The Apothecary Diaries – Episode 3 - Ai Animes 🤖

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thinking we could all do with some thorny palatial intrigue, meaning it’s likely time for a fresh episode of The Apothecary Diaries. The show has proven an absolute delight so far, in large part due to its preposterously charming heroine. Combining a keen intellect and curious mind with a variety of more grumpy, gremlin-reminiscent qualities, Maomao fits into a proud tradition of reluctant detectives, running from modern favorites like Oreki Houtarou all the way back to the indifferent, self-medicating Sherlock Holmes.

With Maomao as our guide, life at the palace has proven a treacherous and fragile balance, a continuous negotiation of loyalties spiced with the threat of venomous betrayal. It’s becoming oddly understandable how Maomao might find comfort in poisons; poisons might harm, but they rarely lie, generally revealing themselves through odor and texture and a certain stiffening of the limbs. In contrast, the nobles of the court are born liars, and that bastard Jinshi the least trustworthy of them all. Let’s see how Maomao navigates this nest of vipers as we return to the palace!

Episode 3

Feel like Maomao is a clear beneficiary of anime’s tendency towards flattering, aesthetic scarring. I imagine her experimental arm must actually look pretty horrifying, like she’s got one zombie limb

We open with a slowly spinning aerial shot, a composition designed to evoke a sense of disorientation and surveillance

“A reward?” Lady Fuyou flees from Jinshi after hearing some apparently intolerable news

And then we return to the stinger from last episode, that vision of an ominous, spectral woman lurking among the courtyards of the rear palace

“I miss the sand and the sunlight back home.” I appreciate these incidental conversations between Lady Gyokuyou’s other ladies-in-waiting, offering some context for their lives here and gestures towards what life is like outside the palace. A key element of convincing worldbuilding is crafting characters who feel at home in their own distinct world, who take its moral and cultural assumptions for granted, rather than observing it with something more akin to the audience’s outsider perspective. That confidence tends to express itself through incidental statements that receive no further explication – all these characters understand that this woman comes from a warm, coastal climate, they don’t need to explain anything to each other

That layering of incidental worldbuilding continues through the introduction of a “Western Capital,” which is where Lady Gyokuyou was staying previously

“It’s the family home of the emperor’s favorite concubine.” So apparently Gyokuyou’s position is so significant that she’s actually responsible for improving trade agreements between the western and central capitals. Concubines are quite powerful here!

Pretty economic scene on the whole, even using tricks like having the speaker looking away from the camera to avoid the need for lip flaps. This show is in general a triumph of art design over limited animation

We come across Maomao developing a cold remedy. The break between episodes serves to cleanly advance her position, to the point where she’s now apparently free to conduct her own chemistry experiments

As with Lady Gyokuyou’s original problem, this story of the palace spirit only reaches Maomao by accident, through one of the fellow lady-in-waiting’s gossip. An excellent running bit for our extremely indifferent detective

And of course, her old friend Xiaolan has all the deets

Another aerial shot as Maomao considers the situation, emphasizing the idea of this spiritual intruder somehow descending from the sky. All about the boarding with this show

“They say that sunken in the moat are the corpses of concubines who tried to escape.” Very Maomao deadpan delivery here. This explanation also serves to more precisely establish the castle layout, something that could be relevant later

Love Maomao’s little trot-walk as she scampers to the apothecary. The show does its best to maintain her particular body language

Maomao explains that relations have thawed between her and the palace doctor, now that he knows she can actually create medicine

Excellent grumbling noises and cat faces as she is denied a snack. Any cat owner should know cats are capable of an astonishing array of weird noises

While griping about Jinshi, Maomao has a sudden revelation: if it seems like Jinshi just lurks around the rear palace all day instead of doing his job, that must be because it is his job to lurk around the rear palace. Don’t embrace the easiest, most self-flattering explanation – divine the truth backwards from what we can actually observe

Of course, Maomao being Maomao, she still indulges in the explanation that he’s just the emperor’s favorite pet

In spite of herself, she is intrigued by Jinshi’s suggestion that the spirit is actually a sleepwalking concubine

His needling eventually convinces her to help. This show’s premise is close to a gender-swapped version of a genre staple – “sullen, antisocial boy is drawn into engagement with the world via an energetic girl companion.” Funny I mentioned Oreki, as this is basically a reverse Hyouka

