Delicious Party Precure

Episode 40

It is starting to look like the Bundoru Gang it's a bit smarter than we had been giving them credit for. You may have noticed that Spiritoru has been missing for the past few episodes; I had erroneously assumed that this was so that we could learn more about Secretoru and her motivations. That may still be true, but when Takumi's father Cinnamon comes home this week, we learn that he has noticed dishes disappearing around the world. That means that Secretoru was essentially functioning as a distraction for the Pretty Cures, allowing her robot creation to wreak havoc in other parts of the world without interference. That is an impressively well-thought-out strategy, and it has considerably upped the ante in terms of what the villains are capable of.

That means that Cinnamon's return to Oishi-na Town isn't just useful in terms of giving us a better sense of the big picture. Cinnamon's very existence is important to the story because, as you may recall, he was framed and banned from the CooKingdom long before our present set of Pretty Cures was born. That makes him essentially a hidden weapon, a source of help that the villains are likely unaware of. He also represents a chance to right past wrongs for Mari; rekindling his friendship with Cinnamon frees up his mind to ask the really important question: if Cinnamon was framed, then who is the real culprit? And does Cinnamon now bear a grudge that could come back to bite everyone in the behind?

So far the answer to that last question seems to be no. Cinnamon appears very comfortable with helping Mari, even if the same cannot be said for his discovery that his son Takumi has been making use of his Delicioustone to become Black Pepper. It's a really on-point dad moment when Cinnamon talks very seriously to his son. There's a sense that he is really proud of Takumi for stepping up, but that is tempered by his fatherly fear that his son is putting himself in danger when he does not strictly have to. This conflict allows Takumi to really think about why it is that he's been fighting with the girls. It may have started out as an offshoot of his crush on Yui, but by this point it has become something important in its own right. Being Black Pepper has been eating at him in the sense that he hasn't been able to bring himself to tell Yui about it, but it's also become a source of pride for him. He may grumble about how his grocery shopping is interrupted every single time the Bundoru Gang attacks, but he's still proud that he can aid in the fight despite, as his father frames it, his not having been “chosen.”

This raises an interesting question about choice and the powers in this show. There's an argument to be made that Takumi would not have been able to use his father's Delicioustone in the first place if the stone had not chosen him in a low-key sort of way. We can compare this to the way that Amane became Cure Finale: there was no little fairy for her, much in the same way there wasn't one for Takumi. Both of them made their choice in their desire to help and because they were strong in their convictions, and both found a way to transform and become part of the battle. Is there really a difference between Cure Finale's locket and Black Pepper's Delicioustone? I would say that there really isn't, and that they were able to transform because of their own desire and inner strength. The fight was already ongoing when they gained their transformations, and their desire to join it is every bit as important as the other three Cures being chosen.

Emotions are powerful things. It is looking ever more like Secretoru's transformation was affected by her own negative emotions, making her the inverse of Black Pepper. Her inability to cook appears to have eaten at her to the point where she blamed it for everything that went wrong in her life, and more specifically for her boyfriend leaving her. She was so focused on doing it right that she perhaps lost sight of why she did it at all, and that seems to be the motivation behind her desire for all foods to simply vanish. She is blaming food for her own insecurities, and while I don't think that is meant to be a metaphor for disordered eating, I also think it may be fair to view it in that light in terms of her unhealthy relationship with food.

Caring about something or someone is a double-edged sword. Yui breaking down in tears when she realizes that the best friend she's been trying to keep her not-so-secret identity as Cure Precious from is in fact the person who has been helping her all along shows the toll that all of this has taken on her. She still remains the least developed of the main cast, but this gives us a bit of a hint that she has been keeping everything bottled up inside. We may be able to say the same of Secretoru and Fennel, and I'm thinking that we really want to keep an eye on the latter going forward.

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Delicious Party♡Precure is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.