Family Loyalty

In the last episode of DokiDoki Precure, episode 22, we saw Regina-san torn between loyalty to her friends, the Precure, and loyalty to her father, King Selfish.  I thought that it was likely that she would be the next Precure, but it turns out that she wasn’t.  (As an aside, I wonder who Cure Ace is?)

Fathers working for the side of evil seems to be a recurring theme in recent Precure.  Of the last four Precure series, this is the third with a main character whose father is working for evil.  In Heartcatch Precure, near the end of the series, we find out that Professor Sabaaku (the apparent leader of the Desert Apostles) is the father of Yuri-san/Cure Moonlight.  Throughout the series, we know that Yuri-san’s father, Professor Tsukikage, was missing.  He was researching the Heart Tree, and he disappeared.  Cure Flower tells the other girls to keep Cure Moonlight from fighting Professor Sabaaku.  We then learn that Professor Sabaaku is Yuri-san’s father.

Professor Tsukikage is redeemed by the Precures, and then he sacrifices himself in their defense.  Cure Moonlight must come to terms with her feelings and her grief surrounding her father before she can become completely whole.

In the next series, Suite Precure, we meet the mysterious Cure Muse.  When we first meet Cure Muse, she is dressed in a dark costume.  At times, she assists the other Precures, but she tells them repeatedly that she is not their ally.  She further insists that she is not anyone’s ally.  After she protects King Mephisto (the ruler of the Evil Minor Land) from the other Precures, we learn that she is the daughter of Queen Aphrodite (the ruler of the Good Major Land) and King Mephisto.  King Mephisto used to be good, and when he turned to evil, she received her Precure powers.  Caught in between the battle between her mother and her father, she helped the Precure at times, but she did not ally herself with them.   She had to be taught that true loyalty to her father was helping him return to his former good self.

In the last episode of DokiDoki, Regina-san was torn between loyalty to her father, King Selfish, and loyalty to her new found friends.  One of the interesting things is that Mana-san did not even consider that Regina-san would fight her father, and she completely understood Regina-san’s love for and loyalty to her father.  She also seemed to believe that Regina-san’s love and loyalty could transform King Selfish.  In both Heartcatch Precure and Suite Precure, this indeed did happen.  Cure Moonlight’s love redeemed Professor Sabaaku and Cure Muse’s love redeemed King Mephisto.

Neither Professor Sabaaku nor King Mephisto were the ultimate Evil Boss.  Instead, they were pawns of the true Evil Boss.  In Heartcatch Precure, the ultimate Evil Boss was Dune, and in Suite Precure, it was Noise.  So far, it seems that King Selfish is the ultimate Evil Boss.  Of course, we may find out otherwise as the season progresses.

Sadly, after the last episode, Regina-san did go back to her father and to the side of Evil.  She did not become the new Precure.  I am interested in seeing how this story progresses.

Doki Doki Precure: Selfishness and Harmony

Selfish Crab attacks order & harmony

In DokiDoki Precure the primary enemy is selfishness, embodied in a monster called King Jikochu (King Selfish) and its humanoid minions, the Selfish.

Each Precure series has a different enemy based on a different “theme”. Superficially these can be seen as so many arbitrary and colorful story elements, but if we look at them a little more closely we can see that there are in fact important connections between them.

In Suite Precure, the enemy is “Noise”. The fundamental conflict is between harmony and discord. The harmony (and the discord) are expressed musically, but we should note that 和 wa or harmony is a fundamental concept in Japanese life and in traditional metaphysics in general (it is an interesting side-note that the most literal battle between harmony and discord in serious music is one of the very few that have gone to the side of the angels in recent West Tellurian history). Wa is both social harmony and the “music of the spheres” — the harmony of all being.

That selfishness is also an opposite to this kind of harmony is clear enough. Self-centered behavior (literally 自己中 jikochuu 自己 jiko, self, 中 chuu, center) is anathema in Japan precisely because it destroys 和 wa. As it says in the Feminine Scriptures:

When each spoke assays to be the center, the wheel cannot turn.

