As a romance girlie, Firefly Wedding was the easiest add to my Fall watchlist. It’s animated by David Production, the studio behind JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which initially piqued my interest. After checking out the show’s first episode at Crunchyroll’s Anime Nights preview event in theaters with the homie Colleen, I read ahead in its first volume that same night. Why? It’s a spicy new addition to my growing pantheon of toxic romances.
Slowly but surely, the tide has been turning in the romance anime realm. Amid the sea of fluffy, meet-cute, high school-centric anime, a riptide of what I’d call bad romance tales runs through—love stories that rub a bit of dirt in your eye and then kiss it better. Love stories so saccharine, they’re toxic. As seen in shows like Project No.9’s adaptation of Hatsuharu’s shojo manga A Girl & Her Guard Dog, the formula typically follows a sweet, flowery heroine’s messy, overprotective love story with a dangerous yakuza man. What I find fascinating about this burgeoning romance genre is how it transfers the medium’s tropey, unhinged yandere trait from women obsessing over self-insert men in your shonen anime to its beautiful shojo men. Basically, these tales ask what if Future Diary’s yandere poster girl Yuno Gasai was a dude who would kill for you.
But there are levels to this shit. Some shows aren’t “I can fix him;” some, like Studio Deen’s adaptation of Asuka Konishi’s Yakuza Fiancé, are shows where “we can make each other worse.” The x-factor in these stories is that they play with the neck hair-raising fight-or-flight response of their headstrong heroines wandering—whether willfully or out of abject defiance—into a romance with dangerous men. Compared to its contemporaries, toxic romance anime of its ilk is sprawling. It’s big, it’s fun, it's fucked up! But that very danger makes it hard to put down.
Firefly Wedding brings to the table a romance anime that walks the razor’s edge of violent, funny, and hilarious, an addition to this pantheon.
Originally created by mangaka Oreco Tachibana, Firefly Wedding tells the story of a romance of convenience between Satoko, a nobleman’s daughter, and Shinpei, an assassin. Satoko kicks off the story starkly by demystifying her place as a woman in a romance tale set in late 19th-century Japan. Women and the theater of marriage are nothing more than a bartering tool for families to bolster their social standing. Still, Satoko is a-okay with the farce of an arranged marriage as long as she makes her father proud. Much of her self-sacrifice comes from the fact that she was born sickly and not given long to live. Instead of giving up on her, her father stood by her bedside. As the eldest of his two children from two different marriages, she feels a sense of duty to repay his kindness. As far as she’s concerned, she’s not long for this world anyway, with even the slightest physical exertion leading to heart trouble. So why not marry for Papa?
Despite her wilting like a flower, Satoko’s personality is anything but dainty. She’s got an ice-queen presence and a sharp tongue, which she routinely uses to put her bratty sister in her place. But that same haughtiness may have been what led to her kidnapping by a troupe of assassins. Among them is Shinpei, wearing the crimson mask of blood from his enemies, tasked with guarding her and preventing his fellow assassins from violating her. Before things get too dire for Satoko, she strikes a deal with Shinpei by offering him something too valuable to refuse: her hand in marriage. After all, she’s spent nearly 16 years expecting the worst to come tomorrow. What worse can the parlay of marrying an assassin be? Shocked by her offer, Shinpei kills her would-be assailants, plots her escape, and agrees to their arrangement.
Mind you, this all transpires in the manga’s first three chapters and the anime’s first episode. The quality of the show was no doubt helped by its screening coming after the latest Solo Leveling slop anime, but I was nonetheless eager to peek ahead and see what the rest of the show had in store for me.
Reading ahead in the manga’s first volume, I was met with a surprisingly pure, if not twisted, romance that keenly ping-pongs between being dark and a darkly funny romp. At the heart of that balancing act is the ebb and flow of Shinpei and Satoko’s contentious dynamic. From Satoko’s point of view, she has to keep up the ruse that she’s fallen head over heels for Shinpei to keep him as a bodyguard. So she plays to his ego, batting her eyelashes and pledging her love as the genuine article. And for the most part, that works. Shinpei genuinely believes she can accept him despite his lifestyle as a killer. Shinpei is also a little shit who goads Satoko at every turn.
Despite being putty in her hands, Shinpei tests Satoko’s convictions by riding her last nerves. He’ll threaten to wander off and die, since she only needs him as a meat shield anyways, and propose to leave her in the red-light district as a prostitute for the express purpose of getting a rise out of her. Their dynamic is what I can only describe as chicken, and it’s pretty entertaining. They’re basically a Meiji-period cuffing season romance that accidentally becomes something deeper the more they give each other shit and then come crawling back. And while I usually find the whole puppy-dog act of toxic romance anime hit or miss, Shinpei’s transition from scaring the hoes to “am I actually falling for him” worked on me faster than it did Satoko. What can I say? I like a guy who can make me laugh, and Shinpei is genuinely funny during their lovers’ quarrels. His earnestness and care around Satoko, pampering her like a princess and giving her the freedom to get her hands dirty by not pandering to her as she’s been all her life, are peak wife-guy material. Likewise, Satoko calling Shinpei’s bluffs and keeping the assassin on a short leash when he gets too full of himself makes their immovable-force, unstoppable-romance dynamic even more entertaining. Every dom secretly desires to be challenged and dommed in turn, and Satoko is Shinpei’s reckoning.
Another reason I’m partial to Firefly Wedding is the trajectory its mangaka underwent before the manga’s serialization. Similar to the mangaka of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All, Tachibana got her start posting acrylic landscape paintings on her Twitter account in 2016. While balancing childcare and posting her art, Tachibana gained a following and the attention of manga publishers the following year, leading to her first serialization, Promised Cinderella. Firefly Wedding was officially picked up as a Viz Media manga in 2023. Learning that her journey as a mangaka began with her sharing her art on social media whilst drawing fan art from shows her kids love, to having her second series receive an anime adaptation three years later, by David Production no less, is no small feat. So if you’re a romance anime fan who's been longing for a sense of danger sprinkled into the mix, be sure to add Firefly Wedding to your list this season.
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Isaiah Colbert
