Witchy Precure! -MIRAI DAYS-

Episode 11

Although I've been enjoying Mirai Days, I'm increasingly confused by what, precisely, it's trying to do. The previous adult-oriented Precure series, Power of Hope: Precure Full Bloom, had a much clearer goal and a message that was rooted in bringing the eponymous power of hope to its older audience. But that doesn't seem to be the case for this series necessarily. It desires to remind us that we can't live in the past because time keeps pressing forward and remaining locked in nostalgia keeps us from living. That's an odd message, though, for a series that's banking on nostalgia from its viewers – we're watching this because we both enjoy the franchise and because we have fond, nostalgic memories of the original Witchy Precure!. So what does it gain by telling us not to dwell on the rosy past?

For Mirai, Liko, Mofurun, and Ha-chan, the answer is a bit clearer. Because they've been stuck in the past, unable to truly move past their separation at the end of the first series, at least Mirai and Liko have been unable to truly move forward. In creating her Maho Girl persona, Mirai is attempting to recapture her Precure past while Liko has devoted herself to finding a way to keep the worlds connected at the expense of actually spending time with Mirai. They've both taken different routes to the same destination, a place where they can't move forward with their lives. I can't help but notice that their transformations rarely include Sapphire in this season, and while that's partially due to time constraints, it also feels symbolic – that transformation calls upon water, and water is always moving, cycling through forms and powered by the tides. And as the saying goes, time and tide wait for no one, something they're having trouble realizing.

Chronosto's final gambit, peeling the gates from his angry planetary sphere to unleash its full power, effectively stops time for everyone. That's been taken in a metaphoric sense for most of the show – people trapped in their happiest past memories. But in a more literal sense, Chronosto is actively killing people, because when someone's time “stops,” generally that means that they're no longer living. That may be the key to this series: the question of what it means to live. Chronosto refers to Mother RaPaPa as being outside of time, an existence exempt from the daily travails of the rest of the world. Ha-chan could only break free of his prison by giving up her memories of living; Hisui was essentially her shell. That's a symbolic death for Ha-chan/Mother RaPaPa, alongside an eventual rebirth as Kotoha. Hi-chan was then, therefore, the memory of Ha-chan rather than a person in her own right. That's why Mirai and Liko must break free of Chronosto's spell in a different way than Mother RaPaPa did because while RaPaPa is eternal and thus can't ever really be destroyed (and Chronosto has tried), the other two are just people. Their time is finite.

Accepting change is hard. That may be where the story is headed in its finale next week. Mirai and Liko (and Mofurun, who is nearly as eternal as RaPaPa) have to accept that things change, relationships evolve, and nothing is ever going to go back to precisely the way it was. Ire, who has utterly vanished from the series, may have done so because he couldn't accept that, to the point of destroying the world to feed his desire to go backwards. I'm not one hundred percent sure that Mirai Days can pull off what it wants to. But if there's one thing Precure always reminds us, it's that you have to hope.

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