Flower and Asura

Episode 12

Well, not every episode can be a winner. Admittedly, this was a pretty underwhelming ending to an otherwise excellent anime. The day is saved and Mizuki gets to go home, thanks to what's easily the most muted recitation performance we've seen throughout the season. And then toward the end of the episode, in a scene reminiscent of the similar one from the first episode, Mizuki and Hana meet on the beach, where Hana gives a now much more hopeful and cheery recitation. We don't get to see the tournament, but it's an optimistic note on which to end the series.

Still, ending aside, this was a wonderful show overall. The visuals are excellent, the character writing is the absolute best we've had this season, and it was so refreshing to watch a show tackle everyday emotional issues like competitive mindsets and wanting things to be perfect from a much more nuanced place than I'm used to seeing in fiction. The main cast of characters, by extension of this, are excellent—as I've said before, it's a breath of fresh air watching a show whose main cast all seems to have a good level of emotional intelligence, and it makes the issues they face feel more substantial.

I know it's been a few weeks since she's been in the spotlight, but I truly can't get over just how much I like Anne's arc particularly. More specifically, I love that she's not villainized for wanting to win, and that the show goes out of its way to say that sometimes people just want to win because they like to win, and as long as they're not hurting anyone, there's nothing wrong with them trying their hardest to win just for the sake of it. It feels so simple, yet it's an idea that I don't think gets explored enough in general—let alone in anime, where I'd say the first thing I think of when I think “wanting to win is their personality” is usually battle shonen characters who have a dead mom or dead master or some other form of dead loved one who they need to avenge or make proud or whatever else. But it doesn't have to be deep. Some characters can just want to win! I promise the readers/watchers won't abandon you, even if your series doesn't feel like it must surely have some kind of tragic backstory quota.

And also, while I'm talking about my favorite aspects of this show, I can't not mention for the millionth time just how cool it is that it's an anime about something that's even competitive speech-adjacent. I know I mentioned this early on, but it bears repeating since I really can't emphasize this enough: this anime marks the first time I've ever encountered any piece of media whatsoever where competitive speech or something close to it so much as gets a mention, let alone is the focal point of the show. If Flower and Asura had been around back in my competitive speech days, I promise you I would've been obsessed with it. I'd probably watch it and re-watch it between rounds at tournaments. I hope you all enjoyed my fun facts and explanations about how things work in competitive speech throughout my weekly reviews for this show, because especially nowadays I so rarely get the opportunity to talk about forensics (as usual: no, not that kind) and getting to do so in these reviews was extremely fun for me.

Meanwhile, I think this show only had one significant weakness, and that's how yuri-bait the whole thing is. Even in this last episode, we saw Hana telling Mizuki how much she likes her and how Mizuki makes her days sparkle. And that's just the tip of the gay iceberg for what we've been getting in the other episodes. It's so hard to watch them and see them as anything but obviously in love with each other. But knowing what I know about Sound! Euphonium, I'm deeply skeptical that it could ever amount to anything—despite how much obvious romantic chemistry they have. But I'll leave it at that.

From start to finish, this show was an absolute delight to watch—my favorite of the season—and I'd love to see even more of it. But even if we never get more, these 12 episodes are still able to deliver a powerful and cohesive story about getting out of your shell, the emotional highs and lows of competition, and more.

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