Flower and Asura
Episode 3
by Kennedy,
How would you rate episode 3 of
Flower and Asura ?
Community score: 3.8
Oh my god, the teacher was in a suit in the scene where we saw him doing a recitation—this IS just competitive speech just with a different name. To be more specific, it's less humorous and dramatic interpretation (HI and DI respectively), and I haven't seen anything suggesting that they do duos (exactly what it sounds like; it's duos performing a scene together), and more, say, poetry, standard oratory (SO), and original oratory (OO). I rarely get the chance to do something like this, but I think the situation calls for a quick, helpful primer of what these categories are. Remember: you're trapped in here with me, not the other way around.
HI and DI (both in solo, and in duo) are closer to something like competitive acting, which would've been much more in line with what the club advisor was talking about at the beginning of the episode. Poetry is more or less exactly what it sounds like—you recite poetry. Although you can't walk around and add as much spice to it with your performance as you can, say, HI and DI, you can still read the poetry in ways that fit the tone of the writing. For example, I can't for the life of me remember what it was called (and no matter how many admittedly vague terms I search for, it doesn't seem to be coming up in any search engines) but there was a really sad poem that a lot of people did—here it is, I'm about to unironically say it—back in my day where a poet talks about their mother getting burned in a house fire, and people would usually perform it anywhere from somberly, to being constantly on the brink of tears.
SO is the recitation of speeches written by others—sometimes famous speeches you might've read or at least heard of elsewhere in school, sometimes not. Finally, OO (my favorite category) is reciting a speech that you yourself wrote. Topics can be anything, but they tend to skew heavily informative—or at the very least, that was my experience. Your mileage may vary. At least back when I was on a speech team, judges tended to be about 50-50 when it came to whether or not they liked it when competitors functionally did stand-up, with fewer and fewer of them scoring competitors as well the bigger and more important the competition was.
So this is all to say that the categories present in the broadcast club seem like they lean less into the more acting-heavy HI and DI. I wonder if that's just something done for the sake of this anime, or if that's actually the way Japan's equivalent of competitive speech is—assuming that they have an equivalent (though the sheer existence of this anime makes me think and hope that they do in at least some schools).
But pulling back from how excited I am that this is basically a competitive speech anime, we had another great episode this week. It took me back to the days where the coach of my school's competitive team would just show everyone videos of recent performances at Nationals, to show what competitive speech is, to inspire us, or at the very least to fill extra time. But that aside, although I was kind of hoping we were going to be treated to the incredibly rare anime protagonist who's surrounded by competitively-minded people but is just there to have fun, what actually seems to be going on is that Hana just lacks confidence in herself. A bit disappointing, but not a deal breaker. And we learn this by way of what's probably the second gayest foot bath scene in anime history (sorry Flower and Asura, but as hard as you fought, I simply don't have it in me to deny Death Note its prize). This series was created by Ayano Takeda, who also created Sound! Euphonium. Admittedly, I didn't watch that anime (no particular reason why; I just haven't gotten around to it). But I know enough about it to know not to get my hopes up for some canon romance between Hana and Mizuki, even if the series itself couldn't make it feel like a more correct and obvious pairing if there was a scene where a skywriter wrote “❤️ Hana + Mizuki ❤️“ in the sky.
Getting back to Flower and Asura, though, yeah, so Hana lacks confidence in herself—confidence that, one presumes, she'll discover as she hones her craft with the broadcast club. Her foil Anne, meanwhile, is being primed for a really good character arc along the lines of learning the joys of doing what you want to do, even (if not especially) if it's not the thing that will optimize you for maximum success. I wonder if Mizuki, similarly, is going to be getting a huge character arc? This is obviously going to be a very character-driven story, and she's one of our main characters. So while she's far from the most obvious candidate we have so far, I also don't think she's out of the running. Still, I think Anne is the one who interests me the most so far, but we're only on episode three. Who knows how long I'll hold to that opinion?
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Flower and Asura is currently streaming on HIDIVE on Tuesdays..
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