Flip Flappers

Episode 6

Flip Flappers was many different things over the course of its first five episodes. Sometimes it was visually stunning, sometimes it was relaxing and playful, and sometimes it delivered a little emotional meat in unexpected ways. But in its sixth episode, the show finally became the best of all its strengths at once, blowing me away more than ever before and leaving me yearning for an even bigger world of possibilities in the second half to come.

Even though I loved last week's episode as its own little adventure in a vacuum, I had to put on my curmudgeon hat in that review for a paragraph or two because we were fast approaching the midpoint of the show, and yet I still felt like I didn't have enough information to get really invested in the story overall. I accused it of "resting on pretty" and resolved to hold back on A-grades until the show started making me feel things on a level deeper than childlike wonder and curiosity. (And yeah, it'd be nice to start getting a couple concrete answers too. I don't want anyone monologuing technobabble or lore at the screen! Just some subtle hints about where this is all going would be nice.)

Anyway, Flip Flappers met all my doubts with resounding glory this week, giving me way more to chew on than I can probably fit into one episode writeup. For starters, I got more of those petty little worldbuilding details that I wanted. For instance, Yayaka and the twins use technology to fight because they can't transform, which means that divorcing yourself from Pure Illusion's control over your emotions also means you can't use its magical powers. It's an emotional tradeoff that speaks directly to the show's ongoing theme of the divide between childhood and adulthood. There is an obvious danger in giving yourself over to childish fantasies as you grow older, but there is also a joy in childish sincerity that you should never abandon too quickly in favor of the cold pragmatism of the adult world. Adolescence is a time when we're forced to decide what kind of people we want to be as we embrace the world on our own, and it seems like Papika is choosing childhood, Yayaka is choosing adulthood, and Cocona remains paralyzed with indecision, desperate to over-plan for a journey ahead that has no roads.

We also learned that Bu-chan's little robot brain is controlled directly by Dr. Hidaka in a blink-and-you-miss-it scene, which makes perfect sense comparing their character designs and personalities. So we can probably consider them the same character for the time being, and while we're on that train of thought, what other characters have an optical-illusion-like reflection in others? Why did the princely version of Uxekull look so much like Dr. Salt, for instance? Does Cocona's grandmother (who does bear a striking family resemblance to our heroine) have anything to do with the maiden/crone figure in her recurring nightmare, and what will happen if Cocona is forced to enter that dream directly through Pure Illusion instead of in the safety of her sleep?

However, all that stuff pales in comparison to the main emotional thrust of this adventure, when we discover that Cocona and Papika are hunting for amorphous fragments inside the dream of their own senpai, Iroha Irodori. I never brought Iroha up in reviews before this one, but she's always been hanging out around the corners of Cocona's life, lending a friendly ear to some of her kouhai's troubles. She certainly doesn't seem like the kind of person who would have horrible skeletons in her closet, but that's probably the point. Cocona and Papika would never know from their senpai's actual dream that she was hiding an incredibly painful past. Iroha's pocket of Pure Illusion is just like her beautiful paintings (minus the giant twenty-eyed robot). If Yayaka hadn't shown up to snatch their spoils, the girls probably would have taken the amorphous fragment back to Flip-Flap without giving this little world a second thought. However, when they stumble into a mysterious Torii gate just off the beaten path of this world, Pure Illusion goes from a world of dreams to a world of memories. While Flip Flappers is fond of using surreal symbols for different emotional concepts, this one is remarkably straightforward. Torii gates not only mark the entrance to Shinto shrines, they also symbolize a passage between the mundane world and the mystical one. In Pure Illusion, they seem to divide subconscious fantasy and conscious reality in the mind, sending Cocona and Papika hurtling into Iroha's childhood to see it through her eyes.

That's not to say the world of Iroha's memories is a world of realism. They're still in Pure Illusion after all, and memories may be less fantastical than dreams, but they are no less subjective. To cope with a miserable life of abuse under her domineering parents, little Iroha escaped to spend as much time as possible with an old retired teacher who lived down the street. Adopting the kind old woman as her own Granny divided Iroha's life into two distinct worlds. With Granny, she could be the "real" Iroha, expressing her true colors in safety and happiness, but when it came time to return home, her spirited drawings devolved into slow scribbles, and she languished in colorless sadness until she could become "happy" Iroha again. This is easily symbolized by allowing both Papika and Cocona to become Iroha in these two different emotional worlds, with sad Iroha always resenting happy Iroha and taking any opportunity to switch places with her. Tragically, this compartmentalized half-life Iroha struggles to maintain can't last forever. Since the warning signs begin to trickle into her happy world in ways that Iroha is too young to recognize (but the audience isn't), you'll probably be in tears by the time Iroha's escape finally comes to an end, and the color she loves finally drains from the entire world around her.

