meimi-haneoka
俺の「すべて」 / All of me
30↑, Italian. Fandom blog.CLAMP (CCS is my main) & 90's shoujo manga. YunaAki & SyaoSaku. Proud Momoist. In this house Akiho & Kaito are loved unconditionally so if you have a problem with that, steer clear. Currently celebrating CCS 25th anniversary! I post translation differences between the ENG and JP versions of the Clear Card chapters with the tag #translation differences (it seems I have CLAMP's blessing for that), and always love to discuss theories & aspects of the story! When CCS is featured I post reports of CLAMP Spaces/Podcasts too.Tag for my art: #my fanartsTag for my YunaAki writing: #spilled words
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Do you guys ever think about how many times CLAMP tiptoe around the word "death", in Clear Card? (you: what kind of question is that???)
Because it's an awful lot.
The actual verb 死ぬ (to die), the classical one, is never mentioned* to indicate "death", and I totally see the reasons why: mainly target and "world view" of the series (lord, if there's something I learned during these 8 years of observing the reactions from the JP fans is that the 世界観, the "world view" is EVERYTHING and if the authors dare doing something that goes against it, they won't forgive them. Especially for a series rooted deep in everybody's childhood).
* (Actually, it is used in chapter 43 in a funny skit with Kero, Suppy and Nakuru, where Kero says "I thought I would die!!!" because he's too embarrassed by the SyaoSaku scene he had to forcefully witness hidden in Sakura's bag 😂but it's a foolish scene)
I think the first time where they actually start to dangle it in our faces is in chapter 28, when they make Momo scream in panic: "If you rewind that far, the repercussions will be immesurable!!" and then Kaito confirming right after "Time magic shortens the caster's lifespan".
命を削る indeed means "to shorten one's lifespan", and what else does that mean, if not that he's killing himself little by little, by using time magic? Sure, magicians have a longer lifespan, but...
Another instance where they make us "sniff" the smell of death but they don't serve the actual meal is in chapter 33, when Kaito goes out in the garden to counter the attack coming from the Association. He condescendingly says 力不足と己の身が滅ぶのを恐れて, mocking them for not including time magic in their collective attack because they're afraid their power won't be enough and they'll literally wreck their bodies in the process. Kaito doesn't straight up say "they're afraid to die", but the verb 滅ぶ means "to perish, to be ruined, to be destroyed" and we all saw what effects time magic had on Kaito's body. He's basically calling them p*ssies, yes.
And excuse me, but the most apparent one....when Kaito (or the Clan) says multiple times "Her soul will break", should Akiho write on herself more power than her body can sustain....isn't that just a very generous way to avoid saying "Akiho WILL DIE" to not scare the young readers away? Because, think about it...if her soul breaks...what is left of her? What is left of Akiho, as we know her? Yes, just a shell, a corpse for use and consumption of the Association/Clan, exactly.
And what to say about the scene of chapter 41 when Nadeshiko is trying to mom-talk Kaito into reason and the guy answers "I guess it's because I'm getting closer to become the same kind of entity as you", meaning, a ghost??? Hence, he's basically saying "I'm about to die"? I always snicker when I read that part because I'm like "OH COME ON, CLAMP, MAKE HIM SAY THE WORD" 😂
Another instance where the characters dance around the concept of death is in chapter 51, when Momo gets to have this very mom-son talk with Kaito (yes, exactly, Kaito set into motion several mother figures throughout the story - Lilie, Momo, Nadeshiko herself - that should tell you SOMETHING). Momo is trying to make him understand that he's literally betted his life away when he made the contract with her, so that should give him an idea of how important this mission is to him, and for whom he's doing this for. She says "When you made the contract with me, you revealed your true name. We could say I hold your heart as magician in the palm of my hand". Here Momo is basically already mentioning the concept I've been saying time and time again when Kaito revealed his true name to Akiho in chapter 80: in CLAMP works, revealing your true name to someone is like placing the most vulnerable part of yourself in their hands. The "imagery" Momo suggests here is actually pretty disturbing: the word 心臓 (heart) is the one commonly used to indicate the actual organ, more than "heart as core of the emotions", and so what she's suggesting is that at any moment, without notice, she might close that hand and crush his heart, basically killing him. Of course Momo would never do that, but she wants to remind him of what damned situation he's put himself in, how far he went for the person he still isn't ready to recognize at this point of the story.
I think the closer they went to say the "forbidden word" was when Lilie in chapter 72 explained to Sakura the extent of her premonitory dreams: "I know things that will happen shortly ahead...things way far ahead in the future...and even things that will happen when I'll be gone".
Another instance where they TOTALLY dance around the real situation (that is, Kaito should've been dead-dead-dead by then) is in chapter 80 when Eriol explains to Akiho what Kaito had been doing: I'm not sure if it's Eriol who sugarcoated it in his speech, or Akiho herself while recounting it to Sakura, but she says "He messed with lots (of dangerous magic), so his condition wasn't supposed to be that good", another polite way to say "he should've been dead by now". In fact, what's keeping him alive is literally the fact that the pocket watch (and therefore, his time) is frozen for now.
And sometimes I wonder if the "unhappiness" or "grief" that Yelan foresaw for Sakura, in the eventuality she couldn't gain control of her own powers, included....death too....NAAAAAAAHHHH
(well, I mean, who didn't think of THAT when they made Kaito say that he could see Nadeshiko because he was close to dying?? Well knowing that Sakura could suddenly see her too?? they did that on purpose jfc)
#card captor sakura#ccsakura#clear card arc#just very randomly musing about stuff#I've been keeping tabs of how many times they've danced around the concept of death in this arc#and it's surprisingly a lot#lmao I feel like Barbie asking THAT question while they're dancing in the movie#but fear not cause even like this the arc never crosses the line#it's like saying well it's time for children to get accustomed with the concept and we'll gradually start to introduce it#gently very gently#but it's useless to keep avoiding it forever#I mean we got someone who was literally throwing his life away as one of the main characters and themes in this arc#sooo...
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When I said "this post is going to become so long I'll have to split it into two", it was because in my Trivia post n. 3 I originally thought to include the development and growth of Sakura and Syaoran's relationship too.......and then I fully realized what kind of two beasts I was about to deal with and I was like "no way, these need each their own post"
They both refer to Sakura's overall growth, but power+self understanding and her relationship with her boy deserve all the right attention and care in two dedicated, separate post.
I'm not sure if it'll be the next one I'll write or if I'll do something similar for YunaAki first....cause honest to god, the times when I got distracted and pulled into YunaAki's story while I was reviewing Sakura's journey were more than one....more than two....more than three, even. 😅
Can't deny my bias even when I'm working on something else I love....
Another post that I ABSOLUTELY need to do, and might take precedence over all the others, is the one about the significance of food in Clear Card, and all the handmade things.
Tamagoyaki, macarons, chocomint...
You have no idea how grating it was to see during the past 8 years all those comments mocking the presence of food in Clear Card, and presenting it as an irritating flaw in the narrative structure because "it wasted time", when it was clear as hell people weren't understanding the role of food in this story at all.
This one should hopefully be shorter so I might address that topic first.
#honestly there's so much to talk about#I know these posts will attract less attention now that the story is over because people like to move on#but no#I'll be here#I'll still be here ranting even when the party is over
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Clear Card Trivia 3 ~ Sakura's journey of growth and self-understanding throughout Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card
Hello and welcome back to my "Clear Card Trivia" series, a collection of informative posts where I delve into certain aspects of the story of Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card! ✨
The topic I will talk about today has been on my "to-do list" for long time. It's something I felt the need to talk about, and I won't hide the reason why: the desire to fully eviscerate this topic grew particularly after reading around certain criticism of Clear Card Arc. But also after listening to CLAMP's Twitter Spaces, particularly the ones towards the end of the story.
It's something that, setting aside my obvious love for the new characters, will always make me think that Clear Card Arc has been a very welcome addition to the series.
This post will delve into Sakura's growth throughout Clear Card Arc.
Sakura grew up considerably during the story, and had a character development that sadly not many people truly realized.
I'm not talking about an evolution of the character design which, despite changing and evolving throughout the story (as it's expected for a long-running serialization), kept depicting Sakura consistently with quite young looks...no, I'm talking about her mental growth, in relation to her self-knowledge and her relationship with her magic powers.
A journey that might almost feel "frustrating", because it is full of "up and downs", and Sakura sometimes seems to be taking one step forward and two back. Aside from the obvious practical reasons (the plot had to develop several other storylines simultaneously), it very much reflects the realistic growth of a pre-teen, which is never a straight line but is made of improvements and relapses.
Along the journey, I couldn't really avoid mentioning some bits of the development of Sakura's relationship with Syaoran, which will get its own deep and detailed post another day.
There's also an extra about the significance of the Clear Cards in the story, at the end.
I have to be honest, the post is very long, but I tried to insert visual elements to make it easier on the eye.
If you're curious to know how the hell I found so much to talk about for this specific topic, follow me under the cut and dive into Sakura's journey throughout Clear Card (it's also a good way to review the story)! ✨
A Disconnected Beginning
Clear Card Arc starts in a very "festive" and happy way: everything is peaceful, a new exciting chapter of Sakura's educational life is starting with the beginning of middle school, Syaoran is back to Tomoeda, this time to stay forever with his beloved girl...everything seems so perfect. And precisely in chapter 1, before everything takes an unexpected turn, we have this scene here, which I consider the "true" beginning of everything:
Sakura says "I haven't been using this lately...well, that's for the better".
At the beginning of Clear Card Arc, Sakura seems to be feeling disconnected from her natural gift.
Despite she had to go on a quest to collect all the Clow Cards, which later she gave a new life to by changing them into Sakura Cards, we have to remember that Sakura was born with magic powers.
They weren't bestowed on her by Kero-chan, nor by the contract with the Clow Book: she always had magic in her blood, and it apparently "woke up" on that fateful day she found the Clow Book in the library of her father.
At the beginning of this arc, Sakura seems to think that the purpose, the meaning of this natural gift which is literally part of herself, has been fulfilled by transforming all the Cards, and splitting Eriol's power as he had requested.
Her words here seem to be suggesting a general idea of "if I have to use this key (therefore, my magic powers), it means something troublesome is happening, so it's better if I'm not using it because it means everything is okay".
And although we can't really deny that what happened afterwards is far from being able to be considered "peaceful", this scene here always left a bad taste in my mouth because there's almost a negative vibe attached to the idea of her magic, transpiring from Sakura's words. It's almost as if she's politely rejecting it.
Precisely after she places her Star Key in her jewelry box, probably hoping to never have to use it again, she has her first premonitory dream of the events that will shake her life afterwards. Almost as if her powers were trying to tell her "no my dear, this is you and you'd better come to terms with it as soon as possible".
Then, as we all know, the Cards turn blank. Sakura produces a new key while having another dream and a quest to fight and "secure" some strange phenomena happening around her begins, leaving her in a state of increasing confusion.
This is the beginning of the part of the story that I quite literally call "Sakura loses sight of herself".
At this very early stage of the story, she still doesn't know that she started losing control over her increasing magical power, and it is definitely not a coincidence that all of this began when she thought of shutting her main magic tool away in a box, hoping to ignore it forever.
For plot reasons, this also happens simultaneously to Syaoran taking the spirits of the Sakura Cards away from her (because in the beginning, you had to be tricked into thinking he was up to something shady and was the real mastermind behind all the incidents).
Syaoran expected for Sakura to lose control over her powers, as his mother predicted a general period of trouble for her that could lead her to unhappiness, albeit without any clear indication of what could happen: Syaoran came to Japan knowing something was bound to happen to his girl and her powers, and that something was going to lead her to grief, but he had no idea about all the rest. So his uncertain and reckless approach, which ended up in some cases worsening the situation, is also somewhat understandable.
He was acting like a worried, overprotective boyfriend at his wit's end.
