And we return…!

To Food­Fling­ing Saku­ra™

When I first watched this, it was dur­ing that time in life where you’d rely on your moth­er to do the cook­ing for you. Com­ing back to it as a young adult and cook­ing for myself, I can def­i­nite­ly say that…

…I real­ly empathize with Saku­ra’s fear of siz­zling oil while fry­ing foods for the first time. It’s not fun.

In “Saku­ra and the Enchant­ed Cards”, we find out that so-called good luck enchant­ment cards are being sold at Mak­i’s store. And they look sus­pi­cious­ly like Clow Cards.

And, well, they seem to work. The non-ath­let­ic Naoko man­ages to do real­ly well at box jumping.

Head­canon:

meil­ing pls

Then again, Meil­ing bought the Love card and that clear­ly did­n’t work.

Head­canon:

Badass Adorable

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the Clow Card of the Day is hid­den among the looka­likes, and sens­ing the mag­i­cal pres­ence of the card, Saku­ra search­es around the shop with her adorably cool seri­ous face.

I mean, just look at it. Give her a hug and she’ll kick your ass, but you’d give her a hug anyway.

After a bit of run­ning around and inves­ti­gat­ing, we find out that Meil­ing is in poses­sion of The Shot card — a very dan­ger­ous attack card.

RAGE QUIT

This reminds me of CLAMP in Won­der­land 2.

The Shot has to be the most vio­lent Clow Card so far (the only one that came close was The Sword). I mean, all of the oth­er Clow Cards thus far have been nui­sances to dai­ly life at best — but no lives were on the line. Here, Syao­ran could have died. The Shot is pret­ty much a gun.

Back when I first watched this episode, I had yet to know how deeply-ingrained “love” as an emo­tion could be in Card­cap­tor Saku­ra, so I was real­ly annoyed when Meil­ing refused to hand over The Shot when Syao­ran and Saku­ra told her it was a dan­ger­ous Clow Card, and that she should hand it over. I mean, why would they lie about that?

After fin­ish­ing the series and learn­ing to appre­ci­ate her char­ac­ter and her lat­er devel­op­ment, I was like, “oh, Syao­ran and Saku­ra were the ones telling her to hand The Shot over”, back then. “Ah. Okay. I get it now.” It’s still an annoy­ing moment, but I don’t hate her for it.

Saku­ra came up with a great plan using The Mir­ror. I think this is the only time The Mir­ror took the shape of any­thing besides the girl on the card and Sakura.

She’s an actu­al mir­ror this time.

だれだ？

…sor­ry, that’s seri­ous­ly what I thought when I was like, eight.

All’s well that ends well

Wow, Tomoyo was there all along, film­ing the fight like a boss.

CONCENTRATION

Suc­cess!

LEVEL UP!

What’s this? A present? Looks like Saku­ra’s defrost­ing Meil­ing — she tends to be good at that.

Thanks Meilin, now maybe Saku­ra can lev­el up her cook­ing skills even more. Sor­ry, been on a JRPG kick with Ate­lier Rorona.

Saku­ra was real­ly hap­py about get­ting a present from Meil­ing, It’s heart-melt­ing­ly cute how much Saku­ra loves all of her com­pa­ny, even if they’re not com­plete­ly pleas­ant to her at the begin­ning. Dude, it’s not pos­si­ble to gen­uine­ly hate Saku­ra and Syaoran/Meiling’s defrost­ing shows (the for­mer espe­cial­ly for obvi­ous reasons).

Unless you’re, of course, a ter­ri­ble human being.

This episode’s Leave it to Kero! talks about the Enchant­ed Cards, which are (again) sus­pi­cious­ly sim­i­lar to Clow Cards.