Flower and Asura

Episode 11

You know, of all the possible things this anime could've done with its last two episodes, “rescue and imprisoned Mizuki” wouldn't have been my first guess. Or my second. Or my third. But all the same, I guess that's where we are. I've been saying it for the last few weeks: we're pretty overdue for more time for Mizuki, who at first seemed to be one of the central characters, in the spotlight. So honestly, it's pretty fitting that this anime is now making her the key figure of these last two episodes.

So stealth wealth-er Mizuki is part of a 1% family, but she hates her family, or maybe it's more of a mutual thing? Or maybe it's kind of a Bruno Madrigal situation and her family just hates her? As it stands right now it's not terribly clear, but I'm sure we'll learn more about the specifics next week, but she's only able to live the independent life she's leading because of her family's money. Something I've remarked on in the past about this anime is the emotional intelligence of the main cast. And this week, we saw some self-awareness on Mizuki's part about the irony of how much she claims to hate her family, and yet it's only thanks to her family's money that she's able to live comfortably and alone. We never really saw her grapple with that—it amounted to little more than a remark on her part—so I'd be willing to bet that next week, we're going to see this contrast take center stage. It would, after all, be very in the style of this anime to see her mentally wrestle with this.

Up until now, the anime has dropped hints with varying degrees of subtlety that there's something going on between Mizuki and the rest of her family. And I don't think it was difficult to guess that they're pretty wealthy—after all, Mizuki lives alone, and doesn't seem to have a job (and even if she did, in an anime as grounded in reality as this one, what job is going to give a high schooler enough pay to live as comfortably as she does, despite giving her few enough hours that her job hasn't been brought up until now?). This is a long winded way of saying that this twist isn't terribly surprising. That they're locking Mizuki up, though, and that the broadcast club just seemed to go right to that when they were trying to guess what manner of trouble Mizuki's in—that's a bit of a plot twist. “Oh no! Our friend won't be here for a few weeks, and this is happening around the same time her estranged family got back in contact with her—oh no, she's locked up in their equivalent of a dungeon!”

That little nitpick aside though, this was a solid episode. We finally learned more about Mizuki—or rather, Mizuki finally got more time in the spotlight in general. I'm going to hold off on offering my thoughts about this last minute plot development until next week though, when we see how it actually plays out, since this week was mostly just set up. Most of the conflicts in this anime thus far have been internal rather than external, so I'm curious to see how it goes about what's without a doubt the most high-stakes of the external conflicts.

In any case, alas, next week this series will come to its end. It's not impossible—I've seen some anime do it, after all (anyone else remember Wonder Egg Priority?)—but pending any unlikely-but-still-technically-possible sharp downturns in the last stretch, I have no qualms calling this my anime of the season. For now, I'll just say that I'll miss having new episodes of this to watch.

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