YMMV / HappinessCharge Pretty Cure!

• Alternative Character Interpretation: For the most part Megumi has the role of The Protagonist and The Leader, but Hime gets more screentime and development than Megumi. As a result, there are many fans who believe that Hime is the real main character and this would make Megumi more of a Supporting Protagonist. If this really is intentional, this would be the first Pretty Cure season to have the Pink Cure as a side Cure rather than the main one, as well as the first season to have the main character as a Cure who isn't The Leader. However, Megumi does have the spotlight all to herself when the final story arc of the show comes around, so it makes up for all of that lost screentime, meanwhile the official spot for "first Pink Cure to be a side Cure rather than the main Cure" instead goes to Ageha Hijiri/Cure Butterfly.
• Angst? What Angst?: A common complaint about the Non-Serial Movie is Tsumugi's seemingly instantaneous physical and emotional recovery from the trauma inflicted on her by Black Mask following the climax.
• Awesome Ego: Oresky clearly has a very high opinion of himself, and loves to express it. As loudly (and dramatically) as possible. Then again, he is voiced by Dio the vampire and Excalibur.
• Base-Breaking Character: Really, pick any character in this season. But here are some prominent examples:
  • Iona/Cure Fortune. Some people love her for being awesome and badass, while others simply cannot forgive her for bullying Hime and felt she was too Easily Forgiven.
  • Phantom. Some people think he's awesome for being the first villain to thoroughly defeat Cures rather than coming close to defeating them. Others hate him and think he's a Scrappy because of the fact that he defeats Cures on a daily basis only to spite Blue.
  • Yuko/Cure Honey. Either she's awesome for using a unique method of fighting the bad guys, or she's annoying.
  • In contrast, Megumi/Cure Lovely is either liked for having more noticeable flaws than Mana or is despised for not only being absolutely preachy about love and happiness, but also being incompetent and reliant on other people whenever her values of life are challenged (e.g. Episodes 30, 44, and 46). And then, there is the deal of her being the central character of the love triangle plot that eclipses Happiness Charge's second half, which caused her to become an even bigger example. However, neither side can deny that the girl most certainly knows how to kick copious amounts of ass...
• Broken Base: In some parts of the fandom, at least, this is the case: you either love Hime and think Cure Fortune is being an intolerable Jerkass to her, or you think Fortune is an awesome badass and Hime is a useless, whiny Spoiled Brat. Fortunately, both sides warmed up to each other after Fortune officially joins the team.
• Common Knowledge: There's the common misconception that Blue was the cause of all the events of the anime since he was the one who rejected Mirage, leading to her corruption. While he may be the root of it, it was still Red who fully corrupted Mirage by using her bitterness over Blue's rejection and used her as a puppet queen for the Phantom Empire.
• Contested Sequel: Ironically, what was supposed to be a Win Back the Crowd season ended up falling into this. While there are some fans that genuinely see this as an improvement over DokiDoki, others are not as forgiving, seeing this as being on the same level as or even worse than the previous entry. The fact that Happiness Charge falls into the same issue of abandoning or sloppily resolving its plot points while hyper-fixating on the lead Pink Cure as the last season doesn't help, but both sides do agree that the staff should've gutted the Romantic Plot Tumor the moment it was drafted.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Hime's lack of social skills, difficulty understanding her own or others' feelings, going into emotional fits when stressed, obsession with Pretty Cure and seemingly suffering from Sensory Overload in reaction to too many people talking to her at once or hearing loud music, could all hint to her being somewhere on the autism spectrum.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The international Cures have piles of fanart on Pixiv, especially the barely-seen Cure Southern Cross, for some reason... one which is perhaps related to her coming from Australia.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The season's been called "HaChaPre" by a good chunk of the fandom.
  • Fan artists on Pixiv have given Megumi a nickname that translates to "Cure Roughly", stemming from the surprising viciousness of some of her attacks.
  • The American Precure team, Bomburger Precure/Bombergirl Precure, has some fan nicknames: the redhead on this team is called Cure Sheriff and the blonde Cure Deputy (a name for the Native American girl has yet to catch on).
  • "Cure Lovely Ballerina Form" for Super Happiness Lovely, due to the costume resembling that of a ballerina.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Some fans were shipping Yuuko/Cure Honey and Iona/Cure Fortune together even before the two officially joined the team in the anime. The opening pairing the two up was all the justification they needed.
