Into the Maelstrom

Perhaps we should thank Stephanie Meyer. I think there's a lot of voices who get precious about "published fanfic," as if fandom is something we need to preserve the purity of, but we're handing over a lot of money to fan artists to draw our little guys so I'm not going to begrudge fellow writers from trying to make money. Nintendo is! But I'm not. Last Saturday, as something to amuse myself, I tried applying the kera method of filing the serial numbers off one of my favourite relationships from Wonderful! Precure. I'm cheating, of course, because the characters involved in said relationship are not original characters I developed for the setting, they are two members of the main cast, but I did it anyway. Two things helped contribute to this decision: firstly, I felt I had put in enough hours ensuring I was going in a different direction than a children's television programme might allow for, and secondly, because of the yearly refresh of Toei's big three—Pretty Cure, Kamen Rider and, ah, whatever we're calling "Super Sentai" now—the conversation surrounding Wonderful! Precure is very much over, it has been over since 26th January 2025, and there is now no one left to talk to. This last part is perhaps the source of my resentment.

I guess I've been speaking a lot lately about how to deal with what I want fandom to be and what it actually is, what it functions as. When I considered the relationship between Nekoyashiki Mayu and Yuki, I realised I needed to do a bit of working back from where I had arrived, that I needed to write a version of their meeting that differed from the source material so I could carry forward what I wanted to do but not lose the feel of the source material. The two episodes I have liked most of Meitantei Precure! were written by Wonderful!'s lead writer, Narita Yoshimi, and it's difficult for me to sidestep the feelings of reverie I have for the work she has done with Pretty Cure, but I also wanted to be honest about the themes I care about, the themes I want to write about, and I wanted to try and distil those elements without making this unrecognisable as rooted in the feelings I have for Narita's work.

This is a K-pop related observation: the older I get, the more I realise that the way in which we address the problems in our lives is by positioning those younger than us amidst the ruin of our nostalgia. That's aesthetics, she said, having heard 404 (new era) by KiiiKiii for the first time in her life this morning—having heard KiiiKiii full stop for this first time in her life this morning. I feel this entitles me to the position of producer of a girl group, as I'm fairly practiced in this, but in the absence of real people who will listen to me, I guess I'm going to keep writing moments like this little story, moments in which I talk about my feelings about the long, lonely summers of my own childhood, and try to convince you that these were your summers also.

Maybe Wonderful! Precure has become part of that nostalgia. Like other stories that have made an impact on me, whenever anything new appears, I rarely think about what they mean as standalone works, I think about how they inform those prior stories. None of Toei's big three are really built to have lasting connective tissue but I am already considering how 30-40-year-old Arcana Shadow, having seen what we might assume is the first Pretty Holic store opening in 1999, might feel visiting the store in Animal Town run by Mayu's mother. And whilst we're on the topic of how one thing relates to another, I never knew this adorable Pokémon Horizons crossover poster was released to market both shows.

In the end, the sincerest form of flattery, so I'm told, is imitation.