The strange events, which Sakura materializes into a new set of Cards, surely leave her distraught and confused, not to mention the situation with the Sakura Cards and Eriol's missing replies, but I feel that what really destabilizes her core are the constant dreams she gets, sometimes even in the middle of her waking hours, making her faint on the spot wherever she is.
Premonitory dreams are a part of her natural gift that she began to express ever since the OG manga, but she never seemed to really understand them or take them seriously.
This time around, she keeps seeing this cloaked figure and this terrifying dragon, no one speaks a word despite her relentless questions and the cloaked figure seems to be wanting to take her newly made key away (Lilie!!! what were you trying to do!! *facepalm* she probably tried to pull her closer so she could talk to her), so it's just normal that all of that leaves her increasingly stressed and anxious, even though initially you never see her openly and verbally stating that, due to her overall positive nature ("I'll manage it, somehow" is part of her "everything will be alright" invincible spell, and this is indeed what she keeps telling herself in the beginning of the arc, even though in some occasions it turned out to be a double-edged sword, as sometimes it looked more like sweeping her fears under the carpet, to me).
"Something Is Not Right"
Dream after dream, Card after Card, Sakura begins to have these general feelings of discomfort and of "something is not right, here", as she openly states to Syaoran in this scene of volume 4, chapter 14.
There's something about this situation that is pricking her sixth sense, and makes her uneasy, but she can't quite put her finger on it yet. All she can do is to keep "fighting" these phenomena happening around her, hoping to find out more along the way.
She reiterates the same feeling of uneasiness at the end of chapter 15, after what I consider one of the most concerning side-effects of her poor control over her powers: Sakura seems almost "in trance" while she leads her guardians to the exit of the maze, and acts in a very uncharacteristic, cold way by shoving her bag in front of Yue to make him hold it for her.
It's almost as if her magical sixth sense worked too strongly and warped her personality in that moment: an effect that has been mentioned several times in relation to powerful magicians like Clow, Eriol and later Kaito too, so it's not farfetched at all to attribute this one-off occurrence to her loss of control over her strong powers, which ended up affecting her personality too. Luckily, it didn't happen again in the rest of the story and the capture of this Card was completely changed in the anime (a wise decision imho, since the JP fandom is particularly fussy about the integrity of Sakura's character, and she needed to stay "Sakura" in order to do what she did at the end).
At the culmination of a "mini arc" (the visit to great-grandpa Masaki) characterized by uncontrolled visions of Nadeshiko, another frightening dream (one that ended up dragging even Akiho in, due to the synchronization) and Sakura for the first time ever confronting Syaoran about the things he's been hiding from her, we reach the following scene of volume 5, chapter 23.
"I Wish I Had A Mirror"
I always considered this scene extremely important, because for the first time Sakura spells out clearly the inner turmoil that's been gnawing at her soul ever since this ordeal with the new Cards started.
"The truth is...I'm the worst at understanding myself. And that is probably causing lots of concern to everyone."
"I wish I had a mirror. A mirror that could reflect the real me. Then, I would probably understand how to not make everyone worry"
Here, Sakura clearly spells out the frustration of knowing, feeling in her bones that there's something wrong with her, something that she's not understanding about herself, and that something is causing problems, but most importantly, is causing her loved ones to worry about her.
Let's not forget that not only Syaoran, but also Yukito, Touya, Fujitaka, Tomoyo, Eriol & his family have all been watching her situation in apprehension, each of them making decisions and moving discretely in a direction they felt was right (and admittedly, not all instances were so).
Sakura can somehow feel all of that, she can feel that it's related to something she still hasn't realized about herself.
This tends to be forgotten because it happens in a relatively early part of the plot, but notice how this is the same problem Kaito suffers from.
A quite stunted ability to understand oneself.
Sakura and Kaito definitely have lots in common, when it comes to this specific part of themselves.
Keep this in mind, because it'll be relevant later.
And then, the situation worsens.
Sakura's dreams start to terrify her, because they begin to show Syaoran's face under the cloak of the mysterious figure who's scaring her in her dreams. An apparent truth she cannot accept, she won't accept, even though she's still unsure about what exactly these dreams she's having are. Despite her boyfriend has been acting shady for long time, she decides to trust him and wait for him to talk to her about all the stuff he's holding inside, instead of putting him through the wringer. This also means, though, that Sakura will keep all her fears to herself, eventually bottling up.
Furthermore, Kaito starts to rewind time to fix a situation without a way out (in chapter 28, Akiho was on the verge of going berserk completely and unleash the artifact), creating an additional sense of confusion when Sakura can feel that her finger is numb due to strain, but she can't understand why (she had fought Kaito's time magic unconsciously). Whenever Kaito will rewind time, even later on, Sakura's magical sixth sense will try to wake her consciousness up more and more, giving her these vibes of "deja vu" or making her act in an apparently inexplicable way.
In the first part of Clear Card, Sakura sometimes literally looks like a soul wandering about in confusion, dragged by the events.
I wish to point out that this is not a flaw in the characterization, it is a precise design by CLAMP.
Sakura IS, in this part of the story, confused and lost, overwhelmed by the events.
She has no idea how to approach this matter other than "treating the symptoms" as they come.
This happens because she's still, surprisingly, quite reluctant to embrace a fundamental part of herself: her innate magic power, which expresses itself mainly through her intuition. But we'll gradually get there.
Around chapter 30, before the big realization, Sakura's situation reached a point where:
- her Sakura Cards unexpectedly became blank;
- almost everyday (sometimes multiple times a day) there's a new incident that she secures into new transparent Cards;
- she constantly sees ominous dreams (in scattered order) with a cloaked figure acting in a questionable way and a scary dragon, and at some point she starts seeing her boyfriend under that cloak;
- her boyfriend acts shady, Eriol doesn't reply to her messages;
- there's a general feeling of "something is not right" with her magic and some stuff starts to not make sense to her (because Kaito rewinds time)
It is at this point that Sakura finally moves one (giant) step forward and connects all the "puzzle pieces" she collected (particularly, how much more "obvious" the creation of a Card became) and understands that she's been the one causing subconsciously each and every single incident that lead to the creation of a new transparent Card.
"I'm Angry At Myself"
And with Syaoran finally coming clean with her (because at that point he had no reason to keep things hidden anymore, as the thing he was trying to delay ultimately happened - and believe me, I'm sure he partly felt relieved to not need to lie anymore, as that took quite a toll on him too), Sakura can at last give an explanation to at least a part of the things that are happening.
And she finally realizes that the doubt that was tormenting her was true: she DID, in fact, not understand something very important about herself, she didn't realize that it was her own power going out of control and that all the incidents that happened bore "her magic signature", so to speak. She failed to "tune in" with her magic.
For the first time ever, Sakura expresses anger at herself.
She will direct that anger (to a lesser extent) to Syaoran too, but I'll tackle that in a separate post.
This is a moment of deep reflection and regrets for Sakura: the poor understanding of herself, the poor "communication" between her heart and her magic powers brought to a situation where her most beloved person was putting himself in danger in order to protect her, while trying to not make things escalate.
This is a very sensitive, beautiful and important moment, steeped in conflicting and complex feelings (and remember, Sakura is just a pre-teen. It is normal for a pre-teen like her to not understand herself, but there's just one tiny detail: she's not a common pre-teen, due to her natural gift, and she needs to take that into account).
Eventually Sakura calms down, and after creating Rewind, her resolute face while hugging tightly Syaoran suggests that from now on she'll face this matter from another, more courageous and determined perspective.
Or at least, these were her good intentions.
Because unfortunately, insecurities are hard to eradicate and in the central part of the story it's shocking to realize how far longer Sakura will insist in shutting away her emotions and refusing to listen to her heart (and intuition) fully.
"It's Just My Imagination"
Part of Sakura's anxiety might have been sedated with the revelation that the Clear Cards are produced by the girl herself, but unfortunately the true core of her problems was not solved at all and will only surface more clearly in the next 20 chapters.
Sakura actively starts having "premonitory bad feelings" when she sees Akiho in volume 7 chapter 34, a bad feeling that she does check with Syaoran, but quickly dismisses as "well, it's just my imagination". This will basically be one of the major problems preventing her from reaching the complete control of her magic.
Sakura, knowing her magic potential, should've given way more credit to her sixth sense, but her anxiety, her insecurity and her crippled connection to her innate gift still pushes her to dismiss these "signs" as nothing really important or true.
Timely as hell, a few hours later something bad will indeed happen to Akiho, where she completely loses consciousness for the first time and the clan/Association actively starts to absorb Sakura's power through the artifact implanted in Akiho. All of this was caused by the high concentration of magic that "triggered" Akiho's artifact (and here I have to sarcastically "applaud" Kaito, just like Syaoran he's another one who does stuff before thinking through, ultimately worsening the problem).
Once trapped in Akiho's artifact, thanks to her power Sakura can see the most horrifying glimpse of Akiho's past, when she was turned into a magic artifact, by living it on her own skin.
And even though Kaito is forced to rewind time once again to save the situation, erasing these memories from Sakura's head, her heart (which is tightly connected to her magical sixth sense - I'd daresay her heart is straight up the source of her magic) DOES REMEMBER, pushing Sakura to act in an apparently irrational way, crying and hugging Akiho tight in empathy.
Sakura is particularly shaken by this feeling, still in pain even hours later, but once again she doesn't understand where it comes from. However, she does express with Syaoran an intention to talk to him about it once she's able to put it into words, and in the meantime do her best with all the rest. At least, there's an intention to understand better this part of herself, but it's still soon to see actual results.
Aaand CLAMP really seem to be wanting to test Sakura in this arc, because at this point of the plot, they add the electrocution spell. 😅
No one seems to understand who caused it (it's not Sakura, nor Kaito, but now we know it was none other than Yelan!!) and Sakura's anxiety increases once again. The fact only Syaoran gets affected by it inevitably reignites the doubts in her mind, unwittingly reminded of that terrifying dream of Cloaked Syaoran she keeps seeing...but she stubbornly keeps telling herself "no, it's not like that, it's just a dream".
It's undeniable that this situation where she cannot understand her foretelling dreams yet, and the way they show her scattered hints because her power is out of control, has surely contributed to Sakura's insecurity when it comes to trust her own intuition.
Her power is so out of control at this point, that even when Kaito shrinks her and throws her in a hole carved into a tree (landing in a "world" created with magic where he hopes she'll create the right Card) her dreams take over again (it's apparent by the "shaaan" sound and how everything turns suddenly pitch black, a common background of her dreams), showing her Akiho in the dress she was wearing when she was turned into an artifact and, inevitably, Sakura's biggest fear, "Cloaked Syaoran".
Pay attention because these visions she's getting here thanks to her power match what will happen later on: what the talking flowers tell her here will turn out to be the beginning of the lyrics of the main theme of the "Alice in Clockland" play.
This vision of Cloaked Syaoran seemingly "about to do something" to Akiho horrifies Sakura to the point of screaming in terror and creating one of the most unsettling Cards, "Break".
It is after this very scary moment that Sakura starts to wonder very specifically for what purpose she is creating all these Cards. The purpose is actually more than one, but she definitely posed herself THE RIGHT question, as this brings her one step closer to the core of the problem and eventually embracing her own magic abilities.
Then, between chapters 43 and 45 we finally start to see some changes in Sakura: surprisingly, she begins to listen more to her sixth sense, first catching Yukito red-handed while activating a newly acquired magic, and then wondering about a strange painful feeling in her chest when her father tells her that lately she and Akiho became even more similar.
We were all lead to believe that this was the foreshadowing of Akiho taking her place (cause everything in the plot at this point deceivingly hints at Kaito wanting to switch them), but she actually was getting foreshadowings of the "rewritten world", where Sakura would genuinely feel wrecked to know that someone important to Akiho was missing, precisely when Akiho would've become part of her family as her twin. In fact, in chapter 45, before falling completely asleep, she hears again the ominous "you won't be able to come back" (the Association's threat to Kaito), wondering WHO wouldn't be able to come back - somehow, Sakura knows that it's not directed at her.
