APADFTMOM Day 7: Cardcaptor Sakura, and Clear Storytelling Intent

Clamp’s Cardcaptor Sakura is a classic manga and anime series that is essential reading or viewing if you’re looking to go down the rabbit hole that is the magical girl genre, which I recommend you go down because it’s a wild ride with decades upon decades of history. There are plenty of topics worthy of writing about in Cardcaptor Sakura and I may go over another one later in the month, but today our focus will be on how the series handles the simple action of telling us what its plot will be and then following through on it. We will be a little looser than usual with spoilers today due to the series being twenty years old, but only a little.






Cardcaptor Sakura began publishing in the magazine Nakayoshi in 1996, which is coincidentally the same magazine Sailor Moon was published in until its end in 1997. Cardcaptor Sakura follows elementary school student Sakura Kinomoto as she frees a set of magical cards known as the Clow Cards and begins tracking each card down to reclaim it to prevent the spirits within from rampaging as well as greater disaster in general. The Clow Cards were originally created and owned by the legendary magician Clow Reed who is long dead at the beginning of the story.




If it feels like that plot explanation was padded to make it longer than it needed to be, that would be because it was. Cardcaptor Sakura’s plot is very simple and divided in half between two storylines: The Clow Card arc where Sakura gathers the Clow Cards, and the Sakura Card arc where Sakura converts each card to be her own. There is a third arc that was recently released known as the Clear Card arc but that will not be touched on due to today’s focus being on the original run of the series.




As a character, Sakura seems bland and generic on paper: She is loyal to her friends, shows intense determination in the face of adversity, cares deeply for others, and dislikes having to go to school. This sounds like getting Generic Protagonist Bingo, but keep in mind that this is all in the context of the character being ten years old. There is no complex mentality behind Sakura because Sakura is just a child and these traits are fine for a child. Sakura does exhibit some uniqueness when it comes to the topic of love, and since this is a Clamp series that whole topic is deserving of its own separate post.




Cardcaptor Sakura is very much the story of Sakura herself and not a story just centered around Sakura. Sakura is the titular character and the whole plot revolves around Sakura’s growth as a magician, but this story structure is firmly cemented with how other characters interact with Sakura. Every character aside from Sakura was very clearly written to be a part of the supporting cast with the sole purpose of helping Sakura in their own unique way. Contrast this against a series like Naruto where the story is about the titular character’s growth but a heavy focus is placed on the rival, or a series like Sailor Moon where multiple characters close to the protagonist are each given their own goals that they try to achieve as they progress through the main story. The characters in Cardcaptor Sakura may have surface-level motivations, but these either lead back to supporting Sakura or are too general to be considered goals even worth resolving in the story.




Each of Cardcaptor Sakura’s story arcs is laid out plainly at the beginning of the arc to show where the point B will be in reference to the reader’s point A. The first half of the story is explained right away: Sakura needs to collect the Clow Cards by subduing the spirits within them. This is a concise goal told to the audience in a direct way that lays out the main conflict and leaves little room for misunderstanding. There may be smaller conflicts along the way, but the main goal here is to have Sakura collect the Clow Cards.




The midpoint of the story is the most important point of Cardcaptor Sakura from a storytelling perspective. After the first arc, the audience has been shown that this series follows through with the narrative path it lays out. Sakura has collected the Clow Cards and there have been smaller conflicts along the way, but those smaller conflicts have been byproducts of the larger conflict so there has been little deviation in the primary goal. There is nothing that could be considered a filler arc; Up to this point, the plot has been as straightforward as promised.




Now the story asks the audience to stick around for a second half as Sakura reclaims each card as her own. The plot here echoes the first half in the sense that Sakura will once again be focusing on the cards individually, except this time the reader is aware of how the story is told and knows that the series is authored in a very honest way. At this point it can be expected that the series will deliver on its promise to have Sakura convert the cards with next to no distractions. With the “what” in place, the story is free to focus on the “how” and “why.”




Cardcaptor Sakura is written with such confidence that it has no issues giving the audience the destination ahead of time because the real intrigue is in the journey. Saying what Sakura needs to do means very little without the details behind those actions that make them hold weight, and those details mean very little when bogged down with lengthy, ultimately unrelated sidetracks. By the time the audience reaches the middle of the story, that confidence behind the writing is made all the more apparent with the series having earned the audience’s trust. Not only can readers expect an enjoyable second act that helps bring the story to a close, but they can expect that act to be laid out with the same level of respect for their time as the first.




Respecting the reader’s time is an important aspect of writing that can easily go unnoticed, especially with a longer series. When it comes to manga, success means putting out a product that people will want to pick up, return to with every new chapter, and spend money on both in a magazine and in the form of a full series volume alongside other chapters. People stop reading when they feel that reading is a waste of their time, and when people stop reading they also stop buying. Granted, there are many individual factors that are to be taken into consideration when respecting the reader’s time, but delivering on promises in a reliable, no-nonsense way is definitely one of the big ones.




Maybe one day we’ll look into something opposite of Cardcaptor Sakura that is notorious for betraying the trust of the audience, but for the month of May we will continue looking into positives. That is the promise I laid out at the beginning of my journey. Cardcaptor Sakura does indeed have a western release through Kodansha Comics and is actually very easy to find and purchase at decently low prices.