Smile PreCure! Episode 10: You Go, Grill!
Okonomiyaki tastes sooo gooooood!
I apologize for the delay in this post, as well as what I suspect will be the shoddy quality of the post itself. I’ve been sick for the latter half of the week, which, combined with the onslaught of some very enjoyable Spring season anime, have made me put off the writing of this post. However, do not let that be an indicator of my impression of this week’s Smile PreCure; it was pretty damn great, and Akane had a lot to do with it.
Synopsis
Akane takes over her dad’s Okonomiyaki shop after he injures his back. She invites the other girls over to sample her cooking, and while they are enamoured by her cooking abilities, Akane’s brother, Genki, points out that her Okonomiyaki is not the same as her dad’s. Akane vows to try to find the secret to her dad’s cooking so that she can make a good impression on the neighbourhood association when they visit during an upcoming weekend. With the help of the other girls, she experiments with different recipes. When the Hino family sets up shop outdoors during a neighbourhood event, Wolfrun attacks and casts the Bad End aura. He summons an Akanbe that snares most of the PreCure with glue-like projectiles. Wolfrun puts down Akane’s cooking efforts by saying that food is meaningless. Cure Happy retorts that Akane put her feelings into her cooking, which makes Akane realize the secret to her father’s cooking. She breaks out of her trap with Cure Beauty’s Beauty Blizzard. She lays a beatdown on the Akanbe and destroys it with Sunny Fire. Akane uses her new cooking knowledge to cook a wonderful Okonomiyaki feast for her neighbourhood association.
Because of the timing of this post this week, I’ll only have a few brief thoughts on the subject.
Taking the Critique-al Approach to Reviewing Anime
As a writer, I’ve been through the process of receiving feedback from other individuals who read my works in progress. Likewise, I’ve had my fair share of experiences with giving feedback to other writers as well, particularly those who I know fairly well (or at least, as well as one could know on the Internet). Reviewing other people’s works requires a particular brand of constructive criticism. For works in progress, the whole point of editing and critiquing is to provide input for the purpose of making a work better than it currently is. Explaining to a writer what works and what requires more work is a fickle process; if the feedback is too overwhelming in pointing out faults, then it might be detrimental to a writer’s motivation going forward, but if the feedback is too positive, it doesn’t give the writer much to work and improve upon.
March Moe Madness, Part IV: The Champion!
Art by AJTheFourth
On Monday, April 4, the winner of the 2012 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball championship was decided, and it was a victory by the number 1 seed Kentucky Wildcats over the number 2 seed Kansas Jayhawks. It was a wonderful game to watch, filled with as much as excitement as one could have, considering the eventual champion’s sizeable lead throughout the game.
But, for the sake of this series of posts, the real winner here is Tachibana Kanade from Angel Beats. The show itself is a monster powerhouse in International Saimoe, with a very rabid fanbase ready to vote for any and all of its female entrants in the tourney. It makes sense, then, that Tenshi won it all, despite some ferocious competition from her finals opponent, Victorique du Blois from Gosick. Some remarkable come-from-behind victories over Charlotte Dunois (Infinite Stratos), Eucliwood Hellscythe (Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?), and even one of my Cinderella picks, Shinomiya Shiori (The World God Only Knows) had Victorique come from nowhere to challenge the titan Tachibana, but in the end, it was the overwhelming favourite who won the entire thing.
Smile PreCure! Episode 9: A Piece of Peace
Doushiooouuuuuuuu!?!?!?!?
This episode was simply terrible. Nothing great ever happened, and it makes me sick to my stomach as a PreCure fan. I pretty much dropped the entire show, and will just go back to watching PreCure back in the good old days when Yes! Pretty Cure 5 was airing.
I lied! April Fools! This episode was quite entertaining, and Yes 5 has the most annoying mascots ever. It’s still a pretty good show, though. I’d definitely recommend it.