  • And then there's Yuuko/Hime.
  • Namakelda and Hosshiwa seems to be picking up momentum. Though Yuuyuu and Hosshiwa easily tops that.
  • Hime/Iona is gaining a lot of traction now that they don't despise each other anymore, and are instead giving off more Tsundere vibes.
  • In a typcial Precure fashion and despite all the straight couples getting exposure (Megumi/Blue, Megumi/Seiji, Seiji/Hime), Megumi/Hime is still the most preferred couple of the fandom.
• Fandom Rivalry: with its fellow series Heart Catch Pretty Cure, which came out four years earlier. while it's not uncommon for most Pretty Cure series to be compared to one another, these two are often the pair brought up the most due to not only for sharing a director and color scheme for their respective teams (pink, blue, yellow, and purple), but also share similar storylines and character archetypes (Ex: Hime/Erika & Iona/Yuri). Because of the similarities, many Heartcatach fans tend to view Happiness Charge as a diet version at best, or a shameless copycat at worst.
• Fridge Logic: Is rice healthy for dogs?
  • Canines are not obligate carnivores like cats, so a bit of rice isn't going to hurt them.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Episode 8, one of the Megumi's friends, Rin, is revealed to have a crush on a guy, and is given a fortune by Iona saying that the relationship can work out. Come Episode 25, where said guy is revealed to be Seiji, and Rin confesses to him, only for her to be rejected. Not only is she rejected by the one she admires, but the fortune she received turned out to be wrong.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the previous season, Ira commented that 100 Precures might be in the end. With this season and its international Precures, that statement might become sooner true than possible.
  • Maria is the name of Iona's sister and fallen friend, unable to save her because of an attack. I think I know of someone who might know that feeling...
  • One of the Fan Nicknames for Cure Lovely's Grievous Harm with a Body moment was "Cure Unlovely". Come episode 30, we get an actual Cure Un-Lovely!
  • When she transform in Ninja, the Pre Change Mirror says: Nin-Nin-Ninja, and the next Sentai reveled is Shuriken Sentai Ninninger.
    • Adding to the humour, one episode has Hime saying "I’m getting fired up!"
  • The fact that this season has a character named Cure Princess instead of the next season.
  • The montage of international Cures includes two American teams in Aloha! Pretty Cure and Bomber Girls Pretty Cure. If the team name's allowed to exist, imagine what Glitter Force Pretty Cure would look like...
  • The name of the 2021–2022 has been announced as Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure, so there have been many jokes about the Hawaiian Cures being the characters to that season.
  • The idea of Cure Unlovely being like Cure Lovely except with a black motif, much stronger, and an overwhelming desire to destroy Megumi's hometown for the fun of it can be amusing if one sees her existence as a precursor to Goku Black.
  • The Indian Pretty Cure team is known as Wonderful Net Pretty Cure, which is very similar to what would become the 2024 installment, Wonderful Pretty Cure!.
• Hype Backlash:
  • There's a lot of fear that this may happen with the Precure cameos, seeing as the first two cameos went from Futari wa Pretty Cure (Cure Black) to Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo! (Cure Dream), making fans fear that after HeartCatch Pretty Cure! (Cure Moonlight) is gonna be Smile PreCure!, thus avoiding the less-popular Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star and Suite Pretty Cure ♪ on its first gos. Cure Egret finally appeared in episode 6, and Cure Rhythm appeared in episode 9. Amazingly, it ended up taking 12 episodes to get someone from Doki Doki! PreCure to show up, since four series got to have two representatives - Cure Aqua, Cure Pine, Cure Blossom and Cure March respectively.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Cure Fortune's long-awaited henshin scene. Many viewers, expecting something unique a la Cure Moonlight, were disappointed when it ended up being something much more subdued.
  • To an extent, the finale. Much like the previous season, Lovely faces off against the main villain one-on-one. It was bad enough for some people when the other Cures were defeated in the previous episode and offered their strength to the main Cure just like in Doki Doki, and the finale only confirmed their fears.
• Les Yay: Can't be a Precure anime without it. See this page for examples.
• Memetic Mutation: See this page for examples.
• Moral Event Horizon: Black Mask goes over by using Tsumugi-chan as a pawn in his game against Pretty Cure.
