Okay I need to get my mind off other things so here's the mid-season review I've been meaning to write:
tl;dr: Smile Precure is so funny it doesn't need to innovate
What a return to form after the disappointing dullness of Suite. I haven't had this much capital-F Fun watching a precure season since Yes! 5 GoGo (which I couldn't even enjoy fully for... other reasons *cough* Coco *cough*). SmilePre does not spare a single second being anything other than an absolute joyride. The humour is incredibly silly, the characters feel spontaneous, the episodic formula is used to its fullest potential with varied scenarios that keep the slice-of-life side of the show fresh and fun. This season is really good at making me enjoy hanging out with these girls, it's a treat.
I also find myself very entertained by the villains' shenanigans. Where the previous season failed to engage me with a cast of bad guys who were neither menacing nor entertaining, this one has it all. Wolfrun is a self-centered snob who often brings his own ruin via hubris, Akaoni is a brute with a fully unearned superiority complex, and Majorina the old hag is just. Supremely funny. Every episode with her as the antagonist of the week is a delight. She just loves a damn situation so much.
And yet what keeps the show from villain decay is the delightfully deranged Joker. He greatly disturbs me, and I have yet to decide if I'm okay with his portrayal because like. SmilePre very much needs a Scary Guy villain to balance out the silly antics of the other three Bad End guys, and he does the job very effectively. On the other hand, queer-coding a villain and framing it as depraved insanity is, as the kids call it, bad. And there's no separating Joker's queer-coding from his villainy, because his animation and performance reeeally ham it up every time he's about to do something extra evil. It's very uncomfortable to watch. It works, but man I wish they'd done it a different way.
I am obligated to comment on the mascots of every season, because they are a key component of magical girl shows and can make or break a story (case in point: Hummy was the only reason I could finish Suite, while Coco's entire *gestures derogatorily* bumped Yes! 5 from a solid 8/10 show all the way down to the bottom of my tier list). And Candy is just incredible. She has very simple motivations, nothing groundbreaking, but her mix of well-meaning determination, infantile naivety and fragility make her a pretty effective child character. And with her magical contribution to the team, it makes her a highly improved version of Pollun from Futari Wa Precure. Her role in the team is heightened by the existence of her older brother, Pop, who serves as a comparison point to her by being an older, more mature fairy to really emphasize how young she is and how hard she's trying to help despite being pretty much a toddler.
Interesting to note, they opted to make a mid-season finale that felt like a true finale. The stakes were immediately astronomically high, he action was peak, everything was so drastically more serious than anything the season had done previously. It reminded me a lot of Futari Wa Precure.
In fact, a lot about this season reminded me a lot of previous seasons. There were several moments where I thought "oh, this is like that part in [other season], but better executed". If there's one thing I could say SmilePre doesn't do, it's add something new to the table; there's nothing it does that hasn't been done before, if you've seen other seasons you will not be surprised by anything here. However, there's nothing wrong with that! The thing is Smile does what it does so well that I don't mind that it's not bringing anything new to the table. The writers took assorted parts of all its predecessors (which is to say: they did NOT try and recapture the best of each season like Suite tried, but rather took elements that worked well together) and built a funny little show that makes me laugh more often than not, and that's what it set out to do: be funny. Which it is. Very.
In conclusion: we are so back