Synopsis
Yayoi is swept up by April Fools Day at home, and when she decides to play a trick on Miyuki by telling her that she’s transferring schools, the lie spirals out of control. Miyuki tells Akane, and the two of them each tell Nao and Reika, who in turn tell the entire class. Yayoi is unable to find an opportunity to clear the misunderstanding and tries to draw a manga to communicate her message. It gets blown away by the wind, and while Yayoi is panicked, Miyuki invites her to her own class celebration of her transfer. Yayoi, emotionally unable to handle her situation, runs off crying. The girls find her, but Aka Oni appears and spreads Bad End throughout the school. He summons an Akanbe and reveals the stray manga depicting Peace lying about transferring schools. Peace’s apologizes to her companions, and their returned kindness empowers her to defeat the Akanbe with Peace Lightning.
Once again, here are my five thoughts on the episode.
March Moe Madness, Part III: The Final Four
Only four girls remain: Tachibana Kanade, Charlotte Dunois, Hasegawa Kobato, and Victorique du Blois.
It’s hard to imagine that in a span of only two weeks, a whopping sixty games of college basketball were played between sixty-four teams, and with just 3 games to go, the national title will be won by one of four storied schools, each featuring a plethora of NBA-level talent as well as coaching staff of the highest caliber at the collegiate level.
Other than Kentucky’s Anthony Davis and Ohio State’s Jared Sullinger, I have very little knowledge of the big names in this sport. However, associating teams with more recognizable anime characters pit against each other in a Saimoe popularity context has surprisingly made this year’s tournament remarkably fun to follow. At the end the week, we will see four lovely lasses hypothetically compete for the affection of their hypothetical fans. Let’s take a look at each of the girls as they hypothetically vie for hypothetical immortality.
(Yes, I am aware that I used the word hypothetical four times in two sentences. I want to strangle myself right now.)
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Smile PreCure! Episode 8: A Fresh Freaky Friday Flip!
Cure Candy, Kuru!
The freaky friday flip is a commonly done trope in fictional media, where two characters of reasonably different personality swap bodies due to some freak incident; the two characters for the most part retain their personality and mental processes, but taking over the other person’s body has major ramifications, and hilarity almost always ensues.
This is especially true for the PreCure franchise, and with this week’s episode of Smile PreCure in the books, the trope has been done twice in two different continuities: Fresh in episode 10, and Smile in episode 8. When I watched Fresh’s take before, it was immediately my favourite episode in the entire series; the same is certainly true for Smile.
Synopsis
On the way to school, Miyuki and Candy discover a pair of rings. After curiously looking through them, the rings clamp on to their respective fingers and the two swap bodies. The other girls are puzzled by the occurrence, and they try to go through the school day with Candy attending class in Miyuki’s body. Hilarity ensues, with Candy failing to act like Miyuki during all of her classes. Miyuki admonishes Candy after school for messing everything up, and the latter runs away, distraught. While Miyuki and the others try to look for her, Candy plays with little kids at a playground. She is discovered by Majorina, who notices the switch, and casts Bad End on the playground. The other cures show up and transform except for Miyuki, but are handily dispatched by a nimble Akanbe. Miyuki stands up for Candy, and her smile pact activates. She transforms while in Candy’s body, turning into Cure Candy, and defeats the Akanbe with Happy Shower.
As I’ve mentioned already, the freaky Friday flip happened twice in the Pretty Cure franchise, and there are some differences between the two with regards to the trope’s execution, resulting in two distinct, yet equally memorable episodes. The freaky Friday flip has a number of recognizable elements: the cause of the flip itself, the contrasting characters involved, lifestyle adjustments, realization of perspective leading to the flip back. Let’s compare the different elements:
Friday Fiction: Finding Your Voice Through Fanfiction
Komachi (Yes! PreCure 5) probably started off as a fanfiction writer before moving on to her own original ideas.
Writing, like every other active hobby, is an activity in which one can improve, often due to experience, passion, and appropriate work ethic. For writing specifically, there lies a lofty goal of honing one’s craft, as well as finding one’s writing voice. Conceptually, the writing voice is a particular style and tone in one’s writing that stands out; it’s the unique voice that pops into people’s head when they read those particular words on a page, computer monitor, or tablet display.
