Character spotlight: Cure Marine

So it seems that ever since Josh started his contest on the CollectionDX show to win an S.H. Figuarts Cure Marine, a lot of people seem to have been coming down on this figure as another girly figure and have been asking why they would bother giving this away, and why they would want to win something like that. Well I’m here to tell you exactly why you would want to win that Cure Marine.

Cure Marine is a character from the 2009-2010 anime series HeartCatch Precure! who is known as Kurumi Erika. She’s a fourteen year old girl who loves fashion. With the help of her fairy partner Coffret, she is able to turn into Cure Marine. By just that description, she may sound like just another typical magical girl type character, but she is absolutely not typical in any sense of the word.

Kurumi Erika is one of the most emotionally and physically charged characters I’ve seen in an anime in a long time. She’s energetic, blunt, hyperbolic, spunky, and most importantly: short. She’s the sort of character that will get incredibly excited about accomplishing something and will set her eyes on that goal no matter what.  Regardless of the fact that she comes from an anime intended for a young female audience, she’s an incredibly entertaining and well-written character in an already fantastic show.

That’s just describing the characteristics of Erika while she’s just a regular school girl. When she becomes Cure Marine, every single aspect of her is amplified one hundredfold. Cure Marine is always the first to rush into a fight and punch a monster right in the face. She’s also the first to just kind of scream and cause a blast-radius explosion to happen around her that causes massive damage to those surrounding her.

I used the word hyperbolic to describe Cure Marine earlier, and I really think it’s a word that perfect describes many of the different aspects of her character. She’s just as quick to beat the crap out of a monster with a camera for a head as she is to eagerly help her friends and do good in the world. Her wide emotional range and spectrum is the reason that I am such a huge fan of her character, and I’m not the only one. Cure Marine is quite popular in Japan as well, to the point where there is an entire fanbook dedicated just to her character (Still need to track down that book, speaking of which…). With this in mind, it’s not just me that thinks that Cure Marine is a super awesome character. Anyone who has watched HeartCatch Precure can agree with me that Cure Marine is a giant blue flowery explosion of awesomeness that will punch you right in the chest so hard is shatters ribs.

And seriously, this girl makes the best faces.