In Heartcatch Precure the enemies are the Desert Apostles whose aim is to cause the withering of the great Heart Tree by exploiting the weaknesses of people’s individual Heart Flowers. Each individual Heart Flower (everyone has one) is connected to the great Heart Tree, and the health of the Heart Flowers and the Heart Tree are interdependent.

The Great Heart Tree is linked to every individual heart

Perhaps we begin to see a pattern here! The connection of the individual with the Whole; the importance of wa or harmony; the enemies who seek to disrupt that harmony in the service of discord, selfishness, or a “bad end”.

In Smile Precure the theme is fairy tales, which, as most of us know, carry fundamental truths at their heart. The Happy Ending is precisely the defeat of discord and the restoration of divine Harmony. The enemies seek 最悪の結末 saiaku no ketsumatsu — “the worst possible ending” for the world. They mock friendship, trust, and amity as things they “don’t need” and continually preach against them.

Precure stories are always philosophical debates in this sense. A friend observed that a Magical Girl can rarely attack successfully without first stating the fundamental rightness of her cause. Very often in Precure battles the girls are at first defeated and the rallying point (while often depicted as a pretty new power) is actually heralded by a speech in which the wrongness of the villains’ cynical perspective and the rightness of amity and universal harmony is eloquently expounded.

Often these speeches will center around everyday things — the happiness of a Japanese omatsuri (festival); the reading of fairy tales to small children; food prepared with love and dedication. To some viewers these things may seem trivial or “childish”. In fact they are the everyday ways in which we express and reinforce wa or harmony.

That the villains sneer at these things while the heroines eloquently praise and defend them is a vital expression of the moral and metaphysical conflict that is taking place. That the villains’ point of view is often remarkably close to the cynicism popular in the current West is something most Japanese people are quite unaware of. They tend to believe that the West is a lot healthier than it actually is.

Someone recently said that English has no word for wa because the culture has no wa. While the metaphysical equivalence of social and cosmic harmony to music is profound, it does show a lack in the language that there is only a musical analogy to represent the concept. A member of the Daughters of Shining Harmony once told me that it would have been impossible simply to use “Daughters of Harmony” because it would sound like a vocal quartet, and there really is no word in English to express wa/harmony.

The Land of Harmony from Suite Precure

However that may be, the villains of the Precure series are fundamentally representatives of  fuwa (anti-wa — or in terms of feminine spirituality, athamë) which is essentially discord: the chaos that precedes cosmos in Greek thought, the opposite of the Music of the Spheres, and the principle of disharmony between people, which manifests as the harmony-destroying selfishness. When each spoke assays to be the center, the wheel cannot turn.

The Precures, by contrast, are the forces of wa. Their role is always to restore harmony and to reinstate the True Heart. As Cure Heart herself says in each episode [of course substituting whatever form the Selfish currently takes for “crab”]:

愛をなくした悲しいカニさんこのキュアハートがあなたのドキドキ取りもどしてみせる！

Ai wo nakushita kanashii kani-san kono kyua haato  ga anata no dokidoki torimodoshite miseru!

“Love-bereft, unhappy crab-san, I, Cure Heart will certainly restore your heartbeat.”

“Heartbeat” here is hard to translate. It is dokidoki , which can mean excitement or happiness but also refers to the heartbeat, and as I think must be clear by now, it refers equally to both these things at once — to the restoration of the True Heart as opposed to the isolated, fuwa, selfish heart. The heart has lost love by becoming selfish. Its self-seeking can only lead to unhappiness because it has left the dance of the Universal Music.

The job of the Precure is to restore the true heartbeat, that is at once harmony, happiness, and abundant life, to both the individual and the cosmos.
_____

See also:
The Philosophy of Doki Doki Precure: Overview
Precures, Sailors and Admirals: the Art of Transformation
Magical Girls are for Real