"Just Tell me Honestly How You Feel"
And then, we reach another moment that I consider pivotal for Sakura's growth during this Clear Card Arc.
The moment when she's on the verge of breaking down and finally lets all her feelings out.
Her anxiety over the dream with the Cloaked Figure reached the highest peak, so much that she finally manifests a Card, Mirage, that challenges her precisely with that appearance. While Sakura battles that Card (which at the moment she still believes it's an actual person), she seems resoluted to get to the bottom of this story, and to pull down that hood to know the truth. You can really feel that she's so done with all this psychological torture.
The fact the real Syaoran appears right at that moment and she finds out the person she saw was just a Card is partly a relief for her, but also throws Sakura again in despair because who the hell is that person in the dream, then??
Syaoran, as the good and attentive boyfriend he is, can just feel that Sakura is stressing over something, so he brings her to his home to help her calming down. And to her umpteenth attempt at sweeping her negative emotions under the carpet, beating around the bush commenting over the tea with a fake smile, he cuts immediately her bullshit and just tells her : "You don't need to force yourself. Just tell me how you feel right now".
When she hears that she's allowed to speak out her emotions with honesty, Sakura wears on her face one of the most heartbreaking expressions of the entire manga. She's literally about to break down in tears of exhaustion, as you can see it above. ☝️
Listening to her, gradually, Syaoran encourages Sakura to get out all that's been torturing her lately, particularly about the dream with the Cloaked Figure. It is a very difficult moment for her, because she has to relive the dream, and expose in front of him all the fears and doubts that were trying to tamper with her trust in him. Courageously, she goes through with it, even though her denial ("it's just a dream!") is so strong that she ends up creating another Card: "Dreaming". Sakura at first seems relieved to see the Card, in the hope that everything she saw was indeed a mere messed up dream and nothing else (see? she's again self-sabotaging her relationship with her magic) but Syaoran with his frankness is quick to bring her feet on the ground: the kanji on the Card show "yumemi", and the word can also indicate a "foretelling dream".
Although Sakura seems disheartened at first, her next dream with the Cloaked Figure is much more relaxed, so much that even the dragon doesn't particularly scare her anymore: our girl's intuition makes her correctly feel a sense of loneliness in this dream, which she attributes to the hooded figure, not realizing that it was more likely coming from the dragon itself (aka, Kaito).
After all, in chapter 72, Lilie will confirm that her presence ended up distracting her from the one "character" she should've paid all of her attention to.
Her intuition, despite being misattributed, ended up having a positive effect through the synchronization with Akiho: the girl will wake up with the same feeling of discomfort of her friend, and as if guided by hitsuzen, she will head to the garden where she'll find a sickly Kaito staring at the moon - most likely feeling the loneliness Sakura perceived in her dream.
I like to think that in this scene of chapter 48, Sakura subconsciously helped Akiho comforting Kaito, by waking her up with the unresting feeling, precisely when Kaito needed it the most.
Still not completely embraced her magical sixth sense yet, but a significant improvement.
The road between chapter 48 and chapter 52 is paved with lots of struggles, as the Mirror Sakura Card gets stolen by Kaito, Sakura runs the risk of being absorbed into Akiho's artifact again, she meets Momo for the first time and she's even given a hint about Kaito's plan (or what Momo thought was his plan, as he had benignly lied to her about that), but almost all of that gets rewound and erased when Kaito intervenes.
Moreover, despite not remembering anything consciously, Sakura is left with a sense of unhappiness when she looks at her home, a remnant of her brief journey in the world of Momo's book which straight up threw her into despair, showing her what her life would be if everyone forgot about her. She also finds once again a Card produced out of nowhere, "Time": I'm convinced she produced this Card because her conscience was awake while Momo and Kaito talked in stopped time, and their conversation triggered her sixth sense to produce Time as a result.
Needless to say, all of this worsens her state of mind once again, which leads to the other pivotal, and finally resolutive, scene of chapter 52.
Never Avert Your Eyes From Your Heart
We finally get to what I consider THE scene, the one that will definitively shake Sakura from her deadlock, from the anxiety that stunted her connection with her innate gift and her deepest emotions. And the one who helps her overcoming all her fears is, of course, the love of her life - with a honorable mention for none other than his mother Yelan!!
Chapter 52 got a very, very special place in my heart, because it's basically one giant parallel between SyaoSaku and YunaAki.
The two pairings experience similar situations, but the response from one side of each pairing is quite different.
Let's remind you for a moment of the part earlier in this post when I told you that Kaito and Sakura, for most of Clear Card, surprisingly have one thing in common: they don't seem to understand themselves well enough, and both have a tendency to look away from feelings that cause unrest to their hearts - anxiety for Sakura, love for Kaito.
Syaoran, always attentive and observant towards his girlfriend, notices immediately that Sakura is suffering, as soon as he sees her at school. Despite being unable to touch her to comfort her, he offers all of himself to support and listen to her concerns. Sakura is visibly and pleasantly surprised of how the boy could read behind her mask, that usual contrived smile with which she tries to dissimulate her emotions and not make him worry. A bad habit she's consolidated lately, but that Syaoran is gently determined to dismantle.
After opening up with him (and this is where Sakura differs from Kaito - by having an established relationship made of love and trust with Syaoran, Sakura lowers her walls with him), she falls once again into the usual trap of "but maybe it's just my imagination" and I love to see how Syaoran is her anchor to the ground, making her see the concreteness of this situation: he straight up tells her "you produced a Card out of it, it cannot be 'just your imagination'. "
And then, like a precious family gift, he passes on to her the priceless words of wisdom of his mother Yelan, an advice that not only Sakura, but also the other "lost soul" of the other paralleling pairing should listen to:
"People with magical power should never ignore the turmoil and stirring in their hearts, the so-called 'intuition'.
And it’s not limited to people with magical powers.
People should never avert their eyes from the changes in their heart."
This is a turning point for Sakura.
These words seem to positively "break" something inside of her, showing her the correct path to follow.
CLAMP beautifully portray this process of "embracing and assimilating" the words she's just heard, by making her place her hand over her heart. I love when they do that (they used the same visual when Akiho heard Kaito's true name, and 'wrote it' on the most important page of the book of her life).
Sakura is truly grateful for the words Syaoran relayed to her, precisely what she needed to get out of her impasse with her feelings and magic. She knows she can always count on the support of her soulmate even in the darkest moments, and she's thankful for having him in her life.
From this moment onwards, Sakura will experience several instances where her magical premonitory senses give her signals through the "stirring" of her heart. Contrarily to before, she starts to actively take them seriously, listening, without dismissing them as the delirium of an anxious little girl.
This allows her to activate the Siege Card in the fraction of a second, successfully shielding herself from Kaito's time magic, making her the first person ever who achieved that.
This also leads her to effectively remember that she saw Kaito using magic, even when time was rewound by him, and contact immediately Syaoran to talk about it, planning how to move from that moment onwards.
A little relapse on her bad habit is immediately dispelled by Syaoran, and our girl even goes as far as saying "there's something inside Akiho", even though she's not sure exactly why she's feeling that way. But it's an intuition she's having and she decides to not dismiss it anymore, with everyone trusting and supporting her in that direction.
By listening more and better to what her heart tells her, Sakura also decides to not confront Akiho about Kaito and his magic, because she's well aware of the feelings Akiho got for Kaito and she doesn't want to potentially disrupt their relationship. So, she decides to wait for her friend to talk about it first.
Thanks to this better understanding of her own intuition, she also says in chapter 57 that she wants to meet the guardian of the book "Alice in Clockland" once more, despite not remembering if and when she's met her before.
This also ultimately leads her to accept the role of Alice in the upcoming play scripted by her friend Naoko, because her sixth sense tells her that it's inevitable for her to do so.
It's important to emphasize how the other characters support and encourage her to listen to her innate gift, at this point, without trampling over her self-determination like they did before.
It is a moment of big growth and character development for everyone.
The Ultimate Growth: Finding a Meaning and a Purpose
What happens afterwards is history: the fateful "Alice in Clockland" play unfolds, and Kaito completes his plan to push Sakura to create the Card he needs, exchanging his magic artifact (the watch) with Akiho's one (the book), in addition to activating the forbidden magic to rewrite the memories of everyone, to fit Akiho as part of Sakura's family.
Sakura's intuition will be crucial to wake her true self up while in Clockland, succeeding in beating Kaito's magic multiple times, till Syaoran comes in and gives the "final blow", cutting off the spell definitively.
And even when everything seems lost because Kaito successfully activated the fobidden magic, changing their memories and erasing himself from their existence, Sakura's magic and sixth sense keep making her say things she either already said or heard before in the "unrewritten world".
Not only that, but even after meeting Lilie in a dream and forgetting her face (due to the strong influence of the forbidden spell), bit and pieces of that conversation keep coming back to her, and she listens dutifully to every single one of these "feelings".
Kaito might have overridden part of their memories (only the ones concerning him, Akiho and the events connected to the creation of the Cards), but the experience, feelings and personal growth of each character were left untouched, that's why the chemistry between Sakura and Syaoran is the same as before the play started, but also Sakura's personal relationship with her magic is far better than before (an information that might have seemed random and unimportant is that now Sakura summons Mirror even just to chat, an indication of her completely changed perspective on her magic).
Now that Sakura finally embraced her magical power, all that's left for her is to find a true purpose for it.
A question echoes in my mind, "What am I creating these Cards for?".
Sakura poses herself this question halfway through the story, and she finds the answer to it precisely at the end of the journey.
Her powerful magic intuition, combined with her immense empathy, leads her to realize that somebody is missing from their reality, and that person is the one Akiho loves.
At this point Sakura is unstoppable: she wants to listen to the voice in her heart that's screaming "Go and help them!! Give the true happiness back to Akiho!", and everyone can only follow her lead as she assertively puts into practice what her heart is telling her to do.
Sakura in this final part of the story shines brighter than ever.
She's more assertive and self-confident than ever.
All of this is because there's something she strongly wants to do with her innate gift, as Eriol unequivocally says in chapter 75: her power grows exponentially again, but this time it's not out of her control - it is Sakura herself who's voluntarily boosting it, thanks to her strong wish.
And that allows her to control it and use it exactly as she wants.
In chapter 79 her growth reaches the highest peak, by handling the resolution of Akiho and Kaito's personal problems in an admirable way (she steps aside for a moment to give Akiho all the agency she needed), but also finding herself in front of an uncomfortable dilemma, which leads her to an unavoidable reality: Sakura quickly understands that she cannot be on everyone's side and there are lines to be drawn at some point.
She can't be a pure and oblivious girl forever.
She needs to grow up.
There are choices to be made, especially when dealing with real evil people.
And Sakura choses to go on with the people she loves, even if that means she has to "stain" her "moral record" a little bit.
Empowered by this strong wish to fix the situation, she literally gives life to a miracle, protecting her dear friend and her beloved from the grasp of their abusers, simultanously giving everyone their true memories back.
The effort exerts her greatly, but what she achieved is by far the most important thing she's ever done with her magic power till now: she helped two dear people lost in a life-and-death situation.
Her magical growth went along with her personal, mental one.
This is also the reason why the accusations of "the other magicians should've trained her" end up being in vain: Sakura's problem with her powers was mainly on a personal level, not on a technical one.
This was a journey she had to mainly walk by herself, finding the right balance and confidence in her abilities, deep down in her heart.
No one could've done that for her.
Merely training the practical aspect of it would've just worsened the situation, because Sakura wouldn't have been truly "in it" with her heart and mind. She needed to go through this process of growth, before reaching this stage of self-awareness in relation to her magic powers.
