Delicious Party Precure

Episodes 42-43

There's always a lot of tension when we get to the end of a Pretty Cure series. But I feel like this final battle is particularly fraught. In part that is almost certainly due to the fact that Godatz was once Fennel, someone everyone believed to be their ally. His betrayal is not something so easily brushed aside, and the confirmation in episode forty-two that he acted out of nothing more nor less than jealousy makes it a particularly bitter pill to swallow. In many ways, it means that the problem begins and ends with him, because as we see from flashbacks, there was nothing that Cinnamon, Rosemary, or Ginger actually did to hurt him. That does not take away the real pain he felt at being outclassed by Cinnamon, but because he did not, as far as we know, talk about what he was feeling, there was pretty much no way that the situation could have been avoided. The problem with feelings and insecurities is that they are in fact all in your head, and there's no easy way to get them out.

That Godatz is acting out of his own hurt feelings doesn't make him any less dangerous. In fact, it may even make him more dangerous, because he is so mired in his belief that people think him inferior that it has become his raison d'être in and of itself. While at first his plan to lock all Recipipis up in the Recipe Bon seems foolish – since if everyone dies of starvation he'll have no one to rule over – it is in fact a pretty smart way to secure power for himself over the entire planet. He doesn't plan to let everyone starve; he plans to use food as a way to get them to obey him. They can eat, provided they do exactly what he says. Plenty of Pretty Cure bad guys have hatched evil or insidious plans before, but this one really hits where it hurts, because he is basically saying that he has power over whether everyone lives or dies. He won't just transform humans into monsters, he'll actually kill them. That's fairly on-brand for this season of Pretty Cure, because death has been a presence throughout the entire series, with Yui's late grandmother playing a fairly large role. Yone has more or less taken on the role usually played by the Legendary Pretty Cure – she may not have been a superheroine in the sense that she transformed and fought evil, but it is her words and actions that keep coming back to give everybody hope.

Even Yone can't help Takumi in his romantic pursuit of Yui, however. He does flat-out tell her that he loves her in episode forty-three, but Yui isn't quite ready to hear what he's saying. She does, however, understand the underlying message that her grandmother left for everyone: that food is a form of caring, and that by sharing food people can express the things they cannot say. Although as a romantic confession it doesn't quite work, what's important about Takumi's words to Yui is that they both care about each other, and in recognizing that she does have emotions that go deeper than friendship allows those feelings to resonate with Takumi's, which in turn releases all the stored energy that Ginger stashed away in the lucky cat figures. Emotional resonance, the understanding that people care for each other in equal measure, is the key.

Secretoru is starting to understand that. After she collapsed in episode forty-two, Kokone brought her home and asked her parents to care for her. As her mother notes this week, she had her doubts about it, but ultimately decided to trust her daughter. Secretoru can't quite believe that, nor that her hero (Kokone's mother) might have some flaws herself. But hearing about it and seeing it firsthand is the first step to breaking her own destructive cycle of perfection, and she may turn out to be part of the key to defeating Godatz if she is able to break free of the crippling needs that allowed him to take advantage of her in the first place. In his way, Godatz embodies all of the issues his henchman have exhibited. And now with everyone's hearts coming together, and the magic of Yone and Ginger working to feed the hungry and to fuel their hearts and bodies, it may be possible to reach Fennel if he still exists within Godatz. If he does, you can be sure that no one is going to stop until they free him.

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Delicious Party♡Precure is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.