Castle Town Dandelion (城下町のダンデライオン) is a 4koma comedy manga drawn and written by Ayumu Kasuga (known for the designs he drew for Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!! and Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle), and serialized in Manga Time Kirara Miracle! since 2012, and moving to Manga Time Kirara as of October 2017. An adaptation by Production IMSnote and directed by Noriaki Akitaya premiered in the summer of 2015.
Akane Sakurada has an issue with being the center of attention. To put it simply, she doesn't like it. The thing is, it's hard to not be the focus of everyone's attention, when your father just happens to be the ruler of your country. And what's even worse, there's a seemingly endless number of security cameras strategically placed around the town, all set to follow your every move.
You'd think that Akane's life couldn't get any more difficult. You'd guess wrong. Because, seemingly on a whim, dear old Dad decided that upon her graduation three years from nownote would be the time the country would decide who among the King's children would become the country's next ruler... through a popularity contest.
Fortunately, being part of the royal bloodline has certain... perks. Akane, and indeed all of her nine brothers and sisters, all have special powers. Except those same powers are now also going to be seen by the public as added appeal for each sibling once it's time to vote...
This series is licensed by Funimation in North America and received an English dub, making it the second Manga Time Kirara title to get an English dub from Funimation (the first being Three Leaves, Three Colors and its broadcast dub).
Castle Town Dandelion gives examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptation Expansion: Par for course for a Kirara 4koma adaptation, where the second half of the first episode is entirely new, and was only done so that viewers could be introduced to each of the Sakurada siblings' abilities.
- Adaptation Distillation: While the manga has the story span 2-3 years, the anime condenses these stories all into one year.
- All Men Are Perverts: Exaggerated in The Princess' Skirt. After knowing Akane is bottomless for the day and she would have to use the stairs, all the 10th grade boys stormed out of their classrooms so that they can have a peek on Akane's panties.
- Author Appeal:
- Since most Western viewers only knows Kasuga through this and Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!!, many wonder if she has a Girlish Pigtails fetish.
- The basic premise of this series are the cameras, and it has been repeatedly mentioned the in-universe population often see her Panty Shot. Viewers thus wonder if this series was originally intended as an excuse for Kasuga to write panty shots without actually showing any.
- Beach Episode: Episode 5A, which was mainly adapted from the colour extras of Volume 2. Downplayed as it is not really a beach; they found the logistics for having a beach vacation too expensive so they faked one from what is essentially a film set.
- Big Brother Is Watching You: Inverted. The city is peppered with surveillance cameras, but the king himself had them apparently set up to make sure the kids were safe while he was doing his work at the castle. However, once the issue of the election comes up, the cameras then gain a secondary purpose — as a ready source of viewing for the public so that they can decide who they would eventually vote for to be the next ruler. In the latter case, people started to discuss these footages as if the royalty were celebrities, Panty Shot included.
- Casting Gag: The romantic subtext between Akane and Karen can be pretty funny if you watched The Irregular at Magic High School, where they played competing with each other protagonist's two main Love Interest.
- Caught Up in a Robbery: Chapter 9 has some of the cast shopping at a department store on Christmas Eve when a group of robbers holds up the store. The purpose of this segment is to showcase Aoi's actual Royalty Superpower: within two yonkoma strips, which won't take more than a few minutes in-universe, she orders the robbers to drop their arms and leave, and they heed her with no questions asked. Then she asks all the bystanders to forget what happened.
- A Child Shall Lead Them:
- According to Chapter 23, Souichirou himself was crowned as a high schooler.
- Since all of the Sakurada siblings are under the age of twenty, this will be the case regardless of who wins the election. This is also mostly true in manga, where the election takes place at Akane's graduation; only Aoi would likely to be above the Japanese age of majority.
- Clothing Damage: In Chapter 18/Episode 8A, all of Akane's clothing burst due to a Power Incontinence of her Gravity Master power.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The Sakurada siblings' auras: red for Akane, blue for Aoi, white for Shu, green for Kanade, pink for Misaki, indigo for Haruka, yellow for Hikari, orange for Teru, and purple for Shiori.
- It is actually quite exaggerated for Akane; she has an obviously pinker skin tone compared to rest of the cast.
- Royal Sakuraka Academy assigns the three grades different trim colors for the students uniforms (skirts and ties for the girls, just the ties for the boys, plus their tracksuits for gym), with red for the freshmen, green for the juniors and blue for the seniors.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- In episode 5A, after the siblings knew the "beach" is practically a film set, Hikari became extremely furious, saying Shuu has been cheating them all along. However, Hikari's anger ceased after Shuu told her the sand and the sea water is real. Misaki, having overheard the conversation, lampshaded this trope.
