English Dub Review: The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity “A Kind Person”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rintaro needs to ace an upcoming test, but doubts his and his friends’ chances, so he tries approaching Kaoruko about studying, but their schools’ bad blood interferes once again.

OUR TAKE

The series continues and the things that work still work and the things that don’t still don’t. I don’t want to have to repeat myself too much from last week, but I also have a minimum word count to reach, so please forgive me if that is what I end up having to do. The animation is still very pretty! So, I can at least say that just about every part of the episode was quite easy on the eyes. Seeing how Rintaro and Kaoruko continue to grow their bond and be absolutely flummoxed by their own reactions to each other is very sweet and wholesome! It’s fun to see these early days of what will become a romance, especially as this is between two people who don’t seem to have much emotional experience with friendship, let alone having crushes. And the stupid nonsense that is resentment between Chidori and Kikyo students CONTINUES to be stupid nonsense! Like I would more or less understand if it’s just a general waryness of boys from another school, but the SHEER DISGUST that Subaru, Kaoruko’s tall silver haired friend, has towards Rintaro ON SIGHT feels like it goes completely overboard! And this is the second time we’ve seen girls from Kikyo be the ones to instigate an argument with Chidori boys, who both times have been understandably pissed that they would get this heat for simply daring to exist in the same vicinity.

So yeah, I am really not caring for that aspect of the story. I understand there needs to be some sort of conflict so that the story isn’t over in like two episodes, but honestly the traversing of building a friendship and probably later romance has enough conflicts for that on its own. A bit of a spoiler, but thankfully Subaru mellows out (at least according to the totally reliable Wikipedia article for the series), so we won’t have to deal with this bullshit forever. But we’re also probably not done with it for at least a few more episodes, so that’s not great. Thankfully, what I am enjoying the most out of these aspects is the main soon to be couple themselves, and they’re the entire crux of the story as it is, so if something had to work right, this is probably the thing to be working. Now, hopefully next week’s episode gives me more to talk about that I haven’t covered extensively already.