• Narm Charm: Cure Honey's "Happy Rice Love Song", which despite the cheesy lyrics still manages to work because of how genuine it comes off as.
• Older Than They Think: The costume-changing cards had people saying, "Hmm, Toei really wants those Aikatsu! profits." However, like with Kamen Rider Decade, they're actually a game mechanic from the Precure arcade game, which has been around for a long time; Fresh fans may remember it as the way Cure Passion's identity was spoiled publicly the month before her introduction (the character was plastered on the side of the cabinet).
• One-Scene Wonder: Phantom as Cure Unlovely.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Cure Fortune was initially seen by the viewers as The Scrappy as she's drawing a lot of ire from the Pretty Cure Livejournal community as of episode 19, because of her unrelenting cruelty to Hime. Not only does she treat Hime like a pariah for whatever it is the latter did, she yells at her every chance she gets, sends her to the benches before the soccer game ends, preaches about the awesomeness of teamwork to keep up appearances but tells the girls they know nothing about it, and she tries to turn Yuuko and Megumi against Hime by asking them to join her. In what seems to be foresight to the fans labeling her as a scrappy. This turns into a My God, What Have I Done? moment when Iona realizes that her sister's defeat and capture had nothing to do with Hime, but it was her fault. In addition, the next episode has her finding out Hime didn't open the box deliberately, and was in fact tricked into opening it by a sad-sounding voice inside it. Fortune has another moment of MGWHID, when she realizes Hime kept trying to tell her what happened, but Fortune's blind hatred leads to her refusing to listen to Hime, who feels horrible about the whole thing. This results in Fortune and Princess both apologizing to each other, and them quickly making peace.
• Retroactive Recognition: Rina Kitagawa, the voice actress of Yuko Oomori/Cure Honey, would later go on to voice Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: A good chunk of the series is overran with this, due to the odd Love Triangle between Megumi, Seiji and Blue that seems to utterly eclipse the rest of the plot. It's made even worse due to the awkward way the plot was resolved. Allegedly, this is due to the writers wanting the theme of the show to stand on its own without the action clashing with it. The morals they were trying to send with this arc was that romance can bring happiness as well as misfortune, and that everyone should be considerate of the more vulnerable party's feelings even if they don't feel the same way.
• The Scrappy: It's hard to find anyone online who actually likes Blue, citing how he doesn't do much to justify his Guardian Of The Earth status, often doing nothing to the point where people say Shin got more done than him. These feelings only became worse when it's revealed that Blue's Commitment Issues single-handedly caused the entire plot to happen due to pulling a random rule out of his behind stating that Cures can't fall in love, which kickstarts Cure Mirage's Start of Darkness, with Red and Phantom going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge in response.
• So Okay, It's Average: A common impression of the season. It's neither bad nor great.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: It has its own page here.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Many feel the show dropped the ball on the form changes, which Pretty Cure hasn't had since Cure Bright and Cure Windy. Almost every time, they're used solely to perform a fully-CGI attack, then they change back. A later episode confirms the Cures can use unique attacks in those forms. However, this is rarely addressed, as the only ones used are Lovely's Cherry Flamenco, Princess's Sherbet Ballet, and Honey's Coconuts Samba, and even then Cherry Flamenco is used the most (twice). The Cards used outside of their Cure forms get used a lot more instead. This is made all the worse by the form changes practically vanishing after the introduction of Innocent Form.
  • By the end of the series, the "collecting cards for a wish" plot is dropped. Heck, even Megumi's reason to make a wish - the illness of her mother - is dropped with the reveal that Megumi's mother isn't as sick as Megumi thought. Other than the episode about the Hawaiian Cures, the international Precures only get a small Big Damn Heroes moment in the final episodes when they could have had a whole World Tour Story Arc. Hime is reunited with her family in a montage. Many people felt that the final battle could have been much better and that the second half of the series put too much focus on Megumi — specifically, placing her at the center of a Romantic Plot Tumor.
  • Even The Non-Serial Movie has shades of this. It ordinally seems that the movie's Big Bad, Black Fang, has created a Lotus-Eater Machine that allows a girl, Tsumugi-chan, who has a love of dance but is no longer able to use her legs, to dance again. This could have been used to set up Graying Morality as defeating the villain would mean causing Tsumugi-chan to become paralyzed again, therefore utterly crushing her dreams and happiness. Unfortunately, the movie crashes straight into Black-and-White Morality, as Black Fang reveals he used magic to disable her legs so he could have a power source of despair, with the Cures in the right all along.
