Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Flip Flappers
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darkchibi07
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It's no doubt Episode 9 was pretty damn epic emotional especially for Yayaka's character (that whole crystal ice duel battle was awesome). I can see why Jake and a few others were underwhelmed with Episode 10 since some of the reveals was too standard. Hell, that whole conga trauma train Cocona dealt with was quite a bit of overkill in my opinion. But I want to give the staff a benefit of a doubt since there are only 3 episodes left, and I feel that's plenty of time for them to tell the story and message they want to convey. If it happened an episode later, then I would be worried.
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Well, at any rate, the show seems to be back to normal this week.
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#862687
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Uh I think Salt was unaware of it because Papika and Cocona were on the run for a year from the lab before they found Mimi, Papi and Coco. When Salt sees them it has been a year so if Mimi was pregnant for a few months before running away, how would he know about Cocona. And what do you mean with how everyone obviously know about it? |
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Ah okay, I didn't pick up on this when watching, I'll look back at it and tweak accordingly. EDIT: Yep, looks like the span between them running away and being recaptured is like 30 seconds in-show with a fast throwaway line of "we've been searching for a year!" No wonder I missed it. That's super-sloppy. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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I thought this was one of the show's strongest episodes yet.
How does she bear any guilt at all when she didn't even remember who Mimi was until half-way through the series? Papika got her mind wiped, and any Cocona-Mimi surrogacy would have been entirely subconscious at best.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that the series is trying to imitate Evangelion just based on the past two episodes. Sure, they come late in the series, but it's hard to say at this point whether they aped Evangelion's visual or thematic components any more than episode 5 aped Maria Watches Over Us or episode 3 aped Fist of the North Star. For all we know, we could just be in the middle of the show's "Evangelion dreamworld" arc.
You don't see it as playing at all into her underlying cautious nature and her willingness to trade freedom for security, as evidenced by the near-constant association of Mimi with confinement-related imagery?
I'd like to imagine he took some time off from lab work to graduate from Evil Medical School, too. 
A minor quibble, but at that point, they were presumably still Asclepius.
It had a profound emotional significance on the girls, and it was the catalyst for them deciding they no longer wanted to work with the scientists. Beyond that, I saw this as more of a Serial Experiments Lain moment (i.e. we don't exactly know what caused Lain's older sister to spoiler[go crazy] or what effect that had on Lain, but the important thing is that it happened).
Here's how I see this sequence of events: after Mimi and Papika decide they no longer want to work with Asclepius, they try to get Salt to run away with them. He's still bummed about his dad, so lashes out at them, which causes Mimi to stop Papika from telling Salt that she just found out she was pregnant with Salt's child. Since they run away right after finding out that Mimi is pregnant, the pregnancy never becomes public knowledge, but presumably the higher-up scientists know because they use Mimi's baby (which is born some time while they were on the run) to recapture the girls. I also don't buy that Salt is a high-level decision-maker in the organization. I got the impression that he was made a lead researcher by virtue of his relationship with Mimi. If an adolescent girl was your organization's key to ruling time and space, wouldn't you want to keep her boyfriend on staff? Anyway, they run away, the baby is born, and they get captured some time later. During their next escape attempt, Saltdad threatens the baby, which causes Mimi to succumb to the dark force that is associated with all of the villains-of-the-week like Welwitschia.
spoiler[My theory is that they're still in Pure Illusion. They have been almost the entire series. That's why the "real world" Cocona lives in is so dream-like.]
At this point, the "Mimi" who is possessing Cocona isn't the same consciousness as "real Mimi", who asks Salt to save Cocona.
You don't automatically marry someone when you impregnate them.  For all we know, Cocona is just the result of a one-night stand, and if that's the case (we simply don't know either way) then that would explain Salt's less-than-warm treatment of his daughter.
One of the hallmarks of this show is that it's been constantly changing, so while I can understand that people might be disappointed with what the show has changed into, I'm not sure how tonal change is just now becoming a deal-breaker. |
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Whoops, my brain couldn't get away from the EVA riff stuff again. Changed to "girlfriend." As for the second part though, I think it's hard to dispute that Salt was in love with Mimi and considered her his paramour, even if he was a dumbass about letting her run off without him. (Again, that might have been more powerful if Salt's emotions or relationship with his father had been explored better.)
