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REVIEW: Betrothed to My Sister's Ex Anime Series Review

And my opinion of the series increased towards the end when it turned out that spoiler[one character's literacy (or lack thereof)] ended up being a critical plot element.

I agree that this one does suffer for comparison to My Happy Marriage (especially on artistic and technical fronts), but it had just enough distinctive content going for it to be worthy of a low-B grade. (MHM has no character who's even close to an equivalent to Mio, for instance; she'll at least be in the running when I consider the year's best supporting characters.).

Key wrote:

I agree that this one does suffer for comparison to My Happy Marriage (especially on artistic and technical fronts), but it had just enough distinctive content going for it to be worthy of a low-B grade. (MHM has no character who's even close to an equivalent to Mio, for instance; she'll at least be in the running when I consider the year's best supporting characters.).

Interestingly, I recall comments elsewhere saying they preferred this over MHM because they liked the prominence of the comfy romance in the plot (and disliked MHM's focus on the socio-political plot which they felt, distracts from said romance).

One thing I honestly appreciated was the frank and honestly fairly realistic handling of race and racism. I don't know if it was actually intentional but I tend to give creatives the benefit of the doubt and assume it probably was, but the fact that the red hair was maligned ended up making a lot of sense when realizing that the kingdom has a lot of aspects of Britain and colonial America, both of which heavily maligned (or directly colonized in the case of the former) Celtic origin. Kyros and Liu-Liu seemed to have aspects of both middle eastern and Indian, I had trouble putting my finger on which but either or both definitely make sense with how they're portrayed and the overt racism coded against them. I'm not used to media in general handling racism well, but honestly it worked well for this series.

Azure Chrysanthemum wrote:

One thing I honestly appreciated was the frank and honestly fairly realistic handling of race and racism. I don't know if it was actually intentional but I tend to give creatives the benefit of the doubt and assume it probably was, but the fact that the red hair was maligned ended up making a lot of sense when realizing that the kingdom has a lot of aspects of Britain and colonial America, both of which heavily maligned (or directly colonized in the case of the former) Celtic origin. Kyros and Liu-Liu seemed to have aspects of both middle eastern and Indian, I had trouble putting my finger on which but either or both definitely make sense with how they're portrayed and the overt racism coded against them. I'm not used to media in general handling racism well, but honestly it worked well for this series.

Maligning red hair isn't so much disdain for Celtic origin. Because red hair is the most recessive of the natural hair colors in humans, the genes for it can hide in families for generations before suddenly manifesting due to a chance combination of parents. Absent a modern understanding of genetics, a child with red hair - when nobody else in the family or village had it - being regarded with suspicion wouldn't be unusual, and historically, some were even accused of being changelings or other supernatural entities.

This isn't a topic which comes up much in anime, but there have been at least a couple of other cases where it was a significant plot point. (The Twelve Kingdoms and The Ancient Magus' Bride immediately come to mind.)

Huh, is that where all the "gingers are evil" jokes originated from? Interesting. I'd always just assumed it was people hating on Celtic folks all this time (my own family is Scottish so I never got anyone really addressing that growing up).

An additional factor to consider is that this was written for a Japanese audience where red hair is almost unknown except for foreign people.