Web Video / Heartcatch Pretty Cure! A Bridging

Tsubomi: What is this?!
Chypre: You're a Pretty Cure!
Coffret: A legendary warrior!
Chypre: A defender of Earth!
Coffret: You're going to fight the forces of evil!
Chypre: And sacrifice yourself for humanity by dying a horrible painful death… which is very likely.
[Beat]
[Tsubomi runs away screaming]
Coffret: We're f**ked, aren't we?

Heartcatch Pretty Cure! A Bridging is The Abridged Series for HeartCatch Pretty Cure! created by PsychoSamuraiWeasel or PSWeasel. It is written and edited by him, with writing consultation and additional voice work by his sister LyralioRC.

The series can be viewed here.

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This series provides examples of:

• The Abridged Series: For HeartCatch Pretty Cure!.
• Adaptational Jerkass: Chypre is quite unhelpful as a fairy partner and will cheerfully act like a jerk to everyone.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Mr. Kurumi's requirements to become the "best photographer there is" is to have ESP, take a picture of the Loch Ness monster, and refrain from using wide-angle lens for eternity.
• Beware the Silly Ones:
  • Dark Pretty Cure acts like a bored teenager, but she’s easily capable of thrashing Blossom and Marine in a fight and would have killed them three times by now if not for external interference.
  • Erika’s ridiculous antics can get pretty extreme, such as the “tamed and totally legal” scorpions in the Fashion Club, her tendency to throw chairs at people for motivation, whatever she did that scared off the transfer student prior to Tsubomi, and kidnapping the rest of the Drama Club during her feud with Azusa.
• Broken Bird: Yuri, as is the case in the original. There’s a moment where she neglects to respond during a phone call with Momoka because she’s preoccupied with an inner monologue about the hardships of life.
• Butt-Monkey: Sasorina is often subject to disrespect and humiliation during her fights with the Cures, such as them not bothering to remember her name after kicking her butt and refusing to address her by her proper name even after learning it.
• Cast Full of Crazy: The number of characters with a remotely normal thought process can be counted on one hand.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: Kumojacky quickly does this by turning Hiroto into a Desertrian after the latter misidentifies him as his Disappeared Dad. A Snackey lampshades how screwed up that moment was.
• Character Exaggeration: Erika is already an excitable Genki Girl in the actual series, but the abridged series cranks it up to eleven and adds a strong dose of Cloudcuckoolander for good measure.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Basically everyone who isn’t Tsubomi and Yuri, but even they have their odd moments. The most prominent examples are Erika (of course), Kaoruko, and Yuri’s mother.
• Club Stub: Like in the original version, Erika has to contend with the threat of the student council shutting down the Fashion Club if she can’t recruit enough members. Unlike the original version, her (mistaken) concern is less about losing the club and more about losing her life at the hands of Itsuki. She also bribes classmates with bubble porn of Momoka to get them to join the club.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Episode 9 explains the animal keeper club president’s absence and the sounds from the student council room in episode 4.
  • When giving Itsuki examples of having multiple interests, Erika mentions that she does let’s plays of horror games, specifically thinking about the time she installed Amnesia: The Dark Descent on Tsubomi’s laptop and contended with a water monster in the first Erika Plays video.
• Disappeared Dad: Hiroto mistakes Kumojacky for his father and says, “You came back from the pet store!” Kumojacky quickly turns him into a Desertrian to avoid the awkwardness. One of the Snackeys comments on how f＊cked up it is.
• Disney Acid Sequence: Erika mentions having one of these by name when wondering about why she remembers fighting monsters that Tsubomi knows they haven’t fought.
• The Dreaded: Itsuki and her associates are assumed by the whole school to be an Absurdly Powerful Student Council who can and have gotten students killed for disobedience. This is partly fueled by the members playing horror games in the dark, partly by Itsuki’s habit of innocuously using threatening words and a stern tone.
• Emo Teen: Yuri is a Broken Bird version of this, while Dark Pretty Cure is a Cloudcuckoolander version of this.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Erika brushes off the idea that Kanae is anything more than a nosy Camera Fiend and has no reason to believe that she’s working with their enemies. Cue Gilligan Cut to Kumojacky having a phone call with Kanae about trying to uncover the Pretty Cures’ secret identities.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The pie chart that Tsubomi and Erika show Itsuki to advocate for the Fashion Club has sections labeled “Reasons,” “Qualities,” “Stuff,” and “Apples,” the last of which occupies more than half the chart.
• Friendless Background: Erika is convinced that Momoka’s Only Friend Yuri doesn’t exist.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Chypre. When Erika tells Tsubomi that they need to rescue their fairy partners from Dark Pretty Cure, she amends her initial statement to say that Coffret has always been there for them.
• Groin Attack: Kanae took embarrassing photos of Daisuke getting one during soccer practice, enough for a flip book according to him.
• In-Character Let's Play: Erika Plays, in which Erika does a Let’s Play of horror games under the username MarineFlowerPirate.
• Inherently Funny Words: Kaoruko considers “marijuana” to be one, which is why she babbles to Kanae about a marijuana patch she may or may not have.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Tsubomi swoons over Itsuki’s martial arts prowess, even when Itsuki’s opponents lament their broken spines.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Kaoruko mentions that she had a nice ass back when she was a Pretty Cure.
