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Victory Script - Nao's Precious Bonds With Family

An example of really well done emotion from Episode 42 of Smile Precure - Nao's precious bonds with family.

Nao's mother is hospitalised while delivering her seventh child, Nao being the oldest, takes charge in looking after the siblings and decides to make a curry for everyone, simple sweet Shojo stuff.
Missing an apple from the recipe, two of her siblings offer to get it for Nao only for them to be captured by the witch villain Majorina in order to lure out Cure March, Nao along with the rest of the family find Majorina and seeing no choice in the matter Nao transforms into Cure March despite it revealing her secret in front of her family.
Cure March struggles with the Akanbe monster prompting Nao's family to defend her which only angers Majorina more as she goes into her younger form and fights Cure March head on as she to powers up, March getting more angered attempts her new attack but it fails to do anything to the Akanbe, Majorina then uses the moment to attack her siblings in an attempt to kill them, March completely has a mental breakdown as she helplessly watches the attack happen, thankfully the rest of Smile Precure show up to save them, the team wrap up by defeating the Akanbe forcing Majorina to retreat. The episode ends with Nao welcoming her newest sibling into the world.
Two Takeaways from this episode.
1. It's a major testament to the voice talent of Inoue Marina for her performance as she absolutely nails the distress that Nao went through and double the praise to the animation team for making that scene so effective. What really sells the scene is the fact that Nao is in so much shock it takes quite a few seconds for herself to click that her siblings are okay, even while her siblings are hugging her, she's still clearly shaking; for a season of Precure that is traditionally sillier, when they do go serious they absolutely nail it.
2. At the same time, I miss when Precure were capable of being serious and really making the effort to push the direction into situations that may force it's target audience to grow up just that little bit, too often over the last few seasons they fall short of delivering the story often being too accepting of a quick resolution.

Next time on Victory Script
Beyblade