The finale at last! With Papika having finally reached her beloved friend both physically and emotionally, the two stand together now, wearing new costumes that seem to fall halfway between wedding dresses and butterfly costumes. Even these costumes feel like a direct validation of their journey, with the bridal notes signaling their unified relationship, while the butterfly motif carries Cocona’s cocoon-inspired name to its logical conclusion. Having fought through terrible insecurities and even the stifling abuse of her long-absent parents, Cocona has emerged stronger than ever, standing proudly beside the girl she loves.

But before Cocona and Papika can kick Mimi’s ass, we’ve got to resolve all that weird timey-wimey stuff regarding Papika in the cage. As I said in the last writeup, there’s very little direct explanation for what exactly is going on here. All we have are hints, like when Cocona meets this Papika and states “you were a big girl before, and an old lady before that, and a baby before that,” implying Papika’s form in this place has been even more variable than we understand. In his commentary notes, director Kiyotaka Oshiyama simply frames this place as a kind of purgatory housing the “tree of life,” and I think that’s all the explanation we can really hope for.

That said, what this segment lacks in narrative solidity, it makes up for in striking imagery and emotional grace. The first meeting of Papika and Cocona plays out something like a reversal of their original “first” meeting in the forest, with Cocona now reaching out to comfort the trapped Papika. There are some arresting symmetrical compositions reflecting their unity of feelings, and goofy visual conceits like Papika gulping down a giant watermelon. For a sequence that seems like it could easily be steeped in binary “this represents this” symbolism and metaphor, the scene offers a surprisingly grounded introduction to Cocona and Papika’s friendship – the two really were friends long ago, and Papika really has been searching for her all this time.

Back in the present moment, Cocona’s new confidence leads directly into a sequence that screams “it’s the finale, let’s give them something to remember.” Flip Flappers’ style of animation has been extremely loose and energetic from the start, but its tendency towards emphasizing movement and embracing abstraction reaches new heights here, as Papika and Cocona dance around Mimi’s attacks. Beams sear and swords slash and the Evangelion nods continue (like this stylized blood spray), all while the solidity of the world around them continues to crumble. In a world where our mental realities are regularly conveyed as coherent and fully realized art statements, it makes perfect sense that the collapse of this world is represented through surrealism, Mimi now finding no steady meaning in anything but her daughter’s obedience.

While Mimi’s physical form wavers along with the world around her, her embodiment of an emotionally abusive parent is sturdy throughout. Mimi has always been contrasted against Salt as the controlling parent to his absent parent, but her representing control thematically and her being a convincingly terrible mother are very different things. Here, her characterization of her own abuse as a reflection of her love, and little moments like her genuine tears and “you raised your hand against your own mother?”, play painfully true to the emotional manipulation of a serial abuser.

Speaking of parental contrast, it’s no accident that Mimi’s big tantrum plays out against scenes of Salt discovering and booting up the old ELPIS device. While Mimi is essentially paying back the violence that was inflicted on her as an adolescent, Salt is doing the opposite, and paying back his debt to his daughter by entering the very device that destroyed his own father. In doing so, Salt takes “becoming your father” in the best direction he possibly can, making a positive sacrifice out of a great tragedy. Meanwhile, Mimi is becoming her parents in the more traditional sense, playing out the controlling malice of the lab that raised her on her own daughter.

Salt’s grand entrance raises some interesting questions regarding the nature of the pure illusion they’re currently inhabiting. As Salt walks across the earth, the flowers turn to ash, and the world behind him is a grey canvas of broken trees. It seems fair to assume that this is Salt’s internal world – a world he himself sees as a dead place, the aftermath of his vibrant time with Mimi. But if that’s Salt’s world, then it’s likely the flowery meadow itself is Mimi’s world, meaning she essentially sees her own life as contained in that one happy memory at the river’s banks. It’s a nicely subtle nod to Mimi’s ambiguity, and the genuine, terrible hurt that led her to see this as her only option. In a show that’s all about the beautiful and often contradictory nature of our internal worlds, it makes sense that Mimi can simultaneously be the most sympathetic, most empathetic, and most viciously selfish character all at once.

After that, it’s time once again for battle, as Mimi herself flip flaps and goes to war with her daughter. There’s more sumptuous animation here, as well as some of the wildest background art Flip Flappers has offered yet. Given its usual creativity, it’s easy to underestimate the visual feat the show is accomplishing here. Most anime have to work pretty hard to convey a convincing reality in the first place – Flip Flappers is attempting to use divergent art styles to convey the outright dissolution of a world, all while conducting a battle within that world that heavily relies on our understanding of that world’s solidity. To accomplish this, the show goes with the smart choice of framing all the truly style-deviant divergences in the less physically active Flip Flap employee asides, while doing smart tricks like compositional match fades to imply a continuity between that reality and the relatively solid, “broken ground floating through space” venue of the actual fight.

After all the fireworks, Flip Flappers’ climax sequence ends the way it pretty much had to: with a bunch of characters talking to each other about their feelings. First off, we have Cocona’s long-awaited moment of true self-assessment, where she at last examines who she’s been, who she is, and who she wants to become. “I actually didn’t want to go on adventures. I wanted to keep drifting through life, like a boat riding a current. Because I was afraid of making choices and regretting them. But you pulled me off that boat.” As her mother said, Cocona’s situation wasn’t unusual at all; she wasn’t a coward or a hero or anything strange, she was just a girl with some strong insecurities and not that many people to support her. After all of Flip Flappers’ wild adventures, this acknowledgment feels important both for Cocona and us in the audience; Cocona’s internal world might be strange and breathtaking, but we all contain such worlds, and just need the push of a friend to embrace them.

With the battle complete and both her parents having faced their actions in their own way, Cocona wakes up to one more strange reality: our own. A deeply subdued color palette lends the whole world a realistic sense of fatigue, while on the walls of Sayuri’s room we see many of the previous episodes’ major fictional influences: Sailor Moon and Mad Max, Ben-Hur, etcetera. As Cocona helplessly searches around for Papika, we get to see more and more sharp contrasts between the world as Cocona has experienced it and the world as we see it, underlining the fact that she possessed a vibrant internal reality from the start.

The distinction between Pure Illusion and reality is dashed altogether in the final scene, one more reprise of Cocona and Papika’s first meeting. As color floods the screen and our heroines don their butterfly armor, it’s clear that the boundaries of Pure Illusion exist wherever we care to place them. Was that last grey reality truly the real world, or was it simply the world that as Cocona believed it would be without Papika, or the hope of adventure? However you interpret it, this strange epilogue ultimately just emphasizes Mimi’s thoughtful words, her understanding that not only do all of us have a vivid inner self, but that any of us can find ourselves needing a little help to express it. From towering mountains to haunting caverns, proudly heralded loves to fiercely guarded secrets, our internal wildernesses are all rich and beautiful lands well worth exploring. Though her path there was uneven and often treacherous, Papika’s hand led Cocona to celebrate the adventures of others, and ultimately even come to love her own.

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