As with everything, it depends on the person and what they wanted to get out of the show, but for me, I saw most of Flip Flappers' run as an emotionally oblique, heavily metaphorical and surrealist take on coming-of-age. It had a few less concrete details and character development than I would have liked to have seen, but it was largely committed to a cohesive aesthetic. Switching into plot-detail-and-philosophy-heavy Evangelion-style anime scifi at this late stage of the game doesn't work for me because we spent so much of the series completely unconcerned with that stuff, and none of the groundwork has been laid for us to expect these major plot payoffs or twists properly, much less understand the complex emotions driving the characters caught in the storm, because these characters don't really have complex emotions. Most of them have barely any traits at all! So the transition doesn't work for me, and the specific twists they're using/how they're delivering them are stuff I've seen repeated over and over in anime for years, usually in place of any creative ideas. Flip Flappers had plenty of creative ideas! It just didn't really commit to many of them.
Yeah, if I squint and tilt my head, but it doesn't feel like a natural evolution of Cocona's character informed by her decisions over the course of several episodes, it feels like a thing that had to happen at this point because we're running out of episodes. As much as I bitched about the specific things that happened in this episode, all of it, EVA-imitant cheap tricks included, could have been executed meaningfully. This is mostly structural problems coming home to roost. It's too late to be making these shifts in this specific way, and too much of what came before seems completely irrelevant to what they're focusing on by the end. |
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kotomikun
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...No, I still don't really get it. I can't understand why being somewhat like Evangelion is terrible. And it is, again, noticeably different; there's no equivalent to the Angels as far as I can tell (final bosses in Pure Illusion are kinda like that, but they're not horse-entities of the apocalypse), Gendo didn't ever go "screw this, I failed, you guys fix it" (presumably?), and in the highly unlikely event that this is headed for a depressing ending it doesn't look like it'll be a "Tang" type of thing. "Shinji" doesn't seem to have much in common with "Gendo," instead they seem to be going for "like mother, like daughter" while also implying in the dream-boat scene that Cocona is starting to disagree with her mother.
At the moment, I'm not convinced Mom is controlling Cocona against her will; her eyes flashed back to normal color when she said "I hate you" to Papika, so it was probably Cocona who said that--Mimi doesn't have any reason to hate Papika, anyway. She did kinda get betrayed and/or lied to by everyone she knows, except the weird girl in her dreams who turned out to be her mom. Though, of course, some sort of reconciliation is bound to be coming soon. There's some sort of parallel between Mimi going berserk and Salt's dad going loopy, so presumably Cocona will also reject the whole world-domination thing and put some trust in Papika and Yayaka again. The past two episodes have definitely been very unlike most of the previous ones... but... so what? I don't think they yanked all this out of a hat at the last minute. The partial similarities to Evangelion have been there from the beginning (spooky scheming leader guy running rogue organization, the cult with even shadier plans, the concept of arbitrarily needing specific children to fight otherworldly beings), and so has the weird girl in Cocona's dreams, along with her suspicious lack of parents and uncanny-valley grandma. You certainly have the right to dislike how it turned out, but it was always going to be something close to this. (I can't claim to have predicted this outcome, but in retrospect, what else could have tied all those threads together?) At any rate, there are still two more episodes, which appear to be headed back towards the pre-flashback era of the show, so I'm not ready to write it off as a failure yet. Or as an Eva knockoff, for that matter. Edit:
Ooh! Yes, I was thinking the same thing. Maybe wishful thinking, but still, it would certainly be interesting. The full-fledged tinfoil-hat edition can be found here. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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In fairness, I would often have little quarrel about heavy helpings of unrefined plot at this stage in a show, misbegotten though they may be in this case. Speaking for myself, the real damage was done within the first half. When character emotions are communicated so predominantly through metaphor and abstraction, then with a little help I can perhaps recognise that these emotions are present and that they are of significance, but this is hardly tantamount to me feeling anything, empathy especially, which quite defeats the object of conveying them at all.
Lacking a solid kernel of personal investment in Papika and Cocona's relationship, I thus have little but a case of Eva-if-I-didn't-care here, which, to stretch a metaphor, is less of a case of spilt milk than of there being little milk to savour whatsoever. |
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PotatoGirl
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The pacing of this episode was weird (And I still can't believe that Salt survived) but I think the ending made up for it. Mostly, I want to see what Pure Illusion is doing to the real world and what's happening to Yuyu and Toto.