- In episode 6A, Teru designed an election flier. But because he has a Shōnen hero delusion, his taglines is immediately seen by his siblings as off-puting.
To eradicate the root of all evil, and lead the world to its end! - Cool and Unusual Punishment: Akane and Hikari being forced to clean the toilets of the castle. And the castle has a lot of toilets...
- Cool Crown: Worn by the Sakurada siblings in the promotional material for the manga and the anime, and of course, worn by Mr. Sakurada.
- A Day in the Limelight: The series switches the focus on a different sibling each chapter, for the most part.
- Deconstructed Trope: The anime seems to deconstruct superpower tropes, albeit lightly, and were mostly resolved in the end.
- Aoi's complex about her superpower is based on the fear her reputation was not a real one.
- Kanade has been haunted by her crushing Shuu's leg some 12 years ago, which eventually was due to the misuse of her superpower leading to the dematerialization of items she previously materialized.
- The anime explained Akane's social phobia also as a consequence of an superpower misuse: when she was playing at Karen's house as a child, she destroyed Karen's house as she overexerted her superpower to fight intruders, putting her into the center of attention very negatively.
- Probably due to Akane's experience above, Teru has to make vows to his parents to limit the use of his superpower. This in turn make him feel useless, since that superpower... isn't one that needs to be used often in The New '10s Japan.
- "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: Yui Ogura (Hikari) and Kaori Ishihara (Kanade), as J-pop duo "YuiKaori", perform the opening theme, while Ogura solos the ending.
- Dragged by the Collar: Misaki did this to Haruka in Chapter 3/ Episode 5B so that they can go home together.
- Dramatic Deadpan: Shuu delivers one during an omake when he accidentally goes into the same bath as his sisters. What sells it is how composed he looks during the whole thing even when he's about to get beat up.
- Elective Monarchy: The King put his successor to universal suffrage.
- Evolving Credits: After Aoi's real power is revealed the opening is changed to make reference to it and her friends.
- Girl Watching: The kind of language on Akane's fansite indicates quite a few commoners used the chance to girl-watch the princesses.
- Gratuitous English:
- The title. It's more correct to call it The Dandelion of the Castle Town, but at least the author should add a possessive after "town" if he wants to keep the current word order.
- Honey Come, the ending theme; the title is gibberish enough, and it's pronounced as "hanikamu," one word. The song also pronounced "Pick me please!" as "Pikumi priese."
- Half-Identical Twins: Misaki and Haruka, which look similar enough despite obviously fraternal twins. Averted by Shuu and Kanade; viewers often forget they actually are twins.
- Happily Married: The Sakuradas have to be, to have nine kids.
- Heroic BSoD:
- Twice in Episode 6:
- When a younger Kanade saw the castle she materialized collapses.
- When a middle-schooler Aoi suddenly found her Royalty Superpower is actually Compelling Voice.
- A continuation of Kanade's case above, animated as episode 10B, have her falls into it again after knowing Shuu's range of motion was permanently damaged because of it, and a perception she ruined Shuu's life as Equivalent Exchange for the said castle.
- Twice in Episode 6:
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: In the manga the King towers over his wife (and indeed, the rest of the family!). The anime tones this down significantly.
- Instant Fan Club: Each of the Sakuraba siblings have this. Episode 4B/ Chapter 6 deals with Akane's.
- Innocently Insensitive: It's a toddler, so it's completely reasonable... but still counts as this trope. In episode 6B Kanade visits a kindergarten as part of her campaign. One of the toddlers drew Aoi in front of Kanade, and says she's going to vote for Aoi. Just as background, Aoi is first in polls, followed by Kanade.
- Irony: Akane, the sibling who hates being in the public spotlight, is now determined to be the next ruler of the country so she could put a stop to the public exposure her family (and by extension, herself) is under. Except being the next ruler would put her into even more public scrutiny. Her older sister Aoi lampshades the holes in Akane's logic with regards to this.Aoi: That's kind of contradictory, isn't it?
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: The castle incident is traumatic to both Shuu and Kanade. However, while Akane eye-witnessed the entire incident—it happened because Kanade tried curry Akane's favour—Akane did not remember it a single bit.
- Love Confession: Happens in the second half of episode 2. Satou lets out her feelings for Shuu, but he turns her down as he has to focus on the election. However, he does agree to talk to her about it again once the election is over. Eventually Shuu returns the favour in both anime and manga with different storylines; in the manga they actually engaged as of Chapter 26.
- Luminescent Blush: Happens to Akane, Shuu, and Satou. Akane because she becomes the unexpected witness to Satou's Love Confession to her brother.
- Massively Numbered Siblings:
- It bears repeating, Akane is just the fourth of nine kids (though four are two separate sets of twins). Mom and dad Sakurada have been busy, for sure.
