so there we go. now i have an Enemy class, which listens to its Hurtbox, which receives an OnTriggerEnter when a Collider hits it (or just gets enabled inside of it), which has an attached Rigidbody, which belongs to a Hitbox. Hitboxes and Hurtboxes can only ever hit each other.

so the more complicated part here will be what happens when a Hurtbox gets hit by a bunch of Colliders all at once, but they're all from the same Hitbox. then i'll need to make sure the event only fires once, so the Enemy will only take one hit of damage. but this structure makes that feasible to solve.

either way, i can now set damage on the Weapon which has a Hitbox, and health on the Enemy which has a Hurtbox. this is starting to look very good, although the animations are still absurd.