Delicious Party Precure

Episode 31

One of my favorite weird anime things is the way that all royalty dresses like they've escaped from a mid-century Disney film at all times. Maira's twenty-four-hour ballgown and her cousin's full-on fantasy Medieval prince getup are somehow the most ridiculous part of an episode that I was very much afraid would turn out to be terrible, but instead managed to be both sweet and funny. Yui is the least suited Cure to be a princess, and that holds true, but what I didn't expect was that in an episode without an Ubau-zo, we'd get a really solid story about finding your courage.

The conceit of the episode is pure The Prince and the Pauper - Maira, crown princess of a fictional island nation, is visiting Oishi-na Town (on, I assume, part of a larger Japan tour) and wouldn't you know it, she's a dead ringer for Yui…something she knows going in because she's met Takumi's dad before. Putting aside the fact that a random fisherman somehow waltzed up to a princess for a casual conversation, Yui is fully ready for Maira to take advantage of this to have a little free eating time, and Maira nervously agrees. The switch, while physically possible, is fully ridiculous when you get down to it, because Maira and Yui are complete opposites. Maira does a better job of fooling people simply because she's got Amane, Mari, Kokone, and Ran to surround her and run interference. Yui? Yeah, she's a disaster.

But what makes this episode is really the last quarter, when Maira's evil cousin kidnaps “her” in order to prove to the world (or at least one random town in Japan) that he should be the heir to the throne. Yet what actually gets proven is what magical girl shows have always meant to me: that the power to help yourself comes from within. While it's amazing to see Yui hulk herself out of her ropes and have the wherewithal to break the surveillance camera so that she can transform, the real meat of the episode is two simple lines: Maira hears Yui's catchphrase and Amane tells her that it's just something Yui says to pump herself up. She's making an excuse in the moment, but Maira takes it To Heart, because if anyone needs a magic spell to give herself courage, it's Princess Maira.

We don't know a whole lot about Maira. She's called “the smiling princess” because she rarely talks, and she tells Amane that's because she gets so nervous speaking in public. She knows that's an issue in terms of presenting herself as the heir to the throne, and she tries to make up for it by conducting extensive research of everywhere she goes – possibly in the hope that she'll be able to overcome her anxiety and hold a conversation. But she lacks the self-confidence to actually do it, and it's Yui bumbling through her role-swap that shows her that maybe she can pull things off. Sure, she doesn't see Yui transform or free everyone else, but she does know that when Yui said that magic phrase, everything started to work out. She doesn't need to know that Yui turned into Cure Precious; she only needs to understand that Yui found the courage to do what needed to be done. When she whispers Yui's catchphrase at the end of the episode before giving her speech in a loud, clear voice, she's demonstrating what magical girls as a genre can do and have done for their audience for years: given people the power to call forth their own inner strength and be brave.

This episode didn't need Secretoru or an Ubau-zo to fight, because the monster was in Maira's head all along. Those are the monsters we have to defeat at the end of the day, and that's what made this episode so much more than I was expecting it to be.

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Delicious Party♡Precure is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.