Clear Card Crit by Floating Catacombs / Anime Blog Tracker

Clear Card Crit

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 9I’ve been waiting to go hater mode on this manga for years, but they just kept pushing back when it would end again and again. Only now that it’s over can I properly lay it to rest. Full spoilers, of course.Veteran Floating Catacombs readers should be well aware that Cardcaptor Sakura is my favorite CLAMP series, with a truly classic anime adaptation to boot. A couple of years ago I underwent a chronological readthrough of their works, and collected my takes in a series of essays titled “Why Is CLAMP Like This”. My big takeaway was that they’re shoujo libertines, but it’s also true that on some level, CLAMP defies categorization entirely. Unfortunately, their post-TsubasaHolic output has largely consisted of retreading old ground, with an endless progression of rehashes, sequels, and callbacks. Sure, there have been crossovers since the days of the CLAMP School, but it’s felt extra blatant this past decade and a half. We’ve gotten 2010s sequels to Wish, Legal Drug, xxxHolic, Tsubasa, and, of course, Cardcaptor Sakura.How could they resist? Cardcaptor Sakura is CLAMP’s most famous work by far, and its 20th anniversary was coming up in 2017. With promises of an anime adaptation and plenty of merchandising in tow, CLAMP got to work on the Clear Card Arc.First things first: that anime is a terrible way to experience the Clear Card Arc, and Cardcaptor Sakura in general. A surprisingly weak effort from Studio Madhouse, the anime adaptation of Clear Card Arc has middling production values, a washed-out aesthetic with far too much bloom, and bland designs. Something’s wrong with all of the eyes. I do appreciate the continuity changes to reflect the original’s anime-only arcs – Meiling is back! However, this adaptation suffers from a staggering amount of filler. Even the manga-adapted parts play out at a dreadfully slow pace, as if they’re just stalling for time and padding out a dearth of chapters. I like even the most aimless parts of the 1998 anime, but here it just doesn’t sit right. Also, the new soundtrack is so bad that they start recycling the original OST halfway through the production.The Clear Card Arc anime ends in a truly terrible fashion. By the final episode, we still know nothing about the main conflict, just that a handful of characters, including Syaoran, are deliberately keeping Sakura in the dark. We’re left with only Sakura’s cryptic nightmares and a friend’s ominous butler as clues. Ten minutes before the show ends, we’re still fucking around and baking sweets, until finally Sakura has an encounter with the presumed main villain that results in a timeline reset. The first few minutes of the first episode play out again, except everything feels a little wrong now.Writing this out, this sounds almost kind of cool. Surreal, even. But for such a mediocre show, it’s not that in the slightest! No resolution, no foreshadowing, just all of the plodding events from the past 21 episodes fully undone, as if the show is mocking and taunting the viewer. “How’s that for wasting your time?”The Clear Card manga at least knows what it wants to be – a plot-driven mystery doubling down on the series lore. The first few volumes of the manga act as something of a smokescreen for the eventual plot developments, much like how xxxHolic Rei began as a continuation of the original before revealing itself to be an alternate timeline and getting plotty. Of course, this being the only stuff that the anime adapts explains exactly why it felt so vague and formless – it’s supposed to be an aimless rehash! You see, Sakura’s powers are now growing at such an unchecked pace that she’s able to create new cards unconsciously. Through recalling old memories she’s been unknowingly manifesting remixes of old CCS scenarios into reality, capturing cards that are largely simulacra of the originals.I’ve gone back and forth on the merits of this plot twist, but having now read the whole thing, it’s one of the better tricks in this manga’s repertoire. It’s a bit of a meta jab at nostalgia – Sakura is simply going through the emotions because that’s what’s expected of her, to the point where the past is literally being summoned into the present, preventing any character growth or development on her part. I wish it had been the main narrative conflict, to be honest.Of course, I can’t give them too much credit, because a lot of Clear Card’s problems can be blamed on CLAMP simply playing it safe with their characters. I went into it expecting to see cute moments of Sakura and Syaoran early on in their relationship, having confessed at the end of the original manga and again in the second movie. But it often feels as if they’re right back where they were before, fully unable to convey their emotions to one another and relying on friends and circumstances to mediate. Characters like Yukito and Toya don’t get any meaningful or sweet moments, instead showing up only to move the plot forward when their abilities or connections are necessary. And don’t even get me started on Tomoyo. Sure, she’s around plenty. But when plot comes to shove, she’s narratively set aside every single time, hardly even getting to dress Sakura in cute