- Satsuki is the oldest of five siblings.
- Mind-Control Eyes: People under the control of Aoi's Compelling Voice have this in the anime.
- Mistaken for Incest: Akane finds her brother, Haruka, looking at pictures of her on a computer screen. She immediately thinks he's having those kinds of thoughts about her. She tells him, somewhat tellingly, that she's not opposed to the idea, just concerned what their family and society would say. Turns out that he was just flagging images on a fan site for deletion because he knows how embarrassed Akane gets from public exposure.
- Modest Royalty: Aside from the fact that the Sakuradas are supposedly the royal family, they act like your typical middle-class family. Heck, they don't even live in the castle; instead, they live in a two-floor flat in the suburbs, and the kids all go to public schools all with minimal supervision from the palace staff (aside from the cameras, of course!). For a casual observer the only telltale sign is the motorcade the King uses to commute to and from the castle.
- Nosebleed: At the end of The Princess' Skirt, this happened to all the 10th grade boys and Karen after Akane innocently flashed in front of all of them.
- Nepotism: Subverted. Sacchan initially thought Hikari got her stardom by this. Of course for viewers, it's hardly the case—when Matsuoka scouted Hikari in Episode 3B, he didn't even know Hikari is the current King's daughter, and he got an Oh, Crap! reaction upon knowing she actually is Princess Hikari.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: Discussed in Chapter 20/Episode 6A, when Misaki criticized most of the siblings that are seriously running the election are doing that for their own reasons... until she also falls into this trope. The reasons are, in order of age:
- Kanade: to have the power to accelerate the nation's medical technology and thus find a way to cure Shuu's right leg, as penance for accidentally breaking it twelve years ago in the process of saving Akane from her crumbling castle, inadvertently ruining his dreams of becoming a football player.
- Akane: To remove all the surveillance cameras.
- Misaki: Wanting Haruka to acknowledge her first among his other siblings.
- Hikari: Wants attention.
- Pervert Alliance: The Akane Sakurada Fan Club (of which her eldest brother Shuu is a member) groups together to watch Akane be flustered and cute. And when Kanade jokingly tells Shuu that the club president was asking for Akane's hand in marriage, Shuu protests loudly. On top of that, all of the boys in her class unite under the goal of seeing her panties when it looks like she's forgotten her skirt and is about to ascend a flight of stairs. Even her bestie, Karin, gets a nosebleed when seeing said panties.
- Power Glows: As a convention characters will glow up when they use their Royalty Superpower.
- Power Incontinence:
- Everyone that has Royalty Superpower would have random periods of this, called Breakouts. Akane has a similar situation in Chapter 18, but it's due to a fever. When adopted as Episode 8A, it shows all of the 8 siblings affected by Breakouts at the same time, so that, for example, Aoi has to refrain from speaking to avoid anything she speaks converted to Compelling Voice, Shu teleporting randomly, Kanade materializing random stuff, and Akane handling with ever-changing levels of gravity, etc.
- Breakouts aside, younger members of the royal family still have problems controlling their own powers usual hours.
- Pun-Based Title: The Light/Sacchan duet song is called Search Light.
- Punny Name: The ad-hoc group between Light and Sacchan is called "Search Light"—or "Sacchi-Light."
- Quivering Eyes: A few times, mainly when realistic consequences set in.
- In Chapter 22 (adapted as a part of Episode 6B), Aoi went into this when she asked a security guard to do a handstand and woof at her he did it with no questions asked.
- In Chapter 29 (adapted as parts of Episode 6A and 10B), Kanade had that twice; first when the castle she materialized came crumbling down and injured both Shuu and Akane, and later when she overheard the severity of Shuu's injuries and why the castle collapsed—for the latter, the Insert Payment to Use/Equivalent Exchange nature of her Royalty Superpower.
- Rotating Arcs: This series is structured such that every chapter/segment is focused on one or two of the Sakurada siblingsnote . Other siblings are often brought into the story as story requires, but there're few stories involving all of the siblings.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: While Akane has a crippling case of shyness, this doesn't stop her from stepping up whenever someone is in trouble, as shown when she goes after a mugger in the first chapter of the manga and the first episode of the anime.
- Royalty Super Power: Played straight, with each of the Sakurada kids having powers because their royal bloodline.
- Satellite Character: Due to the Rotating Arcs / A Day in the Limelight format of this series, many characters are only associated with one sibling:
- Aoi has her Childhood Friends Uzuki, Nanao and Shizuru. The latter three are often seen as Aoi-sama's attendents, which annoys Aoi to no end.