• Jerkass: Chypre, Kanae, Itsuki’s grandfather, and (according to Erika) the entire school soccer team. Erika herself has some malicious moments.
• Larynx Dissonance: Some of the female characters have a deep, masculine voice, most prominently Erika. Tsubomi’s voice is softer but also noticeably male. Episode 10 onwards averts this, with Erika and Tsubomi’s voices changing due to the curse Azusa places on them.
• Never Found the Body: After Ms. Tsurusaki tells off Erika for scaring Tsubomi and reminds her of what happened the last time she scared a new student, Erika asks if they ever found a body.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Azusa does one after Cobraja turns her into the Spotlight Desertrian.
• Noodle Implements: When Erika forcibly recruits Tsubomi to the Fashion Club, she mentions that the scorpions are tamed and totally legal, then does a Verbal Backspace when Tsubomi questions the scorpions part.
• Noodle Incident: Whatever Erika did to the last new student before Tsubomi. All we know is that a train was involved and Erika doesn’t know if they ever found the body or not.
• Not Hyperbole: Erika is incredulous when told that Itsuki’s Unsettling Gender-Reveal caused Tsubomi “love sickness” until she hears Tsubomi audibly vomit from within her house.
• The Nth Doctor: Azusa places an “actor’s curse” that changes Erika and Tsubomi’s voices at the beginning of episode 10.
• Obliviously Evil: The Statue Desertrian made from Itsuki’s Heart Flower retains her sense of self and is completely unaware of the fact that she’s causing people to be Taken for Granite until Marine tells her.
• Odd Name Out: Tsubomi lampshades that Erika’s alias Cure Marine is an anomaly in their flower motif.
• Only Sane Man: Tsubomi is the only normal person in the cast. Surprisingly, Erika is one of these in comparison to her family.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Blossom and Marine would probably get much more done if their fairy partners and Kaoruko bothered to explain anything to them.
  • Itsuki’s status as The Dreaded is due to her odd speech patterns and vernacular making her come off as a murderous authoritarian, which causes no end of stress for Erika. Itsuki also neglects to tell Erika that the Animal Keeper Club they wanted to replace the Fashion Club with was no longer viable, so the Fashion Club would have survived regardless of whether or not Erika could solve the Club Stub problem.
  • Speaking of Itsuki, Erika notices but is too scatterbrained to correct Tsubomi’s use of male pronouns for Itsuki until the Unsettling Gender-Reveal.
  • In a case of poor communication preventing a killing, Dark Pretty Cure would have been able to kill Blossom and Marine had she told Professor Sabaaku what she was about to do instead of letting him get worried about her getting hurt and coming back home.
• Rookie Red Ranger: Tsubomi’s status as this is exacerbated by the fact that Kaoruko is not at all prepared to guide her and Chypre won’t explain to her anything that she hasn’t already figured out.
• Scatterbrained Senior:
  • Kaoruko is far from the wise, grandmotherly mentor figure she was in the actual show. She even mentions that she assumed Chypre and Coffret were hallucinations caused by her own senility, until Tsubomi confirmed she could see them too.
  • Itsuki’s grandfather is also pretty odd, and he is likely the source of her unintentionally threatening speech patterns.
• Shout-Out: Plenty, which you can find here.
• Soap Opera Disease: Satsuki’s “Insidious Commode Disease” that causes him to violently cough up blood. Visitors are not allowed to stay at Itsuki’s residence for very long to avoid contracting it.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Erika is somehow able to understand crow language, which Itsuki’s mother inexplicably speaks in.
• Stealth Pun: The in-universe cause for Tsubomi and Erika’s voices changing is called the actor’s curse.
• The Stinger:
  • Episode 2: Chypre telling Tsubomi about the Heart Seeds and Heart Tree but refusing to answer her questions about what they are other than the fact that the fairies sh＊t them out.
  • Episode 3: Tsubomi asks if Erika’s Talk Like a Pirate schtick from her first fight is going to stick, and an eye-patched Erika subsequently dropping it when Tsubomi corrects her about the difference between a pirate and a ninja.
  • Episode 4: Erika attempts to sell the Indian elephant that the Fashion Club was left with after moving into the space previously occupied by the Animal Keeper Club.
  • Episode 5: Professor Sabaaku chews out Kumojacky for his failures and decides to send Dark Pretty Cure to do the job.
  • Episode 9: Itsuki asks her grandfather about his trip to America, during which he complains about her great uncle Saki being a reprehensible piece of sh＊t.
  • Episode 10: Tsubomi wonders if Azusa’s “actor’s curse” was real, with her and Erika not noticing that their voices have changed. Cut to the new recipient of Erika’s old voice, Emi Yusa.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Erika’s dad put nitroglycerin in their milk for some reason.
• Talk Like a Pirate: What Marine does in her first fight, and the reason she chose the name Marine despite the obvious flower motif.
• Unknown Rival: After spending the entirety of episode 10 trying (and failing) to inconvenience Azusa’s drama club performances, Erika breaks when Azusa is confused about her decision to “end their rivalry”.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Finding out that her first crush Itsuki is a girl and not a boy gives Tsubomi sexual confusion and illness, much like in the original anime. Averted with Cobraja, who actually does recognize on sight that Itsuki is a girl, unlike what happened in the original.
• Wicked Cultured: Cobraja quotes Shakespeare before turning Azusa into a Desertrian.
• Yaoi Fangirl: Ms. Tsurusaki apparently wrote a Batman/Superman slashfic and posted it on fanfiction.net. She leaves class to go to war against the Internet when she catches a student reading it in place of their assignment.
• Zany Scheme: Episode 10 revolves around Erika’s escalating efforts to get revenge on the Drama Club with these.