Noun: "(chiefly Japanese fiction) a fictional illness in which a person bearing an unrequited love coughs up flower petals until they die or their feelings are reciprocated"
If the patient goes untreated, they die because of the disease; the illness is known as the Hanahaki Disease.
2019, Unzila Iftikhar, Before Your Eyes - Despite It All, You Still Rise, page 9:
The cascading emotions are
giving me hanahaki tonight, they're
beautiful but it's suffocating.
2020, Katharine Elizabeth McCain, "Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe", dissertation submitted to Ohio State University, page 27:
It is familiar. In that most everyone is familiar with a coffee shop and thus understands the AU’s basic premise on sight. Unlike, say, Hanahaki fics.
2020, Leslie Melian Taylor, "Fan Worlds: Expanding the Horizons of Fandoms and Fan Studies", thesis submitted to McGill University, page 53:
Japanese fanfiction tropes, such as the hanahaki disease, have become popular on English-language sites […]
2020, Ivy Wong, "The Cure for Hanahaki", English Literary Magazine (St. Paul's Co-Educational College, Hong Kong), page 22:
However, to a hanahaki patient, it's probably far more terrifying for them to have the surgery to cure their feelings than the disease.
2021, Zhengyan Cai, "The Han Lens: Media Representation And Public Reception Of Chinese Ethnic Minorities: A Case of Ayanga", thesis submitted to Georgetown University, page 65:
One of the broadly adopted fictional symptoms in fan-art is “flower-vomiting (hanahaki),” originated from a Japanese manga (comic) work called 花吐き乙女 (a flower-vomiting gal).