From what I can guess, the organization taking Cocona away for the second time was the last straw for Mimi. |
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Edl01
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While I kinda-sorta understood were you were coming from this week since the episode was very heavy on exposition I can't agree with you at all here.
Thematically the episode made a ton of sense, the entire show has had Adolescence and Identity as it's main theme since the beginning. Cocona was a child who didn't understand herself, but through Pure Illusion(And Papika) was slowly starting to leave her shell and become an adult. Mimi represents the opposite, she is the unconditional maternal love of a Mother, all she wants to do it make sure Cocona is protected and happy, but doing this means shielding her from the world and stagnating her growth.(Living inside of the womb seems to be metaphor they're going with.) Finally there were a few standout scenes that were so classic Flip Flappers that I had to love them. Cocona's conversation with Mimi was fantastic, where she ignores the potential apocalypse in an attempt to bond with the mother she's never met. Papika and Yayaka setting off together to save Cocona...and also the rest of the world if they have time was also both excellent and just about the most Flip Flappers thing. The Evangellion references were noticeable, but honestly quite trite. Dr. Salt is absolutely nothing like Gendo, he seems to care for his daughter and in this episode was painted in quite the sympathetic light. I think Evangelion comparisons at this point are unavoidable, but saying the show is betraying itself thematically just doesn't seem true. It doesn't top some of the amazing episode stuff, but I think the show is holding pretty strong and knows where it's going. |
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Shotsy322
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While I still like this show and am looking forward to its conclusion, it has fallen off a bit for me. It is nice to have backstory and all but it came at the cost of what drew me into the show in the first place. I loved the surrealist settings that were dripping with metaphor. It was a nice take on a coming-of-age story. I also liked how the ambiguity of it forced me to sit and think about an episode after it was over in order to get a good grasp on it.
This latest episode didn't really do that for me. It just presented the info very plainly with little room for interpretation (at least compared to the other episodes). I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's like really getting into an artist for their abstract paintings and then seeing them paint a picture of a regular apple. Sure, the apple still looks great and all, but it's not what you came to like the artist for. |
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Luke's Yu-Gi-Oh! Channel
 Posts: 159 Location: Australia |
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I had a feeling that Salt & Mimi were Cocona's parents.
Unfortunately Mimi has gone absolutely crazy. I'm looking forward to seeing Yayaka help out in the next episode. |
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Galap
Moderator
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I guess you and I disagree on this one, Jacob.
For one, I really haven't noticed the writing change, and it seems like the director is doing a great job at keeping things cohesive to me. Isn't it typical for different people to have the credit of script writer in different episodes? However, I do agree that there was not as much super-interesting animation in this episode than we've seen in the past.
I personally saw the philosophy, plot detail scifi as a pretty strong thread running through this one from the start. A lot of implicit development about what's been going on and the nature of Pure Illusion and Flip Flap's goals was peppered throughout the episodes, for example the brain inside Bu, the appearance of welwitschia, and the allusions to previous partners of Papika's that have died. And from these things I was able to infer that something like what these new developments explicitly show was going on. And I think that's probably the strongest part of the show, how it's mostly episodic and adventurous but it repeatedly shows glimpses into an underside of things that is menacing. I was a little concerned that there would be a time when they felt like 'things had to start happening', and then it would go downhill (which I do find is a big faliure mode of a lot of anime), but in my opinion, this show really did it right. As for Salt's motivations, it seems to me that he wants to rescue the 'good' side of Mimi (or at least the side that's amicable toward him) and take out the 'bad' side of Mimi. And it seems that if he can't do that, he is willing to put her down to stop her revengeful rampage and put her out of her appearently miserable existence. He hesistates and doesn't go through with it, though. While I think that different interpretations of a work, i.e. different interpretations of what's being implied by it, theme, symbol, characters, is a big source of the difference in people's tastes and how they respond to things differently and disagree about things (and I think this is some of the source of why our views differed about this episode), I also think that another huge factor that leads to different people's responses is Salience, and I think that one doesn't get discussed as much. By Salience, I mean what people think is interesting or relevant, and that operates independently of the way things are interpreted; two people can have the same interpretation of