Iroha's past is not only heartbreaking because of the unfair cruelty imposed on someone so young, it will also be immediately familiar to anyone who has been forced to live in unsafe circumstances as a child. As adults, we can conceive of escape plans from bad situations, construct healthy coping mechanisms, and communicate with people outside the situation to work through our emotions. Children don't have these options or even understand that they exist, so they're forced into makeshift escapes like the one Iroha chose to keep themselves sane. Iroha believed that she could live with half a life of safety and happiness, embracing that world as the "real" one, even though Granny had no right to guardianship over her and was tragically entering the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. In my own case, as a child in an abusive situation, I embraced nighttime itself as a safe space to feel unthreatened, becoming almost 100% nocturnal for many years afterward as I worked from home, in order to avoid stress-related anxiety attacks even long after I had left home. Needless to say, I resonated with this episode pretty hard, but it was almost more for the effect Iroha's childhood had on her after it came to an end.

When Granny was eventually admitted to the hospital and began to forget Iroha completely, the poor girl was forced to recognize that the world she lived in with her monstrous parents was the "real" one all along. Well, in truth, they were both real, but Iroha was too young to deal with such a difficult reality, so she ran away from the painful compromise of trying to take care of the woman who she had relied on to rescue her. Left with no other escape, Iroha began to subconsciously punish herself for everything that happened, denying herself happiness in even the smallest ways well into adolescence. The Iroha we know today isolates herself from others in a clubroom, losing herself in her art completely, offering a smile and a willing ear to Cocona when she visits, but closing her own heart off from forgiveness or introspection to such an extent that she thinks she doesn't even "deserve" to wear nail polish. She embraces the colors of her fantasies exclusively because she has lost the ability to see color in her reality. Flip Flappers wisely decides to convey these complex emotions through metaphor alone, but they are absolutely true to my own experience and the other children of abuse I have known in life, which brought me to tears both times I watched through the episode.

That would have been the end of Iroha's story if it weren't for Cocona and Papika. After the reality beneath Iroha's wondrous dream-world is done with them, it gives them the boot, but they refuse to go home. They re-enter Iroha's memories and try to resolve her greatest regret: abandoning Granny when it became clear that she could no longer remember Iroha, much less protect her anymore. In the dream-world, they reintroduce themselves as Iroha to Granny, and she seems to remember them, bringing color back to Iroha's memories once again. Back in the real world, they find that Iroha has left the art room (but hasn't stopped painting) to show off her beautiful painted nails with a smile. Whoa. So did Cocona and Papika change Iroha's past, just her memories of that past, or just her emotional state tied to those memories? Whatever the case, this changes everything we thought we knew about Pure Illusion, and I can see now why there are two mysterious organizations devoted to harnessing its power.

Right now, my guess is that the cult Yayaka works for wants to use Pure Illusion to turn the world into some kind of stepfordian utopia where everyone is living their happiest possible reality, while Dr. Salt simply wants to regain something he once lost by stabilizing Pure Illusion into something everyone can escape into, but either invasion of the adult world into a sacred childhood space is likely to result in catastrophe. Dreams are beautiful and necessary to give us hope, but we can't live in them forever, just as Iroha couldn't deny the reality of her world beyond Granny's house. Our responsibility as adults is to take the beauty of our dreams and use them to improve reality together, as seen in Cocona and Papika's choice to give Iroha the power to forgive herself from running away from the truth. We don't know yet whether this was responsible or reckless, considering the weight of these emotions that Iroha has been struggling with for years, but for now, it seems like it was the right decision. It's a step in the right direction, and I can't wait to see where Pure Illusion takes us next after such an outstanding episode.

Rating: A+

Flip Flappers is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jacob doesn't know what do with all these feelings right now you guys. You can follow Jake here on Twitter.