This Week in Anime

Breaking the Mold with Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure

Chris
Nick, I come to you today with that most pressing question of our time:

Have you heard, about the bird?

Indeed, Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure, the latest iteration of Toei's storied Pretty Cure magical girl series, has just gotten its second cour underway. And from the jump, one of the biggest talking points about the series relates to Cure Wing here, who's breaking huge barriers in the series' usual roles.

That's right, we have our very first bird Cure!

Oh, right. Yeah, I guess he's the first full-time male member of an institution so entrenched in its gender roles that they baked "Magical Girls" right into the genre name.

I mean, I mostly stick to my carefully-curated anitwitter circle, especially as the hellsite becomes more hellacious by the day. So I can actually say that most of the people I follow were resoundingly positive about Tsubasa's addition! Especially after the initial series announcement, once Toei confirmed that he was, in fact, a guy.

There can definitely be some odd equivalencies to expound on, and it's visible just by comparing Cure Wing to his other Toei contemporaries. Super Sentai has been a co-ed institution since the beginning, and Kamen Rider introduced its first female Rider a full twenty years ago. So what's the difference that it took twenty years for Pretty Cure to allow a guy on the squad full-time?

There are certainly some baked-in, arguably misogynistic ideas at play in that kind of conventional wisdom. Girls can transform into spandex battle suits or plastic armor that's super cool. But there are reasons why, for the longest time, the idea of a boy spinning around in expressive poses and donning a frilly outfit was wholly seen as, well,

a joke.

Yeah, and it's the sort of thing you can still see in society today, with dudes throwing together videos complaining about boys' t-shirts being too colorful, or having too many rainbows or whatever. Yet there definitely seem to have been some shifts in recent years. Forget about that pressure to avoid pink because last year, last year Toei introduced the first full-time male Pink Ranger in Super Sentai!

KijiBrother, coincidentally, was also bird-themed.

I mean, the cynical answer is that the accountants at Bandai and Toei realized they could double their profits by directly targeting sales of plastic noisemakers at the boys in the audience as well. But regardless of glibly understood motivation, you can see them trying this in those fits and starts over the years. 2017's Kirakira Pretty Cure a la Mode had Rio who, late in the series, joined in the fight with "The power of Precure".

Hey, they work in a patisserie. That's a ton of flour and sticky stuff that's going to be murder on your hair without the proper conditioning regimen.
Meanwhile, in Soaring Sky!'s immediate predecessor series, Delicious Party Pretty Cure, you could see Toei really committing to prototyping the idea with Black Pepper. Though he served a role more akin to ol' Tuxedo Mask, which tended to be how guys active in Magical Girl shows were handled for the longest time.

On that note, even BlackPep continued the "proud" Magical Boy tradition of making jokes about being embarrassed by the outfit.

With that in mind, it's also notable that neither Rio nor Black Pepper got transformation sequences alongside their female Cure counterparts. The one other entry in this subsection who managed that was, of course, Henri, Cure Infini from 2018's HUGtto! Precure. Unlike the others mentioned so far, that one's sadly not available for streaming anywhere. However, Cure Infini basically hits all the presentation points you were saying the others lacked.

Of course, Henri's whole thing in that show was subverting gender roles to such a point that we could probably start a whole new argument over whether the character actually does count as the first "male" Cure or not.

He was absolutely a Guest Star more than a proper part of the squad, hence Tsubasa taking the title of the first true full-time male entrant in a team as Cure Wing. This might make it all the more interesting that—compared to Henri's whole story involving his gender, roles, and presentation thereof—Tsubasa's story is rather entirely unaccompanied by the question of whether a boy (who is also a bird) can transform in a magical girl series.

I'm not sure what Pretty Cure is trying to say about its ancillary adult audience that the grown-up member of the cast is absolutely the biggest weirdo among them.

Just him getting his own transformation sequence is a momentous occasion for the franchise, and it's made all the more remarkable by how unremarkable the show plays it. A Magical Boy on this Magical Girl team, the series is saying, is perfectly normal.