events, see the same meaning and pattern in it, but independently of that sometimes they are much more salient to one person than another. For example, Jacob really liked the episode where there were all the different versions of Papika, and Cocona is essentially working out what her feelings about Papika are. I agreed with pretty much everything in the review of that episode, but at the same time, I also think that that episode was the least interesting one. Don't get me wrong, I still liked it, but that particular part of the show will not be what is most memorable to me. Actually, upon reflection, there were things in that episode that I did find really interesting. While a lot of people seemed to take away a lot from the different Papikas, I was much more stricken by the stuff about Iroha's internal change. Again, it's a question of salience. I guess what I'm getting at is, I think there's a lot going on in this thing, so there's a lot of room for people to find and care about different aspects of it. I didn't really think the writing was bad. For example, I didn't really feel the need to see Mimi on the run from the lab. I think stuff like her running through forests and camping out or whatever would have been superfluous and cliched, and I guess in theory they could have decided to go a different direction with that and made it interesting, but it's kind of hart do argue an open counterfactual. Ultimately, I really liked the way it shows her running away, and then comes to her being captured a year later. It serves to show how much these guys have a hold on her life in terms of being everything that's relevant that's happening (she didn't do anything interesting while she was away). And I also like how this is essentially from Salt's perspective: Mimi disappears and he thinks she's gone to live her life, but suddenly she's being taken back and there's this kid that's almost certainly his that she didn't tell him about. Framing it that way accentuates his point of view of these developments. As for this being an EVA ripoff, I think that's kind of funny. There is a long history of shows that a lot of people say are aping Evangelion (for example, RahXephon, Bokurano, Aquarion). What's funny to me is that In my opinion those shows tend to be: 1. not very similar to Evangelion beyond some merely skin-deep resemblances. 2. Not very similar to each other either, and 3. much better than Evangelion (Which I did not care for that much). I guess Flip Flappers can be counted as an entry in that list too, since to me it meets all those criteria. IDK, to me it's all kind of 'if you squint and tilt your head'. For an example as to why I think the resemblances are only superficial, My friend said he thought this show is ripping off Madoka after episode 3, because there were two groups of 'magical girls' competeing to fight monsters over small objects that were energy resources of some kind, and the fact that a more experienced fighter comes up to finish off and 'killsteal'. Sure, when you put it that way, those two shows do have a superficial similarity. But I don't really think it ends up being meainingful in the long run because the point of all of those events is very different in the two shows, and to me the other things going on in that episode were more important. All in all, I'm still really loving Flip Flappers, and I'm really excited to see how these final couple of episodes bring things to a conclusion. I'm not really sure what's going to happen. I mean, obviously Papika and Yayaka are going to mount a rescue attempt on Cocona, and they will have some conflict with Mimi, but the form that will take is anyone's guess and the exact outcome is up in the air. I'm really excited to see what they do. |
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motormind
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After watching episode 11, the main question that lingers in my brain is: who is Cocona's father? I fail to believe it's Salt. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Do you know who would be a much better candidate? Papika.
After spending all that time in Pure Illusion, Mimi and Papika may have found a way to conceive a child together. Maybe Papika turned into a guy temporarily during one of their trips, and one thing led to another. Maybe it did not even involve any sex; Cocona could have been the product of some reality-bendy hand-wavey event. Of course, with magic Cocona could have been the result of some form of immaculate conception. Christ-analogy aside, that would not make for as good a story than if Papika was actually involved. It would also explain why Cocona and Papika switch hair color during their transformations. Think of it: if would a lot of sense if Papika would be drawn to her own daughter. Sure, it would shoot down any yuri-shipping between them, but my inner shoujo-ai fangirl pretty much died anyway after enduring way too many yuri-bait shows. It's still strange though how Papika would not recognize Cocona as Mimi's child, let alone her own. I am also pretty sure that this will not be the official story, but wouldn't it be awesome? |
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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I also gotta pin this one on the show for slapping it in so haphazardly, but right before Mimi and Papika are about to run away together, and Salt refuses to come along, Papika tries to tell Salt that Mimi is pregnant, thinking it will change his mind. (Mimi cuts her off for...some reason, so he never finds out.) Ergo the baby is Salt's, and I guess they were in love and had trysts offscreen or something. |
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