#darunodo

like, for one thing, the girls’ new upgraded transformations for Healin Good Arrow are angelic, while the Pathogerms’ evolutions are decidedly demonic, so you’ve already got the demon/angel parallels aesthetically, which I am so so so super into in any possible iteration

But then it’s just like. These two are just so interesting as enemies. They have totally, completely incompatible worldviews that necessitates that they fight each other - Nodoka has grown up surrounded by love and support and the belief that people have to take care of each other, and the desire to give something back to the world that helped her make it through her darkest times. She wants to fix things, to heal, she wants to make people happy and to live life with all the joy she can muster.

Daruizen, on the other hand, is literally a parasitic virus. The only way for him to survive was to take, to hurt. Destroying is the only thing he knows and he thinks that that’s the way it should be. He can’t imagine relying on anyone else, always looking out for himself and no one else - even though he obeys the orders of King Pathogerm, he doesn’t do it out of any sense of loyalty, but only out of his own sense of protecting himself. He can’t see the joy in living things.

These two have to fight each other. There is no other option. Neither of them can live comfortably with the others’ viewpoint, in fact, both of their desired realities actively destroy the other’s. 

And yet! There’s also something about them that connects them inextricably that can’t be forgotten. Neither of them would truly exist without the other. For the obvious, Daruizen wouldn’t exist if Nodoka hadn’t been his host. He wouldn’t even be alive without her. But Nodoka, too - her entire worldview stems from a childhood being sick - she’s so enthusiastic about life now that she can live it healthily because her childhood framed her current ideas about the world and her desired reality. If she had never been sick, she’d be a completely different person. Daruizen and Nodoka sharing their lives for a brief time inescapably made who they are today.

And that’s just fascinating to me. I know I’m reading way too far into a cartoon for nine year olds, but the layers to this premise is just so intense that I can’t help it. Two people who would not be themselves without the other, who have no choice but to be opposed to each other - it’s Romantic in the most Gothic sense of the word.

I’m extremely interested to see how their story ends - in any other medium I would say they would have no choice but to end up with either one or both of them destroying each other, but Precure is a little kids’ show, and Daruizen did look pretty surprised here at the end at Nodoka’s determination in her values....