Let’s Take Adderall Together (When the Chameleon Flower Blooms)

When the Chameleon Flower Blooms is a manga created by Shido Kido, starting in November of 2023 and still ongoing at the moment, it’s story focus in the friendship of two autistic kids that should be very medicated.

This is about one the like 4 or 3 new mangas that I started to read this year that are actually great. From the title I would have guess that this is some Shonen-ai, well you can see it that way, it is about the friendship between two boys, one is weirdly obsessed with the other for no reason, you can say that there is a romantic angle to it, but you know it's just weird and creepy to see it like that !! The story focus in the ever developing friendship between Kiyomizu and Shigaraki, Kiyomizu being the star student of his class and Shigaraki being the problem student of the class, problem in this case comes from his erratic behaviour of a very autistic kid, the type that is nearly needs to be taken care of at home just because they don’t function in the outside world, okay he is not that bad,but he nearly there.

Reading this for the first time was incredible, the sort of presentation that this comic puts out is not the stuff that you see in the average drama school story of the likes of this, the art style too goes well with, there is this lack of beautification on it, I think most time manga artist want to have a very clean, very polished and pleasing look to their art, but this is rough, not only for the lack of artistic experience, but also works in the way to make stuff feels more vivid, more real, it reminds me a lot of the works of Taiyo Matsumoto, one of my favorites mangakas, that also have this roughness in his style as well, I do think this comic as kinda of a cross if Taiyo Matsumoto works with an episode of Craig of the Creek, I don’t like doing comparisons like this, honestly because most of the when other people do them it’s lame and incorrect,like they say that something is like a cross of Breaking Bad with Games of Thrones and if you have the minimal of knowledge of both medias, you see that is nothing like that and that person is full of shit !!

It is also good to make it clear that the first chapter was a one shot that eventually got pushed into a series, from what I look up, it won an award a year prior to its serialization, so the author must have worked into making a series based into it, you can even see a clear change of art style in between chapters one and two clearly. In the first chapter we are introduced to our main characters Kiyomizu and Shigaraki, and Kiyomizu develops this obsession over Shigaraki through his art, in an art class all the students in his class making sculptures, and everyone make some mundane thing, but Shigaraki makes this bizarre sculpture with a fishbone and Kiyomizu finds that incredible, this touch of surreal is like the most interesting thing that he has in his sort of mundane life. Then he finds Shigaraki spending hours in the chameleon flower field in front of his house, after he leaves he found that he was making little sculptures with the flowers, and he deduces that they were based on the students in their class because he noticed that Shigaraki was eyeing people intensely recently, so eventually Kiyozumi becomes his next project let’s says, with leads with their first awkward meeting, this first chapter ends with finding the sculpture of flower of him on the field and he has blood dripping from his nose out of excitement I guess, and him concluding that nothing matters of his troubles because he got the most precious treasure of all,and we as reader don’t even get to see the sculpture and it doesn't matter, because it only matter for him. The second chapters start with him trying to start some friendship with Shigaraki and failing, and him finding out rather dramatically that the flower field in front of his home was cut out because a Parking lot is gonna be constructed there. Thus leading him a dramatic reaction of him being shellshocked, the funny bit there is that he remains there in front of the barren field imobile and his parents seem to have dragged back home, clean him and dress him and put him to bed, while he was still in the same shellshock imobile state, thus I reiterate the Craig of the Creek level of cartoon humor that the story have. And also his state is worse when he discovers that the sculptures that Shigaraki made are falling apart, and that gets him so bad that he doesn’t go to school the next day.

Their friendship eventually start to develop when Kiyozumi forces Shigaraki to fix his grass sculptures, something that is impossible, eventually leading him to go his home where he see how he lives, and this where we see another difference between this character, were Kiyozumi is this sort of rich and kinda shelter kid and Shigaraki who is poor and wild, him.and his lives in an apartment that he shares with his aunt and her 6 other kids, that run around the apartment making him into a plaything of their own, thus Kiyozumi started to understand better Shigaraki erratic behaviour. Okay I won’t go over details over every chapter. I mean there are few of them at the moment,like 18 at the moment of writing, two of them are still not readable in manga websites tho ! You can read it if you want I highly recommend it, but that’s the dynamic of the overall narrative, Kiyozumi helping Shigaraki in his artwork and him learning more about him and himself and also Shigaraki getting out of his own erratic and childish behavior as they bond in their friendship. There is this moment were Shigaraki has this nightmare where he doesn’t see Kiyozumi face, he see him but from the back of the head and every time he tries to turn him to see his face he only see the back of his head, that gets me, because I love stuff like that, this surreal representation of the fear of losing his friend, that stuff is great !! That chapter ends with him, Shigaraki looking at the back of Kiyozumi’s head silently, and then he asks if he was smiling, there is a sort implication that he know what his friend is doing just by his body movement, but what you don’t have is a better reaction of him seeing the undoing of his nightmare, because of certain lack of artist experience from the author.

So yeah, I think this is the best I can sum up this comic, on way to say “hey read this thing is good”, because I like it and want make other people like it as well, stuff like is the sort thing that deserves more attention, just because of the level of written and sentimentally that it has, you have a bunch of stuff that in the same vain of comic but they fail at that aspects and get so much attention for whatever reason, and stuff like this gets swept aside. Nah stuff like this should be getting more attention really.