Flip Flappers

Episode 12

I gotta hand it to the Flip Flappers team on this one for creative thinking. If you can't have Studio Pablo make new backgrounds for your final climactic episodes, why not revisit old environments they did make art for in your eleventh hour instead! And so we go on a world tour of Pure Illusion in Flip Flappers's penultimate adventure; it's a major step up from last week both visually and emotionally, but the show still seems to be having trouble putting its numerous Humpty Dumpty fragments back together. (Remember when this show was partially about fairytales? Me neither.)

Overall, Flip Flappers has mostly succeeded in developing meaningful arcs for its trio of heroines, but none moreso than Yayaka, who steals the spotlight by finally rejecting all her delusions of being an "adult" for Cocona's sake by denying her own feelings and desires. Moments from a bloody demise, Yayaka embraces an amorphous fragment, a sparkling grain of honesty in a literal desert of deceptions, resolving only to stay by Cocona's side as a true friend no matter the consequences. This finally earns her a transformation sequence, as she embraces the childlike freedom of Pure Illusion and sprouts her own butt-kicking pair of fairy wings. It's a simple arc of realization that "growing up" doesn't mean denying your dreams, no matter how painful the reality around them may be. Yayaka's (probably romantic) feelings for Cocona will never be requited, a truth made more painful by the fact that Yayaka wasted a lot of time they could have spent together, futilely trying to protect Cocona in ways that she never wanted. At the same time, there's an incredible strength in the simplicity of Yayaka's story, which is more than I can say for the increasingly confused themes behind the other two Flip Flappers' stories.

Cocona's arc comes to a mostly satisfying conclusion in the simple ways that it should; she went from being a girl afraid of her future to a girl who could embrace her dreams and true desires even if she made mistakes along the way, with the power of Papika's love holding her up. Unfortunately, the unexpected introduction of Mimi to this endgame has muddled Cocona's agency in her own story and replaced it with a pretty trite "overprotective mother scorned" plotline for a character who's basically Pure Plot Device as far as we know. (I'll get more into Mimi's own arc in a couple paragraphs.) The problem is that Cocona's prior fear of change wasn't really connected to parental figures in any way, so the show's choice of womb imagery for Cocona's retreat from adulthood, loneliness, and her own sexuality seems like a late addition that doesn't connect naturally to what came before, even when it was foreshadowed in her own nightmares. If anything, the natal-Cocona we knew retreated to the company of two characters who don't factor into this climax at all: her grandmother and Uxekull. The Freudian, Evangelion-esque mother relationship stuff and Cocona's struggle between the child and adolescent versions of herself are both potentially compelling ideas, but the way that Flip Flappers has stitched them together seems contradictory and incomplete.

I say contradictory because the hollow-tree-as-womb is also used to entrap Papika, which doesn't make much sense because Papika doesn't have much of a character journey on her own. As adorable and charming as she is, I can't deny that Papika is more plot device than character alongside Mimi, which weakens this episode for the same reasons that Yayaka's growth strengthens it. Papika's emotional conclusion is given a lot of weight as she struggles to free Cocona from Mimi's tree-womb, but as much as I tried to reason otherwise in last week's review, Papika never really had to choose between Mimi or Cocona or take any responsibility for neglecting one for the other. You can't really blame a child for being childish in their worldview, and even when she became an adult, Papika never seemed to acquire a deeper understanding of conflicts and consequences that would allow her to contemplate any guilt over what happened to Mimi and Cocona. Heck, we still don't know how she was physically re-childified in the first place! All this to say that Papika never really has to learn or grow as a character, which might be okay if the focus remained completely on Cocona as the arbiter of choice in their relationship, but Flip Flappers keeps the focus of this episode on a conflict of wills between Papika and Mimi: two characters with very little depth, trading off simplistic views of the world that are difficult to relate to, while the protagonist between them struggles to take the stage.

