Episode twentyfive of KiraKira Precure À La Mode is the gayest I’ve seen Precure get.
Precure is a magical girl series that has run continuously since 2004, each series featuring a new team of friends fighting against evil. From the start there has been a strong lesbian undertone to the series, with even the original Precure clearly being slightly more than just friends. But most of this has been subtext, not entirely spelled out or made completely explicit. KiraKira Precure À La Mode has had the same thing going on ever since Akira (left) and Yukari were introduced, both high schoolers when the rest of the cast was in middle school (as was always the case with Precure), prince and princess of their school, naturally attracted to each other. There had been enough hints given that you could consider it canon that those two are a couple, even if neither had yet admitted it. But in episode twentyfive Yukari and Akira moved beyond this unspoken love and into a proper romance.
And it was all thanks to Yukari’s jealousy and insecurity, so strong she had to use a rival for her hand showing up as an excuse to test Akira. Which in turn got her hoisted on her petard when Akira didn’t respond as expected and all her anxieties she usually kept hidding came out. To which Akira responded in the right way, professing her love while escaping from the villain of the week that showed up just in time for the inevitable transformation scene. It’s a very strong episode, arguably the best episode of the series so far, which makes full use of the characters as they’ve been built up over the past twentyfour episodes. This is clearly something the series has been working towards from the start, not something read into the episode by fans; it’s way too blatant for that and it’s a clear milestone for Precure as a whole, to allow this explicit, queer relationship that needs only a kiss to be completely on a par with a straight relationship as shown in this sort of anime. I actually have a sneaky suspicion that Akira and Yukari were made high schoolers, rather than middle school students, explicitly to make it easier to tell this story, as the age difference probably make it somewhat easier to tell a queer story in what’s still nominally a children’s series.
I may be wrong though, but it hardly matters. What matters is Precure finally moving beyond subtext with its lesbian relationships. As long as they don’t botch it up.
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