Maomao and Gaoshun have a rare conversation as they patrol the palace. I appreciate getting more of Gaoshun; he’s got a nice deadpan sense of humor that balances the frivolity of Jinshi and venom of Maomao. Jinshi actually courts Maomao’s disdain, but Gaoshun’s blunt familiarity puts her off-balance

The sleepwalker is Concubine Fuyou. She actually looks quite graceful sleep-dancing in the moonlight, with the soundtrack’s gentle piano offering a suitably otherworldly complement to her performance

“She is scheduled to be given to a military officer as a reward.” Thus the stress is likely prompting her sleepwalking. The following composition makes the conflict visually undeniable: Fuyou up on the high wall, unconsciously celebrating her last fragment of freedom. Little wonder this episode has consistently emphasized how the concubines are trapped here; for the first time, we are centering our drama on a character who is unhappy within their cage

Apparently she is known as a skilled dancer, but stumbled in her first performance, and was subsequently shunned by the emperor. Thus she is relegated to being a soldier’s reward

“I heard she’s a princess from a small vassal state. I’m sure she doesn’t want to go back.” More details illustrating the unique social order of this world. Apparently it is an honor for even a princess to become the emperor’s concubine

Maomao reflects on how Fuyou is like her namesake, the cotton rose – a flower that changes its color across the course of a single day

Appearing before Lady Gyokuyou, she relates the tale of a woman at the brothel who was similarly afflicted, seemingly driven to sleepwalking by the threat of being bought by an old man

Fuyou is thus restricted from leaving her quarters, though neither Maomao nor Jinshi seem particularly satisfied with this answer. Kinda funny how mystery fiction imbues us with this same sense of dissatisfaction; the reality of a situation can often be exactly as it seems, but mysteries train us to disbelieve that, to assume there’s always one more hidden layer, one last reversal of expectations

That sorta ties in with why I’m not a big mystery guy on the whole; I like when dramas or character arcs build on themselves in a sturdy, coherent arc, while the twists inherent in mystery fiction often feel like surprise being valued over thematic cohesion. Granted, many of my favorite stories involve mystery writers illustrating human truth through such contradictions (Monogatari, Hyouka, etcetera), so it’s not exactly a hard rule

As Fuyou prepares to leave, Gyokuyou asks Maomao to share the actual truth with her

Maomao relates the tale of another courtesan, one who collaborated with two potential purchasers and faked an illness in order to be sold at half price to the man she actually wanted to be with. Thus she believes Fuyou might be similarly “selling herself” into freedom, feigning illness in order to be with the man she truly loves. Once again, expressions of power take strange forms within this world of concubines; Fuyou is able to use the baseline expectation of the emperor’s attention being desirable to maneuver herself towards the man she actually wants

The production makes a dramatic show of Fuyou marching towards the palace gates, emphasizing once again the difficulty of escaping from this prison

“As a military officer, he could never propose marriage to a princess.” Thus they were able to manipulate the standard expectations of social station by essentially “laundering” Fuyou through her time as a concubine, which put her in a subservient-enough position that she would be considered a reasonable match for a soldier. Interesting contradiction there; he couldn’t marry a princess, but he could marry a concubine of the emperor, a station that is otherwise considered actually superior to being a provincial princess. The nebulous, fluid social status of the emperor’s concubines once again sparks some fascinating political drama

“Would it make me a terrible woman if I said I envy Concubine Fuyou?” Such a strange, elaborate dance, but through it she actually achieved her escape

Oof, this ending is lovely. A poignant song of longing, quick snippets of their joyous days before she was taken, and then the greatest flourish of animation of the entire episode, as we get wonderfully fluid character acting for the two embracing at long last. Sometimes love survives

And Done

Whew, what a terrific episode! This show has been a pleasure from the start, but this felt like a clear high point, an episode with a mystery and personal drama just as compelling as our central characters. As usual, the storyboarding did a terrific job of emphasizing the episode’s core themes, persistently highlighting the boundaries of the palace so as to place us in the same entrapped mindset of Fuyou herself. And the resolution of her drama offered a number of intriguing new wrinkles regarding the social stature of these concubines, as well as the relationship between the central authority and outlying provinces. All that plus Maomao’s consistently endearing commentary and that heart-on-sleeve ending flourish made for both a gripping and winningly sentimental adventure, a testament to love’s endurance even through all cultural barriers and machinations of fate. Clever work, Lady Fuyou!

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