outfits. You can’t keep that from her!!! She needs her dressup time to live!!! Though in the end, I’m almost willing to forgive it all for Frogcaptor Sakura. Almost.Anyways, as I said earlier the initial episodic format gives way to mysterious plot development after mysterious plot development. A lot of the card capturing is from here on out is largely incidental. Of course, the in-universe explanation is that Sakura is just manifesting cards left and right at this point in ways that don’t really require card abilities to be used, since she’s not being tested like in the original. But also, if we’re tapering down the fun card usage and the cute slice of life scenes, how much is really left?Well, there’s a powerful sorcerer named Yuna D. Kaito who’s manipulating events behind the scenes. His goal, it seems, is to try and put pressure on Sakura in such a specific way that she manifests the exact card that he needs. What card is that? Why? What should be a straightforward scheme is drip-fed so slowly that it’s easy to lose the narrative thread. At least he has a cunty little rabbit who acts as his Kero-chan type guardian. She’s fun, although her role in the plot ends up oddly convoluted.Kaito is the butler and sole guardian of a young girl named Akiho, who is Sakura’s age and gradually becomes more and more similar to her in both personality and demeanor as the series goes on. Unfortunately, neither of these new characters are a particularly exciting addition to this world. A more introverted Sakura without her existing social ties is fairly uninteresting, and it’s obvious from the very first appearance that the butler is scheming and going to be our Eriol-style villain.Except Eriol wasn’t really that bad of a guy, was he? So one gets the feeling that Kaito’s villainy will give way to sympathetic motivations and a bittersweet resolution. This process somehow takes the entire manga. Sixteen volumes is an unbearably long length for the story actually being told here. For reference, the original Cardcaptor Sakura is only twelve volumes, and Eriol doesn’t even show up until halfway through. In the meantime, new characters are steadily introduced, and secret aspects of existing characters are gradually revealed, so it never feels stale. In comparison, Clear Card Arc has an incredibly small pool of new characters and concepts to work with, and it has to stretch them out soooooo much further than the original ever did. This means that Sakura as well as reader are constantly kept in the dark, and plot payoff happens so infrequently and is so carefully measured out that it just never feels good. The result is a truly meandering plot instead of anything resembling “narrative arcs”. It’s maddening. It’s lunacy. This is all pretty similar to the rest of CLAMP’s modern sequels – take the existing setting and add a few new characters, layer on the intrigue, provide some additional backstory, and see what happens. Drug & Drop and xxxHolic Rei are both like this, but they’re only a few volumes long apiece! Once again, sixteen volumes of drastically less substance than the original, is ridiculous. After the initial fakeout (which, to repeat, encompasses the entire Clear Card anime), the manga has a noticeable aversion to returning to the original’s vibes, except there’s nothing to replace it.CLAMP’s modern artstyle, developed in the Tsubasa shounen mines, has noticeably thicker lines than their spindly compositions of old. It comes off as a bit simplistic in the early chapters, but as CLAMP drops all of their other series and begins to work at a slower pace, the drawings reach an impressive fidelity. Card Arc is a timeloop narrative with a lot of fairytale elements, so they went with steampunk and Alice in Wonderland as the primary motifs, neither of which are aesthetics that I’m particularly a fan of. At least they do go hard on them.I’ve been putting it off, but I’m going have to actually summarize the later plot beats. Kaito keeps rewinding time for the sake of his Schemes, and curses Syaoran so that he can’t talk to Sakura about it. Great! He straight-up cast a spell of Narrative Contrivance. This will surely make things fun to read. Anyways, all of the time magic is taking a toll on Kaito, and he starts dying about it before we even know what’s going on or why. Sakura continues to get impossibly powerful, but it kind of stops being of concern to the plot? It’s is a shame because I was hoping they’d do a thing where someone dear to her has to try and put her down to keep the world from breaking.CLAMP does finally detonate the setting in the last few volumes. We go full clockwork calamity, with every aspect of the narrative colliding such that the entire Tomoeda school puts on a steampunk fair revolving around a play titled “Alice in Clockland”, which was originally a magical book that nobody but Akiho read because she’s the one who manifested it. Still on track? Okay, by putting on the play, Sakura and Akhio get sucked into the world of this book, but Syaoran (dressed as a steampunk catboy, for reasons) is able to dash in to help at the last second thanks to… Touya gaining the ability to stop time for a few seconds out of nowhere? Why are we stealing classic Jojo asspulls for Cardcaptor Sakura, of all things?From here on out the manga