This brings us to Mimi herself. In Evangelion terms, she basically went from Rei to Yui without exploring the complexity behind either character type, through flashbacks in the show's twilight moments. Once again, this jump from blank slate child learning to embrace empathy to misunderstood mother who would sacrifice everything to protect her child might be okay if the show didn't suddenly place her at the center of its ultimate thematic conflict, but I don't really get why such a simplistic pseudo-antagonist has to take up more time and attention than the actual main cast at this late stage, and that's before we get to her split personality twist. One half of Mimi is an outlandish Mommy Dearest who will trap her child in a cage and turn the whole world into a fantasy playplace around it, while the other half is a completely understanding perfect maternal ideal who has all the answers to Cocona's insecurities. But that doesn't fit the themes of Flip Flappers as we've been exploring them so far.

The show's "optical illusion with two meanings" symbolism has been almost universally used to illustrate a divide between childhood and adulthood in the past, since Cocona is currently experiencing adolescence, the transition between those stages. But when Mimi says "there are two versions of everyone and both are real," her own two versions don't have to do with the childhood/adulthood divide, but an unrelated conflict entirely. The split between overprotective mother and supportive mother is not only confusing because it happened so immediately and cartoonishly in a bout of weak writing, but also because I don't see "overprotective mother" as the Pure Illusion/child side to contrast the reality/adult side of "supportive mother." It's not necessarily more honest and pure than a desire for Cocona to become her own person (unless you believe that mothers innately want their offspring to remain perfect babies forever), and it's also informed by a fear of the outside world and its consequences that Pure Illusion specifically dispels. After all, Cocona's fears of adulthood were enhanced by reality, while her honest feelings and the sense of freedom they gave were accelerated by Pure Illusion. Trying to flip these versions of Mimi to match opposite worlds doesn't work either for inverse reasons, ignoring that the show itself directly ties Bad-Mimi to Pure Illusion and Good-Mimi to reality, which was also why Dr. Salt was trying to draw her out of it and grumpily disavowed the conflict-free side of Pure Illusion that represented Bad-Mimi to him.

Now for all of my bitching and moaning about the mess that Flip Flappers has made, the fact that I can discuss all of this in detail without it turning into philosophical gobbledygook betrays a great level of care and thought on the part of Flip Flappers' staff. All of these ideas are rich, valuable, and worth discussing for how well they succeed as well as where they might fail. Depending on how you feel about the show's characters, their emotional arcs could definitely speak more strongly to you than they did to me. One of my biggest problems with the show is its lack of character development, because Cocona and Yayaka are the only main cast members that seemed to have more than one dimension; cuddly and lovable as Papika or Hidaka might be, they didn't really develop more from episode one to episode twelve, paling in comparison to Iroha who only featured in one episode! I don't think Flip Flappers is a failure by any means, it just failed to connect with me, and the great thing about art is that there's no one right way to look at it, just like Pure Illusion itself!

Anyway, I spent way too many paragraphs talking about what I didn't like this time because I felt I hadn't done it well enough last time, for an episode I liked much less than this one. However, as a relatively simple climax to Flip Flappers main story, episode 12 shook out pretty nicely, with a bevy of gorgeous animation sequences that the show had been lacking in for the last couple weeks. If I just turn my brain off during Mimi's trite monologues, Flip Flappers remains an endearing feast for the senses with snuggly characters you find it impossible not to root for. Also, Cocona and Papika's wedding dress battle armor was completely kickass, and I can't wait to see more of them in action next week. I guess we'll also find out what Dr. Salt, his new love interest research assistant, Mega-Bu-chan, and totally-unnecessary-third-amorphous-girl are doing next week too, but I couldn't care less about that bunch. I hope our lead couple (and Yayaka) manage to save both worlds and whatever's left of Mimi all on their own.

Rating: B+

Flip Flappers is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

So does this mean that Cocona has two mommies? Or does Papika make three? Anyway, you can follow Jake here on Twitter.