Flower and Asura – Episode 04

Episode Synopsis:

Hana is taking her practice seriously, and this extends to reading through each of the recitation pieces on offer for this year’s competition.  In this episode, she’s reading The Sarashina Diary, a piece of classic Japanese literature.  Anne is against it because it can be hard for modern audiences to understand old-timey turn of phrase, but Ryoko is all for it because classic literature is her passion.  Hana is also invited by Mizuki to participate in the daily radio show the club puts on for the school during lunch, but she almost immediately clams up and doesn’t say a word when she has to ad-lib. Her classmate Miiko gives her some advice on how to get some ad-libbing confidence.

Episode Review:

Folks, I’ll give it to you straight – I am not enjoying Flower and Asura.  Hana is so shy it’s painful, Anne and Shudai are insufferable, and Ryoko, Setaro, and Matsuyuki are effectively non-entities.  It must be painful for Mizuki to try and carry this whole bunch herself, but that often feels like what’s happening.  For me the show is falling into the trap of making the characters annoying or unlikeable so that they have an arc of character development – but they were made so annoying/unlikeable that I’m not interested in seeing them improve.  Hana at least is starting to show the tiniest signs of confidence, though the radio ad-lib thing probably set her back another few episodes.

I think a perfect example of why I often feel exhausted is the exchange between Hana and Miiko.  Hana has been advised that ad-libbing is like chatting with a friend.  And so of course:

Like, come on.  You’re telling me you have never made small talk with anyone? It’s not like Hana is a shut-in, she’s practically a minor local celebrity on her island for her good work reading to children.  She’s never talked with one of their parents before or after a reading? What makes this scene particularly annoying is that I thought the actual ad-libbing part of the episode was pretty well done.  Mizuki was indeed throwing this shy girl in the deep end, making riffs on caller’s names, quickly creating little stories, and then suddenly tossing that to Hana.  I think most people would be intimidated trying to keep up, and it was an effective scene.  But for the cause to be explained as “I have never talked with another person in a casual setting” is dumb.

These have just been the preliminaries, though.  A warmup act.  Because whatever is going on with Ryoko has me skeeved out.  I mentioned above that she is a non-entity, and that has largely been true thus far.  This episode she gets a scene to herself, where she gets to nerd out about classic literature with Hana.  Let’s see how that goes.

I’m not sure why the show takes a hard turn here to let Ryoko espouse her strong opinions on the merits of book rape, but I do know I didn’t enjoy it.  Mizuki comes in to play it off as a joke:

But here’s an idea – maybe get out while you still have all your skin, Hana.