I truly feel this is the reason why CLAMP made certain choices inside this story.
Again, as I always say, a good part of Cardcaptor Sakura does revolve around magic, but the main focus and linchpin of this story is and always will be the main character's heart, her growth and the interpersonal relationships with her loved ones.
This makes Clear Card Arc, in my opinion, a worthy sequel and a full-fledged part of the Cardcaptor Sakura series.
I think those who decide to skip it or read it with a superficial approach miss a journey of tremendous growth for our beloved protagonist.
So much for those who kept saying "This is not Sakura's story".
How can all that ☝️ NOT be Sakura's story?
I'll let you judge. 😊
Extra: The Significance of the Clear Cards
I want to digress for a moment about a thorny topic: the significance of the Clear Cards in this story.
Sakura isn't always completely passive towards the events happening around her, but wonders several times during the story why all those Cards are manifesting like that.
While the first and easiest answer is of course "because her powers are going out of control" (and this is something Momo herself questions Sakura about in chapter 50), it becomes apparent at some point that the more the story goes on, the more the Cards that are created by her are particularly relevant and connected to the events that will happen in the final part of the story.
I know this is a sore spot for many who complain about not understanding the purpose of the Clear cards.
It's because people tend to compare this set of Cards with the ones Sakura captured previously.
That's not the right way to look at them, because their origin and purpose are different and change throughout the story.
Forget about the Sakura Cards, even though so many of these "Clear Cards" (which are never called so, not even once, in the story itself, but just "new cards" or "transparent cards") might look so similar in purpose to the previous ones.
First of all, the Clear Cards are an outlet for Sakura to vent in a healthy way her power in excess. Power that if kept inside, untapped and confined in her body, might have unpredictable harmful effects on her (<- probably the grief Yelan foresaw).
God bless the Clear Cards for existing and allowing Sakura to vent out these bouts of uncontrolled power in a relatively safe way.
The Cards that Sakura produces in the beginning are sometimes reminiscing of the Sakura Cards, because her power manifests itself basing on Sakura's experiences, feelings, thoughts and wishes.
The Sakura Cards are an important part of her life (before Syaoran took them, she literally acted like their "mom", keeping them alive with her power) so it's only normal that the first base for some of these new Cards would be a magic tool that she already knows.
In this sense, it becomes easier to understand why many of the "captures" seem so easy, way too easy compared to what a reader would expect from a sequel: the goal of the capture here isn't to make her power and experience in capturing cards grow.
She already had 2 arcs to do all of that.
The capture of the Cards in this third arc becomes something new and unexpected: a "damage control" of a regrettable situation with Sakura's powers, while she learns to dominate them and enter into harmony with her supernatural abilities.
The growth Sakura needs here is mainly a mental one. Performing her magical power aimlessly without having a true connection with it and a true understanding will only exacerbate the problem.
This is the reason why, despite having a "capture" element, Clear Card derails from the previous arcs in the purpose of the capture.
It's a pity that an element that should've brought freshness to the plot was in many cases received as an actual flaw.
In the beginning, as Sakura's power is completely out of her control, some Cards might look completely random too - they don't look based on Cards, thoughts or wishes (like Appear, Reflect, Action, etc.).
But pay attention, because the more the story goes on, the more the Cards begin to become particularly specific to something that shook Sakura's heart in that moment, or referencing events/feelings that will become pivotal to the events Sakura will experience later.
Especially regarding Kaito's plan. Many of the later Cards Sakura produces are a direct reflection of the feelings and wishes that Kaito infused in the activation of the forbidden magic, with the creation of "the story for Akiho", the one he wanted to absolutely have a happy ending for.
Cards like Repair, Promise, Choice, Kindness, True and False, Synchronization, Rewind....many of them didn't even get to express their magical abilities in a "conventional way" (everyone expected to see Sakura literally activating them like she does with all the others), but it's just because at that point the Cards Sakura is producing are born following her premonitory intuition: thanks to the hints/speeches that those Cards give her in Clockland, Sakura little by little regains consciousness of her true self (it's a pity that many English readers will never realize all the times Sakura was about to "wake up" in Clockland, because the translation didn't respect the change in fonts of the JP text).
Sakura wasn't supposed to "use" them in a conventional way (how do you "use" Kindness? You force people to be "kind"? 🤨 and what about Choice??), she was supposed to listen to them and let them guide her towards the truth. This is also the reason why all of these Cards bear the face of her loved ones.
Think of them as tarots. Which is, incidentally, another use of the original Clow/Sakura Cards.
I am basically sure of this interpretation because the kanji of some of those Cards I mentioned above are brought up during the climax: particularly when Akiho talks to Kaito in chapter 78, she uses two specific verbs, referring to Kindness (慈愛 - a kind of gentle and tender love) when she describes the love and support her family gives her in this rewritten world, and to Choice (選択) when she questions Kaito about his choice to disappear completely from her life.
So to summarize, the last Cards Sakura produced "accidentally" weren't accidental at all, but were actually specifically produced by her power in reference to Kaito's plan, to help her finding the way out to a dire situation.
This represents a very important indicator in the plot: at that stage of the story, Sakura started to listen more and more to her intuition and her sixth sense, finally quitting her bad habit of downplaying it ("maybe it's just me") but actually giving it credit and taking it seriously, trusting her instinct to lead her in the right direction.
And this was, of course, all thanks to the speech Syaoran gave her back in chapter 52.
It is also the case of the Rewind Card, which Sakura will ultimately understand the purpose of on her own, at the very end of the series.
That's the moment where everything will become clear and make sense to her: "This Card, too...I created it precisely for this moment".
The Clear Cards ultimately became the embodiment of her foretelling powers. Which then led to the birth of the first two consciously created Cards, Blank & Remind, which will become so important in the climax.
If we ever get a new arc in the next years, we'll certainly deal with a more mature Sakura, who's more in sync with her magical powers 🩷.
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Clear Card Trivia 3 ~ Sakura's journey of growth and self-understanding throughout Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card
Hello and welcome back to my "Clear Card Trivia" series, a collection of informative posts where I delve into certain aspects of the story of Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card! ✨
The topic I will talk about today has been on my "to-do list" for long time. It's something I felt the need to talk about, and I won't hide the reason why: the desire to fully eviscerate this topic grew particularly after reading around certain criticism of Clear Card Arc. But also after listening to CLAMP's Twitter Spaces, particularly the ones towards the end of the story.
It's something that, setting aside my obvious love for the new characters, will always make me think that Clear Card Arc has been a very welcome addition to the series.
This post will delve into Sakura's growth throughout Clear Card Arc.
Sakura grew up considerably during the story, and had a character development that sadly not many people truly realized.
I'm not talking about an evolution of the character design which, despite changing and evolving throughout the story (as it's expected for a long-running serialization), kept depicting Sakura consistently with quite young looks...no, I'm talking about her mental growth, in relation to her self-knowledge and her relationship with her magic powers.
A journey that might almost feel "frustrating", because it is full of "up and downs", and Sakura sometimes seems to be taking one step forward and two back. Aside from the obvious practical reasons (the plot had to develop several other storylines simultaneously), it very much reflects the realistic growth of a pre-teen, which is never a straight line but is made of improvements and relapses.
Along the journey, I couldn't really avoid mentioning some bits of the development of Sakura's relationship with Syaoran, which will get its own deep and detailed post another day.
There's also an extra about the significance of the Clear Cards in the story, at the end.
I have to be honest, the post is very long, but I tried to insert visual elements to make it easier on the eye.
If you're curious to know how the hell I found so much to talk about for this specific topic, follow me under the cut and dive into Sakura's journey throughout Clear Card (it's also a good way to review the story)! ✨
A Disconnected Beginning
Clear Card Arc starts in a very "festive" and happy way: everything is peaceful, a new exciting chapter of Sakura's educational life is starting with the beginning of middle school, Syaoran is back to Tomoeda, this time to stay forever with his beloved girl...everything seems so perfect. And precisely in chapter 1, before everything takes an unexpected turn, we have this scene here, which I consider the "true" beginning of everything:
Sakura says "I haven't been using this lately...well, that's for the better".
At the beginning of Clear Card Arc, Sakura seems to be feeling disconnected from her natural gift.
Despite she had to go on a quest to collect all the Clow Cards, which later she gave a new life to by changing them into Sakura Cards, we have to remember that Sakura was born with magic powers.
They weren't bestowed on her by Kero-chan, nor by the contract with the Clow Book: she always had magic in her blood, and it apparently "woke up" on that fateful day she found the Clow Book in the library of her father.
At the beginning of this arc, Sakura seems to think that the purpose, the meaning of this natural gift which is literally part of herself, has been fulfilled by transforming all the Cards, and splitting Eriol's power as he had requested.
Her words here seem to be suggesting a general idea of "if I have to use this key (therefore, my magic powers), it means something troublesome is happening, so it's better if I'm not using it because it means everything is okay".
And although we can't really deny that what happened afterwards is far from being able to be considered "peaceful", this scene here always left a bad taste in my mouth because there's almost a negative vibe attached to the idea of her magic, transpiring from Sakura's words. It's almost as if she's politely rejecting it.
Precisely after she places her Star Key in her jewelry box, probably hoping to never have to use it again, she has her first premonitory dream of the events that will shake her life afterwards. Almost as if her powers were trying to tell her "no my dear, this is you and you'd better come to terms with it as soon as possible".
Then, as we all know, the Cards turn blank. Sakura produces a new key while having another dream and a quest to fight and "secure" some strange phenomena happening around her begins, leaving her in a state of increasing confusion.
This is the beginning of the part of the story that I quite literally call "Sakura loses sight of herself".
At this very early stage of the story, she still doesn't know that she started losing control over her increasing magical power, and it is definitely not a coincidence that all of this began when she thought of shutting her main magic tool away in a box, hoping to ignore it forever.
For plot reasons, this also happens simultaneously to Syaoran taking the spirits of the Sakura Cards away from her (because in the beginning, you had to be tricked into thinking he was up to something shady and was the real mastermind behind all the incidents).
Syaoran expected for Sakura to lose control over her powers, as his mother predicted a general period of trouble for her that could lead her to unhappiness, albeit without any clear indication of what could happen: Syaoran came to Japan knowing something was bound to happen to his girl and her powers, and that something was going to lead her to grief, but he had no idea about all the rest. So his uncertain and reckless approach, which ended up in some cases worsening the situation, is also somewhat understandable.
He was acting like a worried, overprotective boyfriend at his wit's end.
The strange events, which Sakura materializes into a new set of Cards, surely leave her distraught and confused, not to mention the situation with the Sakura Cards and Eriol's missing replies, but I feel that what really destabilizes her core are the constant dreams she gets, sometimes even in the middle of her waking hours, making her faint on the spot wherever she is.
Premonitory dreams are a part of her natural gift that she began to express ever since the OG manga, but she never seemed to really understand them or take them seriously.
This time around, she keeps seeing this cloaked figure and this terrifying dragon, no one speaks a word despite her relentless questions and the cloaked figure seems to be wanting to take her newly made key away (Lilie!!! what were you trying to do!! *facepalm* she probably tried to pull her closer so she could talk to her), so it's just normal that all of that leaves her increasingly stressed and anxious, even though initially you never see her openly and verbally stating that, due to her overall positive nature ("I'll manage it, somehow" is part of her "everything will be alright" invincible spell, and this is indeed what she keeps telling herself in the beginning of the arc, even though in some occasions it turned out to be a double-edged sword, as sometimes it looked more like sweeping her fears under the carpet, to me).
"Something Is Not Right"
Dream after dream, Card after Card, Sakura begins to have these general feelings of discomfort and of "something is not right, here", as she openly states to Syaoran in this scene of volume 4, chapter 14.
There's something about this situation that is pricking her sixth sense, and makes her uneasy, but she can't quite put her finger on it yet. All she can do is to keep "fighting" these phenomena happening around her, hoping to find out more along the way.
