Flower and Asura – Episode 1

What’s it about? Haruyama Hana lives in a small village on an island isolated from the rest of her community. She has grown up to be the mentor to many of the small children on the island largely absent any other children her age. Once she gets to high school, however, she is confronted by Usurai Mizuki, the head of the Broadcasting Club. Mizuki wants Hana to realize her secret dream: to do public poetry recitation.

Flower and Asura is a show very much in the shadow of Yamada Naoko. It is a show about a mentally ill teenage girl, has a similar interest in subtle character animation, and is literally based on a series of novels by the Sound Euphonium writer. Despite this, it never feels like “Sound Euphonium without Yamada Naoko”–largely because it is gorgeous in its own way. It is produced by the impeccable Studio Bind, whose work has had the albatross of horny source material around its neck for both its previous series, Mushoku Tensei and Onimai (though in the latter case they also went beyond the source material). It is intensely gratifying to see them use their powers for good and not for evil.

I spent much of the runtime of the show fascinated by and compelled by the ambiguity of the protagonist and the general sense of ambivalence in much of the imagery. She is pathologically self-defeating, and within ten minutes of the show starting I was already starting to wonder “what happened?” It never comes across as dehumanizing, as much of her interiority is conveyed through strong direction and acting choices, all of which track onto her larger arc. Seeing her become more and more comfortable with the physical affection the Mizuki lavishes on her, for example, seemed to chart her increasing comfort with intimacy over the course of the episode–as she has finally revealed to somebody her deepest dream, which is also consequently one of her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet, there was always a sense of ambiguity here. The show offers no easy answers to why Hana is so pathologically self-effacing, unless the mother’s answer of “because there are no other kids her age on the island” is supposed to be entirely convincing (it’s not). The dream sequence towards the middle where she sees Mizuki walking towards a crack in the wall is especially evocative, and I loved all the layers of meaning within Hana’s psychology, foreshadowing her relationship with Mizuki, and the meaning of the poem. It was a brilliant directorial choice!

Alas, because this is the Sound Euphonium writer we are talking about, I’m afraid I have to talk about queerbaiting. This show falls right into the kinds of borderline Class-S territory that that writer sure does love, starting with an intensely physically affectionate relationship between Mizuki and Hana complete, just in the first episode, with bedtime face-to-face heart-to-hearts, sidling up real close as you pursue somebody for “club recruitment” (framed by the camera in slightly sexual terms from the waist down), and generally building towards an intense older sister/younger sister relationship that seems straight out of Maria Watches Over Us. I can almost guarantee these will not go anywhere romantic based on the path of Eupho, which did include canonically queer characters but never as leads.

This is a show I will try to put my need for gay aside to enjoy for what it is: a beautifully directed, psychologically rich hobby anime. If that is possible or even desirable for you, I suggest you do the same.