My Thoughts on the Pretty Cure Franchise

The reason why I made this post is because I wanted to give you my thoughts of this long running magical girl/shoujo franchise from Toei Animation and Bandai. Remember the post discussing the future of this series? I'm still skipping Star Detective as I continued to wait for next year's season to see if it peak my interest again after I was burned from You and Idol. What I would want in a Pretty Cure season is similar to Heartcatch or Go Princess (an slight deep story, memorable characters that don't irritate me, more Puff and Aroma (Go Princess) and less Candy (Smile), and crazy fights that is more physical like the early seasons such as Fresh prior KiraKira) When I started watching Pretty Cure with Smile in around (also known as Glitter Force on Netflix), I thought of being like actionized Sailor Moon due to have a 5-member team and had some traits such as the magical attacks, slice-of-life and a monster of the week format but more physical combat like actually punches and kicks at the monsters and villain than use just destructive magic. I was totally fine with Pretty Cure in early 2018 (Hugtto was the latest entry at that time) since I was still an newcomer to it and I started watching Pretty Cure in mid 2017 with Smile or Glitter Force on Netflix. It reminded me of the dream I had during the 6th grade in early 2003 with the fighting style of DBZ mixed with the magical girl stuff and humor of Sailor Moon but kept the inner five girls, no additional members. By the time I did Tropical Rouge in 2021, I'd reached my peak on posting this franchise with the HUGE amount of foot scenes from the girls especially Manatsu and Laura who wear sandals and go barefooted at times. So much that both of those girls broken my back from drafting a lot of posts on them alone (as you see on the blog). Because of Tropical Rouge, I started to get tired of the series and ended up skipping Delicious Party and Wonderful as a result due to like I said burnout, exhaustion and the overexposure of Tropical Rouge, it became palpable that my frustration to draft posts of PreCure while keeping up with each entry since my introduction to the franchise with Smile (Glitter Force), I do go back to the earlier seasons like Futari wa and Heartcatch. I mean, Soaring Sky (the 20th anniversary season) was all right but by then, I passed my peak with this magical girl series with Manatsu and Laura (Cures Summer and La Mer) despite redoing old posts from Go Princess (an personal favorite of mine) and Yes! PreCure 5. I haven't done much of the sequel spin offs like ~Mirai Days~ and Power of Hope: PreCure Full Bloom because I haven't seen the former but the latter and that didn't have much foot content of the Yes! girls as adults. Once the anniversary stuff was out of the way, I once again skipped another season, Wonderful, due to my lack of interest in an animal themed premise and the only episode I saw was that Christmas one but it lacks the physical combat traits (no punching or kicking the baddies just chase them down and hug them tightly until the enemies give up.), it did have some barefoot content like the beach episode but I just didn't bother with it. Next PreCure season after that, You and Idol, had me hoping that I can get back to the franchise but once again, I started to lose interest after Cures Zukyuun and Kiss made their debut in Episode 18 and worse they got their human forms in Episode 32 as the two fairies, Purirun and Meroron, can change into civilian forms by accident by summoning the Kirakkiran Ribbon Baton, touching two Kiraki Lights together, when they began waving the Lights at each other thinking they could appeal each other into humanity, the idol themed concept and being a musical (How many times would you listen to Uta sing happily randomly even in troubled times if not constantly?), I ended up skipping a few filler episodes like 13 (an sports episodes with the school volleyball team), 15 (A Meroron episode trying to get Purirun's attention), 28 (Uta's dog focused episode), 33 (a episode focus on the sumo wrestler, Kurikyuta and his visit to KirakiLand.), etc. out of 49 episodes. Around the time I got into Princession Orchestra while dealing with You and Idol PreCure last year, I thought it was be just another boring musical idol theme magical girl series but what I got was more than that, it felt like a breath of fresh air for me since some of my problems with You and Idol such as over long transformation scenes were shortened in Princession or skip them altogether to how some characters got better development than Uta, not to mention, better villains like Band Snatch and the mysterious Carol can physically fought the Princesses in Alicepia. All in all, I have a love-hate relationship with Pretty Cure in general and which is why I did that post on why I will stop drafting new content of it once You and Idol ended because of my personal issues with the series being annualized, meaning an new season comes out every year since 2004. As for my favorite seasons: Futari wa (The original show that started it all), Fresh (Cure Peach or Love is cute), Heartcatch (the story and characters are awesome along with the fights being over-the-top and brutal even by Precure standards), and Go! Princess (it's just that beautiful to look at especially the fights that rivals Heartcatch) and Haruka Haruno herself being a dorky but kind-hearted girl who wanted to be graceful buy strong princess). Apologies for this since I wanted to give you all an update of Pretty Cure. If you want to know what post started my time with this series, check out Miyuki (Emily).