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Let us continue with Ten Things I Hate about Cardcaptor Sakura. Today’s post again necessarily contains spoilers.
Number 3: The Creeptastic Mid-story Plot Twist
Midway through the story, right at the end of the sixth volume of the Cardcaptor Sakura manga, is a little revelation exposited across two pages. These two pages had a strong effect on me when I read the comic, so I was surprised to see that these details were deleted from the anime—which then had to wedge in references to them later, awkwardly, to explain certain things.
As this is complicated, I’m going to reproduce the two pages so you can see them for yourself:
Explanation
If you’re not closely familiar with Cardcaptor Sakura, that just looks like a big string of names. Let me break it down for you:
- Syaoran
Li-kun (whom Kero-chan calls “the brat”) is Syaoran, the ten-year-old boy from Hong Kong who is Sakura’s rival for the Clow Cards.
- Mizuki
Mizuki-sensei is Kaho Mizuki, the serial child molester, who is Sakura’s math teacher and her older brother’s former girlfriend.
- Yukito
Tsukishiro-san is Yukito, Sakura’s older brother’s current boyfriend, and also Sakura’s childhood crush.
Discussion
Syaoran spends most of the first arc crushing on Yukito just as Sakura does. This is not only because Yukito has a strong gaydar but also because he has lunar magic. Sakura feels “floaty” around child-molester Kaho and realizes that this floaty feeling is the same one she has around Yukito because Kaho has her own form of lunar magic. The rest of it … um … figure the rest of it out yourself.
Feeling the Magic
The long and the short of it is that these characters have magic powers, and their magic is screwing with their emotions. I mentioned this yesterday in my discussion of Sakura’s brother Toya.
This is a way of wrapping up the bizarre and tangled relationships the characters have formed over the course of the series (though it doesn’t explain all of them—but that’s the subject of tomorrow’s post).
The Implications
When you think about it, this is as much as CLAMP admitting that their characters are mentally ill: Their attitudes, their sentiments, their affections are getting jerked around by powers outside their control. Notice what child-molester Kaho says to Syaoran on the second page—”You couldn’t have liked me.”
That is, there’s no choice in the matter. This is not only because Kaho preys on little boys but because she and Syaoran have opposing forms of magic.
Creepy. No wonder the anime downplays this.
Final Comments
As I mentioned yesterday, Toya has a similar issue: His magic causes him to be attracted to magical things, and this leads him into the predatory arms of child-molester Kaho, after which he goes gay with Sakura’s lunar guardian. Once he understands the source of his decidedly weird infatuations, he’s not even slightly perturbed but goes full speed ahead.
In fact, the only character who fights his disordered affections—and wins—is Syaoran. After learning why he’s infatuated with Yukito, he gets over it, and his affections come to rest in a much better place. I’ll talk about that in the final essay of this series.
