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Content Warning! Content Warnings: Mentions of disease, blood, death, and vomit. Images depicting realistic body horror and vomit. |
"Hanahaki Byou" (JP), also known as "Hanahaki Disease" in Western media, is a term used for a fictional illness that causes a character to begins coughing up flowers due to an unrequited love.
Etymology
Meaning of the Term
Hanahaki-byou (花吐き病) comes from the words "hana" (花), meaning "flower", "haki" (吐き), meaning "vomit", and "byou" (病), meaning "disease".[1][2]
Origin
Hanahaki disease comes from the 2008 manga series Hanahaki Otome (JP), where a girl suffers from the disease.[3][4]
Personality
Hanahaki disease is an affliction that appears when a character's feelings are unrequited. The character will begin to cough up flower petals. As the disease progresses, the infection will spread throughout the lungs and sometimes the heart. The character will begin cough up more and more petals. The infection is painful for the character, causing terrible chest pains. By the time they start coughing up full flowers, the disease will have reached the final stage. If not treated, the disease will result in death, usually from the character choking on their petals and blood. The trope is popular for the tragic, yet beautiful way the person dies.[5]
Hanahaki disease can be cured in two ways. One way is for the character's crush to fall in love with them, which makes their feelings no longer unrequited. The second way is by performing surgery on the character to remove the roots of the flowers. This way, however, can cause the character to lose their feelings for their crush, or even forget that they ever existed.
The flower that sprouts is usually depicted as cherry blossoms. However, the kind can be influenced by a character's favorite flower, a color associated with them, or even their name, among other factors.
Hanahaki disease has been used in many different ways. Some characters' disease takes years to become severe, while some die after only a few months. Some stories do not have the disease progress to being deadly at all, instead having the disease become a simple annoyance to the character. Some stories may have the flowers sprout in other places in the body too, like the stomach.
Hanahaki disease is most often used in fanworks.
Similar Japanese Archetypes
- Byoukidere: A term for a character who who is kind and gentle at heart, but suffers from a serious illness.
- Yandere: A term use for a character who suffers from a mental illness that causes them to have an excessive obsession with their love interest.
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 Karren von Rosewald from Tokyo Ghoul:re |