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Precure Day 153

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 05 - “The Qualifications of Precure” Date watched: 5 October 2019 Original air date: 4 March 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/irm8JKB Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

There are some episodes of Precure that really stick with you, for one reason or another. This episode is well-remembered for what doesn’t happen, and what it means. Most of you probably already know what I mean, but I’ll save it for the discussion section. First, let’s recap.

The Plot

The episode shows us a day in the life of Karen, school council president. Everyone admires her intelligence and leadership, but she can’t be honest with herself. Whenever someone requests her help with something, she sighs and says that she should have known that if she wanted something done right, she should have done it herself. This is a terrible attitude for a leader, as she’s simply assuming the burdens of other people rather than helping them to resolve their problems. She can’t even be honest with herself and admit that she’s overburdened, or that she misses her parents. We get to see her home, it’s a giant mansion, the other girls claim it’s even bigger than the school grounds, but the only people that live there are Karen and her butler, because her parents are professional musicians and they’re always traveling. They call her once in a while, and this is one such day, but despite her initial enthusiasm to receive the call, she quickly puts on her working face and tells her mother she’s not lonely, there’s no need to worry about her, so please do their best at their job, and then she hangs up without having had any meaningful or enjoyable conversation, because she doesn’t want to burden her parents. Basically, she’s a mess.

who are you trying to convince?

Over in Labyrinth HQ, Bunbee scolds Arachnea for her failure and sends her down the time-out chute before deciding he’ll go get the Dream Collet himself.

Meanwhile, Coco reminds the four girls that they need to seek out their final member, and Nozomi insists that Karen is the one. Komachi takes them to visit Karen’s house, but she got roped into more student council work so she isn’t home yet. They take a walking tour of the property while they wait for her, and when she finally arrives, Komachi reveals she has brought some bean jelly from her family’s pastry shop for them to eat, so they proceed to a gazebo on the property to eat and talk. Nozomi and Rin get up to some shenanigans, which causes Karen to laugh a little and enjoy herself, but then she gets down to business and asks why they’ve come. Nozomi hesitates but asks her to join Precure again. Karen is understandably skeptical, and Rin admits that this is the normal response. Nozomi pulls out Coco to help prove their honesty, but a Pinky appears so he instructs Komachi to catch it. Her Pinky Catch instrument is a flute (incidentally, since I think I forgot to mention this in episode 4, Urara’s is a harp), and she almost gets the Pinky when suddenly Bunbee snatches it out of the air and makes his debut in front of the girls. He asks them for the Dream Collet which of course they refuse to hand over, so out comes a mask and he turns the gazebo into a Kowaina. Nozomi leads the girls in transforming, and poor Karen is in over her head.

At that moment, Karen realized she was gay

The four girls fight the Kowaina and have the upper hand, so Bunbee transforms into his monster form. Despite being bee-themed, his armor is mostly red and he has gatling guns on his wrists that he can use to fire a bunch of stingers or one giant stinger. When Cure Mint uses her shield to protect from his barrage of stingers, he fires the giant stinger at them, breaking the shield and leaving the team vulnerable. Karen is watching this from afar and wishes she could help, but she is crippled with fear. Suddenly, a blue butterfly appears and starts flying towards her! Coco tells her to transform, and she doesn’t want to, but she flashes back to all the times she’s carried teams before and sighs, saying she always has to do it herself. The butterfly lands, wraps around her wrist and..... disappears! Everybody is shocked and Karen laments her inability to do anything. Nozomi manages to fire a Dream Attack at the Kowaina, destroying it, and Bunbee retreats with the Pinky.

As the sun sets, Karen tells the four girls that although she believes their story now, clearly she cannot help them, and to please not ask her to join them a third time. Nozomi, not one to take “no” for an answer, declares that she’ll keep fighting to make Karen a part of the team, and the girls walk off. Karen stares longingly at their backs and wonders why she couldn’t transform.

The Analysis

I can only think of two instances in all of Precure where a girl is on the cusp of being able to transform but cannot do it, with the other example being Homare in HUGtto! Precure. It’s a very rare storytelling tool, which makes it all the more poignant. What the audience sees, which Karen needs to learn, is that she wanted to become a Pretty Cure for selfish reasons. She always takes on other people’s burdens, weighing her down, instead of working together to find a solution. We see this during the battle: she is afraid she will get hurt, but when she sees the girls struggling, she thinks she has to take on their burden, to fight instead of them, not with them, which goes against the point of the team: together they can do what any of them individually cannot. It’s okay to want to protect them from danger, but to diminish their abilities and try to take it all on yourself is counter-intuitive. I love the idea of someone failing to become a Precure because their heart is in the wrong place, because it seems like all you see are girls who are put in dangerous situations and rise to the challenge, but not everybody is like that, not everybody can be like that. It’s pretty fascinating.

The looks into Karen’s lifestyle are eye-opening. She has a very strong resemblance to Honoka from FW and MH: she’s from an upper-class background, her parents are always traveling, so she lives at home with only one other person and tries to pretend she’s not lonely. She has one close friend at the start of the show, and is in a position of leadership in the school. on the other hand, Komachi got a lot of Honoka’s more intellectual traits, so you could argue that they split her character into two for this show. Anyway, learning about Karen’s family background helps us to understand why she is how she is, and the journey she has to take both in the next few episodes and over the course of the series. She doesn’t want to make her parents worry, so she has convinced herself that she has to be self-reliant and able to handle any problem on her own instead of asking for help. Also, younger Karen is really cute.

On the opposite end of the spectrum you have Nozomi, the eternal optimist. Nozomi will not see anybody but Karen as the fifth Precure, and she is determined to get her on their team. She knows that if she can get Karen to understand, she’ll do great. But she’s not trying to overrule Karen’s views, she’s trying to make her understand what they’re doing, how, and why. She also wants to understand Karen better, which is why they visit Karen’s house and end up learning more about her lifestyle and background. Of course Nozomi is sad when Karen fails her transformation, but she pushes on to win the fight, and at the end, she says she’s going to try again because she knows Karen can do it. She’s a bit stubborn, and the two girls have that in common, but she’s also deeply compassionate. She sees something that Karen can’t see in herself, and that’s her strength.

This wasn’t her first introduction, but I neglected to talk about her before, so let’s discuss the lunch lady, Otaka-san. She’s a witty middle-aged lady who gives good advice to the students but acts a little frazzled. There’s a running gag where she will add a few zeroes onto the amounts of things, so 200 yen in change becomes 2 million. Her main role in this episode is as a possible candidate for the Precure of Intelligence. Komachi seems to be seriously considering her, but none of the others think it’s a good idea. Later, she sees Karen leaving school very late and comments that she should stop trying to do everything alone, or she’ll never have time to do the things she wants to do. She’ll be a recurring character in this show and she’s fun. Her most distinctive attribute is her raspy voice.

Bunbee is an interesting guy. We’re still very early into his character arc, but already his facade is starting to crack. He wasn’t much more effective in combat than any of his underlings, so it seems like he might be more talk with little to back it up. He still acts very cocky but he might just be the type that enjoys bossing people around. Also, minor note, he shares a voice actor with Uraganos from Max Heart.

Next time on Precure Daily, it’s finally time for the debut of the Precure of Intelligence! Look forward to ti!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 2 kettei!