Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32453627-20190724191444/@comment-24740411-20190911062231

I think an important thing to realize is, also: there's definitely a difference, between Toei having a rule about what their employees can and can't create or put on a show, vs an actual rule of the show's lore. Toei simplied forced their employees to stay away from the idea of adding male cures.... at least for a time. Though, the characters clearly never were opposed to it. For example, Ichika mistook Akira for a boy. Even when she became Precure, this misconception remained, and Ichika wans't all like "omg! male precure!" or anything like that - as the idea was completely normal and fine to her. It wasn't until long after the battle, at the tail end of the episode, that she actually found out Akira was a girl... And then there's the more minor examples, of the HeartCatch cures wondering about that guy they imagined as Cure Fire (I forget his name since I didn't watch HeartCatch and don't care for it much) and the Suite cures questioning the same thing that Ouji might be Cure Muse. Their gender literally made no difference to them. And Cure Sebastian, I should clarify, was NOT just an imagination scene and it actually happened. And sure, he became Batman, but that's because, like any cure, his transformation expresses his inner beauty outwardly - same reason Cure Doctor Traum became a giant robot dude, instead of a dude in a dress, because that's what he wanted to be. While I suppose the argument could be made that it only worked on Sebastian because the commune was artificial, that argument is weak because, you know, infinite possibilities? If you can't achieve your dreams one way, then find another way. If there's not enough Prehearts, simply have a miracle happen that splits one of them into two. Cure Tarte, was a weird one, since it was a male character's soul, in a female character's body (even though an imagination scene earlier in the episode had showed it the other way around). But the message here, was just that if they work together and are in sync, anything is possible! I don't think Tarte's gender wasn't actually supposed to matter here, and it wasn't extreme enough to break what at the time, was toei's rules. All these things that happened prior to Hugtto, made the "infinite possibilies" philosophy that Precure holds as an entire franchise quite clear, but possibly only to people who thought more deeply about the series, and there were also plenty of ways people could cast doubt on them. So Hugtto just decided to utterly destroy all that doubt by doing everything they did, thus for the most part confirming or at least alluding to that these examples are valid. But when Henri became a Precure, that wasn't enough for some people. The finale where the whole town transformed, toei pretty much had to do it, to prove that to be a boy precure, you didn't somehow have to fit in with the others or be the "exception to the rule", as there actually wasn't truly a rule to begin with, ever. You didn't have to be a boy that was young, thin, good looking by the world's standards, and liked to dress effeminately. You could literally be anyone at all. Like what Anzan previously said, teenage girls are simply toei's norm. But they are in no way a requirement by the show's lore, even a little bit!