After Rintaro saved Kaoruko’s life, he realized she is more special than any other person he’s cross paths with.
Video Review
What Stands Out About This Episode?
Don’t Do to Others, What You Don’t Want Done to You
The first episode of The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity focuses on the overall theme of the story and building the romantic foundation between Kaoruko and Rintaro, as the second episode focuses on a major aspect of the story’s theme, “prejudice.”
Coming from watching something wild and wacky like Dan Da Dan, to something like The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity, there are—surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly—some real similarities in their romantic themes. The first couple of episodes build a foundation for a romance that is rarely seen. In Dan Da Dan, we have a geeky nerdy four-eyed unconfident deuteragonist. In Rintaro’s case, he’s seen as the scary brute from others, except as an audience, we get to see his inner conflict and the real him. That is what makes Kaoruko Waguri’s interest in him so fascinating because she sees exactly what the audience sees, which is the real good guy qualities that most people ideally want anyways.
Kaoruko and Rintaro’s relationship feels like a modern-day mishmash of fairy tales like a Beauty and the Beast, combined in a contemporary anime. We have Rintaro, who is the misunderstood beast with great mommy cakes and we have the munchkin beauty in Kaoruko. Combined, we get a wholesome combo that looks to one day become a true union. However, during this process they must bring along the others who see the class divide between the Chidori Public High School—filled with bottom-of-the-barrel dummies versus the “rich girl” elites at Kikyo Private High School.
This episode pretty much capitalizes on that very dynamic between Rintaro’s misperception of Kaoruko and how he projected it without realizing. Rintaro’s character arc is very clear. He is actually a kind soul, but others see “DELINQUENT AURA!” Also, he can be a bit dense and not too bright when it comes to putting his nose into the books. There are various aspects of Kaoruko that get revealed in later episodes that provide more about her situation, but this episode clearly showed her discomfort with what Rintaro tried to unintentionally reinforce.
Besides Rintaro’s friends, his mother and Kaoruko, many other characters see the more “scary” side to his presence. It’s that “presence” that kind of gives him a bad rap, where he subconsciously ends up projecting onto Kaoruko by applying the Chidori and Kikyo dynamic to their relationship. What Rintaro was trying to say to Kaoruko was that he thought she’d run away after figuring out that he was a Chidori student—that struck a nerve within Kaoruko. However, later on she realized she might have gone a bit overboard with her reaction there. It is Rintaro, who was just trying to protect her due to the backlash, and he apologized for perpetuating the same stigma that neither of them would agree with. And of course, it ends in the perfect acknowledgment that at least these two can see each other as “friends.”
OTAKU SINH 