The Apothecary Diaries is a fantastic anime that does something rare for new seasonal shows: Adults can watch it without feeling embarrassed. It respects your intelligence by not spoon-feeding you answers as you suss out the culprits in both its weekly and long-form murder mysteries. It features a fully-realized cast of attractive characters and is a captivating soap opera-flavored political drama.
While the show premiered in the autumn of 2023, I'd foolishly let it languish in my backlog. I've since corrected this error thanks to online chatter for its second season and the hype around the anime adapting a scene from a light novel that manga readers simply referred to as "the frog scene." The cryptic allure of something called "the frog scene" putting a relatively quiet fandom in such a tizzy piqued my interest enough to get caught up on the anime in time to witness its spectacle.
As someone who spent their teenage years on Tumblr hyper-fixating over anime ship GIF sets, it's my duty to put you on to the absurd brilliance of the scene. But before I get into why an amphibian had me gnawing on the bars of my enclosure, let me give a brief rundown of the show and why I dig it.
The Apothecary Diaries is best described as a historical series that takes the same comfy drama cadence of shows like House while weaving a palpable will-they-won't-they romance between its leads, like Dana Scully and Fox Mulder in The X Files or Patrick Jane and Teresa Lisbon in The Mentalist (for my fellow "Jisbon" heads out there). The series follows Maomao, a young apothecary forced to work as a servant girl in the Emperor's palace after being kidnapped by bandits. Maomao prides herself on pragmatism, hiding her ability to read so she doesn't attract attention to whatever bullshit the bourgeois are up to. Maomao's also a freak when it comes to poisons, testing all kinds of concoctions on herself to the point of developing an immunity to most of them and disfiguring her arm testing different allergic reactions.
She's able to stay under the radar until a beautiful eunuch named Jinshi witnesses her covertly solve a string of political poisonings that were believed to be a curse plaguing children born of the Emperor's harem of courtesans. In what might be the epitome of begrudgingly becoming important at work, Jinshi appoints Maomao as the lady-in-waiting to the Emperor's favorite concubine as a poison taster and resident Columbo to the castle's stream of politically motivated poisonings.
Until now, the medical mystery interspersed with the hierarchical drama of the Emperor's concubines, whom the show treats with the same reverence as the feuding houses of Game of Thrones, was what enamored me about the anime rather than its romance. My tune has been forever changed after seeing the frog scene, and now I'm on the verge of strip-mining the fandom for a nugget of information about future "Jinmao" moments.
In the short time I've been a Jinmao shipper, I've discovered I'm a creature whose brain can only make happy chemicals from watching a man yearn for a woman desperately trying not to be put in a situation. For two seasons, I've witnessed Jinshi try (and fail) to weaponize his bishi wiles against Maomao, gawk at her wearing makeup, stammer over an indirect kiss, and nearly crash out at the possibility of her striking up a tryst with someone else. All the while, Maomao is oblivious to his pining. To her, he's objectively a beautiful man who the gods made a eunuch to prevent all-out war amongst the women in the imperial palace over breaking off a piece of him for themselves.
Add that to the mix of the show, by nature of its title, following Maomao's perspective and being an unreliable narrator. Some characters, like her estranged father, are initially portrayed as downright evil until the show gives him texture outside of her bias against them. For the most part, Maomao's perceptive deductions of people's characters are on the money. However, Maomao only wants to know as much information as necessary for survival in the imperial palace. This brings us to the anatomy of The Apothecary Diaries' frog scene.
Spoilers for that.
The frog scene is so cliché that it's almost silly to obsess over. Jinshi and Maomao fall off a cliff into a ravine. Jinshi gives her mouth-to-mouth to resuscitate her in a cave under a waterfall. They strip down to avoid hypothermia and stand on top of each other to climb out of a chasm near the opposite end of the cave. When a leaping frog startles Maomao, she loses her balance, and they topple on each other. When Maomao moves to get off Jinshi, he holds her close, placing them in a compromising face-to-face position. Picking up from the previous episode's cliffhanger ending, Maomao's hand brushes against what she believes to be the frog when she readjusts herself off Jinshi. Jinshi tells her to move her hand away, reflexively prompting her to clasp even harder for whatever reason. The dominoes quickly fall in Maomao's head as she pieces together that she's been grabbing his junk—something he shouldn't have anymore—and that Jinshi isn't a eunuch.
Before Jinshi confesses his true identity (a mystery the show, despite Maomao, telegraphed episodes into the first season), Maomao cuts him off, saying she must've crushed a frog. This leads to a funny back and forth where Jinshi ricochets from taking offense to feeling oddly complimented by her saying it must've been "a fairly large frog" before culminating in him asking her if she wants to check herself. He lifts her leg, and the two almost kiss before they're interrupted by a rescue party. I apologize for not recognizing that The Apothecary Diaries was operating on this level of romance novella in tandem with its political drama, because now I'm obsessed with this ship.
Fans—myself included—are so beside ourselves at what amounts to a two-episode-long dick joke pushing our ship to the next level that there are posts scientifically breaking down the average size of a frog to Maomao's proportions and reverse engineering Jinshi's size on Twitter. I've never seen this level of innovation in any fandom I've frequented, and, unlike Maomao, I'd like to learn more. It's taken everything within my power not to call upon the wisdom of folks who've read the light novels and manga to tease other watershed moments that await me in their budding relationship.
On a deeper level, the moments sandwiched around the frog scene have me in awe of the engaging character writing in The Apothecary Diaries. In a world where every other scene involves a buxom supermodel of a concubine and aesthetic beauty is king, Maomao routinely disparages her appearance. When Maomao strips down to her underwear before Jinshi, she apologizes, saying she'll hide her frail frame as best she can. A slight remark, sure, but it also smacks of her viewing herself as a lowly, unattractive commoner whose appearance anyone of higher social ranking (even a eunuch like Jinshi) would find ugly. Meanwhile, viewers are given a front-row seat to Jinshi's perspective and his awe of her.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jinshi, who only views his beauty as a weapon to leverage for political means not yet made clear in the anime, is routinely disarmed by how Maomao is more concerned with the wellbeing of the human underneath his facade by checking his temperature and not fainting into a useless puddle at the sight of him being shirtless. The added cherry on top of this episode is Maomao explicitly spelling out that she perceives Jinshi as a person and not an object to gawk at or some political figure worth smooching up to. This watershed moment development in Jinmao's Shakespearean tale of forbidden romance is all thanks to a frog that hopped in a hole. I, for one, salute the green quadrupedal icon for its service.