While it might take quite a bit of time to establish a writing style that reflects that singular tone in writing, it’s a lot easier to notice than you would think. It comes up in the tweets you make, in the comments that you write in blogs and messageboards, and even in text messages that you send to people that you know in real life. The challenge, then, is to harness those natural occurrences into a controlled narrative environment, and to stretch that voice from 140 characters to thousands of words.
Smile PreCure! Episode 7: Home is Where the Heart is
It's not too comfortable, but it's home.
With seven episodes under our belt, we have an initial idea of what kind of show Smile PreCure is all about, particularly in relation to the other cure shows. While each continuity follows a strict formula, the exact formula differs from series to series. With Smile PreCure, the identity falls upon the cast itself, with all five girls going about their lives as PreCure, with the bare minimum in monster-of-the-week shennanigans. This means reduced emphasis on combat, which seems to go against the grain of the identity of PreCure as a whole. However, the increased focus on the characters themselves is very rewarding; with such fantastic voice acting, we get to know the characters more each day, despite barely scratching the surface of the show’s overall plot. Smile has become the magical girl equivalent of K-ON, and I’m quite fine with that.
Synopsis
Unable to find a private place in school to discuss PreCure-related matters, the girls go on a mission to find their secret base. They meet up at the mysterious library, but due to the somewhat hazardous environment, they try to search elsewhere for their ideal base. Reika takes the team to the top of Mount Fuji and gives a speech about the PreCure journey, which goes over the heads of the others. Yayoi takes the team to a futuristic command centre, but the place is revealed to be the set for a superhero film. Nao finds a nice comfy little room with stuffed animals, but it turns out to be a display for a stuffed animal store. Akane leads her friends to a gorilla exhibit at a zoo, and they get chased away by a zookeeper. Miyuki proposes a secret base in the woods that she used as a child growing up, but upon arrival, she discovers that the secret base has since been occupied by two little girls playing house. Wolfrun appears and casts his Bad End aura over the kids, transforming a tree into an Akanbe. Miyuki and the others transform into Smile PreCure and defeat the Akanbe using Cure Happy’s Happy Shower finisher. Resuming their search, the Precure settle for the mysterious library as their home base.
This episode was interesting in that it showcased the five girls selecting places that they would deem fit for a secret base. These settings act like an extension of the characters themselves because of their attraction to it. Here are my thoughts on each character and their secret base choices after watching this episode.
March Moe Madness, Part II: the Sugoi Sixteen
A field of sixty-four cute girls whittle down to just sixteen. Who will ugyuu their way into the finals?
After a hectic week of cute collegiate competition, the tournament picture has become much clearer than it was in the beginning. Upsets were had, and countless NCAA bracket predictions were left in shambles, including mine (which shouldn’t be surprising, considering the method I used to pick my teams). While I have been a bit too busy to keep up with watching the games on television, I always had one eye on my smartphone’s sports ticker app to see who went through and who went home. Let’s take a look at each of the divisions with moe goggles once again!
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Fiction Friday: Keep the Beat with Literature Girl
Fiction Friday is a new series of posts published on Fridays. It encompasses the realm of general fiction writing, which includes tips for writing as well as writing-facilitated lifestyle. More often than not, FF will include examples from anime, manga, and especially light novels.
My favourite series so far in 2012 is, by a wide margin, Daily Lives of High School Boys. The title speaks for itself, as it is nothing more than a highly amusing depiction of characters in high school. They exude highly likeable personalities, and while they go through some remarkably outrageous situations, there’s an element of familiarity in their experiences that make the audience respond in an “I know that feel, bro” fashion.
Despite having no particular overarching story or plot, Nichibros does such an interesting job with regards to writing individual scenes, and from a writing standpoint, a fantastic example comes from an ongoing series of scenes involving Hidenori and Literature Girl.
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