#pcd241

You know what’s fun? The night. What’s more fun than night? An Arabian night! What’s even more fun than an Arabian night? How about a thousand and one of them? Yes, today we are going to dive into another classic story to fight some bad guys, and learn some lessons along the way about self-worth. Let’s dig in!

The Plot

Anacondy pays Shibiretta a visit to implicitly threaten her job, so the witch gets fired up in plans to retaliate against Eternal’s second in command, as well as capture the Rose Pact.

Komachi and Nozomi are chatting in the library about the value of stories and just how many of them there are that Komachi’s could get lost. Nozomi tells her that no matter what, she’ll find her friend’s book. Suddenly, everyone finds themselves sucked into another world… or several, and facing unique individual threats from their stories.

Despite being separated, the girls and fairies figure out that this is another of Shibiretta’s plots and manage to reunite with each other by following the narratives and intents of the tales. They confront the witch and tell her she’s using stories wrong, which she rebuts as they’re just tools to use however she wants. Everyone was able to reunite with each other because they respected the stories. Nuts adds that the story of 1001 Arabian Nights is about a woman telling stories to the brutal king every night, in an attempt to get him to soften his ways; and what Shibiretta is doing is completely counter to that narrative.

In response, Shibiretta creates a genie Hoshiia and kidnaps the fairies and rose pact, so the girls transform, and the battle moves outside of the palace. They have trouble fighting it, since it can turn into smoke and their attacks just pass right through it.

Cure Mint and Shibiretta engage in a verbal tete-a-tete:  the Witch from Eternal says they both uses stories to suit their needs, but Dream defends Komachi saying her stories are exciting and heartfelt and she loves them, while Shibiretta just makes messes of existing stories. Shibiretta retorts that she tried telling stories to the director, and he was unmoved, causing Mint to shoot back that stories won’t respond to her methods. They fight again; Milky Rose defeats the Hoshiina while the Cures take out Shibiretta once and for all with Rainbow Rose Explosion.

Before the world dissolves, Aqua assures Mint that all of them are looking forward to her next book. Over in Eternal, Anacondy remarks that a report for this would be pointless.

At dusk, Komachi tells Nuts she wants to write about her amazing friends and share the feelings of all the good times they have together, in hopes that if someone lonely reads it they'll be inspired to find friends like hers. Everyone else was listening in and all of them want to be the main character of her story, with their own spins, and this ends the episode.

The Analysis

What I Liked

It’s one of the better Shibiretta episodes. I’ve often criticized her episodes for only using the surface elements of the story and not putting the characters through the plot. This time they actually addressed that and made it the entire point of the episode: Shibiretta is only taking advantage of the stories for what she can gain from them (monsters and distractions to attack the precures) and not the underlying morals and emotions. I thought it was especially poignant how she said she had read stories to the director and he was bored, so that means stories are worthless at inspiring emotion; and Komachi shoots back that it’s precisely because all she does is to use stories like tools.

Also, as per the narrative, you can actually see the difference between embracing the story and using it as a tool. The girls are able to reunite by understanding the tales that they are in. Rin kindly asks the magic carpet to help them and it responds. Urara’s sincere feelings to protect Syrup revert him from 40 clones of himself back to one. Nozomi uses “Open Sesame” on the door, and later Karen asks for a sign of the right way to go to find Komachi. It’s a bit convenient but hey it works.

On that note, as usual the antics that the girls get up to in the story world are great, they make some good jokes and gags out of them. The 40 (actually 39) Syrups, the magic carpet, the “Open Sesame” scene and of course the genie Hoshiina, all great uses of the setting. I also like their outfits.

I feel like Nozomi and Komachi are one of the less explored pairings in this series. Sure, Nozomi was the one who first enticed Komachi to become a Precure, but they haven’t done much together since then. Komachi is usually paired up with her longtime friend Karen, and there was that one time she and Urara had a really good bond. It’s true that everyone has been supportive of Komachi’s writing throughout both seasons, but this episode is the first time that Nozomi explicitly praises, uplifts, and defends Komachi’s writing and what it means to her, and that translates to a really great climax where they work together to ward off Shibiretta.

The fight against the genie Hoshiina that turns into smoke kept me on the edge of my seat. Its permeability is a distinct advantage but then Rose turns around and uses that to her gain, before dealing the finishing blow. It’s the kind of creativity I live for here.

Similarly, the battle of the Precure against Shibiretta was really well realized with some great stylized animation and action. Shibiretta launches herself like a rocket, but Mint and Dream combo their attacks to deflect her, and then Lemonade and Rouge kick her out of the sky so the team can perform their final attack on her.

What I DIdn’t Like Nothing comes to mind.

Miscellaneous

When Nozomi uses “Open Sesame” on the cave entrance, she does Kamen Rider’s henshin pose.

One Thousand and One Nights is a compilation of stories from the Middle Eastern region, from a variety of authors and tracing origins back over a millennium. The earliest known mention of the central character Scheherazade is in the 9th century, but many of the individual tales are believed to be much older, hailing from India and Persia. Over time stories from West African, Hebrew, Greek, and other traditions made their way. It’s a dynamic work that was passed down by storytellers over many generations and cultures. There’s no singular version of the text, there may not even actually be 1001 stories as some of the most famous ones, which incidentally are the ones featured in this episode (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and the Lamp, The Tale of Sinbad the Sailor) were actually separate stories that later got rolled into the collection much later. Trying (and failing) to unravel this complex history to give context to the references in the episode was a bigger undertaking than this blog merits.

In the scene where Syrup is supposedly cloned 40 times, as the 40 thieves that attacked Ali Baba, there are actually only 39 of him.

Conclusion

This was a fun episode exploring some real juicy feelings about anxiety and the future and legacy, and also the purpose of stories. It was a nice sendoff to Shibiretta, whom I’ve had very mixed feelings about throughout the show. She was a step up from the duo but solidly middle tier as far as Precure villains go. Smile Precure will give us another witch character to play around with so when I get to that series I’ll do a compare/contrast.

Next time on Precure Daily, Nozomi comes face to face with the director of Eternal! Look forward to it!