Have you ever wondered what the main cast of chuubo's gnarvelous nishgranting hengine, the hit* campaign of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, would be like if toei animation were to lovingly recreate them as pretty cure-style magical girls**?
...No?
ok look humor me ok because it works really well, and in this essay I willā
* one presumes everyone is already following geo "sphere of the sacred worm" statonary on various social medias
** "girl" status may vary
āAhem.
OKAY GREAT, I'm so glad everyone is, just like me, invested in this a very normal amount.
The reason doing this interests me is because, much like chuubo's itself, precure as a series uses color symbolism, with each of their classic magical girl colors having clear associations for both personality and character arc. (That said, toei still of course tries to shake things up, so a disclaimer that my generalizations for the colors are just that. Even when they break their own rules, though, you can still see clear traces of internal logic!) I'd also like to give a hat tip to one of my good friends, iaiamothrafhtagn on tumblr, for helping develop this ~precure meta.~
So! Without further ado...
the pink one: Theremin Viel
THE protagonist. The pink one is the "leader" specifically by virtue of being the emotional core of the group. This is the character who most embodies the core principles of the story, and who drives the plot forward by taking big emotional risks such as reaching out to antagonists. They have the lowest lows, and ascend the highest in turn.
the blue one: Liza Voronina
The ace. This frequently means an elegant intellectual anime student council president typeābut not always. This character's arc is very often focused on the tension between rigid duty and personal passion: what do you do when what is expected of you isn't what's in your heart?
Bonus: for some reasonāmaybe because of the important social roles they tend to be in? maybe they're just cursed??āif a blue precure beefs it, they REALLY beef it.
the yellow one: Cora Viel
The ray of light. This personality type can be really all over the board, but yellow types reliably are "emotional glass cannons": the person the other people in the group look to for support, often coupled with the ability to really pack a punch. Yellow ones are very in touch with their own emotions (unlike pink ones, who are on a hero's journey about it, or blue ones who are A Messā¢), and it's a source of strength for them.
We're still in the magical girl genre, though, and yellow ones need their friends because they can be pretty intensely vulnerable to those few things that actually manage to undermine their sense of self.
the red one: Mara "Viel"
The red one is the character who COULD have been the pink one if they weren't the red one. What does this mean? It means that, like the pink one, their themes are really closely tied to the core principles of the storyābut unlike the pink one, the red one's narrative role is to explain to the pink one WHY they're the pink one.
...Also this character is reliably just like. really really gay. Even by precure standards.
Red is one of the colors sometimes associated with "mid-season cures," i.e. major characters who go on to become "surprise" new magical girls. Mid-season cures are often reformed villains and/or nonhuman entities.
the purple one: Yulia Zakharova
The mysterious outsider. Even when this character is part of the group from the beginning, purple ones usually have a kind of aloof elegance to them. They may have been in this fight longer than everyone else (whether as a magical girl or not) and have likely been hurt in the past, with all the baggage or even cynicism that entails. Likewise, their arc is often about the struggle to bridge the lonely gap between themself and others.
Purple is another one of the colors sometimes associated with "mid-season cures"āthe most traditional mid-season cure color, in fact.
the aqua (sometimes multicolored) one: Ovida, the moss
Unlike purple and red, this color is only available to characters who are literally not human. As a result, there can be some narrative overlap between them and red/purple cures! Aqua/multicolor cures are typically on some kind of journey of self-actualization (with the help of Our Hero the pink cure), symbolized through becomingāand then succeeding asāa magical girl.
Aqua/multi is, of course, the final go-to mid-season cure color. In this framing, it is likely Ovida herself did not become a precure until the nishgranting "episode" where she lost/gave up her statue body!
.......If you're still reading this, thanks for coming to this extremely important academic exercise. I will now accept questions, etc.