Netflix gets a terrific but grounded romance anime with The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity
The 2025 anime fall season was marked by a few intense couples, from Momo-chan and Okarun in Dan Da Dan, Gojo and Marin in My Dress-Up Darling, to the multiple girls trying to date Renako in There’s No Freaking Way I’ll be Your Lover! Unless… Despite its delayed release in the West, which pushed the first episode to launch only on Sept. 7, Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity offers a more simple and yet sincere romance story.
Adapted by CloverWorks studio, The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is based on the manga of the same name written by Saka Mikami, and it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It’s not an isekai. There are no aliens or elves. Instead, we follow two high-school students, Rintarou Tsumugi, a tall blonde boy, and Kaoruko Wagurui, a delicate girl with long hair and a heart-warming smile. To give the narrative a Shakespearean twist, they are enrolled in schools that hate each other. Kaoruko attends a school for rich and well-educated girls, while Rintarou’s school is a public educational institution for supposedly less intelligent boys. And, yes, their schools are one beside the other.
Such a stereotypical setting works in favor of The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity because it creates a clear canvas where the writing can really shine individually and as a couple. From the gothic supernatural Toilet-bound Hanako-kun to the funny witch-loves-ogre romance in Witch Watch, many new shows seem to come up with a different catch to distinguish themselves from the multiple others releasing every season. However, in The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity, there are no complex subplots or any quirky elements, like a curse or being part of the badminton team, to guide these characters and make their relationship progress. They need to meditate on their feelings and talk. It’s as simple as that, which is rare nowadays.
The setting and cast in The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity make us question the assumptions we, as individuals and society, have about others and the world around us. Rintarou has grown up with people being hostile toward him because of how he looks, making him internalize that he is a scary person. At the same time, it’s easy to take Kaoruko as a naive, rich girl who needs to be protected — something her own friends assume about her. We quickly learn that Kaoruko is capable of taking care of herself and that she’s confident about her feelings, while Rintarou has a kind heart, which is only known by his closest friends, his mother, and eventually by Kaoruko.
Through the relationship with Kaoruko, Rintarou can question the distorted image he has about himself and see his value as an individual. He is a flower bud who timidly extends each of his petals throughout the show due to the confidence in himself that Kaoroku helps him to achieve. The show takes a more grounded approach to creating a story based on the argument that love is about giving the other the chance to love themselves.
I would still watch the show even if it was not that well animated, only to see more of the dialogue and scenes between Rintarou and Kaoroku. Thankfully, this is not the case. The palette of colors gives the setting a sober vibe, which helps the character design stand out. The animation has been able to capture the character’s feelings in beautiful scenes where it’s possible, by the way their eyes and expression were animated, to almost hear the feelings their hearts long to put into words.
When an anime walks a more common route by using the classic tropes of a genre, most of the result depends on the quality of the writing and animation, like we’ve seen in the past with Ao Haru Ride and Horimiya. The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity proves that by turning the world of teenagers into a garden of potential flowers whose beautiful colors I’m eager to see.
The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is streaming on Netflix.