- Shuu has his Love Interest, Hana. Although in Hana's case it is eventually averted as she effectively became part of the Sakurada family as Shuu's fiancee.
- Akane has her Childhood Friend Karen and the vice-class rep Fukushina, which is also secretly the president of her Instant Fan Club.
- Hikari has Matsuoka, her manager and producer, and Sacchan, a fellow Idol Singer.
- Security Blindspot: Attempted, with varying degrees of success, by Akane Sakuraba, to preserver her privacy. As she's a princess, and there are over 2000 security cameras monitoring the city she lives in, it's not an easy feat. And the camera pattern gets shifted from time to time to make sure she can't evade the cameras all the time. Once in awhile she'll use her power over gravity to fly, putting her above the scope of the cameras, but this has the disadvantage of providing a Panty Shot to anyone below her, and as mentioned before, she's shy. So she can't use that option often.
- She Is the King: The country's monarch is always called "King", whether they be female or male
- Sick Episode: Chapter 13/ Episode 7A involves an Akane brought down with fever, with Kanade and Shiori the only other people at home.
- Sibling Seniority Squabble: Played straight with Shu and Kanade in Episodes 6A and 10B, where Shu has to remind Kanade that he's the older twin between them. Averted with Misaki and Haruka, as Haruka has no problem calling Misaki his older sister, and also had to correct others that said that Haruka was the older sibling.
- Slice of Life: Of an extremely Modest Royalty with superpowers under constant surveillance.
- Shout-Out: In Teru's Imagine Spot in episode 11, Hikari (as a warrior) wore Hestia's breast ribbon.
- School Girl Series: Mostly averted, despite the reputation of its publisher and five girls as the main characters. Instead, the series includes three their brothers as protagonists with different levels of participation in the plot and borrows part of the tropes from other genres.
- Smashing Watermelons: An anime-original bit of episode 5A involves the Sakurada siblings (sans Haruka) attempting to do this on the beach. Shiori succeeded in persuading the watermelon to split on its own. This skit, strangely, is to showcase Haruka's Awesomeness by Analysis superpower.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Shuu is basically a clone of his father, except being slightly shorter. They have similar temperaments as well.
- Succession Crisis: Averted. Not only is their dad the King alive (he's still 38 and apparently healthy), none of the Sakurada kids seem to treat the coming election with any seriousness, and around half of the siblings aren't even interested in being the next monarchi.e. . Indeed, Akane is only maybe thinking of going after the crown only because, if she were the ruler, she'd be able to order all those security cameras disabled.
- Talent vs. Training: Hikari decides to become a pop idol to earn support for the upcoming royal election. She is naturally talented and her power over age allows her to change herself to the ideal physique as an idol. Her fellow performer, Sacchi, works diligently to learn choreography and singing and worked hard to get where she is. As such, Sacchi is initially bitter toward Hikari and later fears what would become of her when she sees Hikari actually buckling down and applying herself.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Looks like the entire household likes what Japanese refer as puddingnote .
- Universal Group Reaction: In one episode, it appears that Akane has forgotten her skirt, and when word reaches her sister Kanade in the Student Council, she summons Akane to the room to find out for herself. Cue a ton of guys who are hoping to catch a glimpse of her underwear as she walks upstairs following. When Akane finds out what's going on, she explains that she had torn her skirt trying to avoid the security cameras, and put on a pair of gym shorts instead. She lifts her sweater to demonstrate, only to show that she was, in fact, wearing just panties under her sweater. Cue a Nosebleed from every guy, including her brother Shuu, as well as her bestie, Karen.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: At The Stinger of most episodes, a Sakurada sibling will mention their personal idols, which is relevant to what is in their minds. While most of these idols are well-known European monarchs, Haruka's choice Gajah Mada
, while fits to his ambition to "merely" be The Strategist, is obscure for anyone who's not an Indonesian nor played Civilization V. - Wardrobe Malfunction: Chapter 12/ episode 4A deals with a bottomless Akane.
- Wham Episode: Episode 6 of the anime, which is adopted from 4 different chapters. When you know in 25 minutes Kanade is acting so eager in the election because she ruined Shuu's leg 12 years ago, Aoi has a real ability that out-Lelouches Lelouch, and she feels really bad about it, you can call it a Wham Episode.
- What's Up, King Dude?: As the king wants his children to blend into the normal people as much as possible, this is a given. Princes and princesses are literally walking around the city like any commoner, as long as they are greeted with -sama.
- World of Technicolor Hair: The royal family seems to have this problem. Shuu and Teru have more realistic colors of black and strawberry blonde. However, the rest range from peculiar to outrageous. Akane has hair the color of strawberry jam, Aoi has indigo hair, while Haruka has lavender colored hair.
- Yonkoma: Of course!
