It’s been a month since my last update. Yes, I’ve taken a long break this summer due to some personal matters, so I really appreciate your patience and support. ❤ For those of you who prefer to read in Spanish, my friend Yue Chan has translated my series Did Candy find her happiness? Muchas gracias mi querida amiga ❤! You can find the translation for this post here, “¿Candy encontró su felicidad? (Parte 9)”
Back to this topic of happiness, I can do more comparisons between the old CC novel and Candy Candy Final Story (CCFS) but I’ve decided to wrap up the series instead. Lately, it came to my attention that some people claimed that Albert was homosexual. Why? Just because his birthday or birth month happened to be the same day / month as gay pride. I don’t know about the details and honestly don’t care to find out, but I was quite surprised that such a rumour exists. First of all, don’t they know LGBT around the world celebrate on different days of the year? Secondly, back in the 70s when the story was first published, gay culture wasn’t as prominent or widely acknowledged, at least not in East Asian countries like Japan. Besides, whoever spread this rumour probably isn’t aware that the June birthday for Albert was not an official one. According to my friend, since his real identity wasn’t revealed until the very end in the manga / anime, unlike the other characters in CC, his age had been a mystery to readers. Fans could only guess that he was Anthony’s age when he first appeared in the story as Prince on the Hill (which makes sense to me), and some fans even gave him a birthday. It was only in CCFS that Mizuki (real name Nagita) finally wrote an official age for him. Yet, his birth date remained unknown.
In addition to this rumour, some people have been obnoxious enough to deliberately mock the story of Candy Candy. They have created a fan page to make fun of Albert as the husband of Candy. Yes, she married him but she missed Terry in secret, etc. Well, I guess they are free to do anything they want, but I’m aware that they have been stealing people’s fanarts (including mine, though removed some time later) in order to insult the characters Albert and/or Candy. Not only that, they have created posters or collages to insult Albert fans too. I certainly won’t stoop to their level of announcing who they are, but at the same time it makes me wonder, how far can these fans go to offend Albert fans or make fun of the beloved characters of Candy Candy? They show no respect of others in the fandom. If they have done all this for the love of Terry, if Terry had been real, he would have been upset by his followers’ deeds. 🙁
That said, I’ve prepared to be one of their next targets (if they haven’t yet done so by now), but guess what? I’ve made up my mind not to check their page ever again, and if any of you see me being jeered at, please do me a big favor of not informing me. I’m not at all interested to play their game.
At any rate, I’m afraid these people don’t really understand the plot of CCFS, which apparently still sticks to the original story shown in the manga. It’s a story between Candy and her Prince on the Hill. While Mizuki has made some changes in CCFS, the story structure has remained the same as the old novel. Namely, the time and place of the story, the theme, the characters and the conflicts (the major events) have not changed.
Those who insist that Candy would rather wait for Terry to leave Susanna one day (for whatever reason) and return to her side have totally missed the real ending of CCFS, where Candy herself plainly wrote to Albert that “now is my happiness”. There’s no doubt she was happy with her prince; not only he loved her and was willing to share her sorrows in life, he was also her best friend and confidant, whose presence alone gave her the marvelous feeling of security. Who else in the story can measure up to him, really? Candy loved her prince too, or else she wouldn’t have pressured him to come on her birthday to spend time with her on her special day. When it’s clearly written that Albert didn’t want her to be his sister or his adopted daughter and she knew deep in her heart that he was special and living with him was slightly different from living with a family member, it’s bizarre why some people still believe Candy regarded him as her big brother or he was a father figure to her. Come on, Candy had changed and moved on in her life. Why some people are reluctant to see the truth is beyond my understanding. On the other hand I must say that it’s funny to read some of their arguments, and often times they can’t seem to decide whether he was her big brother or a father to her.
As a genuine fan of Candy Candy, one should sincerely wish happiness for the main heroine, don’t you think? Not to mention that Terry’s character was an afterthought. A CC fan Chako on Twitter posted Mizuki’s famous interview on Twitter, and she herself expressed her disappointment about that because she was a Terry fan. Anyway, in the interview we know that by adding Terry it made the story of Candy Candy somewhat different from Daddy-long-legs. Yet, this didn’t cause Mizuki to change the ending of the story. She had to remove Terry from Candy’s life somehow. If I have time in the future, I can discuss this interview with more details.
Another thing is the badge which the prince had absentmindedly dropped in the beginning of the story. It plays a significant role in the story, and it was mentioned again and again throughout CCFS. Interestingly, as far as I know, it didn’t seem to be in Candy’s jewelry box, where she had kept only significant keepsakes (items or letters in memory of people in her past), or at least Candy didn’t mention it at her present or during her retrospection. Wouldn’t this make you wonder where it was?
In the old novel, Candy wanted to return the badge to Albert after his confession, but he essentially told her to keep it. He said something like “if you give it back to me I will present it anew to you”. In CCFS, Albert did ask Candy for his badge as his way to reveal that he was her prince, but it wasn’t mentioned again till Candy’s last letter to him. She planned to return her diary to him so that he could keep it for her, just like the way he had presented his badge back to her. In other words, what used to belong to him or her now also belonged to the other. It’s a strong hint that they owned these items together from now on. Not only that, it implies he wanted her to keep the badge for him; since it represented her Prince on the Hill all these years, he would be by her side, as always.
Hence, Candy must have kept the badge with her since then. I don’t think Albert would ever ask it back again because he had presented it to her as his gift. So where did it go?
In the manga we read that Candy liked to keep the badge in a box together with her other memory keepsakes, so it’s only natural that she kept it in the damascene jewelry box as well. If so, why didn’t she mention it in her own narratives? Yet, doing so she would have to talk about Prince on the Hill, right? 😉 And if she did, she would probably have given away who Anohito was, I guess. 😀 Another possibility is that Candy no longer kept the badge by the time she was in her thirties, because the badge had been passed to the next rightful heir of the Ardlays. ❤❤
Candy and Prince on the Hill