Delicious Party Precure

Episode 39

Advice is rarely one-size-fits-all. In a lot of ways, that's a really difficult lesson to learn, because our inclination tends to be that if something was good or helpful for us, it will do the same for someone else. But as Yui finds out this week, everyone's got their own special circumstances, and the truth is rarely on the surface. While all of the episodes of Delicious Party Pretty Cure have had a really nice flow to them, feeding into each other in an organic way, there's a particularly good connection between this week's and last week's episodes. Yui is fresh off of meeting with her grandmother in the past, and that has renewed her enthusiasm for an idolization of all things Yone. Her grandmother means so much to her that it is hard for her to understand that what works for her might not work for everybody, and as it turns out, that's not a particularly comfortable thing to understand. Maybe it's because she was raised in a restaurant family, but in Yui's mind, cooking is a joyous event, one that people do out of sheer love for it just as much as anything else. So when she sees her friend Wakana's lunch, handmade by her dad, her immediate assumption is that he must enjoy making them as much as she enjoys eating them.

Much like advice, cooking is another thing that rarely elicits the exact same feelings from everybody. Even if we take out factors like disordered eating or emotional baggage surrounding food, cooking itself is an activity that people often find to be a chore rather than a joy. While some love throwing together exquisite meals with carefully thought-out nutritional values, others would really rather just chuck something frozen in the microwave, either because they don't like to cook or because they do not have time to prepare home-cooked meals. Although this hasn't been touched on all that much in the show, this episode does hint at it for Yui, and she realizes that simply parroting her grandmother's words about how home-cooked meals are the best and that food equals love can be very hurtful to people in different circumstances. Yes, Wakana's father goes to great lengths to make sure she has a beautiful lunch box every day, but he does so at the expense of his own health, and that's just not something that Yui has ever encountered before. When he almost collapses on the street in front of her, Yui suddenly realizes that there is a lot more going on than her experience of the world would indicate, and this becomes the overarching metaphor for the episode, and possibly the entire end game of the series.

I say this because of the glimpse we get of Secretoru's past this week. We've known that she's wanted to more or less gatekeep food since her takeover as the main villain, but this week we see that it's not because she herself is an exquisite cook; it's more that she is the ultimate perfectionist, and her own frustrations with her imperfect cooking have driven her to be a particularly harsh critic. She flat-out tells Mari that perfection is everything, and that seems to be something that she will gladly sacrifice herself in order to achieve. This parallels Wakana's father and his quest to be the perfect single dad to his daughter; he is more than willing to throw away his own well-being in pursuit of parental excellence, and it is only when Yui and her mother realize what's going on that makes it possible for the cycle to be broken. Clearly there was no one to break Secretoru's cycle, and she eventually fell to the dark side.

With this episode, it starts to look like there's a lot more going on than just “good versus bad.” Fennel's reaction to Mari meeting Ginger is a little odd, and even if he's just jealous that Mari got to meet their old master, it's something that bears keeping an eye on. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that Takumi and his mother were both very aware that his father was Cinnamon, and they're becoming increasingly nervous about Mari's presence. This raises the question of what they will do to protect him, and what Cinnamon himself will do; we know that Yui's father is able to come home from their fishing trip sooner than expected, so that may mean that Cinnamon is coming home early as well. What this will mean for Mari and the girls is almost a more pressing question than how they ultimately deal with Secretoru, because if Black Pepper and Cinnamon default to a third party (I doubt they're going to be on the Bundoru Gang side), it could complicate things quite a bit. Yui is learning to be her own person rather than a carbon copy of her grandmother, as well as to see the shades of grey in the world, and those may well be the most valuable lessons she's picked up as the story heads into its finale.

Rating:

Delicious Party♡Precure is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.