User blog:GlitterInformer/Smile Pretty Cure!/Glitter Force SDC: Episode 37 (Sub), 29 (Dub)

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'''Japanese title: “Reika’s Worries! A Noble Heart and a Noble Vote!!”'''

English title: “Candidate Chloe”

'''Please don’t get too political in the comments section. This is a discussion of the specific election within this show, not any real-life regional or national elections. Please restrict discussion of real-life elections to student council elections.'''

The episode starts with Reika/Chloe sweeping leaves off the school grounds and watering the flowers. In the sub, this is silent; in the dub, Chloe hums and talks to herself, and a classmate calls to her. Then, we see Reika/Chloe and said classmate greeting the students coming in. In the sub, they’re wearing bands that say, “Greeting” (“Aikatsu” in Japanese, though in this shot, only “Ai” is shown). In the dub, the bands are removed.



As people put in their ballots, the dub adds dialogue where a student tells people to put their ballots in one of the boxes and criticizes a guy named Tommy for putting in more than one. We then cut to a student announcing the results of the election: Reika/Chloe won. Wolfrun/Ulric gets mad and teleports away, and for some reason, none of the students notice. The students cheer, Reika/Chloe thanks her friends, and the episode ends.

But first, the dub gives us a new ending theme! It’s called Every Woman, and while it differentiates itself from the other songs with its synthesizers and Auto-Tune, it’s still pretty bland. The background are back to minimalistic, though the video has an interesting gimmick where the characters are sometimes depicted on cards. The choreography is the best out of all of the American ending footage, but it’s ruined by the fact that the rather uncanny models are performing it.

Overall: This was an engaging episode, though at times it did suffer from subpar drawing of faces. It’s an interesting conflict between what sounds good and what is good, and how it can be hard to sell somebody to what is good when a candidate promises something that sound better but really isn’t.

My main problem with this episode is that its conclusion seems too idealistic for me. One could go on and on with examples from major political elections, but I’d rather stay out of that. Instead, I’ll bring up a student council president election I had in sixth grade that didn’t end as well as the one here. The winning candidate promised to give students recess if he was elected. I pointed out that this was impossible, as he didn’t have that power, but nobody listened. Of course, we didn’t get recess. It’s sad, but sometimes people don’t make the right choices. Though to be fair to this episode, maybe the students didn't want to vote for Wolfrun/Ulric anymore because they knew that the other two transfer students weren't really human and guessed the same for him.

Next time: The girls, Wolfrun/Ulric, and Akaoni/Brute become kids!