Today’s deck is the Future Ancestor Tarot.
I’m a sucker for watercolors so I like this one.
Today’s reading is inviting me to meditate on how so many things that gave me a hard time have solved themselves over time.
And yeah, it’s easy to get lost in the grind and not notice things sometimes.
I did some work today. It’s Sunday but the drive to not see a reminder email first thing on Monday is extremely strong.
Aside from that, Precure has been very good lately, like, SHOCKINGLY so, concerningly so.
The unspoken understanding about Precure and those kinds of Nitiasa shows is that you’ll get like… One good episode every 6 or so bottle episodes but Tanpri has been concerningly good in the “I saw Doki Doki Precure and how they killed their momentum near the end” sort of way.
It’s not just the plot though, even the animation is crazy good. I’m used to Precure having one (1) episode remembered for the animation and yet here we’ve had a few by now.
Talking about it with N I of course remembered Hugtto’s ending and Hana giving birth on-screen. In the moment (and I still stand by this) I felt like it was kinda dangerous to go telling little girls that hey, if you don’t have any ambitions it’s fine to just be a baby machine. But N did raise the good point that it’s actually quite the complex thing to add to a kids show, the idea of “being a homemaker is just as valid an ambition”.
Then trying to think what they could’ve done to make it all feel less sudden I realized they kinda Couldn’t. The option would be to have a 14 year old talk about how much they want to be a mom and for as much as people complain about what 14 year olds are up to in anime, that’s a specific sort of line I’ve never seen crossed outside of literal porn.
It’s no secret that I don’t feel inclined to start a family (more specifically I believe families need people from all paths of life so I’d rather be part of a family as the single uncle) and honestly enforcing my choice not to without respecting the default choice to would be a bit hypocritical of me.
One funny bit is that Hugtto only came up because I briefly mixed it up with Healin’ Good Precure, and I confused them because… to be honest there’s basically a mental gap I have between “the pink cure gave birth” and “Kururun” since, to be perfectly honest, Star Twinkle is forgettable outside of having a half mexican girl and alien girl having the best design in the franchise to that point, and HEalin’ Good having the most “this could be any season” designs to the point that the human forms are more memorable than the cure forms.
And it all made me realize how long it had been since I saw Hugtto around its own release time. It’s been long enough that I wonder how I’d react to it outside of remembering mostly the ending.
But then I wondered why Hugtto’s ending caused such a visceral reaction when, to be honest, it’s not really the worst thing ever, Happiness Charge is more aggravating both during the watch and after the fact.
Then I remembered.
You know what else released in 2018?
Darlifra.
Darlifra is bad, I’m not gonna apologize for saying it. You know you’re Not Good when Super Robot Wars (mobage or otherwise) has refused to touch you with a ten foot pole while at this point Inferno Cop has a bigger chance of showing up.
Darlifra also had a Shinzo Abe-worthy level of clumsy clumsy awful hilariously bad “let’s all have kids” propaganda.
So I’m gonna assume that Hugtto choosing that theme for the ending when Darlifra made the splash it did at the moment painted reactions at least somewhat.