aims to speedrun Tsubasa levels of Plot Bullshit. Syaoran has to fight his NPC doppelganger (also a catboy) because he wasn’t expected to make it into the narrative that Sakura and Akiho got sucked into. That whole mess ends with Kaito swapping Sakura and Akiho’s roles in the play, setting of a cascading chain of events that resets the timeline one last time and recasts Akiho as Sakura’s twin sister. That was Kaito’s plan all along. He needed to remove the magic from within her and place her under the protection of the Kinomoto family, so that evil British wizards wouldn’t seek her out and do fucked-up experiments to try and draw out her magical potential. That’s it! Why did this scheme need to be slow-rolled over the entirety of the manga? It’d be fine if it showed up late like Eriol in the original, but as a grand overarching justification for Clear Card Arc existing, it’s so shallow.This timeline reset means that the opening of the manga rolls AGAIN, this time with Sakura and Akiho as bestie sisters. At least it explains why Kaito and the plot in general were so invested in making Sakura and Akiho converge on having nearly the same personality. Also, three or four separate characters take the time to call Sakura a siscon, including Tomoyo, who must be eating her own organs while saying that. I cannot fathom why they would take the time to brand her as such. I had to guess, it’s because stepsiblings are the one kind of ~scandalous relationship~ missing from the original CCS, and they wanted to finally get around to it decades later. But why is this coming up eight chapters before the end, only to be fully undone alongside the rest of this particular timeline in the finale? What did you mean by that, CLAMP?Since everyone’s clued in on the time-loop bullshit at this point, Sakura and company are able to use the Clow Cards to record messages that can persist through loops, allowing them to break the cycle once and for all and travel to space in order to rescue the dying Kaito, who has… turned into a dragon and been imprisoned inside an illusory moon?Look, nothing makes sense at this point, but at least this is compatible with my take on Touhou that any plot revolving around the moon is destined to become incredibly convoluted. Sometimes you gotta pull a quick Imperishable Night! The closest thing we have to a final boss at this point is an automated meteor spell set up by those damn offscreen British magicians, which Sakura does manage to disarm using her nascent demiurge powers. With one last reset, everyone gets their happy ending. Akiho can hang out with Sakura and friends and take care of Kaito as they figure out how to cure his time dragon illness, and she never has to worry about wizards hunting her down ever again. End manga.Who is this for? Demographic crossovers have always been a strong point for CLAMP. They’ve got plenty of shoujo that can just as easily be appreciated by boys, and shounen and seinen that draw in all kinds. Combined with their unique aesthetics and atmosphere, CLAMP’s best manga has something for everyone.But Clear Card Arc is, comparatively, a funnel. You have to be a diehard fan of Cardcaptor Sakura to understand it in the first place, and you also have to be deeply invested in its lore and magic system. I don’t know about you, but those are just not what I come to this series for. Groups who will be disappointed include: Sakura x Syaoran shippers, slice of life enjoyers, acolytes of Tomoyo (patron saint of pining lesbians), people who like the nonmagical extended cast, and fans of the original anime who appreciate quality adaptations.Clear Card Arc is a curious, yet ultimately meaningless, exercise in nostalgia. It mostly fails as a throwback, and decidedly fails as a soft reboot for pulling new fans in. Its priorities would interest almost no one except for CLAMP themselves, and its few novel ideas are stretched so thin that the whole thing feels like a well-drawn exercise in meaninglessness. CLAMP’s clearly been running out of steam these past fifteen years, shelving most of their projects in favor of ever-safer investments. Cardcaptor Sakura was the logical endpoint for this endeavor. And while they did enough obligate rehashing in the first few volumes to script the anime and stock the gashapon machines, one wonders who the rest is for. Were these sixteen volumes a passion project, borne out of total creative freedom, or was it stretched the way it was out of contractual and financial obligation? Both answers are dire.Now that Clear Card is over, CLAMP plans to resume xxxHolic Rei, and while I liked that one, I hope more than anything that they’re able to take a good, long, break. CLAMP’s members are starting to grow old, and they’ve been working near-nonstop since early adulthood. Hopefully the royalties are good enough that they can take a break and get those creative juices flowing again, or even retire for good! I wouldn’t begrudge them one bit. They’re fascinating and accomplished mangaka, even if they also did Chobits.One more rating, for old time’s sake.CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 4/5OVERALL RATING: 2/5

Floating Catacombs

Dec 22, 2024 • Subscribe

Chobits, Alice in Wonderland, Cardcaptor Sakura

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