  • Hime being the one who opened Axia and unleashed evil upon the world had potential for her to become The Atoner and lead to some moving Character Development, only for the show to completely absolve her of all responsibility by quickly revealing that she was just an Unwitting Pawn and completely moving on from this plot point.
  • Really, any plot point even remotely interesting that got introduced in the first half of the season (The International Cures, Iona's rivalry with Hime, etc.) would up falling into this by the second half when they all became Aborted Arcs. Combined with the back-half's sudden fixation on Megumi, it gives the impression that the anime's staff didn't have the guts to go through with any of those previous story elements, going through what is basically a small-scaled Soft Reboot for the sake of keeping consistency with the older seasons.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The head-to-body proportions of episode 15. With normal-sized heads and tiny bodies, the 3 Cures look almost like titans.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Most fans assumed the Pretty Cure cameos would be in order. Boy, weren't they surprised when Cure Dream showed up instead of Cure White! (Or Cure Bloom, if they had introduce all leaders first.) And then they threw everyone under the bus when the next one was Cure Passion instead of Cure Peach.
    • Some other fans have assumed there was an actual system of the cameos. It looked right when Cure Moonlight appeared, but then came Cure Happy and the theory was thrown away.
  • Episode 8 begins with introducing six foreign Pretty Cures; three in America, one in France and two in India.
  • The cameo for episode 14 is Cure Fortune, followed by Cures Lovely, Princess, and Honey.
  • Cure Flora makes appearance at the end of the final episode.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Iona has been heavily hit with this. In spite of losing her older sister Maria, A.K.A. Cure Tender to Precure Hunter, Phantom, she qualifies as this trope due to her self-righteous attitude and tendency to blame others for things that either aren't their fault or had little control of have made a lot of fans quit feeling sorry for her. When Hime opened Axia and freed the Phantom Empire, leading many innocents to be in danger (Including her older sister), she has become hostile, strict and dismissive towards her, and whenever they interact, she would constantly scold her for the whole incident, she refuses to listen to any explanations. And while Happiness Charge Pretty Cure are fighting the monsters to save the world and Hime working tirelessly to restore her home and save her people, what is Iona doing? Fighting the monsters alone vowing to not do anything with Hime, let alone joining a team where the person she despises is in, not even trying to figure out why Hime's own Dark Secret happened or helping her restore her home. If there's anyone who we should root for is Hime, the real victim of the abuse. Fortunately, she gets better by episodes 22 and 23, where after learning the truths behind said Dark Secret and Cure Tender's downfall, she had become remorseful of her treatment of Hime And apologizes for her harsh behavior.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Once again, we have a Teacher/Student Romance situation as a plot point. This time, between the seemingly immortal Physical God Blue and the rather green Megumi. While this plot element eventually builds up to nothing, the fact that the season spent a huge chunk of time to it is enough to bring angry reactions among westerners.
  • To some, the International Cures can fall under this, since their designs use base-level assumptions of the culture in which they originate from (The Bomber Girls, for example, is a Texas-based Pretty Cure team that has a Caucasian girl dressed in a Native American motif along with her two partners having cowgirl motifs, which would not fly especially now). And that is not going into the accusations of whitewashing as the Hindi and Egyptian Cures are designed with the same fair skin as everyone else, the only international team with darker skin being the Hawaiian team (and even then, it's not by much compared to everyone else).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The first episode already has some decent animation, but the CGI in the new dance ending (Lyrics here) is nothing short of phenomenal.
• Wangst: Red has a really bad tendency to constantly repeat that love is bad and hate is good every five minutes, and doesn't seem intent on stopping, much to the consternation of some viewers.
• The Woobie: As of episode 20, Hime definitely counts. She opened the Axia Box which caused the Phantom Empire to come out. Her kingdom is invaded, her family is taken hostage, she can't fight for the life of her, and despite her obviously not wanting any of this to happen, Cure Fortune is ardently convinced otherwise and absolutely hates her to the point of holding it over her head and outright bullying her every chance she gets! Not only that, she has to live with this huge mountain of guilt along with staying in a world that's completely different from her own! Someone give this poor girl a hug already!

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