What Romance Tropes Saka Mikami Avoided With The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity Manga
by Isaiah Colbert,
The series tells the burgeoning love story between high schoolers Kaoruko Waguri and Rintaro Tsumugi. Rather than an age-old beef between the Capuletes and the Montegues keeping its star-crossed lovers at bay, Waguri and Tsumugi's love story is abated by a beef between their schools. Waguri attends a fancy private all-girls school across the way from Tsumugi's “lower-class” all-boys school. Love knows no perceived economic bracket, and as proof of that, Waguri and Tsumugi's friend groups have their respective prejudices checked as the pair deepen their feelings for one another. The first season of the anime series is streaming on Netflix.
Anime New Network got to speak to Mikami over Zoom before her appearance at Kodansha House during New York Comic Con Weekend to ask her about how her romance series came to be, romance tropes that irritate her, and s
Despite romance series often getting the label shojo by default among the anime zeitgeist online, Mikami considers The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity to be a shonen series. Aside from its own theming pointing towards the series being a romance, Mimance mangaka, the genre that influenced Mikami to become one herself growing up, was shonen. Speaking with Kodansha, the series that had the most influence on her were Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan and Peach-Pit's magical girl series, Shugo Chara! Though if she were to pinpoint what romance manga she thumbed through growing up that influenced her to try her hand at it, that distinction would go to Negi Haruba's harem series, The Quintessential Quintuplets.
While Attack on Titan, Shugo Chara! and The Quintessential Quintuplets couldn't be further apart from one another narratively, they share one commonality—they're all Kodansha series. That commonality was enough to make Mikami aspire to be published under the same banner. Mikami would break into the industry with drama and romance one-shots Koroshiya Maid to Obocchama and Song of the Jellyfish (Kurage no Uta) before becoming an assistant to Wind Breaker mangaka Satoru Nii.
Anyone who's read both manga can attest to the distinct thematic similarities both series share. Both have a plucky “don't judge a book by its cover” message as their teens navigate how to talk through their issues instead of letting things fester. Granted, the former opts to have its gents settle their disputes with their fists in territorial skirmishes, while the boys in the latter try their damnedest to overcome the more gruff reputation of their school.
Under Nii's mentorship, Mikami says she learned a lot about the basics of art—those basics being consistency not only with background art but with the density of consistency of background art, with the key word being consistency.
“Because it was my first time being an assistant, how to manage the workplace of a mangaka and see the workflow of the overall work was probably the biggest takeaway that affects how I create today,” Mikami said.
On the outset, being the assistant to a renowned mangaka before doing their own thing comes off as a sure bet. However, while being an assistant to a renowned mangaka, that journey came with the hardship of getting her storyboards rejected. Surreptitiously, nine months after Wind Breaker began publication in 2021, The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity made its debut a year later at Kodansha.
As of the time of writing, The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity has sold over 8 million copies (with 15 volumes published in English). The ongoing series has also done well in the accolades department, placing 2nd in the 6th TSUTAYA Comic Awards, 6th place in the 2022 Next Manga Awards Web Manga criteria, and getting the runner-up prize at the Sanyodo Bookstore Comic Award.
When Mikami began writing The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity, her main goal was to “draw a series where every character was kind.” That'd prove no small task, considering the Waguri and Rintaro's relationship comes with the baggage of their respective friend groups being predisposed to being prejudiced against one another. When asked what storyline developments or characters changed or evolved since she began writing her treatment for the series, Mikami admitted that The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity's ensemble would often take on a life of their own. Stifling a laugh, Mikami said her characters would often do “their own thing,” growing and evolving in ways she didn't expect.
“Sometimes, I felt like I couldn't keep up with them,” she said.
Spoiler Warning!
Of The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity's ensemble, one instance of Tsumugi doing his own thing that shocked Mikami changed the entire trajectory of the series. That being his confession to Waguri in chapter 39.
To set the scene, the pair were out on the beach with the friends playing with sparklers. Usually, anything fireworks-adjacent in a romance anime spells a failed or interrupted confession on the part of either party. Not here. Dude let loose his arrow, leaving Waguri, readers, and Mikami shocked despite the fact that it's her series and she writes and illustrates what happens in it. Which just goes to show what happens when you write a series where “just talk” spills over into declarations of love.
“When [Rintaro] has his confession scene accidentally spill, saying 'I like you,' that was completely unintentional and unexpected at first,” Mikami said. “But as I was drawing it, his feelings, and everything that led up to that, came as a natural result of everything.”
Romance manga connoisseurs will be the first to admit that the long walk toward a confession is a double-edged sword of a trope. You're lucky if a series culminates in a confession around its 100-chapter mark. Not all tropes are created equal, especially among creatives like Mikami whose career trajectory saw her go from being a fan of the genre to scribing her own. In all her years reading romance manga, Mikami too finds some tropes irritating or, politely, dislikes. After laughing over our Zoom interview when I asked what tropes she dislikes or finds irritating, she revealed one thing she took care to focus on with The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity was to ensure the characters her protagonists fall in love with were people readers actually liked as well.
“One thing that pulls me out of the story when I'm reading other romance stories is when the protagonist falls in love with a guy, and the readers are going, 'Why that guy?' and they can't really understand it,” she said. “I want to make sure to avoid that feeling in my own work and make sure that readers can also understand why the protagonist likes this guy.”
Speaking of disliked tropes, The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity avoids, Mikami does something her contemporaries rarely commit to: continuing to tell its story after its central couple becomes a couple. One of the reasons it was important to Mikami to keep the series going after Tsumugi and Waguri became a couple was because that's when the real work begins.
“When people become a couple—when romance happens—oftentimes, the time spent after becoming a couple is longer than the lead-up to becoming a couple,” she said. “After you become a couple, the different parties grow [and] they might experience things differently. That's part of what makes it the romance. Developing that is realistic.”
Another hallmark The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity series has garnered among its readership is the series expanding its scope beyond the framing of Waguri and Tsumugi's relationship. Woven throughout the hills, valleys, and potholes Waguri and Tsumugi face as a couple are entire arcs where the series explores relationships—be they romantic, platonic, and familial—that wilt and blossom amongst the rest of its ensemble.
“As part of my own life, relationships with friends [and] relationships with teachers all play just as important a role in life as romance,” Mikami said. “To reflect that, I wanted to make sure that I portrayed those as well.”
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