Power of Hope: Precure Full Bloom

Episode 12

If there is a single pervasive message in this series, it is that there is always hope…with the caveat that we can't just sit back and wait for it to happen. Although this has a happy ending, it's one that comes with a few strings attached, because hope without action is nothing but a passing dream. It's darker than most Pretty Cure series go, at least in terms of how they end, but this is Pretty Cure for adults after all, and even though the series tells us that we need to hold on to our hopes and dreams, it also wants to remind us that as grown-ups, we have the ability to actively help make them happen. And if we don't? Bell will be there. Her final words to the group about seeing them in the future are warm in the moment, but burn hot enough to hurt in the final scene, when we're forcibly reminded that not even magical girls can fully save the day alone. We must be active participants in our own futures, and we become complacent at our peril. Bell is waiting in the future, but which version of her?

It's not an endeavor that can be accomplished by a single person. That makes the choice of the Yes! Precure 5 series make a lot of sense for this sequel. The third series in the franchise (counting Futari wa Pretty Cure and Max Heart as a single series), it was the first to feature a larger team, and a lot of the imagery drew as much from the super sentai series as it did from earlier magical girl teams like the Sailor Guardians. (Cure Lemonade's attack looking suspiciously like Sailor Venus' aside.) The idea of teamwork is even more central to Power of Hope than it was to Yes 5/Go Go, and that's why the two previous Pretty Cure teams also have a part to play. It could feel like feeding off of the audience's nostalgia to bring in Cure Black, Cure White, and Shiny Luminous along side the Splash Star duo, but what it really seems to be in service of is showing how we all have to come together if we're going to make a difference. We even see that in the epilogue – everyone is working to make a change in the world in their own way, but all of them involve working together, whether it's Komachi and Nozomi teaching children to care, Milk becoming prime minister, or Nagisa and Honoka traveling the world as climate scientists. It has to be a group effort.

In some ways, we can interpret Nozomi waking up from her coma as also being a part of that theme. In a beautiful combination of “no one can do it alone” and the old fairy tale concept of true love, Nozomi can't awaken until Coco finally says that he wants them to be together. All realistic issues aside (he was her teacher when they met, he's not human), I really like how this frames their relationship. Nozomi doesn't have to stop teaching and he doesn't have to step down as king; being apart sometimes doesn't make them any less married. It's a continuation of what we saw with Mai and Saki as they grappled with the social expectations imposed upon women: Nozomi represents a third way people can find fulfillment, in a marriage that some would deem nontraditional and is very much on both parties' own terms. There's no one right way to be happy. It's up to us to find our own path to it.

Although this has a happy ending, it's one that feels conditional. If we don't keep working towards it actively, there's a risk that things could once more start to go downhill, and the thing about going downhill is that you can start going much faster than you planned without realizing it. We do have hope, but we can't just sit back and dream about it; if the time flower dropped a seed, it's to remind us that something ominous is still out there. Bell is waiting in the future. If we don't want it to be the dark version, the ending says, then we're going to have to work for it. But if we remember to do so with hope, we can all be our own Pretty Cures, striving towards the future we dream of.

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Power of Hope: Precure Full Bloom is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.