Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Arc 08
カードキャプターさくら クリアカード編 chapter 08

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

After Sakura freaks out over the walking trees, Tomoyo tells the teacher she will take Sakura to the nurse’s office. Once they are in the clear, Sakura frantically explains the situation. Sakura believes there is another card at work. Tomoyo is excited by this since she gets to say one of her catch phrases. In addition, Tomoyo produces a new (Chinese) outfit for Sakura to wear.

Sakura changes, then transforms her key into the staff. Looking at her cards, she decides not to use Aqua as it might help the trees. She encases the trees using Siege. The trees attempt to break out, so Sakura has Siege take a flexible form. She uses Aqua to flood the space within Siege, but open a path for her to force the Card into card form. Doing this, the Card is revealed to be Action.

Sakura and Kero visit Yukito, who transforms to Yue to help Sakura. Sakura explains the situation on the Action card. Further, Sakura had to use it to get the trees to move themselves back to where they are supposed to be. Yue senses no magic in the cards, but using the new key does use some magic power.

Yue’s services finished, he transforms back to Yukito. As Yukito prepares drinks, Syaoran calls Sakura. Sakura briefs Syaoran on the situation. During their call, Sakura says she’ll make Syaoran lunch. She gets permission to call Syaoran anytime, even if there are no problems. After they hang up, Syaoran looks worriedly at his magic board.

Thoughts/Review:

With everything going on in my life at the moment, I missed that chapter 8 came a while back. Oops.

The Dynamic Duo

I know that Sakura is the main character of this series, but there are times when Tomoyo is the real hero. While Sakura is busy freaking out by what she sees outside, Tomoyo comes up with the illness cover story to get Sakura out of class where she can do her magic girl thing. So as a team, they work well together, which is lovely.

Tomoyo also manages to get her moments of scene stealing, such as when she realized she could say one of her classic lines while producing a new costume for Sakura. She always cracks me up with her otaku enthusiasm to capture Sakura on video, doing her thing. And then there’s Tomoyo’s lament of not being able to see the action inside the Siege area.

Capturing the Card

As usual, the card capturing element of the story continues to make no sense, or rather very little sense. I seem to recall in the original Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura could see the magical entity that made up the card. So she’d capture that and force that being to revert to card form. Now, there’s really not an entity to see. So what Sakura keys in on (no pun intended) to capture is never clear to me. I still don’t know exactly how doing what Sakura did allowed her to capture the card.

CLAMP is trying to keep the cards similar yet different by not allowing them to be the beings they were before. Further, causing the cards to have no magical element (apparently) is another way for CLAMP to try to make things different. There’s a part of me that would like to speculate, but we don’t have any real information to base speculation on. Further, knowing CLAMP, Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Arc will go into hiatus before all is said and done.

Sakura and Syaoran

While the card capturing stuff isn’t anything that interesting (CLAMP hasn’t found a way to make it interesting), the romantic element between Syaoran and Sakura is. I loved the cute moment when Sakura asked to make Syaoran a lunch. I also loved the cute moment when Sakura got permission to call Syaoran just to chat. Being a sucker for romantic stuff, I’m rather hoping to see this element of the story progress, especially since it will be wholesome and sweet.

The only cloud is Syaoran’s involvement in this Clear Card incident. I’ve no idea what he and Eriol are up to. He sure looks worried in the final page of the chapter. Not only that, his magic board is all lit up.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Time to get this wrapped up ’cause work is calling me for more fun.

• I like seeing Yukito and Yue being involved in the story. I wish there could be a greater role for Yue.
• Kero-chan is also being kept on the sidelines as comic relief. That’s a bit disappointing.
• I mentioned Tomoyo being a scene stealer. Even though Sakura is the MC, she had her own scene stealing moment when while talking with Yukito, she angrily went off about Touya and breakfast. “Oniichan!? He made me eat broccoli this morning! He was even saying ‘grow-grow into a monster.” 😆
• We lost transfer girl Akiho. She didn’t even come up in the discussions.

In the end, Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Arc 08 is fun, mainly thanks to Tomoyo. It is also cute and sweet, thanks to CLAMP touching on the romance between Syaoran and Sakura.