My Happy Marriage follows Miyo, a young lady from a prestigious family who’s known nothing but abuse and torment all her life until she meets her fiancé. The series is currently streaming on Netflix.
Story
Miyo, the daughter of the prestigious Saimori family’s head, Shinichi Saimori, and the late Sumi Saimori, has led a life of torment and abuse at the hands of her stepmother Kanoko and stepsister Kaya ever since Shinichi remarried.
Keeping with the tradition, her sister Kaya is arranged to marry Koji, the only man who ever treated Miyo with empathy and loved her. Miyo is sent off to be engaged to Kiyoka Kudo, a man with a terrible reputation regarding his former fianceés.
However, Miyo’s life takes a turn for the better when she realizes that her fiancé is nothing like his reputation paints him out to be. He’s gentle, beautiful, and extremely caring. Kiyoka has doubts about Miyo at first, but he soon realizes she’s different.
He also learns about her traumatic treatment at her home and begins working on healing some of the hurt and helping her overcome her fears and insecurities. Meanwhile, Miyo’s lineage proffers a lucrative opportunity that many wish to grab upon.
Kiyoka pulls no punches to protect her, though. He frees her from her family’s immediate effects. However, her nightmares grow more and more frequent and trouble her immensely.
Kiyoka tries to get to the bottom of it as a relative of hers surfaces. Her latent powers, sealed within her by her mother to protect her, get unsealed as she drifts away from Kiyoka for a while.
When Kiyoka needs help to recover after an injury on the battlefield, she rushes to him and protects him, while overcoming her fears and insecurities significantly. The two continue living their days in bliss, as My Happy Marriage season 1 concludes.
Performances
Reina Ueda voices Miyo Saimori and delivers her tormented and complacent whispers with a painful timber that conveys all the grief and trauma the character has suffered.
Kaito Ishikawa’s voice lends so much to Kiyoka as it succeeds in making the character both stern and kindhearted, confident and vulnerable.
Ayane Sakura as Kaya is very effective and her voice is just as sharp and abrasive as her pointed, antagonizing eyebrows and glaring eyes filled with arrogance and disgust.
Positives
My Happy Marriage is beautifully animated and nearly every frame is a testament to the love and effort that went into making it.
The anime makes for a really adorable comfort watch and it’s as warm as they come.
What’s astonishing is that the anime is a blend of so many different genres and makes them all work seamlessly well. From the romance to the fantasy to the slice-of-life and serious drama — it does it all.
As far as the endings to such anime shows go, it delivers a fresher, more comforting ending to its first season over taking a more familiar one where danger is always around the corner and no room for blissful pause is allowed.
Negatives
Kiyoka and Miyo’s story is great but it could be handled better and more time could have gone into exploring and developing their equation than focusing on the grander stuff regarding power battles and such.
Verdict
My Happy Marriage is a satisfying mix of genres delivered with panache and competence. It also balances beauty and depth, while also not shying away from its more fantastical elements.
At the core, thorough, the anime is about the power of love and care to heal wounds of the psyche and a girl’s journey from being complacent about her dastardly state of life to being confident and secure in her relations, desires, and dreams.
My Happy Marriage season 1
Director: Takehiro Kubota
Date Created: 2023-07-05 20:30
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Also Read: Miyo Saimori: My Happy Marriage character explained