©︎Amagishi Hisaya/MF Books/DB PROJECT
Imagine you’re an online writer. By some mix of providence, skill, and luck you’ve managed to get a regular following on your online writing forum of choice. Things are going well, but there’s just one problem: you’re out of immediately interesting ideas. You’ve got some in the tank, but nothing concrete enough to turn into a full-fledged story arc. You could simply wait for these ideas to gestate into something stronger, but the attention economy and even a few weeks without updates could cause your story to lose the tenuous fandom it’s built up!
So what do you do? You screw around for a while. You put out half-baked entries with ideas that could, in the future, prove useful but don’t really have a point right now. You bring in new characters and conflicts for ten minutes to keep readers coming back, but don’t actually resolve or develop them beyond their utility at this exact moment. It’s the kind of thing that any editor worth their salt would throw out immediately, but whoops, it’s years later and the stuff you wrote to keep reader numbers up years ago is now being turned into actual TV for people to watch. I knew there was something we forgot to do! Womp womp!
That’s about the only rational explanation I can think of for the sheer amount of meandering these last few episodes. Just look at Dahlia’s meeting with the military crew at the mansion. The scene itself is fine, with some solid comedic build-up in a wacky sitcom style way. Yet to get there we spend the entire last third of the previous episode watching Dahlia receive the invitation to the palace, study for her trip to the palace, travel by carriage to the palace with Ivan so she can go to an empty room where Wolf picks her up to…I guess take her by carriage to a different room in the same palace? There’s finding charm in the little diversions in life and then there’s navel gazing at the DMV, and I think all that nonsense qualifies as the latter.
Suffice to say that episode 10 is much like the last several, which only contrasts with how episode 11 is actually able to build a substantive conversation for the first time in what feels like months. It’s a little awkward that Dahlia and Wolf still have to formalize even the sharing of secrets, but it’s nice to finally see these two grow closer as they throw back their wine and fine dining. Moreover, what we learn about Dahlia here is one of those quiet, all-too-human stories you can find 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 taken, just a story of human connection for good or ill that both the character and audience have to sit with.
It’s basically what I’ve been asking 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 it. I suppose I can say I’m happier with it than without, and hope that whatever Dahlia in Bloom hast left, it’ll be worth returning for.
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Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start With Magical Tools is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.
