Under the Moon's guidance

Light and Darkness are more alike than you think.

I know, I broke the promise I made last time, but as you can guess things didn’t work the way I wanted so I couldn’t put this out earlier. But that doesn’t really matter that much because I’m here, and this finale was amazing, and I’m more in love with this series than I ever was and this is what matters!

After this first paragraph is not a surprise if I say that I enjoyed this second half of Max Heart. Writing this post will be a little hard for me without being way too repetitive from what I wrote for the first half because this is a pretty solid season and most of my feeling from the first half got carried away through here. The show kept on an amazing level of quality all the way through and the way they slowly started to escalate things to culminate in such a high point at the finale didn’t leave that much room for a very low or very high point that needed to be discussed on a certain way that I already haven’t touched on the first post.

I have barely anything negative to say about this part, but I did have a few nitpicks here and there that don’t necessarily ruin my experience or anything but that were things that got me thinking about in the afterward that I feel like I need to discuss about briefly just so these thoughts can leave my head.

My first problem and the only one that is exclusive to this part is, surprise surprise, Lulun. I feel like Polun gets a bad reputation for having a somewhat rough start in season 1, but trust me, Polun is amazing, it’s Lulun who -is the problem. And Lulun is a problem for two major reasons, the first one is that she’s kinda useless, like, yes the show gives her a purpose but it’s not something that could’ve been done for Polun, for example. I feel like if Lulun was written out with Polun inheriting her powers very few little of the show would change, Polun would lose those episodes where he learns about siblings love but then those wouldn’t be necessary since he wouldn’t have a sister and they could use that time to work with something else for him. And the other reason why she ends up becoming a problem is the fact that, different from her brother, she didn’t get any development, she ended the show more or less the same as how she was introduced so there’s very little to remember about it that isn’t her crying and clinginess.

My next two points are kinda intertwined and they aren’t specifically related to this portion of the story but for the season as a whole. I got a problem with the Heartiel and with how they just appeared whenever the show thought it was the time. The point I made in the first post about liking them remains, but it was really awkward how this was supposed to be a quest but had no quest element to it throughout the whole season but then the final Heartiel appeared because they “filled a condition” like if it was a quest so… I think they could’ve written them in a better way.

And this ties in with my problem with the villains, they had a similar quest where they had to watch the Boy in the mansion and make him grow, but they didn’t have anything to collect and even if they did it wasn’t shown to us so it always felt like the villains attack for the most part were just random, arbitrary, and without a purpose. Of course, after a certain point this wasn’t more the case, in fact, after Hikari and the Boy meets for the first time Viblis start to get very overprotective of the kid so she’s always ready to go all out if it meant it could keep the Boy safe, but when it comes to Circulas and Uraganos it felt like just tossups that were there just to fill a quota. Yeah, they created a lot of cool and interesting fights, but they felt very lost in the middle of all of this.

My other problem, that is more like a disappointment rather than anything else is the fact that Nagisa’s story with Fujipi didn’t reach a proper conclusion I feel. Like yes, they had a lot of times where they bonded on the season, and it was great as a side development for Nagisa, but I feel like this story was finished without an end. If they had made this point of the story happen a little sooner and we had the opportunity to see Nagisa actually showing signs that she’s more chill about this situation it would’ve been a more concrete way to feel like this chapter of the book has ended rather than how it happened and it made me feel like the show ended without giving this plotline a proper conclusion.

My final nitpick is that because this is a show that happened at the same pace almost matching with the same time frame of the original show a lot of plots felt reused. Like in this second half only we had the training camp, we had an episode where they helped on a farm, we had Nagisa’s birthday, Fujipi’s birthday, Christmas, the school trip, the school play, another story of the girls potentially getting apart, and a few lacrosse games that were part of the tournament season I believe. I know that some of these are inevitable to change, and each one of the episodes was different from its “counterpart” from season one so it’s not like a blatant copy and paste, but at certain times it gave me that taste of reheated food, which it’s not bad on itself but you can still feel the difference from something fresh.

With that being said, I still enjoyed the hell out of this season. As I said, these were nitpickings I had after I already had finished the show and I sit down to think about it and think about what I’d write for this post, not something that took my entertainment or anything like that.

One thing I think this part has done very well was mixing the understand people’s feelings theme they had during the first half with the theme of hope that was present through Season 1 in a way that didn’t feel weird and inconceivable and without making it feel like it was forced. I’m not gonna lie, I wish that they had stuck only with the understanding theme, but that’s just because I was oversaturated by all the talk about hope in Kamen Rider Wizard and I was in need of something different and not a fault of the show itself.

Something tells me I have talked about them in every post about Futari wa, but I couldn’t wrap up this series without mentioning how great Akane and Sanae were in this show. I’m gonna sound repetitive but their presence as mentor figures is so strong, I’m so glad the show didn’t just forget about them. Even though I feel like they didn’t take all the mileage that they could with Sanae, she provided some gorgeous moments that made me feel warm inside. This season was Akane’s moment to shine, having her as Hikari’s “caretaker” opened up more opportunities for her to appear and all of her interactions that got the chance to go beyond the trivial stuff always yielded fun and touching moments that gave an extra flair to the season.

Putting plot aside for a little bit, it’s impossible to talk about Max Heart without mentioning how great the action is. No joke, in almost all episodes of this second batch I’ve written on my notes “this was a great fight”, I don’t know what happened in between Season 1 and Max Heart that made the higherups allow for a bigger budget, but you can see that the money was spent on a very good way, especially after episode 40 or so. Watching the Max Heart fights makes you go “YAS, THIS IS WHAT PRECURE IS ALL ABOUT at least in regards to the fighting magical girl portion of the thing XD”

And I think what crowns such a wonderful and memorable season was the ending, those final 4 episodes were magnificent. They deliver on the plot, they deliver on the action, they deliver the hype, they deliver on the characters, it’s just awesome. My vocabulary isn’t vast enough to describe everything I felt while watching it, it was just like I was in a trance, watching it, absorbing it, being enchanted by it, and becoming an emotional mess. Like, I knew they wouldn’t kill Hikari, this is precure deaths don’t happen like that, but I was really apprehensive for her during episode 45, and having her “sacrifice” herself in order to revive the queen broke me, especially because I few minutes before Nagisa and Honoka were already punching me with the feels with those scenes of them looking back at moments where they felt desperate but their family was there to give them hope.

And it was also great to see a tradition being born when they started the fight against the Dark King that had possessed Baldez and the power of the people of the city brought the Sparkle Braceletes back and while the fighting was going on they had that very emotional speech that he wasn’t fighting just the Precure, he was fighting EVERYONE. Like, I know at this point this is a staple, but seeing the first one happening, after everything that was build up during those 96 episodes, was just EPIC and very hype.

Rewatching Max Heart was magical and even though it irl it was a more bumpy of a road as I would’ve expected and wanted, I’m very glad I decided to embark on this crazy journey to rediscover this series and deconstruct a lot of silly and shallow thoughts I’ve carried for years about this show. This can change as a continue to go down on this franchise and I rewatch other seasons but Max Heart has definitely become one of my favorite precure seasons of all time. Pure gold.

The Splash Star post that was due to come out tomorrow will only be released on Friday because of logistic reasons, but before that, I’ll release a post on the Max Heart movies that I thought of including here but 1, this post is already very long; and 2, I didn’t feel like it belong with the other things I discussed in this post. In any case, thank you all so much for reading through all of this, it means a lot to me. I’ll talk to y'all another time. Bye-bye~