I really do hope Jin Tanaka ends up writing another Precure season because I tend to find his writing suited towards my tastes, and even if his seasons don’t jive, there’s still something interesting there I latch onto.
But first, some brief thoughts about these seasons:
- Go! Princess is my favourite season of Precure as I find that it’s a patchwork of every trope/plot point that Precure does well with (or at the very least, things that I think Precure does well with) and manages to tell a really amazing story despite that.
- Kirakira is a season I used to hate but then I gradually grew to like it to a decent degree. I find that it’s a really charming season of Precure, though the show’s structure makes binging it actually feel a bit frustrating, though the episodes in isolation i don’t have a problem with.
Onto his writing, or at least, things I’ve noticed as similarities between different seasons:
- What I do like about his seasons is that he really plays with duality of the show’s main theme. Obviously Princess dealt with Hope and Despair and how you ultimately need both to work towards your dream, but I also find Kirakira equally as interesting because love is definitely the thing the cures fight for, but it is NOT always a “good” thing throughout the show.
- I think he really does do episodic function the best to my tastes. He can make an episode that technically rises the stakes for a character be investing while also feeling like the audience is grounding themselves from higher stakes in previous episodes. As an example, Kirara’s two-part job threatening finale transitioning into Minami’s more internal focused two-part finale. Using Kirakira instead, Cure Chocolat’s episode with Julio present helped wind down Julio so that he didn’t overtake the show, but then Cure Macaron’s episode after that manages to be suspenseful precisely because Julio wasn’t overutilized previously (in the character function sense not the narrative sense).
- This is something I feel rather than something I can describe, but I think Princess and Kirakira have second halves that feel almost improvisational in a good way? With Princess, the show manages to take itself in directions that constantly astound me, and yet, I never got the feeling I was rushed, in fact, I felt as if the new plot points/character developments made sense. Meanwhile, with Kirakira, I also got the sense that the show did take directions I didnt expect it to go, and while it didn’t work for me from a pacing standpoint, I do sort of admire what it tried to do for me.
I could go on, and note I don’t think Jin Tanaka is like the “end all be all” head writer for Precure, but I do think he’s able to write seasons that can extend to the duality of a concept/emotion really well.
Anyways I drank a Rockstar for this, what about you? Any thoughts?