She reiterates the same feeling of uneasiness at the end of chapter 15, after what I consider one of the most concerning side-effects of her poor control over her powers: Sakura seems almost "in trance" while she leads her guardians to the exit of the maze, and acts in a very uncharacteristic, cold way by shoving her bag in front of Yue to make him hold it for her.
It's almost as if her magical sixth sense worked too strongly and warped her personality in that moment: an effect that has been mentioned several times in relation to powerful magicians like Clow, Eriol and later Kaito too, so it's not farfetched at all to attribute this one-off occurrence to her loss of control over her strong powers, which ended up affecting her personality too. Luckily, it didn't happen again in the rest of the story and the capture of this Card was completely changed in the anime (a wise decision imho, since the JP fandom is particularly fussy about the integrity of Sakura's character, and she needed to stay "Sakura" in order to do what she did at the end).
At the culmination of a "mini arc" (the visit to great-grandpa Masaki) characterized by uncontrolled visions of Nadeshiko, another frightening dream (one that ended up dragging even Akiho in, due to the synchronization) and Sakura for the first time ever confronting Syaoran about the things he's been hiding from her, we reach the following scene of volume 5, chapter 23.
"I Wish I Had A Mirror"
I always considered this scene extremely important, because for the first time Sakura spells out clearly the inner turmoil that's been gnawing at her soul ever since this ordeal with the new Cards started.
"The truth is...I'm the worst at understanding myself. And that is probably causing lots of concern to everyone."
"I wish I had a mirror. A mirror that could reflect the real me. Then, I would probably understand how to not make everyone worry"
Here, Sakura clearly spells out the frustration of knowing, feeling in her bones that there's something wrong with her, something that she's not understanding about herself, and that something is causing problems, but most importantly, is causing her loved ones to worry about her.
Let's not forget that not only Syaoran, but also Yukito, Touya, Fujitaka, Tomoyo, Eriol & his family have all been watching her situation in apprehension, each of them making decisions and moving discretely in a direction they felt was right (and admittedly, not all instances were so).
Sakura can somehow feel all of that, she can feel that it's related to something she still hasn't realized about herself.
This tends to be forgotten because it happens in a relatively early part of the plot, but notice how this is the same problem Kaito suffers from.
A quite stunted ability to understand oneself.
Sakura and Kaito definitely have lots in common, when it comes to this specific part of themselves.
Keep this in mind, because it'll be relevant later.
And then, the situation worsens.
Sakura's dreams start to terrify her, because they begin to show Syaoran's face under the cloak of the mysterious figure who's scaring her in her dreams. An apparent truth she cannot accept, she won't accept, even though she's still unsure about what exactly these dreams she's having are. Despite her boyfriend has been acting shady for long time, she decides to trust him and wait for him to talk to her about all the stuff he's holding inside, instead of putting him through the wringer. This also means, though, that Sakura will keep all her fears to herself, eventually bottling up.
Furthermore, Kaito starts to rewind time to fix a situation without a way out (in chapter 28, Akiho was on the verge of going berserk completely and unleash the artifact), creating an additional sense of confusion when Sakura can feel that her finger is numb due to strain, but she can't understand why (she had fought Kaito's time magic unconsciously). Whenever Kaito will rewind time, even later on, Sakura's magical sixth sense will try to wake her consciousness up more and more, giving her these vibes of "deja vu" or making her act in an apparently inexplicable way.
In the first part of Clear Card, Sakura sometimes literally looks like a soul wandering about in confusion, dragged by the events.
I wish to point out that this is not a flaw in the characterization, it is a precise design by CLAMP.
Sakura IS, in this part of the story, confused and lost, overwhelmed by the events.
She has no idea how to approach this matter other than "treating the symptoms" as they come.
This happens because she's still, surprisingly, quite reluctant to embrace a fundamental part of herself: her innate magic power, which expresses itself mainly through her intuition. But we'll gradually get there.
Around chapter 30, before the big realization, Sakura's situation reached a point where:
- her Sakura Cards unexpectedly became blank;
- almost everyday (sometimes multiple times a day) there's a new incident that she secures into new transparent Cards;
- she constantly sees ominous dreams (in scattered order) with a cloaked figure acting in a questionable way and a scary dragon, and at some point she starts seeing her boyfriend under that cloak;
- her boyfriend acts shady, Eriol doesn't reply to her messages;
- there's a general feeling of "something is not right" with her magic and some stuff starts to not make sense to her (because Kaito rewinds time)
It is at this point that Sakura finally moves one (giant) step forward and connects all the "puzzle pieces" she collected (particularly, how much more "obvious" the creation of a Card became) and understands that she's been the one causing subconsciously each and every single incident that lead to the creation of a new transparent Card.
"I'm Angry At Myself"
And with Syaoran finally coming clean with her (because at that point he had no reason to keep things hidden anymore, as the thing he was trying to delay ultimately happened - and believe me, I'm sure he partly felt relieved to not need to lie anymore, as that took quite a toll on him too), Sakura can at last give an explanation to at least a part of the things that are happening.
And she finally realizes that the doubt that was tormenting her was true: she DID, in fact, not understand something very important about herself, she didn't realize that it was her own power going out of control and that all the incidents that happened bore "her magic signature", so to speak. She failed to "tune in" with her magic.
For the first time ever, Sakura expresses anger at herself.
She will direct that anger (to a lesser extent) to Syaoran too, but I'll tackle that in a separate post.
This is a moment of deep reflection and regrets for Sakura: the poor understanding of herself, the poor "communication" between her heart and her magic powers brought to a situation where her most beloved person was putting himself in danger in order to protect her, while trying to not make things escalate.
This is a very sensitive, beautiful and important moment, steeped in conflicting and complex feelings (and remember, Sakura is just a pre-teen. It is normal for a pre-teen like her to not understand herself, but there's just one tiny detail: she's not a common pre-teen, due to her natural gift, and she needs to take that into account).
Eventually Sakura calms down, and after creating Rewind, her resolute face while hugging tightly Syaoran suggests that from now on she'll face this matter from another, more courageous and determined perspective.
Or at least, these were her good intentions.
Because unfortunately, insecurities are hard to eradicate and in the central part of the story it's shocking to realize how far longer Sakura will insist in shutting away her emotions and refusing to listen to her heart (and intuition) fully.
"It's Just My Imagination"
Part of Sakura's anxiety might have been sedated with the revelation that the Clear Cards are produced by the girl herself, but unfortunately the true core of her problems was not solved at all and will only surface more clearly in the next 20 chapters.
Sakura actively starts having "premonitory bad feelings" when she sees Akiho in volume 7 chapter 34, a bad feeling that she does check with Syaoran, but quickly dismisses as "well, it's just my imagination". This will basically be one of the major problems preventing her from reaching the complete control of her magic.
Sakura, knowing her magic potential, should've given way more credit to her sixth sense, but her anxiety, her insecurity and her crippled connection to her innate gift still pushes her to dismiss these "signs" as nothing really important or true.
Timely as hell, a few hours later something bad will indeed happen to Akiho, where she completely loses consciousness for the first time and the clan/Association actively starts to absorb Sakura's power through the artifact implanted in Akiho. All of this was caused by the high concentration of magic that "triggered" Akiho's artifact (and here I have to sarcastically "applaud" Kaito, just like Syaoran he's another one who does stuff before thinking through, ultimately worsening the problem).
Once trapped in Akiho's artifact, thanks to her power Sakura can see the most horrifying glimpse of Akiho's past, when she was turned into a magic artifact, by living it on her own skin.
And even though Kaito is forced to rewind time once again to save the situation, erasing these memories from Sakura's head, her heart (which is tightly connected to her magical sixth sense - I'd daresay her heart is straight up the source of her magic) DOES REMEMBER, pushing Sakura to act in an apparently irrational way, crying and hugging Akiho tight in empathy.
Sakura is particularly shaken by this feeling, still in pain even hours later, but once again she doesn't understand where it comes from. However, she does express with Syaoran an intention to talk to him about it once she's able to put it into words, and in the meantime do her best with all the rest. At least, there's an intention to understand better this part of herself, but it's still soon to see actual results.
Aaand CLAMP really seem to be wanting to test Sakura in this arc, because at this point of the plot, they add the electrocution spell. 😅
No one seems to understand who caused it (it's not Sakura, nor Kaito, but now we know it was none other than Yelan!!) and Sakura's anxiety increases once again. The fact only Syaoran gets affected by it inevitably reignites the doubts in her mind, unwittingly reminded of that terrifying dream of Cloaked Syaoran she keeps seeing...but she stubbornly keeps telling herself "no, it's not like that, it's just a dream".
It's undeniable that this situation where she cannot understand her foretelling dreams yet, and the way they show her scattered hints because her power is out of control, has surely contributed to Sakura's insecurity when it comes to trust her own intuition.
Her power is so out of control at this point, that even when Kaito shrinks her and throws her in a hole carved into a tree (landing in a "world" created with magic where he hopes she'll create the right Card) her dreams take over again (it's apparent by the "shaaan" sound and how everything turns suddenly pitch black, a common background of her dreams), showing her Akiho in the dress she was wearing when she was turned into an artifact and, inevitably, Sakura's biggest fear, "Cloaked Syaoran".
Pay attention because these visions she's getting here thanks to her power match what will happen later on: what the talking flowers tell her here will turn out to be the beginning of the lyrics of the main theme of the "Alice in Clockland" play.
This vision of Cloaked Syaoran seemingly "about to do something" to Akiho horrifies Sakura to the point of screaming in terror and creating one of the most unsettling Cards, "Break".
It is after this very scary moment that Sakura starts to wonder very specifically for what purpose she is creating all these Cards. The purpose is actually more than one, but she definitely posed herself THE RIGHT question, as this brings her one step closer to the core of the problem and eventually embracing her own magic abilities.
Then, between chapters 43 and 45 we finally start to see some changes in Sakura: surprisingly, she begins to listen more to her sixth sense, first catching Yukito red-handed while activating a newly acquired magic, and then wondering about a strange painful feeling in her chest when her father tells her that lately she and Akiho became even more similar.
We were all lead to believe that this was the foreshadowing of Akiho taking her place (cause everything in the plot at this point deceivingly hints at Kaito wanting to switch them), but she actually was getting foreshadowings of the "rewritten world", where Sakura would genuinely feel wrecked to know that someone important to Akiho was missing, precisely when Akiho would've become part of her family as her twin. In fact, in chapter 45, before falling completely asleep, she hears again the ominous "you won't be able to come back" (the Association's threat to Kaito), wondering WHO wouldn't be able to come back - somehow, Sakura knows that it's not directed at her.
"Just Tell me Honestly How You Feel"
And then, we reach another moment that I consider pivotal for Sakura's growth during this Clear Card Arc.
The moment when she's on the verge of breaking down and finally lets all her feelings out.
Her anxiety over the dream with the Cloaked Figure reached the highest peak, so much that she finally manifests a Card, Mirage, that challenges her precisely with that appearance. While Sakura battles that Card (which at the moment she still believes it's an actual person), she seems resoluted to get to the bottom of this story, and to pull down that hood to know the truth. You can really feel that she's so done with all this psychological torture.
The fact the real Syaoran appears right at that moment and she finds out the person she saw was just a Card is partly a relief for her, but also throws Sakura again in despair because who the hell is that person in the dream, then??
Syaoran, as the good and attentive boyfriend he is, can just feel that Sakura is stressing over something, so he brings her to his home to help her calming down. And to her umpteenth attempt at sweeping her negative emotions under the carpet, beating around the bush commenting over the tea with a fake smile, he cuts immediately her bullshit and just tells her : "You don't need to force yourself. Just tell me how you feel right now".
