Flower and Asura

Episode 9

So this week, our squad goes to a workshop to help them further perfect their craft—and in the process, they (or more specifically, Hana) meet other broadcast clubs from other schools. Right off the bat, I had a good chuckle at the idea that the large team had about 30 people—because, anecdotally as usual, that rings true for speech teams, too. Especially if you're not including debaters. (While I'm not sure whether or not this is true across the board, at least when/where I was on a speech team, speech tournaments and debate tournaments were the same tournament. Debate was just its own, very separate division. Either way, it's still forensics—which is to say, competitive talking—all the same.)

Something worth bearing in mind about speech team sizes is that not every member of the team has to participate in every tournament. Sure, more active members will probably go to most of them, but I'm not sure I've ever known someone who went to every single one. And that can give you a really distorted view of how many people are on a given school's team—including your own. The timing, the size of the venue, the distance from other schools—there's a ton of factors that can lead to some tournaments generally being bigger or smaller than others (though I'd argue timing is, by far, the biggest one).

And speaking of more competitive speech-isms, you've heard me talk about the weird balance competitive speech can have with acting here before, and we saw it get a bit of a mention this week. This is another one of the rare times where we see a branching point between broadcast club and competitive speech—it sounds like, outside of TV dramas, they try to keep acting to a minimum in recitation. The recitation category sounds pretty close to poetry and prose in competitive speech. And in these categories, they generally encourage some level of acting, or depending on the circumstances (EX: if people have a conversation) even some characterization. But I've already talked about acting in poetry and prose in a previous weekly review for this show, so I don't need to rehash that again. Suffice to say: in competitive speech, the equivalent category that Hana is doing often does include at least some level of acting or characterization. It sounds to me like that's what Hana likes doing, so she'd probably find it a good fit.

Anyway, it was fun to see Hana meet other members from other teams. You definitely run into a lot of the same people at speech tournaments, especially if you're in the same categories, so I imagine that's pretty true for competitive-speech-adjacent broadcast club as well. Fun as it is, it's definitely on the more niche side of school club or team activities—remember, 30 people constitutes a big team, after all.

But of course, the main thing this episode was about was Anne and Misakki meeting again after all this time—and Anne being disappointed to realize that Misakki's no longer as good as she was in middle school. Meanwhile, Misakki claims that this is because she was only so good because she had Anne to guide her. And as usual, this anime brings a ton of nuance to the table and approaches conflict in a way I'm not sure many other pieces of fiction, in general, would. What would've been so easy to turn into a big, over-dramatic argument that would probably lead to Anne either getting really full of herself or really depressed, is instead used to rekindle the friendship between the distanced childhood friends. Come to think of it, I think this week's episode really highlights how part of this anime's secret sauce when it comes to how elegantly it manages to handle disputes is how direct it often is in pointing out what the core issue is. Characters in this show are much more honest and in-tune with their feelings than they are in most other shows, and that character writing muscle gets flexed its hardest during times of strife, when being aware of these things can make or break a character's decisions. It not only makes for a more engaging show, but also, it's really refreshing.

More than most weeks, this was an episode that really brought me back to my own bygone competitive speech days—of countless weekends spent waking up at the crack of dawn to put on a suit and read the same script 50 times by the time the day's over (to this day, I can still remember the opening lines of the original oratory I did my senior year). And if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: that's certainly not the only thing this anime has going for it, but I can't help but love how competitive speech-y this anime is. Still, even taking that aside, my favorite character got a great moment of development, so all in all, I'd say it's been another great week for Flower and Asura.

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