A Small Epiphany on Episode 32
We interrupt your irregularly scheduled posts about Gundam IBO to talk about a very, very different kids’ toy commercial: Hugtto Precure, the latest installment of Toei’s fifteen-year behemoth of a magical girl franchise.
So, I watched the latest episode with The Fam tonight and we agreed that it was a very solid entry in what is shaping up to be a show of uneven focuses but unusual emotional honesty. There was one thing that initially seemed so weird as to be jarring, though. Namely, Saaya’s “transformation.”
When all the girls’ get hit with the toge-power beams and transform into various fairy tale character cosplay, why Cinderella for Saaya? She’s hardly the wealthiest Blue Cure to ever grace a TV screen, or even the richest Cure in her own show, but there’s nothing to indicate she’s living particularly shabbily. Her parents (both alive) adore her, and she’s an only child. Of her two career interests, the only one that has much of an archetypal rags-to-riches story is making it big in acting, but that’s not the narrative you get when you’re a child commercial star and the daughter of a renowned TV actress.
So why Cinderella? Is it the story’s general air of classic grace? Was it just because the best-known iteration of the character is typically pictured in Sayaka’s signature pale blue? And why were all the stories chosen Western except the one Hana got, Urashima Taro?
We bandied the topic back and forth a bit before it finally struck me. There actually are elements all five of the chosen stories have in common: they all involve time, and they all involve a “wonderland” aspect.
Homare, the center character of the episode, has The Little Mermaid, in which the main character is transformed so that she can pursue her heart’s desire in a world not her own--but that transformation has a time limit, and once it’s up, if she hasn’t met the terms of the deal she struck, she’ll turn into seafoam and lose everything.
Saaya has Cinderella, whose beautiful dress and glass shoes grant her access to the ball, which for the disenfranchised servant girl from the cinders is a dream world wholly separate from her own. Like the mermaid, though, her ability to stay in this place has a ticking clock attached.
Emiru has Alice in Wonderland, a story in which a young girl grows bored with her sibling’s tiresomely grown-up book and dozes off, subsequently dreaming up a nonsensical land of anthropomorphized critters that is kicked off by an encounter with a rabbit with a pocketwatch fretting about being late.
Lulu has Little Red Riding Hood, wherein the protagonist is convinced to wander off the beaten path and tarry in a field of beautiful flowers, wasting the day away while the wolf goes ahead of her.
You could probably have a reasonably lengthy discussion about the way these story choices tease at elements of the girls’ established characters or don’t--Emiru certainly chased a few rabbits (a pink one called Heroism and a purple one called Friendship) into a topsy-turvy land of magic, but I’m inclined to think she’s the aptest call of the four above.
But then there’s Hana, and man, Criasu has got her number.
Urashima Taro is a Japanese fairy tale in the Rip Van Winkle/spirited-away-to-fairyland mode. While in the episode itself it’s largely played as a joke, as a reflection of who Hana is and what she fears, it’s actually quite cutting.
Taro was a youth who showed compassion to a creature he had no prior connection to or reason to care about, and for his selflessness, he was brought to an undersea palace where he spent several enjoyable days/months/years being fêted by a beautiful princess. When he eventually became homesick, the princess tried to dissuade him from leaving, but when he insisted, she relented, gifting him with an ornate jeweled box he was not to open, lest he never be able to return. Of course, when he gets back home, it’s been several hundred years and everyone he loves is long dead. In his grief and desperation to find a method to return, he forgets the princess’ warning and opens the box, only to find that it contains all his lost years--he turns instantly into a wizened old man (and, in some variants, immediately dies and falls into dust).
Harry and Hugtan map pretty clearly as the creatures Hana helps to begin the story, for which aid she becomes a magical girl. This reward comes with, in very short order, a brand new friend group, and she spends the next several months having a grand magical adventure. The thread unravels a bit here; Hana’s anxieties are about a future that will steal what she has, certainly not an idyllic past that she's lost. It’s Criasu Corp that offers her, in their goal of freezing time, the jeweled box that will let her remain forever in her joyful otherworld; rejecting the box is what threatens to load her down with age and grief.
But then, her transformation is one wrought on her by the monster of the day, not a role she’s chosen to play, and it’s no surprise that said monster spits out stories that all involve idyllic moments that hang right on the brink of age or loss or death, such that if the story’s characters could only halt the hands of time they would never have to face a ‘tomorrow’ that is less happy than their ‘today’.
That is, after all, literally the Criasu Corp’s entire mission statement. Well played, Hugtto Precure; well played.
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