I had The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity at the top of my manga and anime list for a long time. However, the powers that be at Netflix and Kodansha—exclusive owners of its anime and manga—turned my genuine interest in checking out the series into a frustrating comedy of errors this weekend, and I need to vent about it.
The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is a cute romance series. In it, Rintaro Tsumugi, a “mean-faced” high school delinquent with a heart of gold, and Kaoruko Waguri, the quintessence of “must protect at all costs” honor student at a prestigious high school, strike up a tumultuous Romeo and Juliet love story. As a lover of romance anime (trashy or otherwise) that waves its male shojo-josei fan flag and scoffs at shonen, Fragrant Flower is extremely my shit.
And what’s not to love? It’s a charming manga by Saka Mikami, a creator who used to be an assistant on Wind Breaker. The series allows the characters to just talk to each other, subverting frustrating, tropey misunderstandings. It also has a mature exploration of growing out of implicit class biases, questions the eagerness of young people to jump into relationships before establishing friendships with the opposite sex, and simply being a kind, empathetic person. The anime is animated by Cloverworks, a studio deep in its bag, having also brought Wind Breaker’s anime to life. Alongside an anime that challenges toxic masculinity, Cloverworks is delivering a fantastic follow-up to its rom-com, My Dress Up Darling, in tandem with Fragrant Flower’s release.
However, Fragrant Flower’s anime release schedule is the first inconvenience in my effort to watch the series this weekend.
To call Fragrant Flower a Summer 2025 anime in the West is a misnomer. Despite it airing on July 6 and being advertised as Netflix’s latest exclusive, the show is only airing in Asia. It won’t air in other regions, such as the U.S., until September 7th. This shit sucks especially hard because this isn’t the first time Netflix has fucked up a show’s release.
Famously, when Netflix became the exclusive home for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean—the first and only epic in Hirohiko Araki’s long-running series with a female protagonist—the streamer replaced Crunchyroll’s weekly release with a binge drop of the anime that it didn’t even promote. It was a move that, at the time, I criticized because it eliminated the show’s once-coveted online status as a weekly topic of online conversation. Before there were Dan Da Dan Thursdays and Gundam GQuuuuuuX’s Machu Tuesday, there were JoJo Fridays. During this fan-designated day, fans would look forward to creating fan art and discussing the week-to-week developments from the previous season, Golden Wind.
While Netflix seemed to learn from its mistakes by releasing its popular shonen series weekly, it adopted another frustrating trend in anime, made famous by Disney+, known colloquially as “Disney Jail” with Fragrant Flower.
As fellow anime enthusiast Geoff Thew pointed out, “Disney Jail” has caused otherwise hyped shows like Heavenly Delusion, Summertime Rendering, and Tokyo Revengers to lose popularity because of their staggered exclusive releases on Disney+ and Hulu, which takes them out of the conversation with other shows they’re supposed to be airing alongside. “Disney Jail” has become such an annoying issue that it has united even the most red-pilled MAGA manosphere online anime critics in a rallying cry against it. Because yeah, it fucking sucks.
But fine. Whatever. Netflix, in all its infinite wisdom, is playing a Tortoise and the Hare game, sabotaging the hype of a promising non-shonen show by stifling its Western momentum through staggered releases for reasons only known to God. All of this would’ve been easier to stomach if Netflix hadn't been flaunting the show in my face by posting clips from its new episodes on social media that I couldn’t watch.
I’d resigned myself to remaining steadfast and not going to the high seas to watch the show until it premieres in September. It’s a virtuous decision on my part. I’m paying Netflix an exorbitant fee to watch and be denied access to an anime because of my spawn point on this bitch of an Earth. However, the second act in my weekend's gripe with heaven and earth, which prevented me from experiencing Fragrant Flower legally, was marked by the insidious introduction of false hope.
On July 25, K Manga, Kondansha’s manga reading app, retweeted a post from anime news account animetv_jp, announcing that all chapters of Fragrant Flower would be free to read on its app and webpage this weekend. In the past, I’d criticized K Manga as one of the more frustrating manga reading apps of all time because of its ticketed gacha gamification, which made reading manga feel like a series of hoops to jump through. I countered this system by logging into the app every morning and saving five tickets, which could be used to read one chapter of a manga.
However, I gave up months ago when I forgot to keep up with my routine—my tickets (about 100) expired. Yep, all my apes gone. A couple of weeks ago, I tried, unevenly, to rebuild my ticket stash, but like falling out of a gacha game, it’s hard to get back into the habit or see the point once the spell’s been broken.
But hark, descending through luminous god rays breaking up my manga-reading thunderclouds, K Manga recognized that Netflix fumbled the bag with Western anime fans and was throwing a life raft to folks like me by stopping its poor practices and letting me read this weekend as a cosmic apology.
This, too, was a lie.
While reading chapters of Fragrant Flower, I noticed that clicking on new chapters—despite being labeled as free—still required me to click on the ticket to “rent” a chapter I was reading. Too generously, I gave K Manga the benefit of the doubt, thinking the website, which would briefly show a Windows Internet Explorer 9-era browser clicking out of a full-screen view before snapping to Windows 11, had some sort of coding snafu not taking into account its chapters being free. But the more I read the slow-burning manga, which admittedly moved its plot along brisker than other romance manga that often shy away from having their characters discuss their feelings, I noticed my K Manga ticket count dwindle.
Surely, they weren’t still charging me to read Fragrant Flower by using my tickets during its free weekend? I endeavored to keep reading until I ran out of my tickets and see if K Manga would still let me read more of the manga, which was again advertised as being free to read this weekend.
NOPE.
Once I hit chapter 25, Kodansha informed me that I’d run out of premium tickets to read Fragrant Flower manga chapters, and they did so on my weekend dedicated to reading chapters of Fragrant Flower digitally on K Manga with the promise of all chapters (“except for the latest chapter”) being free on the weekend.
In an era where simulcast—English and Japanese releases of episodes—have become the norm, why would Netflix, a streamer that has been eating Crunchyroll’s lunch in both viewer numbers and quality over quantity with its careful curation of anime shows in its growing library, stifle itself by staggering a show’s release and almost forcing fans to go to the high seas to experience a show that has been teasing them by posting clips when folks can’t watch it on their platform?
By the time the show premieres on Netflix in September, all momentum and conversation about Fragrant Flower will be a shadow of Disney Jail and Netflix’s binge model, shaking hands like Dutch and Dillon, killing the cute show’s chances of being in the conversation it so desperately deserves. Where is my $27 going, Netflix? Why are you Mr. Krabs, Kodansha? Why must you conspire to make it impossible to experience this cute series legally?
