©︎Hisaya Amagishi/MF Books/DB PROJECT
Imagine you are an online writer. Through a combination of providence, skill, and luck, you’ve managed to gain a regular following in the online writing forum of your choice. Everything is going great, but there’s just one problem: you don’t have an immediately interesting idea. You’ve got something, but nothing concrete enough to turn into a complete storyline. You could simply wait for these ideas to germinate into something more powerful, but with the attention economy, even a few weeks of no updates can cause your story to lose the fragile fan base it built!
What do you do? You’ve been fooling around for a while. You came up with some half-baked entries with ideas that might prove useful in the future, but don’t really make sense right now. You introduce new characters and conflicts in ten minutes to keep the reader coming back, but don’t really resolve or develop them beyond their usefulness in the moment. This is something any editor worth their salt would throw out immediately, but heck, it’s been years and something you wrote years ago to keep your readership up is now actual television for people to watch. I know we forgot to do something! Woohoo!
This is the only reasonable explanation I can think of for the massive twists and turns in the last few episodes. Just look at Dalia’s meeting with military personnel at the mansion. The scenes themselves are good, building to some solid comedy in a wacky situation comedy style way. Yet to get there, we spent the entire last third of the previous episode watching Dalia receive an invitation to the palace, prepare for her palace trip, ride to the palace in a carriage with Ivan, and so She can go to one of the empty rooms Wolfe picks out for her… I want to take her to a carriage to one different Room in the same palace? People look for charm in life’s little diversions and then do self-examination at the DMV, and I think all this crap falls into the latter category.
Suffice it to say, Episode 10 was very similar to the previous episodes, just in stark contrast to Episode 11 which was the first time in months that it was really able to establish a substantive conversation. It’s a little awkward that Daria and Wolff even have to officially share their secrets, but it’s nice to finally see these two grow closer while giving up the wining and dining. Furthermore, the story we learn here about the Dahlia is one of the quietest, deeply human stories to be found anywhere in the world. We can’t really explain why her mother left her father, and neither can she. There’s no clear resolution or obvious lesson to be learned, just a story about human relationships that both the characters and the audience have to endure, for better or for worse.
That’s basically what I’ve been asking for from this show for weeks, and I can’t decide if I’m relieved or frustrated that it waited until the 11th hour to actually deliver. I guess I can say I’m happier without it and hope anyway blooming dahlia Already gone, worth coming back.
grade:
Dahlias in Bloom: Using Magical Tools to Create a New Beginning Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
