MARRIAGETOXIN

Episode 7

This week's MARRIAGETOXIN sees Gero's quest for a bride take a brief detour, but if we had to get one, it's hard to think of one more appropriate than a fluffy wedding episode. Since Gero is obviously still far from being marriage material himself, he instead gets the privilege of attending one for his buddy, the Bug Master that we met back in episode one, and soaking in the vibes of the kind of marital bliss he's pursuing. Nice as that all sounds on paper, you can't have a wedding episode without a wedding crasher or two to stir the pot, and while they don't manage to ruin the proceedings, they do end up dragging them down.

First things first, I really loved the commitment to the bit with the Bug Master having a big bug-themed wedding. We've got giant nests decorating the ceiling, centipedes to whisk the newlyweds down the aisle, and the man of the hour himself decked out with giant butterfly wings so he can show off by flying his bride around the wedding hall. It's a little excessive, perhaps, but considering what kinds of gimmicks some people are willing to pull for their weddings, there are far worse ones he could have picked. That said, I absolutely have to draw the line at having a pair of hornets as the ring bearers. I'm sure the Bug Master has them properly tamed at all, but I can't think of anything that would give someone the wedding jitters more than having bees hovering over them in the middle of wedding vows, so the fact his bride was still willing to marry him after that is perhaps the purest sign of true love that I've ever seen.

With how generally bad Gero is at expressing himself, it is nice seeing him genuinely happy for his friend while also expressing his own heartfelt wish to have the same kind of experience someday, but a lot of this stretch of the episode feels a little light on substance. Considering MARRIAGETOXIN is centered around the idea of well…marriage, it would have been good to maybe dig a little deeper into how the Bug Master formed a relationship with his partner or maybe see him facing some of the anxieties that come with tying the knot, so it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity for Gero to learn a little more about what makes a lasting relationship work.

With this still being part battle shonen and all, a good chunk of the runtime is instead spent on Gero dealing with an assassin looking for revenge on the Bug Master for an old grudge. Since that's pretty par the course for action movie cliches, this turn wasn't too hard to predict, but I was a little more surprised by the assassin's actual motivation. Rather than going for the obvious punchline of them being some jilted ex, the assassin is instead just some guy who'd completely given up on life, to the point of not even being fazed at getting made into a human bomb by some other mystery master assassin, so when the Bug Master spared his life purely out of the goodness of his heart, he took that as enough of a personal offense to dedicate his life to taking him down with him. It's as funny as it is kind of sad, which makes the scene of Gero swinging him all over the place while Kinosaki fills in for his wedding speech all the better. Still, I can't help but feel like his presence in the episode wasn't particularly necessary since there are other ways it could have stirred up some drama. The fight itself also came off as a bit anticlimactic since the assassin just decides to blow himself up after seeing the Bug Master's smiling face, and presumably realizing how much of his life he wasted obsessing over this scheme. I suppose there's a good moral here about how wasting time being bitter over someone else's happiness instead of seeking out your own is literally self-destructive, but he still could have been removed from the episode while letting Gero give a normal speech, and it wouldn't have really changed much. I wouldn't quite call the fight boring, but it did feel a little tacked on, so it's not really doing much to change the impression that MARRIAGETOXIN is at its weakest when it leans into being a more standard battle shonen.

If there was anything major gained from this outing, it was getting to learn a little more about the hierarchy of the assassin underworld. We've gotten suggestions that Gero's family was pretty high up the ladder, but it's interesting to know that nearly all the other assassin families are just branches of the five that sit at the very top, and his sits among them. That he disregards this hierarchy enough to be fine making friends with assassins from “lower” families also further indicates that even before he started looking for a partner, Gero never quite fit the mold of the role he's been groomed for, which makes it sweet when his assassin buddies thank Kinosaki for helping Gero try to married, as they've always seen him as being better than he gives himself credit for. Nice as this all was, though, I can't say the episode was among MARRIAGETOXIN's strongest offerings, and I do wish it had done a little more with the wedding part of its premise. Now that the reception's done and everyone's had their cake, I'm eager to get back to Gero's search for his partner and whatever fun new heroines lie over the horizon.

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MARRIAGETOXIN is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.