Hard to believe its been an entire year since Flip Flappers began to air, on the other hand its hard to believe its only been a year. In honor of the Flipflappiversary, each week there will be a new post about that week’s episode. Not a full write up or analysis, just a brief look at something or someone important to that episode.
For the first post, lets talk a bit about Cocona’s Glasses.
As you may remember, Cocona wore glasses in episode 1. Or rather, she wore them a few times. For most of the episode she goes without them, though apparently kept them on her in a pocket. She doesn’t seem to need them to read, and they honestly don’t fit her very well, being quite large, thick rimmed ones that are big on her face.
The glasses are most notable for being the instigator for the concluding setpiece, where the glasses are lost onto the herd of snow monsters and Papika risks her life to retrieve them, and is ultimately saved herself by Cocona awakening to mysterious powers. The glasses however are broken, much to Papika’s dismay. When they return to the real world, Papika puts the glasses on Cocona’s face and asks her to go adventuring again. Cocona removes the glasses and tells her no.
Cocona never wears the glasses again. The last time they appear is in the beginning of episode 2, where they have mysteriously been repaired and are sitting on the table in Cocona’s room. So why did she wear the glasses? Where did they come from and why did she stop?
Well, the show never directly answers this, but the original owner of the glasses is revealed late in the show. In episode 11, there is a flashback to when Mimi, Papikana and Salt were young adults. And we see Salt is wearing black, thick-rimmed glasses, very similar to the ones Cocona owns. So it seems the glasses are Salt’s. Perhaps the only thing Cocona has directly connecting her to her parents.
At the end of the episode, Cocona takes the glasses off before turning down Papika’s offer. However she’s awakened to some new feelings, and for the first time has planted in her a desire to step forward in life. She puts away the glasses and walks forward on her own. Ironically, perhaps, on a road that will lead her to a reunion with both of her parents.
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Never caught that about the glasses being Salt’s, nice. And man, despite watching ep 1 a bunch of times, Cocona with glasses is just such an odd feeling. She’s totally not the glasses type (not sure it fits any of the FliFla girls, besides Sayuri who could totally pull it off), though I wouldn’t mind seeing her and Papika go matching red-rimmed glasses a la Yun and Hajime from last season, just for a day.
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She only actually wears them in like, 3 scenes, total.
Thinking back I would have said she wore them for the majority of the episode, but nope.
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I suspect that Cocona partly uses those glasses as a prop and as armor against her own feelings. If you wear glasses like that, you must be a studious and boring and proper person, right? Cocona is certainly trying to pretend to be that person, especially to herself (consider her repeatedly stopping herself from enjoying bits of things in this first episode, for example).
This leads to various interpretations of things like the glasses being cracked in the adventure, in Cocona taking them off at the end, of them being silently repaired at the start of the second episode (implicitly by Asclepius), and then Cocona abandoning them. Perhaps Cocona’s already changing before her decision at the end of the second episode.
(On the one hand, I’m wary of reading too much into incidental things. On the other hand, we know that Flip Flappers is deliberately loaded with tons of stuff by the writer and director, and the glasses are such a prominent prop here.)
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