Help, my favorite anime couple is getting cockblocked by minding their own business

Cour 2 of The Apothecary Diaries season 2 kicks off this week, and man, if the show continues last week’s momentum with its delicious romance, I’m going to lose it. (In the best way.) 

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for this season of The Apothecary Diaries.] 

While most of The Apothecary Diaries is medical mystery meets court intrigue, the show also contains a fantastically intoxicating slow-burn romance between Maomao, the titular apothecary, and Jinshi, the beautiful eunuch with secrets who runs the administration in the rear palace, where the emperor’s concubines live. They have deliciously contrasting personalities: Jinshi is flirtatious and charming; Maomao is pragmatic and almost cold (except when it comes to gushing over rare medical ingredients). Through working together, they’ve established a rapport and a bond, though Maomao insists on not deepening it, due to their respective stations. 

In the most recent episode, the pair almost kissed — and not just an almost-kiss, but an almost-kiss where Jinshi flipped Maomao on her back and hiked her leg up over his waist, right after she’d accidentally grabbed his dick. That’s a big step for any relationship, but particularly for these two, since he has been pretending to be a eunuch but is secretly not; the action had him all flustered and pink-cheeked and — AHHHHHHHHHHHH! It was pretty damn steamy, and had me gnashing teeth.

But Jinshi and Maomao’s accidental romantic situations never go smoothly — especially because Maomao usually deliberately goes out of her way to avoid them. In the moment right before, after Maomao had fallen on top of Jinshi, with her hand splayed on his penis, she simply decided not to acknowledge that he had one. After all, knowing he was secretly not a eunuch would make her life way more complicated than it already was. Instead, she insisted that she must be touching a “somewhat large” frog. (Apparently, fans are trying to figure out just how big that might be). 

Such is the contrast of Maomao and Jinshi, which swings from bickering and indifference to incredibly intimate and steamy moments in the blink of an eye. It’s a thrilling roller coaster and I am so here for the ride. Even if it’s causing me emotional whiplash — that’s a bonus in my book. 

At this point in the show, Jinshi is at least aware that he has some affections for Maomao. Maybe the teasing started because she was completely immune to his beauty, but he’s grown to respect her opinion and purposefully seeks her out, driven a little crazy when she ignores him. She’s likewise grown to respect him, and even though she finds some of his antics ridiculous, she generally trusts him. Still, for the most part, she remains utterly unimpressed by his flirtatious behavior. And the best part is a lot of it is on purpose.

Maomao is so wickedly smart and can easily figure out the layers of court intrigue at play here — if she wanted to. That’s the key factor. Maomao very much does not want to know anything that’s above her pay grade. However, she keeps getting dragged into increasingly complicated situations that she does not want to deal with, thank you very much. And Jinshi has been hiding way more than his anatomy from her. These past two episodes, Jinshi has wanted to tell her the truth about his identity. She does not want to hear it at all. She wants to claim plausible deniability, to the point where she’s willing to pretend his dick is a frog. Unstoppable force meets immovable object.

The episode ended without much closure on both the romance and Jinshi’s big reveal, so I’m particularly riled up and begging for more. The Apothecary Diaries has been so damn good about teasing along its bigger mysteries while answering smaller-stakes questions. The romance is structured the same way, a slow buildup that occasionally hikes up all that tension in a big moment, like an indirect kiss via fingertips or a daring rooftop rescue. Those already made me scream, but these past couple of episodes have really sent me into a tizzy. Unfortunately, while the rush is so, so sweet, I’m left craving even more. It’s frustrating; it’s perfect.

We’ll see just how this romance progresses in the next half of the season — and considering how the stakes are ramping up, I know I’m definitely going to be keysmashing my live reactions. 

The Apothecary Diaries season 2 cour 2 starts on Thursday on Crunchyroll.