New poster here! This is Ember, Pike’s girlfriend who got her into Pretty Cure! I’ve been working on a pretty ambitious meta series for this blog, but it’s kind of been stalled out for a while, so in the mean time, I’ve decided to introduce myself with a birthday tribute to one of my all-time favorite Cures, Arisugawa Himari, aka Cure Custard!

I’ve found that Himari is pretty direly underappreciated in Pretty Cure fandom! In my opinion, KiraPre as a whole is underappreciated, but I’ve also heard people specifically say that they found Himari’s arc underwhelming, which I really don’t get because I feel she had the most satisfying and well-constructed arc out of all six heroines in her season. Here, I’m going to break it down to try to explain why! It might get rambly, but I suspect that Himarin would appreciate a loving infodump as a birthday tribute even if it is a bit unpolished!

Himari is introduced in episode two as Ichika’s shy classmate, who Ichika invites to the magical bakery to make pudding with her. In one of the most personally relatable sequences I have ever seen in a children’s cartoon, Himari tries very, very hard to politely refrain from commenting on Ichika’s repeated mitakes…

Until finally she can’t take it anymore and explodes into a passionate explanation of what Ichika is doing wrong and why it matters.

The explanation becomes a cheeful infodump about pudding and food science, which goes on for so long that it starts to get dark outside, at which point Himari suddenly realizes what she’s doing, panics, and flees the bakery in a flurry of apologies, scared that she’s ruined her chances of ever becoming friends with Ichika by being so weird. Ichika’s reaction so far has been fairly positive, but that’s not much reassurance to Himari because, well…

It always seems to go like this. People try to be polite at first, and maybe they even find it genuinely interesting, up to a point. But after that point, your “quirkiness” stops being charming or even tolerable, and then they turn on you. It certainly doesn’t help that, aside from esoteric intellectual obsessions, another common trait of autistic people is difficulty reading emotions, so we often don’t see the signs that someone is gradually getting tired of a conversation and only notice that something has gone wrong when we’re told outright to stop talking. From our perspective, it can feel like the person we’re talking to has gone from being encouraging to being disparaging in the blink of an eye. As a result, we learn not to trust encouragement.

Fortunately for Himari, Ichika is genuinely supportive, and they end up being magical girls together!

The next Himarin scene that really stuck with me comes in episode eight, after the whole pre-Ciel team has been assembled and the girls have decided to open their bakery to the public. Himai gets put in charge of buying ingredients, which does make a certain amount of sense given her specialized knowledge, but makes less sense when you consider that shopping for anything means dealing with people. Sometimes lots of people. Himari decides to do her best anyway, gathers up her courage, and…

Utterly fails.

But it’s okay! The other girls realize that they made a mistake in sending her alone and have Akira go with her next time to do the talking for her, all while remaining very clear that what Himari is good at is extremely valuable regardless of what she isn’t so good at and needs help with.

Himari’s first focus episode after her introduction is episode 13, when she, Ichika, and Aoi put together some videos to promote the shopping district on the internet, and Himari is anxious about performing on camera. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this episode. It feels a bit like the other characters put too much pressure on Himari to do something she isn’t quite ready for, and even if it all works out in the end, I’m not 100% comfortable with the message that sends. Ultimately, though, it’s an important point in Himari’s arc as she realizes that she can use different kinds of media to do what she loves – tell everyone about how cool the science of baking is! – and that she wants to do that badly enough to be brave even when it’s hard.

Her next focus episode is episode 28, where Himari meets her personal hero, who is basically the Bill Nye of food science. She gets to be a lab assistant on his show, where the two of them attempt to set a world record for the largest sponge cake ever baked. The Sweets Professor is pretty clearly no more neurotypical than Himari herself, but he’s confident enough to host a television show and speak in front of large crowds. Himari takes a small step toward being more confident herself when, after at first being too nervous say much onstage, she realizes that the professor has gotten so distracted by his own infodumping that he’s about to miss an important step in the baking process, and she has to be the one to speak up and remind him.

When their experiment fails, Himari is quick to apologize and say that it must be her fault, but the professor assures her that she’s part of the reason they got closer to their goal than he’s ever come before, and that passionate curiosity and attention to detail are the most important things when it comes to baking; as long as you have those, everything else will follow with enough trial and error. This is something that I think Himari desperately needed to hear at this point. She is terrified by the prospect of people losing patience with her, and while it’s definitely been helpful for her to learn that she has it in her to pull through when it counts and be worth people’s time, it’s also important for her to be shown that her value isn’t contingent on success. Himari loves science, and the scientific process involves a lot of failure. The people who matter understand that.