It's a place we've gotten to on account of all those prior, prototyped efforts. It wasn't just Pretty Cure, as anime has been pushing the boundaries of how to do Magical Boys for a long while. Of course, you had the aforementioned Tuxedo Mask, the male character in a Magical Girl show treated more as an interest, interloper, or some combination of both. You can even see that old type coming back in the concurrently running second season of the Tokyo Mew Mew remake.

It can be kind of weird to see such an old-school handling of the trope airing alongside the unapologetic progressions of Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure, but at least it's not hewing back to that other idea of Magical Boys solely as objects of parody.

Magical Girl Ore was a show that felt like it could have had something to say about gender. But in the end it, uh, sure did say something considering it went the gender-opposite direction to "Guy transforms into a Magical Girl" and still came out on the side of jokes about cross-dressing being inherently funny somehow.

At least on the other end of the spectrum (as it were), you have the likes of Cute High Earth Defense Club Love, which was more of a broad parody of Magical Girls in general, just incidentally starring a cast of cute guys.

That's why we had to wait a couple more years for something like Fairy Ranmaru to come along and unflinchingly embrace the manservice potential of the whole concept.

Normal ending credits sequence for a normal, magical adventure show.

It's deserved when you think about it. Adult-targeted, "subversive" Magical Girl shows have been as much of an institution as their Sunday-morning forebears since Madoka Magica chomped its way onto the scene. It's only fair that guys get a turn with the potential for darker themes and sexed-up character designs.

Heck, some of those "dark" Magical Girl shows were pushing those gender boundaries themselves. The 2016 Magical Girl Raising Project anime had this big reveal about the heroine's childhood friend right in its first episode.

That stigma, incidentally, factors directly into Souta's story in the series!

Magical Girl Raising Project isn't the most revolutionary Madoka-like. It doesn't do too much to explore Souta's boy/Magical Girl feelings before; what generally happens to secondary characters in this genre of show. But I also can't discount a series too much that casually drops this lil' platitude.

The cultural component of the occurrence will always lend some amusing elements to Tsubasa's debut here. And lord knows when the big crossover movies happen he comes off akin to that one Simpsons screencap of Homer in the lesbian bar. But while we, on the outside, recognize how he represents a major culmination of all those other efforts we mentioned, that just makes it even more effective that he's not actually bothered that way in the story.

He's just a guy! Just a little guy! If they stick to this, maybe as the franchise goes on, boy Pretty Cures will be a regular sight as girl Rangers or female Riders.

I love the way he's fully included in the babysitting element of Soaring Sky!'s story, with no aspersions about guys participating in childcare.

And of course, you gotta dig how, despite being intelligent and accomplished in researching the world of aviation, Tsubasa still immediately starts sharing a single brain cell with the meathead team leader Sora the instant anyone mentions "Heroes."

As a semi-regular Pretty Cure follower, it's been a great entry so far! And a lot of that is its commitment to freshening up the formula compared to prior years. It's not just Tsubasa's status as the first full-time Magical Boy; you also have the aforementioned Sora as a rare blue-colored team leader, and Ageha waiting in the wings (pun intended) to join the crew as the franchise's first adult Cure!

Forget dealing with bullies or school club drama; Ageha could potentially wind up indisposed from a week's monster fight because she's busy filing her taxes!

It's funny how she flips the usual idea in superhero shows of having a tagalong kid, as she is an adult tagging along with a bunch of young heroes, mostly by virtue of being able to drive them places in her big, stupid yellow Hummer.

Real talk: a lot of Ageha's dynamics with Sora and Mashiro come off as her trying to wingwoman (again, pun intended) for the pair.

It truly sells the show's central theme of "Anyone can be a hero". And that's sweet because spreading out the inclusion of the cast that way makes it feel like the voices behind that declaration actually believe in it, rather than just using it as a yearly springboard to sell a new batch of toys.

Maybe that's why Tsubasa's status as a Magical Boy on the team actually works in its "treated-as-no-big-deal" framing: because the people writing it did so from a place of earnestness, rather than seeing it as a cynical marketing ploy or a subversive swerve.

She would have been here sooner, but she got pulled over for speeding.