Flower and Asura – Episode 12

Episode Synopsys:

The club secures an interview with Mizuki’s brother, then convinces him to help free Mizuki from her grandmother’s house arrest.  The whole group confronts the grandmother, who reluctantly stands aside to allow Mizuki to leave.  Hana invites Mizuki to sleep over at her house, and the two discuss what just happened and the upcoming tournament preliminaries.

Episode Review:

Oftentimes during the show, the “each character gets an episode and a half” format has felt a little weird, but nowhere is it more so than this, the final episode of the season.  What could easily have been the climax of the season or a major arc of another show, the showdown with the grandmother, is all taken care of in half the episode. The club easily gets in to an interview with Mizuki’s brother, he instantly agrees to help them, and they’re off to her house, where they gain entry to her room without incident.

It’s all so easy and conflict-free up to this point that it almost feels like a waste of time to animate it.  I was really expecting the club would have to use rhetorical skills or a heartfelt speech they’d practiced to convince the brother, or to use their broadcasting skills to distract staff at the house while they found Mizuki, but none of that occurs.  The showdown against grandma is suitably emotional…

…but it’s also over very quickly.  A few lines back and forth, a dramatic recitation, and that’s it, they just walk out while the grandmother stands aside. You can really feel the time constraint of that half episode, and it loses a lot of impact as a result.

The second half of the episode is if anything worse.  There’s no time for the club to even make it to the preliminaries (though Sainoji is shown winning hers), the thing they’ve been building up to for most of the show.  Instead, we end with an almost-confession from Hana to Mizuki, the kind where it’s really obvious someone wanted the characters to say “I want to be with you forever” but has to settle for “I want to be in a club with you forever”.

Given that the show is out of episodes, re-confirming the strong (but wholly platonic) feelings of the two lead characters, and some visuals setting up the future battle between Hana and Sainoji, is pretty much all they had time for.  It just feels like the show would’ve had a much stronger ending if the club had made it to preliminaries and we’d saved grandma drama for its own arc in a theoretical second season.