When she hears that she's allowed to speak out her emotions with honesty, Sakura wears on her face one of the most heartbreaking expressions of the entire manga. She's literally about to break down in tears of exhaustion, as you can see it above. ☝️
Listening to her, gradually, Syaoran encourages Sakura to get out all that's been torturing her lately, particularly about the dream with the Cloaked Figure. It is a very difficult moment for her, because she has to relive the dream, and expose in front of him all the fears and doubts that were trying to tamper with her trust in him. Courageously, she goes through with it, even though her denial ("it's just a dream!") is so strong that she ends up creating another Card: "Dreaming". Sakura at first seems relieved to see the Card, in the hope that everything she saw was indeed a mere messed up dream and nothing else (see? she's again self-sabotaging her relationship with her magic) but Syaoran with his frankness is quick to bring her feet on the ground: the kanji on the Card show "yumemi", and the word can also indicate a "foretelling dream".
Although Sakura seems disheartened at first, her next dream with the Cloaked Figure is much more relaxed, so much that even the dragon doesn't particularly scare her anymore: our girl's intuition makes her correctly feel a sense of loneliness in this dream, which she attributes to the hooded figure, not realizing that it was more likely coming from the dragon itself (aka, Kaito).
After all, in chapter 72, Lilie will confirm that her presence ended up distracting her from the one "character" she should've paid all of her attention to.
Her intuition, despite being misattributed, ended up having a positive effect through the synchronization with Akiho: the girl will wake up with the same feeling of discomfort of her friend, and as if guided by hitsuzen, she will head to the garden where she'll find a sickly Kaito staring at the moon - most likely feeling the loneliness Sakura perceived in her dream.
I like to think that in this scene of chapter 48, Sakura subconsciously helped Akiho comforting Kaito, by waking her up with the unresting feeling, precisely when Kaito needed it the most.
Still not completely embraced her magical sixth sense yet, but a significant improvement.
The road between chapter 48 and chapter 52 is paved with lots of struggles, as the Mirror Sakura Card gets stolen by Kaito, Sakura runs the risk of being absorbed into Akiho's artifact again, she meets Momo for the first time and she's even given a hint about Kaito's plan (or what Momo thought was his plan, as he had benignly lied to her about that), but almost all of that gets rewound and erased when Kaito intervenes.
Moreover, despite not remembering anything consciously, Sakura is left with a sense of unhappiness when she looks at her home, a remnant of her brief journey in the world of Momo's book which straight up threw her into despair, showing her what her life would be if everyone forgot about her. She also finds once again a Card produced out of nowhere, "Time": I'm convinced she produced this Card because her conscience was awake while Momo and Kaito talked in stopped time, and their conversation triggered her sixth sense to produce Time as a result.
Needless to say, all of this worsens her state of mind once again, which leads to the other pivotal, and finally resolutive, scene of chapter 52.
Never Avert Your Eyes From Your Heart
We finally get to what I consider THE scene, the one that will definitively shake Sakura from her deadlock, from the anxiety that stunted her connection with her innate gift and her deepest emotions. And the one who helps her overcoming all her fears is, of course, the love of her life - with a honorable mention for none other than his mother Yelan!!
Chapter 52 got a very, very special place in my heart, because it's basically one giant parallel between SyaoSaku and YunaAki.
The two pairings experience similar situations, but the response from one side of each pairing is quite different.
Let's remind you for a moment of the part earlier in this post when I told you that Kaito and Sakura, for most of Clear Card, surprisingly have one thing in common: they don't seem to understand themselves well enough, and both have a tendency to look away from feelings that cause unrest to their hearts - anxiety for Sakura, love for Kaito.
Syaoran, always attentive and observant towards his girlfriend, notices immediately that Sakura is suffering, as soon as he sees her at school. Despite being unable to touch her to comfort her, he offers all of himself to support and listen to her concerns. Sakura is visibly and pleasantly surprised of how the boy could read behind her mask, that usual contrived smile with which she tries to dissimulate her emotions and not make him worry. A bad habit she's consolidated lately, but that Syaoran is gently determined to dismantle.
After opening up with him (and this is where Sakura differs from Kaito - by having an established relationship made of love and trust with Syaoran, Sakura lowers her walls with him), she falls once again into the usual trap of "but maybe it's just my imagination" and I love to see how Syaoran is her anchor to the ground, making her see the concreteness of this situation: he straight up tells her "you produced a Card out of it, it cannot be 'just your imagination'. "
And then, like a precious family gift, he passes on to her the priceless words of wisdom of his mother Yelan, an advice that not only Sakura, but also the other "lost soul" of the other paralleling pairing should listen to:
"People with magical power should never ignore the turmoil and stirring in their hearts, the so-called 'intuition'.
And it’s not limited to people with magical powers.
People should never avert their eyes from the changes in their heart."
This is a turning point for Sakura.
These words seem to positively "break" something inside of her, showing her the correct path to follow.
CLAMP beautifully portray this process of "embracing and assimilating" the words she's just heard, by making her place her hand over her heart. I love when they do that (they used the same visual when Akiho heard Kaito's true name, and 'wrote it' on the most important page of the book of her life).
Sakura is truly grateful for the words Syaoran relayed to her, precisely what she needed to get out of her impasse with her feelings and magic. She knows she can always count on the support of her soulmate even in the darkest moments, and she's thankful for having him in her life.
From this moment onwards, Sakura will experience several instances where her magical premonitory senses give her signals through the "stirring" of her heart. Contrarily to before, she starts to actively take them seriously, listening, without dismissing them as the delirium of an anxious little girl.
This allows her to activate the Siege Card in the fraction of a second, successfully shielding herself from Kaito's time magic, making her the first person ever who achieved that.
This also leads her to effectively remember that she saw Kaito using magic, even when time was rewound by him, and contact immediately Syaoran to talk about it, planning how to move from that moment onwards.
A little relapse on her bad habit is immediately dispelled by Syaoran, and our girl even goes as far as saying "there's something inside Akiho", even though she's not sure exactly why she's feeling that way. But it's an intuition she's having and she decides to not dismiss it anymore, with everyone trusting and supporting her in that direction.
By listening more and better to what her heart tells her, Sakura also decides to not confront Akiho about Kaito and his magic, because she's well aware of the feelings Akiho got for Kaito and she doesn't want to potentially disrupt their relationship. So, she decides to wait for her friend to talk about it first.
Thanks to this better understanding of her own intuition, she also says in chapter 57 that she wants to meet the guardian of the book "Alice in Clockland" once more, despite not remembering if and when she's met her before.
This also ultimately leads her to accept the role of Alice in the upcoming play scripted by her friend Naoko, because her sixth sense tells her that it's inevitable for her to do so.
It's important to emphasize how the other characters support and encourage her to listen to her innate gift, at this point, without trampling over her self-determination like they did before.
It is a moment of big growth and character development for everyone.
The Ultimate Growth: Finding a Meaning and a Purpose
What happens afterwards is history: the fateful "Alice in Clockland" play unfolds, and Kaito completes his plan to push Sakura to create the Card he needs, exchanging his magic artifact (the watch) with Akiho's one (the book), in addition to activating the forbidden magic to rewrite the memories of everyone, to fit Akiho as part of Sakura's family.
Sakura's intuition will be crucial to wake her true self up while in Clockland, succeeding in beating Kaito's magic multiple times, till Syaoran comes in and gives the "final blow", cutting off the spell definitively.
And even when everything seems lost because Kaito successfully activated the fobidden magic, changing their memories and erasing himself from their existence, Sakura's magic and sixth sense keep making her say things she either already said or heard before in the "unrewritten world".
Not only that, but even after meeting Lilie in a dream and forgetting her face (due to the strong influence of the forbidden spell), bit and pieces of that conversation keep coming back to her, and she listens dutifully to every single one of these "feelings".
Kaito might have overridden part of their memories (only the ones concerning him, Akiho and the events connected to the creation of the Cards), but the experience, feelings and personal growth of each character were left untouched, that's why the chemistry between Sakura and Syaoran is the same as before the play started, but also Sakura's personal relationship with her magic is far better than before (an information that might have seemed random and unimportant is that now Sakura summons Mirror even just to chat, an indication of her completely changed perspective on her magic).
Now that Sakura finally embraced her magical power, all that's left for her is to find a true purpose for it.
A question echoes in my mind, "What am I creating these Cards for?".
Sakura poses herself this question halfway through the story, and she finds the answer to it precisely at the end of the journey.
Her powerful magic intuition, combined with her immense empathy, leads her to realize that somebody is missing from their reality, and that person is the one Akiho loves.
At this point Sakura is unstoppable: she wants to listen to the voice in her heart that's screaming "Go and help them!! Give the true happiness back to Akiho!", and everyone can only follow her lead as she assertively puts into practice what her heart is telling her to do.
Sakura in this final part of the story shines brighter than ever.
She's more assertive and self-confident than ever.
All of this is because there's something she strongly wants to do with her innate gift, as Eriol unequivocally says in chapter 75: her power grows exponentially again, but this time it's not out of her control - it is Sakura herself who's voluntarily boosting it, thanks to her strong wish.
And that allows her to control it and use it exactly as she wants.
In chapter 79 her growth reaches the highest peak, by handling the resolution of Akiho and Kaito's personal problems in an admirable way (she steps aside for a moment to give Akiho all the agency she needed), but also finding herself in front of an uncomfortable dilemma, which leads her to an unavoidable reality: Sakura quickly understands that she cannot be on everyone's side and there are lines to be drawn at some point.
She can't be a pure and oblivious girl forever.
She needs to grow up.
There are choices to be made, especially when dealing with real evil people.
And Sakura choses to go on with the people she loves, even if that means she has to "stain" her "moral record" a little bit.
Empowered by this strong wish to fix the situation, she literally gives life to a miracle, protecting her dear friend and her beloved from the grasp of their abusers, simultanously giving everyone their true memories back.
The effort exerts her greatly, but what she achieved is by far the most important thing she's ever done with her magic power till now: she helped two dear people lost in a life-and-death situation.
Her magical growth went along with her personal, mental one.
This is also the reason why the accusations of "the other magicians should've trained her" end up being in vain: Sakura's problem with her powers was mainly on a personal level, not on a technical one.
This was a journey she had to mainly walk by herself, finding the right balance and confidence in her abilities, deep down in her heart.
No one could've done that for her.
Merely training the practical aspect of it would've just worsened the situation, because Sakura wouldn't have been truly "in it" with her heart and mind. She needed to go through this process of growth, before reaching this stage of self-awareness in relation to her magic powers.
I truly feel this is the reason why CLAMP made certain choices inside this story.
Again, as I always say, a good part of Cardcaptor Sakura does revolve around magic, but the main focus and linchpin of this story is and always will be the main character's heart, her growth and the interpersonal relationships with her loved ones.
This makes Clear Card Arc, in my opinion, a worthy sequel and a full-fledged part of the Cardcaptor Sakura series.
I think those who decide to skip it or read it with a superficial approach miss a journey of tremendous growth for our beloved protagonist.
So much for those who kept saying "This is not Sakura's story".
How can all that ☝️ NOT be Sakura's story?
I'll let you judge. 😊
Extra: The Significance of the Clear Cards
I want to digress for a moment about a thorny topic: the significance of the Clear Cards in this story.
Sakura isn't always completely passive towards the events happening around her, but wonders several times during the story why all those Cards are manifesting like that.
While the first and easiest answer is of course "because her powers are going out of control" (and this is something Momo herself questions Sakura about in chapter 50), it becomes apparent at some point that the more the story goes on, the more the Cards that are created by her are particularly relevant and connected to the events that will happen in the final part of the story.
I know this is a sore spot for many who complain about not understanding the purpose of the Clear cards.
It's because people tend to compare this set of Cards with the ones Sakura captured previously.
That's not the right way to look at them, because their origin and purpose are different and change throughout the story.
