otona precure rant post
spoilers for otona precure if you give a shit
but tbh i don't really care that much, you're better off not watching it
credit to sagiri asuka on pixiv for this cool art!
anyways uh. go under the cut for salt
bell from otona precure is the most terrible villain i've ever seen in a piece of media. ever. EVER ever. bar none, the worst.
i need to explain what i mean here. see, this isn't a rant about irredeemable "complete monster" type villains. i actually LOVE villains who are just horrible people for the sake of it— not all the time of course, but every so often there's a piece of shit so rancid that you just can't help grinning at the thought of the heroes taking them down. AM. william afton. ridley. pennywise. junko enoshima before DR3 ruined her
bell's not that.
tbh i think i probably would have liked her a lot more if she WERE meant to be irredeemable
the reason why she's so terrible is simple: her evil plan is complete nonsense. it's so brain-dead that if i travelled back to the 1920s to call her an idiot, just so that could actually mean something, it would still be an understatement.
if you've never seen otona precure, here's the story. there's some fuckass city with a bunch of ex-magical girls called precure who are all working ordinary adult jobs now (wasted potential but that's another rant). all of a sudden these weird Shadows start attacking people. now the magical girls have to figure out what the fuck's going on before these abominable CGI turds figure out how to move quickly enough to actually hurt something besides the viewer's eyeballs from beyond the fourth wall
bell is the "brains" behind the shadow attacks, and the one summoning them.
do you want to know why this woman is forcibly turning people into ugly shadow zombies?
because climate change.
no that's not a shitpost.
bell saw what happened to the city decades in the future because of climate change TRAVELLED BACK IN TIME TO THE PAST and instead of warning anyone maybe pulling a luigi or two
"here's how i'm gonna stop climate change," says the extraordinary time-travelling angel who can shapeshift and lives in her own personal pocket dimension. "i'm going to turn everyone in this city into shadow monsters so they stop polluting"
BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY, YOU CAN PREVENT THE SYSTEMATIC DESTRUCTION OF THE ENTIRE PLANET BY CASTING A SPELL ON ONE GODDAMN FUCKING CITY. THAT'LL SOLVE EVERYTHING! SOMEONE GET HER A FUCKING NOBEL PRIZE ALREADY!
as if this wasn't already the most colossally stupid thing in all of anime, bell somehow FAILS TO MENTION ANY OF THIS until there's only one episode left in the season, and spends the rest of the time acting like a generic moustache-twirling big bad evil guy and hiding behind cryptic riddles. SHE CAN READ MINDS. IT'S NOT HARD TO TELL THE MAGICAL GIRL WHO JUST TAUGHT HER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE ANIME ITSELF WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO PULL. instead she's like "i'm going to make you lose your will to fight me oooooooooo i'm so evil"
and when she's finally cornered, explains everything, and all the precures are understandably like "what the fuck??? why did you choose to go about this in the most convoluted stupid way possible", she decides the only way to make them realize how foolish and naive they are (holy projection, batman!) is by MAKING ALL THE SHADOW MONSTERS INTO A FUCKING KAIJU AND SICCING IT ON THEM. the kaiju proceeds to go completely berserk and vaporize everything in its path. like, the buildings just vanish into nothingness from one touch.
AND THEN.
WHEN A TEAM OF LIKE 12 MAGICAL GIRLS, PLUS THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP OR WHATEVER, IS FINALLY ENOUGH TO KILL THE KAIJU
BELL'S LIKE
"oh."
"shit"
"i guess i fucked up huh"
"okay i'm good now. im gonna go fuck off to my pocket dimension now"
YOU DO NOT GET TO HAVE A LAST-SECOND REDEMPTION ARC AFTER NEARLY BLOWING UP THE PLACE YOU WANTED TO PROTECT OUT OF SELF-RIGHTEOUS STUPIDITY. WHAT THE FUCK TOEI
oh yeah also there's a stinger scene after the entire rest of the show has wrapped up its dogshit excuse for a plot that pretty much implies the shadows are gonna be a permanent problem now.
congratulations, bell.
now they're gonna have to deal with climate change
AND the monsters you conjured from the depths of your nonexistent grey matter
AT THE SAME TIME.
tl;dr local "guardian angel" causes more problems by trying to solve them in the most stupid and short-sighted way imaginable
