Witchy Precure! -MIRAI DAYS-

Episode 5

It happens to most of us: one day, you wake up and realize your parents are old. Sometimes it's sudden, like when my mom suffered a TBI five years ago. Sometimes you know it's coming, like with my father's Parkinson's Disease. However it happens, it's disorienting, a confirmation of the passage of time in a way you intellectually knew would happen, but emotionally weren't ready for. That's part of what Mirai is going through this week, and it's part and parcel of the bigger picture for her. Seeing her father's vision get worse is just one more reminder of the way things have changed for her and Liko; her grandmother's injury and Mofurun's frayed thread serve to exacerbate the way she can't ignore that time waits for no one.

Although Mirai has demonstrably been moving forward (she is in college, after all), we've also seen evidence that she's still holding tight to the past. Leaving Liko's room untouched is the biggest indicator. She also was expecting (hoping) that she and Liko would slip right back into their old relationship – even Hi-chan seemed perfectly set up to be Ha-chan 2.0. But she's gotten some pushback on that golden image, and that crystallizes this week when she realizes that Liko looking at an apartment isn't about her and Liko moving in together – it's about Liko moving out alone.

That it doesn't occur to Liko that Mirai would move with her is interesting. It could be as simple as Liko knowing how close Mirai is to her family and not wanting to ask that of her, or Liko thinking that she'd rather be living with her family if she had the choice. But whatever the reason, it's the first major discrepancy we've seen between the way they think, and it goes way beyond Liko learning about limiting screen time for kids. Liko may be the Cure who gets visions of the past, but it's Mirai who's fixated on it.

Does this give Mirai more in common with Ire than she thinks? It's an idea worth exploring. Ire, who works at a library rather than a bookstore, something I should have considered but didn't because his apron threw me, confesses to Mirai that he's always wanted to travel through time. It's because of a book he read, and re-reads constantly, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't feel relatable – surely I wasn't the only person who read Penelope Farmer's Charlotte Sometimes and dreamed of waking up in another time. But there has to be something motivating Ire that we don't entirely understand yet, possibly related to the picture of a younger him and a woman who might be his mother. It would make sense, given the emphasis on how Mirai is realizing how her family is aging, and it's also a reason that Mirai might be able to understand. She wouldn't condone whatever he did to Ha-chan, but condoning something and understanding it are two very separate things.

I think I'm probably giving Liko short shrift in these reviews, or at least making it sound like I'm less sympathetic to her. That's not true at all, and the fact that her visions of the past are coming faster than Mirai's of the future is significant. Liko's never been quite as emotive as Mirai. It could be less that she's not as bound to the past and more that she's been actively shoving those memories and emotions down deep inside of her. Both of them are hurting, and not knowing what's happened to Ha-chan is only compounding that. Unless they learn how to cope, they'll be stuck in an unmoored present, stranded mid-transformation by being unable to see.

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