Forget about the Sakura Cards, even though so many of these "Clear Cards" (which are never called so, not even once, in the story itself, but just "new cards" or "transparent cards") might look so similar in purpose to the previous ones.
First of all, the Clear Cards are an outlet for Sakura to vent in a healthy way her power in excess. Power that if kept inside, untapped and confined in her body, might have unpredictable harmful effects on her (<- probably the grief Yelan foresaw).
God bless the Clear Cards for existing and allowing Sakura to vent out these bouts of uncontrolled power in a relatively safe way.
The Cards that Sakura produces in the beginning are sometimes reminiscing of the Sakura Cards, because her power manifests itself basing on Sakura's experiences, feelings, thoughts and wishes.
The Sakura Cards are an important part of her life (before Syaoran took them, she literally acted like their "mom", keeping them alive with her power) so it's only normal that the first base for some of these new Cards would be a magic tool that she already knows.
In this sense, it becomes easier to understand why many of the "captures" seem so easy, way too easy compared to what a reader would expect from a sequel: the goal of the capture here isn't to make her power and experience in capturing cards grow.
She already had 2 arcs to do all of that.
The capture of the Cards in this third arc becomes something new and unexpected: a "damage control" of a regrettable situation with Sakura's powers, while she learns to dominate them and enter into harmony with her supernatural abilities.
The growth Sakura needs here is mainly a mental one. Performing her magical power aimlessly without having a true connection with it and a true understanding will only exacerbate the problem.
This is the reason why, despite having a "capture" element, Clear Card derails from the previous arcs in the purpose of the capture.
It's a pity that an element that should've brought freshness to the plot was in many cases received as an actual flaw.
In the beginning, as Sakura's power is completely out of her control, some Cards might look completely random too - they don't look based on Cards, thoughts or wishes (like Appear, Reflect, Action, etc.).
But pay attention, because the more the story goes on, the more the Cards begin to become particularly specific to something that shook Sakura's heart in that moment, or referencing events/feelings that will become pivotal to the events Sakura will experience later.
Especially regarding Kaito's plan. Many of the later Cards Sakura produces are a direct reflection of the feelings and wishes that Kaito infused in the activation of the forbidden magic, with the creation of "the story for Akiho", the one he wanted to absolutely have a happy ending for.
Cards like Repair, Promise, Choice, Kindness, True and False, Synchronization, Rewind....many of them didn't even get to express their magical abilities in a "conventional way" (everyone expected to see Sakura literally activating them like she does with all the others), but it's just because at that point the Cards Sakura is producing are born following her premonitory intuition: thanks to the hints/speeches that those Cards give her in Clockland, Sakura little by little regains consciousness of her true self (it's a pity that many English readers will never realize all the times Sakura was about to "wake up" in Clockland, because the translation didn't respect the change in fonts of the JP text).
Sakura wasn't supposed to "use" them in a conventional way (how do you "use" Kindness? You force people to be "kind"? 🤨 and what about Choice??), she was supposed to listen to them and let them guide her towards the truth. This is also the reason why all of these Cards bear the face of her loved ones.
Think of them as tarots. Which is, incidentally, another use of the original Clow/Sakura Cards.
I am basically sure of this interpretation because the kanji of some of those Cards I mentioned above are brought up during the climax: particularly when Akiho talks to Kaito in chapter 78, she uses two specific verbs, referring to Kindness (慈愛 - a kind of gentle and tender love) when she describes the love and support her family gives her in this rewritten world, and to Choice (選択) when she questions Kaito about his choice to disappear completely from her life.
So to summarize, the last Cards Sakura produced "accidentally" weren't accidental at all, but were actually specifically produced by her power in reference to Kaito's plan, to help her finding the way out to a dire situation.
This represents a very important indicator in the plot: at that stage of the story, Sakura started to listen more and more to her intuition and her sixth sense, finally quitting her bad habit of downplaying it ("maybe it's just me") but actually giving it credit and taking it seriously, trusting her instinct to lead her in the right direction.
And this was, of course, all thanks to the speech Syaoran gave her back in chapter 52.
It is also the case of the Rewind Card, which Sakura will ultimately understand the purpose of on her own, at the very end of the series.
That's the moment where everything will become clear and make sense to her: "This Card, too...I created it precisely for this moment".
The Clear Cards ultimately became the embodiment of her foretelling powers. Which then led to the birth of the first two consciously created Cards, Blank & Remind, which will become so important in the climax.
If we ever get a new arc in the next years, we'll certainly deal with a more mature Sakura, who's more in sync with her magical powers 🩷.
#card captor sakura#cardcaptor sakura#clear card arc#ccsakura#sakura card captor#clamp#sakura kinomoto#syaosaku#clear card trivia#I hope this post will make you look at Clear Card from another perspective#I'm sorry for the length but I really wanted to make a deep dive
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My guilt keeps telling me "Cinzia, if you don't cut and make this post shorter people will be less inclined to read it and your purpose will be wasted"
But I can't bring myself to, I can't I can't I can't. I can't cut, anywhere, I need to unravel this in its entirety or I feel like the the real core of the topic won't be conveyed clearly enough. 🤦♀️
I have seriously no idea how some people can say there's nothing to this particular topic, when there's so much to say behind each gradual progression of the plot.
At least I'm using pictures and dividers to make the experience easier on the eye.
#I know I will end up repeating myself in some parts of the post#but I feel like some concepts need to be repeated and engraved in people's skulls
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my god what I've put myself into...
I'm writing another Clear Card Trivia post and it's getting so long that I'm afraid I'll have to split it into two 😂
Well, it's understandable. It addresses.....Sakura's growth throughout Clear Card.
Yeah I really need to write this one out.
#my gosh I realized I haven't being digging into Sakura's character for long time#in the past 3 years I've been writing and reading mostly about YunaAki because they were the most misunderstood ones#but I have to say this aspect is one that needs to be explored and written out#especially now that the series is over and the picture is complete#god there's so much I want to write about but I'm just one and the things I want to do are too many#with little time and little energy#I want to write also about the things I didn't like in Clear Card#YES OMG guess what I have things I didn't like too#I just don't make a big deal out of them#cause they're a very small part compared to everything this story's got to offer
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🥺🥺🥺🥺 oooh these tags on the reblog of my Cosmos one-shot! 💜💜💜
Thank you dear!! I'm so honored you chose my fics to cheer you up?? 🙈🙈🙈 This is definitely a nice feeling I'm not used to!! Thank you!! 🥹 Re-read them to your heart's content! (I hope I can write one more soon 🤭 this one is gonna be a bit more.. mischievous )
#I woke up to these tags and my day riddled with PMS immediately got better#love this mutual healing with lovely people ❤️
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i'm also puzzled when people say they don't know when Sakura begin to have feelings for Syaoran cause it's actually quite obvious when you begin to read between the lines. the way she expresses her feelings for Syaoran and Yukito are very different, and i think that's why it's easy to miss sometimes. the reason behind it, i think, is because she knows her feelings for Yukito and expresses it outwardly. but in Syaoran's case, she doesn't her own feelings either yet. she's not even aware of what it's growing into, and so her reactions are more subtle. almost like her heart is subconsciously doing what it does.
but there are lots of moments where Sakura's reactions toward something Syaoran does is remarkably different than it is with someone else.
one example comes from the anime; Sakura's reaction towards the news of Meilin leaving in episode 43 and to the lingering idea of Syaoran leaving in episode 47 are very different. while she's sad in both cases, notice how her expression is different when it concerns Syaoran. there's a sense of loneliness and desolation.
another example i can think of is her body language. she's incredibly comfortable around Syaoran during the Sakura Card Arc and the way she literally BEAMS with a smile every time he shows up to help her. i'm currently doing a rewatch and typing down my observations on my priv twitter acc, and i can't wait to see what else i can pick up when i start reading the manga again.
okay now i'm gonna go cry because of how much i love these two magical bbs ;;;
Yes, I think so too, Sakura gives a lot of signs throughout the OG manga too, like all the times she instinctively hugs Syaoran??? That's one of the biggest signs....when she's happy or scared, she always instinctively looks for his arms ❤️
But I think the biggest and strongest sign for me was precisely one of the panels I've posted previously...the one where she says that she just knew that the Valentine chocolate she found in her mailbox was made by Syaoran! Without a tag or anything! Like, that is already on another level.
The way CLAMP depicts love connections is so magical. It's like your bond to someone is so strong that it makes you recognize them in any condition, any form. Even if you can't see them in that precise moment.
Even if they're appearing as, I dunno, a dragon. 😉
It's like your special someone got an "aura" of their own and your love for them enables you to see it at any time.
It's the kind of stuff that makes me sigh in awe and romance. 🥰
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>Still no news about CCS: CC season 2
Trust me, you would know if there was anything.
I would post about it here and pin it to my blog.
#reply#please let's not send these asks every 15 days now that the manga is over#I know we were all waiting in expectation for April 1st but CLAMP said in the latest Space that it will still take a while#even though the announcement will CERTAINLY come#but it doesn't depend on them they've been pretty clear about that#Kodansha if you're there make a noise
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I know you do mainly ccs stuff but I figure I ask this sense I saw some sailor moon stuff on your blog
I was rewatching sailor stars and I cam across episode 7 I realised
Sailor moon in the 90s anime is a lot more forgiving in the anime and has no kill rule to her while in the manga she seemed pretty OK killing off her enemies now yes she has killed before in the anime buts that's like rare exceptions and it only for really evil people like queen beryl
Now, personally, I don't think she should kill considering she's meant to represent love and kindness but tell do you think sailor moon should have a no kill rule?
Ahhh I'm sorry, I have to admit that I haven't been touching Sailor Moon related stuff for a long time, especially regarding the original anime series and manga...it is definitely one of the anime/manga that defined my childhood and teenage years, but ever since CCS came back with Clear Card, I've took gradually my distance from the Sailor Moon world and my knowledge of the plot is pretty rusty now, particularly for the manga.
I can't really make a well informed discussion about this because I literally don't remember many parts of the manga...I only remember that it was way darker and horrifying than the anime, particularly for the last arc. And maybe that's why Sailor Moon seems more "unhinged" and "ruthless" than the anime. I do remember that in the anime she was pretty adamant about not wanting to kill anyone, though. Sorry for not being much of help!
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So I was watching episode 6 and I came across the scene where sakura almost dies from the illusion card before being saved by her mom
In the manga, she's at a festival of her friends, and the illusion card is under water, so she goes and sees her mom, and in her eagerness to be with her she pops the bubble she was in and almost drowns
In the anime, it's in a forest, and the illusion card appears to have some sort of hypnotic trance in her which causes sakura to fall before being saved by her mom
Personally, I prefer the anime version mainly because when I read the manga chapter, it just seems weird that after being saved, Sakura doesn't ask "hey why did mom nearly let me drown" I mean yeah I'm glad she's happy to see her but still the anime version seemed to give hypnotic trance towards her like she was telling her to come closer
But tell me do you prefer the manga or the anime version of this scene
I don't know, I think I like them both, maybe I slightly prefer the manga version because it shows Sakura's feelings for her mom better! 😊Even if they were putting her in danger, it felt more "genuine"!
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I'm going to randomly copy and paste some musings I wrote on my private account on Twitter, cause I find it kinda amusing and I want to share it here too :3
"The moon is really beautiful, isn't it?"
"Because it's something about you, Akiho-san."
