My Bride is a Mermaid

Genre: Comedy
Age Appropriate: Pre-teen
Emotional Response: LOL
Notable Features: mermaids, yakuza, marriage
Language: Japanese
Length: 26 episodes
Overall Recommendation: Pretty Good

"Ya see, 'honor among thieves' is really 'honor under the seas'!" - Sun

A young man, Nagasumi, goes on a vacation to a seaside village to visit his grandmother and ends up in a heap of trouble. Somehow, he manages to end up drowning off the shore and is saved by a beautiful young mermaid. In the process of trying to get his parents to believe his story, she shows up at the house and asks him to take responsibility for what happened! Seconds later the house is approached by "her people," and they demand that Nagasumi and his parents return with them to her father's home. On top of it all, they're Yakuza! Because the daughter, Sun, allowed him to see her true form there is now a lot of drama about what to do about it. The mob rules say that if a mermaid is seen by a human, then the mermaid must die. Her father wants to kill him, therefore removing the problem - which Sun resents as she saved him in the first place - and her mother suggests marriage. If he's one of the family, the no one has to die (which now includes his parents as they've been drawn into the whole thing with him). And so, the junior high students get engaged.

The series follows the young teens through out their school years with the interference of Sun's family and friends from her past. The key players in Sun's family actually integrate themselves into her new life, following her inland, and making more trouble for the youngsters. There is a pop star idol who is obsessed with beating Sun at life, and an orca-man shut in who was treated kindly by Sun as a child and wants to marry her. Sun is also followed by a fairy-type assassin bent on killing Nagasumi to release Sun for her promise to marry him. Nagasumi has/had a friend who resembles a chimp (and is therefore nicknamed Chimp) who actually switches sides to help Kai (orca-boy) for Kai's wealth. IN the last episodes, the challenge becomes keeping Nagasumi and Sun together, along with keeping their friends land-side against an unknown evil. This series is a pretty standard teen-life anime.


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Just to get it out of the way: I wasn't a huge fan of the animation style. Generally, it's the same as most, but some of the dramatizations were just weird. It was pretty distracting. Also, the ya's drove me crazy, though I assume the translation was attempting to get the accent across, that's just something impossible to do well in writing. However, that doesn't have much to do with my liking (or disliking) the storyline.

The series was actually pretty fun! I really didn't think it was going to be. I had a hard time getting through it, but around episode 8 it started getting good. It was an epic musical mermaid battle but I was clapping like a school girl at the end. Something about anime brings out the school girl in me - despite never having been that kind of school girl. While this is a typical teen-life anime (mermaids aside), I still appreciated the humor. I might recommend other things first, but there is nothing wrong with this one. It gave me a number of good laughs, just don't expect anything special from it. There's nothing questionable really, so feel free to let your tweens watch it. There are a off-color comments, but it would likely go over their heads. The end battle was pretty awesome, too. So, yeah, it's pretty good.

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Wait for it...: Aria the Scarlet Ammo