So over the past two months myself and my lovely girlfriend @emberkeelty have been watching Futari wa Precure and its sequel series, Futari wa Precure Max Heart. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been loving it. Just loving it. I love Honoka and Nagisa, I love the fairies, I love Hikari, I love the battle scenes, I love the music, I love most of the side characters, I loved the Max Heart finale.

There was one major obnoxious thing about the show that I was NOT a huge fan of, though, and that was this dude:

who, in fairness to him, spent most of his time being polite and playing soccer with his buddies and clearly not caring about girls. Unfortunately, the show had to try to shoe-horn in Nagisa’s crush on him at every moment. Arienai? Yeah, arienai!

This is where I introduce you to the second Max Heart movie, which aside from being probably the best Precure movie I’ve seen so far, basically takes all the subtext out of the Nagisa/Honoka ship teasing and turns it into… well, just text.

The movie starts out with a bang: Nagisa isn’t good at snowboarding, so Honoka provides moral support by looking deeply into her eyes and telling her she believes in her. This culminates in hand-holding, because they are girlfriends who love each other.



Next, Honoka and Fujipi-senpai (the boy in the earlier screenshot) are mistaken as a couple by some other girls. This upsets Nagisa. You would think this is where the het nonsense would kick in, but you would be wrong. See, this is presented completely ambiguously, i.e., it can be easily read as Nagisa being jealous because Honoka is hers, not because she thinks the boy could be. In fact, this reading actually makes the most sense, because when Honoka confronts her later and asks her if she wanted to go skiing with Fujipi? Nagisa gets upset and runs away.

Soon after that the main story starts rolling. But don’t worry, the Gay Energy doesn’t stop there. At one point, Porun laments that baby phoenix Hinata will be all alone, and contrasts this with Mipple and Mepple (fairy lovers) and… Honoka and Nagisa, who promptly give each other terribly flustered looks.

Soon after that, Nagisa and Honoka (as Cure Black and Cure White) are forced to fight each other thanks to the bad guys planting ice chips of hatred in their hearts. Originally only Cure White is affected, but when Cure Black refuses to harm her girlfriend…

the bad guys implant an ice chip in her heart as well. They beat each other up for a while in a scene which is remarkably more gay than I have time to put here because there are flashbacks, brief tearful moments of recognition, the use of each others’ first name (rather than typical Cure call sign), and eventually Honoka holding out her arms and accepting her fate at the hands of the girl she still loves.

…then they remember their feelings for each other at the last second and hold each other as they plummet to what the bad guys hope is their death:

…they don’t die, of course, because they’re Precure (and their fall was cushioned). They DO, however, have a very emotional scene where they hold hands and cry and talk about how awful it was having to fight each other:

Then they escape by climbing out of the pit that they’re in - with one hand, because they’re refusing to let go of each other.

(Rina and Shiho are two of their friends, who are also very clearly girlfriends. Rina was giving Nagisa a pep talk earlier in the movie about how to reconcile with Honoka.)

They make a makeshift snowboard to travel back to where the bad guys are (STILL HOLDING HANDS), and when they get there and the bad guys demand to know how they thawed their frozen hearts, Nagisa and Honoka reply that it’s because their hearts were burning with love. Gay love, obviously.

They hold hands again (do they ever stop? NOT REALLY) to take one final blow from the bad guys:

at which point they truly are frozen solid, still holding hands.

They are saved by the phoenix baby and go on to win the day, of course. The movie wraps up with the girlfriends reconciled and going skiing together. The boy Nagisa has supposedly been crushing on asks when she got so good, and…

…then they ski off into the sunset together…



…and we get a gay ending theme…

…and Toei brings us wedding merchandise.

Excellent gay ending to an excellent gay series. 10/10, would watch again.