Kaito's behavior in the special chapter might appear "new" and sudden, but he's actually always been throwing "bombs" at Akiho, exposing his feelings just like it was the most natural and normal thing. 🤭❤️ The only difference is that now he understands what those feelings are 😁
Like, I can totally expect that one day in the future he'll just go "One day, when we'll be married..." completely out of nowhere while they're chatting & having dinner and Akiho will struggle to not choke on her plate 😂😂😂 Yeah, somehow I don't see very flashy kind of proposals from either of them, probably cause they've been through enough "out of ordinary" shit that normal and comforting is what makes their heart beat the fastest, and makes them the happiest ❤️
In this regard, I'll say once again that Kaito totally reminds me of Sakura. The way they can just blurt out their feelings in such a nonchalant, almost naive way, while not fully understanding what they are. Here Sakura is basically doing the same thing Kaito did throughout Clear Card! Saying stuff like that ☝️ and yet not understanding that she was falling in love with him herself. 😁
The nonchalant way in which Sakura and Kaito's feelings surface makes people misunderstand them for "friendship" or common affection, throughout their respective arcs. Like, I can't count how many times I've seen people say they didn't understand when Sakura started to fall in love with Syaoran, and that the realization at the end felt too sudden. It's because, as usual with Clamp, you have to pay attention to what they're NOT spelling out. That's what happened with Kaito too. 🤷♀️ People couldn't see that he's been literally spelling out his feelings himself since long time (that's why Momo got mad! Like "how can you say something like that and not REALIZE IT??"), they got sidetracked by the idea he was a villain (and therefore just manipulating and using her), and then by his relationship with Lilie (all stuff Clamp did on purpose, mind you, cause it was too soon for you to be sure of it yet). It's been clear for a long time, but in their Spaces lately CLAMP reiterated how they love to keep their readers guessing and on their toes till the end, so in my opinion they won't hesitate to try to sidetrack you a little bit along the way (but if you stick closely, you'll understand what's the real deal). I guess with Sakura they tried to sidetrack with her crush on Yukito. 😁
So yeah, I've been saying multiple times during the serialization how those two gave me such a similar vibe (and that maybe helped Sakura empathize with him).
Akiho is quite straightforward too, especially after she found her own confidence and voice, but I was just thinking that Syaoran is quite the opposite instead, he's very conscious of his feelings and even in Clear Card, he had to prepare himself days in advance before managing to ask Sakura, stuttering and all, for a date himself 😂 Thankfully, at the end of the special chapter he was able to make his own romantic statements without getting too flustered 😆 (at long last, after 2 years of dating! 😂)
#cosmos & crystals#clear card arc#ccsakura#💚🩷#my random musings because people need to see the connections between Sakura and Kaito#I think they're so interesting considering they're two VERY powerful magicians#but also the parallels and connections between the OG and Clear Card that too many people still insist in denying#Sakura was able to gently scold Kaito into acknowledging his bond with Akiho in ch. 77#precisely because she went through the same turmoil HERSELF#understanding yourself ISN'T easy especially for some people
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Hey there Cinzia! It's been a while. I had been busy with some personal stuff but I just finished reading your April 1st updates regarding CCS. Somehow, it is slightly upsetting to read that Tomoyo won't be making clothes for people other than Sakura. I dunno. Like I understand making for Sakura is a way for her to express her love for her but she has also made costumes for the play and for Syaoran. So I find it surprising for CLAMP to say that. Or am I misunderstanding stuff out here?
Heeeey Aubretia!! Nice to see you again 🥰
I did think "uh, I haven't seen Aubretia in a while 🤔" and I had guessed you were busy, it's totally relatable 😅
I confirm, from the other ask you've sent, that we have concretely no news about the anime, but CLAMP did say "hold on a little more" so here we are, waiting and waiting 😅also because it seems it doesn't really depend on them, it's Kodansha the ones who have to make the announcement.
Hmmm for Tomoyo, well, you have to consider they were talking about an hypothetical situation where Touya would be "the chosen one", the one involved with all the magic shenanigans.
If Touya had been the one with the task of capturing the cards, and considering how Tomoyo only got this polite relationship with him as Sakura's brother (I know they're cousins too but let's be honest, they haven't interacted for most of their life at that point), but not much beyond that, it would feel a bit out of place for her to go all the way and sew costumes for him...especially considering Sakura would be oblivious to her brother's activities 😂
Tomoyo effectively got introduced in the events of "our" CCS just because of Sakura and her bond with her...even when she expanded her costumes production, you can trace it back to Sakura. Syaoran, the play, etc...there's always Sakura involved.
However, she's teaching Akiho how to sew for her practice on the book binding, and that's something that seems to be disconnected from Sakura. Still, it's not a costume, that requires a looooottttt of effort and time and resources and I have to be honest, only Sakura can give her the right driving force to do that, even in the case of Syaoran or the play! 😅
But what I really think was happening in that Space is that in their game of "what ifs", CLAMP just wanted an excuse to say that it would be YUKITO the one making the outfits 😂since Touya is his most important one and all 😉I found so endearing that in their idea, Yukito would try to make them anyway even though he's not particularly skilled at sewing 😂that's love 😁
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Hi
This is my first question and it's been one I've been thinking about for a while
I've been thinking about this idea of sakura using the return card to go back in time and try to prevent her mother death now if you had to make a epsiode out of this concept how would you do it and what would the story be like?
Hello!
Hummm, we're talking about the anime side since it's about Return.
I'm not sure to be honest, because that would go against everything CLAMP have always claimed in their stories, that is, the deads cannot come back. Once you're gone, you're gone.
So, they wouldn't make Sakura do something like trying to go back in the past to bring her mother back...it would represent a regression for the character herself, as Sakura seemed to have already accepted the situation back in the Illusion episode of the Clow Card Arc, when she said "yes, I miss her, but I prefer to know she's in a nice place now". Besides, nothing but bad things would come out of an attempt like that...I shudder just at the thought 😬this is not an "episode" material, it's stuff for an entire arc 😅
Hmm so no, I wouldn't want to make an episode of this. 😅
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I know Clear Card (manga at least) is ended but I still don't understand how the Clear Cards have their eyes opened unlike the Clow Cards who have their eyes closed.
Uhm, difference in design? A wish to differentiate them? It doesn't have to have a super-deep plot related reason 😅
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I’m sorry I said some unpleasant things to you earlier.
Your answer made me think about a lot of things I hadn’t thought before, both about CLAMP and Clear Card ? So thank you
I'm going to reply to this one immediately because I've been thinking for the past hour whether to reblog that post again and reply to your questions, or leave it be as I had said 😅
I'm sorry if I came across as irritated too, but the reason why I (and I think the other fan you reblogged from too) feel so over the edge about this topic is because it's been very difficult lately to interact with certain corners of the fandom without slipping into a puddle of negativity feeding on negativity, over matters that concretely no one of us can do anything about.
Sometimes I have the impression people see only the "artwork producing" side of Clamp and forget that they are human beings too, with their own wishes but most importantly, reasons and circumstances we know nothing about. And I have the impression the ease with how fans insult them might stem from (temporarily?) forgetting about that. It's so easy especially on the internet.
I don't know what perception you have of Clear Card and how much of what's been going on reaches other sides of the general Clamp fandom, but in 7 years and half many things changed, and I changed my perception too.
It might be absurd to think about that now, but there was a period early on when I also thought Clear Card could be here only as a commercial opportunity and I couldn't feel the love in the story. Turns out, I was probably influenced by external factors but most importantly, I hadn't reached the core of the story yet. I hadn't touched what was one of the biggest thematics they would talk about and I didn't understand yet what they were trying to do with this series, what risks they've taken to develop and portray properly those parts (like creating new characters that had importance and influence on the plot as much as the main character herself).
It's been 7 long, bumpy and difficult years of complaints in & out the CCS fandom, and the English official translation didn't help at all since it skewed most of the portrayal of the new characters. Now the last volume is out and I'm checking the comments of the Japanese fans, and lots of people who had dropped the series for the reasons I told you before are now satisfied with how the series ended.
A character in Clear Card says "when given the reason to change, no one can ever stay the same" and that's something we really need to remember more often. People, things, situations change. And what initially was discussed as just a one-shot to promote the start of the anime project, quickly changed into a full fledged and complex manga series. Ohkawa was probably struck with inspiration for a good story and thought it would've been a pity to develop it only through an anime, she wanted for them to tell that story with their own hands.
I also want to quickly address something you said in your reblog that I hadn't seen before.
For a lack of a better word, "fetish" to me means everything that encompasses your inclinations when you read a story. Those that make you go 😍 about it. It can be anything, big hands, wide shoulders, even kisses or the request for a wedding: I've seen over the years the most disparate complaints and even insults, sometimes, over those things. Like how Clamp didn't know how to draw anymore just because they didn't stay stuck in the past with their 90's shoulders and their art style is constantly changing depending on the themes of the story. It should be something to praise them for, because they're evolving and always keeping up to date with the trends, they're not stagnant.
I'm not saying we can't wish to see those things in their stories, what I said is that we can't expect them to live and work in the function of satisfying those requests for us. They should be free to write and draw what they really want to portray.
If I was able to make you see another side of the situation, I can only be glad about it! Thank you for your ask.
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I'm glad I met you too ❤️ I feel like we have similar views on several topics, and it's really refreshing to interact with someone who likes other Clamp series and not feeling uncomfortable or belittled, for once. It's so nice to feel you love and understand the series I love too. I completely get what you mean, it wouldn't be a problem for the occasional whining but it's the constant, pounding negativity that drives us further and further from interacting in fandom spaces...because that's what I feel too. We don't need to specify further because we perfectly know what we're talking about and what we have seen around.
That said, I'd better get back to work on some other post (or answering asks 😅) 😆
I know my last report is so long...and technically, I could've summarized so many of those info in shorter paragraphs.
But it's all intentional. I really wanted to write their dialogues out as far as possible, because I've noticed something in the fandom. I'm pretty sure this is not limited to CLAMP but to 'public figures' in general, especially on the internet.
I've noticed a sort of tendency to dehumanize these four women. Sometimes I come across comments that make my skin crawl. People calling them names, insults, "these old hags", people who think these four women should only live to satisfy the fandom's hunger for content, or their fetishes. They don't consider (and even if they do, they do not seem to know what the words 'be indulgent' mean) these are four human beings who have their lives, wishes, preferences, shortcomings, health problems, or even not a 100% great mental space.
I admit I have "joked" with heavy terms in private too, in the past. But lately, especially after they started to open the Twitter Spaces, showing their more "raw, genuine side" to us, and ever since my JP skills allowed me to understand them better, I can't bring myself to do that anymore. It might be because I'm getting old too and I understand painfully well what it means to begin having problems related to age (for memory or even physical pain), and the love and care (and often pain) that lie behind a piece of artwork, but I just can't help empathizing with them. Hearing them joking among each other, knowing how much they care for one another like sisters, hearing them talking so humbly about their work even after such a long time, getting to know when they're feeling sick and knowing their struggles because on the workplace they're like a machine that can work well only if all the components are in good condition...it really really makes you realize how human they are.
I think the turning point for me was when I heard one of the personal Spaces Ohkawa opened every morning for a week, while she was having breakfast, talking about various topics. In one of the firsts, she apologized because you could hear the noise of the washing machine working on the background. It struck me so powerfully. This is not some kind of unapproachable, inaccessible person living on another existential plane, this is a normal, regular human being who writes stories for a job but who's got to do laundry like every other regular person on this earth. They might drink champagne and go to fancy restaurants (but Ohkawa in particular is a fan of McDonald's too) but that doesn't mean that they lost their humanity.
And I found myself not wanting to partake in this stupid game of dehumanizing them anymore. Actually, with my translations, I want to try to make people see what I see too. Make them feel the "vibe" through their own words, because you can understand so much of them through the words they often use. Ohkawa might look like this merciless and whimsical boss, but she actually just loves the stories she envisioned very much, and she's ready to go through a shitstorm to defend her choices on the workplace.
She just feels a bit guilty that when there's criticism of her choices, the work of her colleagues gets dragged down along, but they're all in this together and they stick to one another tightly.
I can only do these translations when it's about CCS because they're exhausting to me and take me so much time, so my "brainrot" helps me push through to finish them. But at least for that, I want to try to do this, when I can.
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