the two fairies are none too pleased about. While Nozomi and Urara plead with them to give the mascots back, Rin has a heart-to-heart with Karen and Komachi about what to do. They suggest that now might be the best time to pick one team and stick with it, especially since she seems to really enjoy the futsal team. She’s still worried that nobody but her can handle Yuu and Ai when her mother isn’t around, however.

Before she can make a decision, the soccer ball the kids are playing with gets kicked out of the field, and it bumps into Gamao, who has taken up a job as a janitor at the park instead of working for Nightmare. Public service has done nothing for his attitude, and when the kids ask him to return the ball, he hurls it at them at high speed, nearly knocking them out if Rin hadn’t caught it in the nick of time. Now the girls are all upset and they tell the kids to go play on the other side of the park for a while, while they contend with Gamao. Rin is naturally angry that he tried to hurt her siblings, and she tries to attack him, but he turns a Pinky into a Kowaina. The other four transform and deal with it while Rouge fights Gamao. She is absolutely furious at him for threatening her family and she unloads on him. If he weren’t such an awful person I’d almost feel sorry for him. As before, the girls manage to break the mask off the Kowaina without hurting the Pinky, while Rouge threatens Gamao until he retreats.

As night falls, the girls all sit down and Rin admits that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to help the futsal team. At that moment, Yuu and Ai walk up and promise to behave and be good so she can join the team, because they love her and want her to be able to have fun sometimes. At that exact moment, Mika appears and forcefully asks Rin if that’s her final decision. The twins answer that their sister will DEFINITELY win, and Mika takes that for confirmation, snaps a quick picture of a startled Rin, and runs off to write about how the school’s star sports player has decided to join the futsal team. Rin playfully chides the children but it’s clear that, despite her exasperation, she’s happy with this outcome.

The Analysis

Rin’s struggle between doing what she wants (playing sports) and having to watch over her little siblings probably hits close to home for a lot of people. When you’re the older sibling, oftentimes your job is to watch after the younger members of the family when your parents can’t, and that can interfere with your own personal life. Rin was ready to sacrifice doing what she loved in order to take care of her siblings, and that is beautifully tragic. The show gives this struggle its proper diligence, fully showing both the desperate need for someone to look after Yuu and Ai as well as Rin’s love for soccer, and how much the other sports teams are coming after her. It’s a difficult balance, and the writers deftly showed this with a mix of humor and age-appropriate gravity.

Also, purely from the standpoint of trying to choose a sports team to join, the small futsal team is the obvious choice for Rin. We’re told she helps with all the others, but none of them need her the same way the futsal team does. If she joins them, they have just enough members to play against other teams and form a proper club. If she picks one of the established clubs, they get an ace in the hole, but they aren’t lost without her. This is driven home by the added detail that her flashbacks are the only time we see her actually participating in these sports, while she actively plays futsal at the beginning. It was never really a matter of which sport she’d choose, only if she would commit. The illusion of choice that the writers presented her with is transparent, but intentionally so. They’re only trying to make you feel invested in the underdog.

Now, let’s discuss Rin’s family, and the lengths she goes for them. This is the first time we’ve actually seen her home, her mom, or her siblings (It might even be the first time we learn that she has siblings, I honestly don’t recall). Yuu and Ai are introduced as rambunctious twins whose favorite activity is stirring up trouble. Nozomi can’t control them, Rin has to shout to get them to settle down, they are a handful.

However, they love Rin a lot and they understand, to a degree, that certain things are precious to her. They’re upset when Gamao is being mean to them and to Rin, and they want Rin to be able to play sports without worrying about them. Similarly, Rin loves her little siblings and wants to protect them from danger. When Gamao acts like he’s going to hurl the soccer ball at them, she jumps in and takes an astonishingly hard throw, before getting righteously upset at his threats against her family. Rule 1 of Precure: never piss off the big sister, it will not end well for you.

The flurry of punches she unleashes on Gamao rivals Cure Black’s ruthless attack on Gekidrago way back in FWPC 11, for similar reasons. I love it, we know Rin represents passion, and this is the culmination of a threat against two of her passions combined: her family and her hobbies. You don’t mess with that.

as Gamao learned the hard way

If there’s a downside to this episode, it’s entirely conditional, and that’s that I don’t believe we ever see Rin with the futsal club again, or see how her siblings are taken care of. I am happy to be proven wrong, since I’m sure there’s a lot about these shows I have forgotten over time. We’ll see.

Other high points: Mika is a good source of comic relief, as always, and this time she’s at least reporting on something actually sort of newsworthy, and not Nuts. I hadn’t realized that she recurred quite so frequently, she’s been in every episode bar one since her debut. She’s a good investigator and if she wasn’t so easily distracted, she could probably be a valuable asset.... or a major obstacle to the girls, either way. As it is, she’s a tabloid reporter, and she gets laughs for that.

I appreciate the gradual shifting from day to night on the day of the fight. It’s a minor bit of continuity that really shows that they cared, and demonstrates how long Rin was anguishing over the decision.

Next time, Karen struggles with club budgets, and learns a surprising secret about Otaka-san. Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 1 Kettei!

#Precure #Pretty Cure #Yes! Precure 5 #YPC513 #PCD161

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