Mewkledreamy

DGFischer Jul 24, 2020

8.5

The first review was written under the mistaken notion that the series would do a short run of 13 episodes and be done.  The plot was never so deep that the typical episode was about a friend/acquaintance/family member who was slipping into a depressed state, ushering in a Black Abyss spell cast by the bad kitties.  Yuma and Mew use Dream Synchro to invade the victim of bad dreams and cure him/her/it, gaining a Dreamy Stone in the bargain.  Get all the Dreamy Stones (which help Yume in battling the nightmarish Abyss) and Yume gets her wish.  Okay, maybe it will take a little longer than 13 episodes to get them all, but a simplistic storyline extended mercilessly would not worth an update. Thank goodness something more than cured dreamers worked into the synopsis.  And I don't mean this trend of nobody confessing their love to nobody although people are crushing all over the place.  Okay, just Yume, but that has helped move the story in an interesting direction, but the chances of love triangles forming were slight.  Now we have reason for a season well past 40 episodes. Long story short, we have a ‘love mess’ rising.  Yume does have a crush on tennis icon Haruhito, all the time never realizing that her childhood friend Asahi is struggling to confess that he's been attracted to Yume since ... well, childhood.  But we've a love triangle with a wrinkle.  Haruhito is an agent for the Queen of Nightmares.  That dark figure has instructed Haruhito to capture Yume's collection of Dreamy Stone so she can thwart the happiness the Queen Above the Skies has planned for the world.  Haruhito 'dates' Yume to give his henchmen (ah, henchcats) opportunities to sneak off with the Dreamy Stones.  The best that Asahi can do is be a friend to Yume and have constructive chats with her across the yard.  What Asahi now has is a dreamworld cat like Yume's Mew.  Rei de Richard is a gallant figure whose advise to the lovelorn is lost on Asahi who needs that push to get those difficult words 'I love you' out of Asahi’s mouth into Yume's ear. One weakness of the series centered on villains not worth their stuff.  Yuni and his gang of Hagi and Tsugi are too loveable to be despised felonious felines.  It's a good thing they are incompetent.  Haruhito's heart is not really in the nightmare spreading game.  Thank badness that you do have a legitimate heartless fiend in the Queen of Nightmares; the audience has someone to boo and hiss.  Up to now, ‘Ahhhh, wasn’t Yuni so adorably stupid in trying to foil Yume’s dream-saving work’ wasn’t enough to sustain Mewkledreamy for much longer. With plot shaping up, it is now understandable for the influx of new characters which usually burden the premise of the story.  Perfect matches of girl and familiar as the comedic Maira-Peko or scholarly Kotoko-Su balance out the clueless Yume-Mew team.  Even with Asahi getting Rei de Richard we have a familiar trying to get his master the qualities that are lacking in a young first year middle-schooler hoping to be somebody in his new school.  A desirable match between Haruhito and Yuri before they go their separate ways on graduation to high school is still one more iron in the fire, and the more irons, the hotter goes the flames.  It's really the missing essence in Mewkledreamy.  With little flames of passion (hey! it’s a kid show after all) you’ll need fire from the forces of evil. The first season is coasting to completion with the promise of a second season, Mewkledreamy Mix.  There is so much to resolve, and one thinks that no progress is being made.  But we are entering the fortieth episode, and things are set to go off, now that we are starting to discover a tangible threat coming from the Nightmare Kingdom.  What will the Land of Sweet Dreams do to counter?

sansaii Apr 3, 2022

3

CW: fat shaming/ food shaming,  depression, anxiety.  Monster of the week magical girl children's series clearly made to push merchandise. There are some cute gags and blinding kira kira sparkle cuteness, and although the bad guys have unclear motivations, I think they're cute too. The reason I rated this so low is because the first episode I saw was S2:E1 where they, I guess introduced a magazine model, who is presumably an adult, who one of the child characters works with and admires. The explicit and implicit story suggested that her sudden onset supernatural depression caused by the bad guys would jeopardize her modeling career not only because it inflicted depression and anxiety, but also because it was causing her to eat more than she used to. They mentioned her exaggerated fear of weight gain in passing earlier in the episode and this character trait is simply treated as normal and expected, whereas eating her fill is concerning and requires intervention with as much urgency as her depression/anxiety. The depression/ anxiety is also not treated with realism for the sake of making this a monster of the weekchildren's For this reason, I think this show entirely fails to consider the potentially dangerous impact this may leave on their target audience: children, probably mostly little girls. So even though I think it's a mediocre kids story with cloyingly cute, but ultimately benign cheerful bright visuals.I wouldn't recommend this for kids to watch because of the normalization of unhealthy hyperfocus on body and weight, even if only in one episode. This is not a healthy message for kids.