12 Days of Anime--#7: Smile Precure's Joker

The next person that says Madoka is the only magical girl show that subverts tropes will find this guy in their room tonight.


While I've enjoyed Smile Precure all the way through, it took a while for it to move up from just being enjoyable to one of my favorite anime for this year. A lot of this had to do with the villians and episodic nature of the series; while the fairy tale-themed villains were fun to watch and even endearing (Wolfrun, the big bad wolf, Majorina, the evil witch, and Akaoni, literally a giant red demon) they were (and still are) mostly played for laughs, with their motivations for attacking becoming increasingly trivial with each episode. There are a few episodes where the villains fight the Precure girls only because they want food.


However, Joker is on a different level. He takes a while to make his entrance, and even longer to directly engage the Precure. To use a Sailor Moon example, he's kinda like Queen Beryl (and others like her in the series) in that he's mainly focused on getting his boss resurrected. It was clear that this was not a guy you wanted to cross. But even with the hype his character received beforehand, his first battle against the Precure was a huge surprise. The levels of creepy and overpowered were turned up to eleven, and the girls get beaten badly.

 
This marked a big change in the tone of the show in the immediate aftermath. The rest of the episode is spent with the characters contemplating the possibility that they'll die if they continue on. It's pretty heavy stuff for a morning kid's show, but the payoff is excellent; in fact, if the show had ended there, that would've been an amazing season finale. But as the season continues on, and Joker clearly having more tricks up his sleeve, I'm pretty sure he'll be the catalyst for an even better ending.

That's okay, sleep is over-rated anyway.

If you're interested in more Smile Precure moments, Kriz over at Cure Blogger is pulling some the best moments from the series during the 12 Days of Anime!