I Call Myself an Artist

Precure is pretty consistent with its cameos ala being really bad. The only ones that made a large enough impact in the fandom were Cure Gorilla and Dancing Star. It’s fair to be wary about the new one.

And I’m not going to deny the episode was partially used as a marketing strategy. There was a lot of promotion for this crossover. I can count 10 videos that were made for it off the top of my head, and they streamed the first show for a weekend. And it was asked if anyone started watching the stage because of the episode in the recent audience survey, so they knew this was going to get them attention. 

But calling this an attempt at a cash grab is incredibly disingenuous.

Precure is, first and foremost, a show to sell toys. Because of that, Bandai cares a lot about what happens in the show. And I can say with absolute certainty they weren’t going to be making much money off of this episode. Bandai has yet to make any merch for the stage; that’s mostly on Marvelous. And the only time they sold any merch of the stage in the Pretty Store was 2 months before the episode aired, and it was while supplies lasted. Bandai doesn’t like to take risks either (Cure Wing) so I doubt they were looking forward to this.

Dancing Star is owned by Marvelous before it is owned by Toei as well. And the target audience is different between the two shows (young girls vs older fans) so it creates a whole different issue altogether. Most people don’t know that the stage was already referenced in Wonderful, but it’s super subtle. But Kimipre’s showrunners were reportedly fans of the stage and actually worked really hard to make the crossover happen in the first place. And after a while, they managed to pull it off.

But that creates another issue with the episode: they needed to pull in the already very busy theater actors, 4/6 having no voice acting experience, just to record their lines. And then they added the stage character designer to the staff for this episode, so it’s already becoming one of the priciest of the season. And with how long it took to get approved, they probably didn’t have the time to fully incorporate the boys into the plot.

Like, yeah it’s aimed at younger readers and almost everyone who watched the movies are adults now, but the first book is actually really good if you like the films. It’s a little fast paced at times, but reading it felt like watching the movies again and it expands on the world created in the films. The new cast is charming and unique. And it ended on a pretty decent cliffhanger for the sequel to follow up on.

It also reintroduces the concept of talentless fairies, the secondary protagonist is genderless (with no attention being brought to it at all), brings iron into the franchise (which afaia was mythology not adopted previously), and has anti-capitalist and totalitarian commentary. The only thing that truly brings it down is the irony of it being a Disney product.

Also

Tink tells people to go outside.

Back in my very first post about this au I mentioned an idea about what a sleepover would be like so I decided to explore that with a comic!

BONUS

Lila: *mumbling to herself* I must’ve kept her up alll night…

Nino who overheard: