It's time to abolish streaming jail
The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is good, but it probably would have been even better months ago.
by Rollin Bishop
The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is a new anime series produced by CloverWorks based on the popular romance manga by Saka Mikami. It follows two students, Rintaro Tsumugi and Kaoruko Waguri, that attend rival schools: one for delinquent boys, and the other for affluent girls. You get the idea. But "new" here is relative, because while it finally came to Netflix in the United States on September 7, it's actually been airing in Japan (and streaming internationally) since early July.
For whatever reason, Netflix put The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity in streaming jail for nearly two whole months. I'd been looking forward to its airing — and it is nice and charming, to be clear, though not exactly a world-altering release — but the delay is nonetheless an inconvenience. It's also the latest in a long line of minor, unnecessary inconveniences that ultimately harms the potential reach and impact of the material, and I'm practically begging folks involved to put a stop to it.
The everchanging streaming service structure has been a consistent thorn — Amazon's much-maligned Anime Strike subscription service and Disney putting shows up for streaming only through its TV Everywhere DisneyNow app come to mind as older examples — but the reality is fairly simple: if you own and operate a streaming service, and you either have the rights, purchase a license, or fully own a show or movie from tip to tail, there's pretty much no satisfying justification for a delayed release.
This is effectively doubled for any lengthy delay. Take Summer Time Rendering, for example, an anime adaptation of the eponymous manga by Yasuki Tanaka. The supernatural thriller anime began airing in April 2022, was licensed by Disney+, and didn't show up until January 2023 in the United States. By the time folks could legally watch the show, the entire online conversation among the show's audience had moved on as weekly simulcasts have set a certain tone and expectation for engaged fans — fans who were already a season or more ahead by the time Summer Time Rendering was finally widely available. One of the best anime of 2022 literally just wasn't available for months.
There are, as always, any number of reasons for this particular streaming hell we live in. Rights complications, streamers waiting on dubs (*cough* Netflix cough), production problems… the list goes on. But it's increasingly an international concern, and any company that doesn't figure out an effective pipeline to get Korean thrillers, German dramas, and Japanese animation to its audience in a timely fashion is quickly going to be left behind.
And it honestly doesn't matter what the reason is; it will always feel bad. Any barrier to entry irrationally layered on top of the usual is just more friction preventing folks from engaging with art. I don't necessarily subscribe to the logic that piracy is essentially folks that wouldn't ever pay for a given product anyway, but I do firmly believe that ease of access is the simplest way to ensure that more people don't search out alternative means. If it's relatively painless and reasonable to buy a thing, a whole lot of people will. If it isn't, they won't.
And this isn't even an anime-only problem. Anime is by far the biggest victim with the worst offenders being Netflix, Disney, and Amazon, but Western animation sometimes falls afoul of this as well.
Take, for example, the recent release of Disney's animated series StuGo. The show premiered on Disney Channel in January 2025, fully aired its entire season by the beginning of May, and was finally added to Disney+ on… July 30, 2025. Even accounting for the fact that the target audience skews younger (it's rated TV-G and aired on Disney Channel, after all), kids are more online than ever, and a huge chunk of folks were prevented from even registering interest because it simply wasn't available to them.
It boggles the mind. I sometimes feel as if I am simply shaking the bars of my cell, demanding to watch my shows. It really shouldn't be this complicated when in my heart of hearts I know the following to be true: if you stream it, they will watch.