Speaking of the people who matter understanding, Himari’s next focus episode after that is a joint one with Aoi, and it is super frigging cute.

Himari attends a fancy party put on by Aoi’s family so she can meet the famous patisserie who’s catering for it, but her inability to fit in with high society makes her worry that she isn’t good enough to be Aoi’s friend. Aoi strongly disagrees. When Himari misplaces her recipe notebook, Aoi immediately understands the urgency of her distress and helps her look for it, getting down on her hands and knees and crawling around in the grass in her fancy dress without hesitation. When the party guests criticize Aoi’s behavior, Himari swallows down her fear of talking in front of them and stands up for her friend. The climax of the episode comes when the villains attack Himari and Aoi declares her admiration for her in a scene that conspicuously parallels Akira’s declaration of romantic love for Yukari earlier in the season.

It’s worth noting at this point that Himari has an official duet with Aoi (lyrics here) where she sings things like: “I’ll always love you, even if you are in a bad mood,” and: “Someday we’ll be together forever.” Between that song and this episode, their relationship is definitely a bit romantically tinged.

The episode concludes with the observation that while the extroverted rocker girl Aoi and the shy science nerd Himari seem like very different people on the surface, they have the same going-all-out attitude when it comes to the things that they like. Aoi is fairly unconventional herself, and while there are many spaces she would probably have an easier time fitting in than Himari would, she was brought up in an environment that absolutely is not one of those spaces, and she’s used to being surrounded by people who come down harshly on any deviation from social norms. With that history and all of the frustration it’s caused her, Aoi is someone who loves Himari not in spite of her weirder traits, but because of them.

The conclusion of Himari’s personal arc is episode 43, and this is the one that I’ve seen people drastically misunderstand. After her positive experiences with the shopping district promotional videos and the Sweets Professor episode, Himari responds to a casting call for an assistant on a television cooking show. When she shows up for it, though, it’s not quite what she expected.

The audition judges aren’t looking for someone who’s passionate and knowledgeable about baking. They’re looking for someone who can be pretty and charming for the camera while pretending to bake. Upon realizing this, Himari chokes at the audition, then berates herself for not being the kind of person they were looking for and wishes that she weren’t the way that she is. Even after close to a year of being around friends and mentors who support her, a rejection this harsh still has the power to send her spiraling right back into self-loathing.

The villain shows up to kick her when she’s down. He brutally attacks her, burns her notebooks, and assaults her with images from her alienating and isolating childhood. But Himari fights back with images of all the happiness she’s found since meeting Ichika and of a possible future where she gets to do what she loves while surrounded by people who understand and appreciate her.

After the battle, someone sees Himari while she’s still transformed and, mistaking her for a different girl who showed up for the audition in a squirrel costume, drags her back in front of the judges in spite of her protests. This time, things go… differently.

I’ve seen people criticize Himari for this because she’s “cheating” by “auditioning again,” but I disagree completely. First of all, the show gives us no indication that this audition is any more objectively successful than the first, and even if it were, it stands to reason that the girl she was mistaken for would reap the benefits rather Himari herself. More importantly, though, this is not Himari taking advantage of a second audition. This is Himari taking the opportunity for a second audition, burning it down, and salting the earth to prove to herself and anyone else who cares to know that she doesn’t need or want to be the kind of person who can succeed at this kind of thing. And to me, that’s beautiful.

(Granted, it’s not exactly fair to the girl she was mistaken for, but I don’t think that’s on Himari, since everything happened so quickly that she probably didn’t have time to work out the exact nature of the mistake and its implications for another auditioner. And I don’t think the other squirrel girl is necessarily out of luck, either, since she may still have a chance to explain the misunderstanding after the fact and do her own audition.)

The episode, and Himari’s whole arc, concludes with Himari declaring that she’ll create replacements for her destroyed recipe books, which she pretty much knew by heart, and that she’s excited to learn new things to make the new ones even better. And then this:

GOOD FOR YOU, BABY GIRL!

(…Yeah, I teared up all over again while rewatching these last few scenes to get screencaps.)

As a closing note, each of the KiraPre girls has two concepts that they “mix up” when they’re transforming: Ichika’s are energy and smiles, Aoi’s are passion and freedom, and so on. If you pay attention, it quickly becomes clear that the first concept is a personal strength while the second is a personal goal. Himari’s strength is intelligence, and her goal is courage. Throughout the season, she strives for the courage to overcome her shyness enough to share her love of sweets and science. In the end, she also finds the courage to do something far more fundamental, but also far more daunting: to love herself in a world that has told her she doesn’t deserve it.

So happy birthday, Himarin! You and all the autistic or otherwise neurodivergent girls out there who see themselves in you are absolutely deserving of love!