Cardcaptor Torika
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"MAAAAAAAA!"
—Torika Showron
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http://www.bwillettcomics.com/cardcaptortorika/index.html
From the art desk of Clowprincess223 (http://bwillettcomics.com), this doujinshi series was the first this author / artist completed in full and this artist's first doujinshi series. It seems like a stock mahou shoujo / Cardcaptor continuation fare, but it shows its differences after a while. The character interactions are very distinct, as the series is a strange amalgam of the dub, the anime, and the original manga. If you're familiar with Cardcaptor Sakura, you'll recognize a lot of reused plot lines, but with different resolutions and characters filling them, so it feels like watching the series unfold all over again.
The series has three arcs:
- The Star Cards: Torika becomes a cardcaptor and chases around her mother's former Star Cards. Progressively, we meet Torika's friends and learn that Sakura is in a coma (similar to how Sakura didn't have her own mother around while growing up... but not really).
- The Heart Cards: In order to bring Sakura out of her coma, Torika must transform the Star Cards she has captured into Heart Cards.
- The Emperor of Nightmares: An evil force is stalking Torika's dreams, as well as the dreams of Torika's friends. On the bright side, Sakura woke up.
- Stories From the Sakura Book: A bonus prequel that manages to unify the endings of the anime and the manga into a single continuity, before the events of the main series occur.
Tropes used in Cardcaptor Torika include:
- All Just a Dream: The fight scenes in the Emperor of Nightmares arc largely fall under this category.
- Art Evolution: And how! The series basically chronicles the artist getting progressively better and better at drawing.
- Babies Ever After: One of the main premises of the entire story is that, not only did nearly everybody from Cardcaptor Sakura become a parent, but their kids are largely dead ringers for their parents.
- Bury Your Gays: Subverted. The atypical pairings of all kinds are skirted around, but still identifiable.
- Butterfly of Doom: Torika fears causing one of these while attempting to capture the Return Card.
- Continuation Fic
- Covers Always Lie: Not once does Torika ever wear the outfit that she wears on the host site?s home page.
- DVD Bonus Content: For following and voting for the series on a comic-rating website, you were rewarded with a variety of Character Cards, now all available on the host website.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's Cardcaptor Sakura, but with Torika as the Cardcaptor.
- Generation Xerox: Particularly in the earlier chapters, Torika would go through the exact same methods (and plot) to defeat the Clow Cards that her mother used.
- MacGuffin: The photo album in the Heart Card arc, and the mysterious library book and the "gifts" Jeri / EON gave to Torika in the Emperor of Nightmares arc.
- Pet the Dog: With the literal dog, Tsuki.
- Prequel: Stories From the Sakura Book, joining the gap between the second Cardcaptor Sakura movie and the start of Cardcaptor Torika.
- Spin-Off: The upcoming Chaos Card Captor Torika assuming the thing ever makes it out of Development Hell.
- Technology Marches On: While in Cardcaptor Sakura, technology was budding near the turn of the millennium (for instance, cell phones were crude prototypes compared to modern cell phones), Cardcaptor Torika is more modern, with new (fictional) gaming consoles and even TiVo.
- Word of God: For a while, the artist answered emailed questions on the same website that hosted the series.