Five Years of ~ULTRA HAPPY!~

Ah, Smile Precure. You want to talk about a love-hate relationship... of all the Precure seies, Smile has my favorite cast of characters, my favorite character designs, my favorite villain, and my all-time favorite Cure in the form of Yayoi Kise / Cure Peace / PRECIOUS BAE... but good lord do I ever hate its story and pacing. Seriously, I've said many times that I wish I could pluck the whole cast out and drop them into a different series. They all have so much potential, and so much of it gets squandered by filler and the baffling decision to keep it "simple" instead of letting the story breathe...

And yet. Despite all of that, I'm compelled to commemorate Smile's fifth anniversary. After all, if it wasn't for Smile, I wouldn't have jumped as hard into the Precure franchise as I did. I saw in the pre-release material that Ika Musume/Squid Girl's Hisako Kanemoto (Ika Musume/Squid Girl), Gurren Lagann's Marina Inoue (Yoko Littner), and Pokemon's Ikue Ohtani (Pikachu! Yes, really!) were all cast members, and given that I love all three of those series, I decided I had to check it out. And when I did, I fell head-over-heels in love with Yayoi, and when I burned through all six episodes of Smile up to that point, I decided I had to have more, and then I found out that there were eight other Precure series... and then I decided to write a fanfic where Yayoi became a Puella Magi instead of a Precure, and...

And now here we are. I'm completely hooked. Not even stinkers like Precure 5/GoGo, Doki Doki, and Mahou Tsukai can keep me off this franchise for long.

So we have Smile to thank for my fandom, despite its flaws. After all, if we didn't have Smile, there would be no Shattered Skies, and what a waste that would be, depriving you all of the chance to see Joker being an even bigger asshole than he is in canon. XD

Happy anniversary, Smile Precure, you beautiful mess, you.