Honor Among Thieves Is Honor Among The Seas! – My Bride Is A Mermaid TBT

Watching Blend-S on New Years Day was a great and relaxing way to enjoy some laughs with a friend and reminded me of a particular comedy from a while back called My Bride is a Mermaid. This show came out over a decade ago and is one of the few shows that I enjoy both in dub and sub format but the English dubbed version of this show is really quite well done. My Bride is a Mermaid is a romantic comedy follows the story of fappy bastard Nagasumi Michishio and his mermaid bride Sun Seto. While the show follows the two’s budding love, the real humor comes from their interactions with other characters, specifically other mermaids and even more specifically, Sun’s Yakuza family including her insane and homicidal father Gozaburo Seto, Boss of the Seto group.

Other great characters included are Nagasumi’s parents who are just some of the worst parents in anime that aren’t outright awful human beings, and other Yakuza including the charismatic Masa (voiced by a man you might have heard of named Christopher Sabat) and the adorably murderous Maki the Conch (English VA being Monica Rial) as well as Sun’s rival, an idol Mermaid whose “Papa” is the Terminator, and Nagasumi’s childhood friend and daughter of the chief of police, Mawari Zenigata. Overall, the characters all play this amazing synergy off one another leaving us with an amazing and outstandingly great show that would take a while to outline (you are better off just watching this awesome anime).

These characters set up an amazing cast and the overall plot of the show. The show begins with the good Nagasumi drowning in the Seto Inland Sea only to be saved by a beautiful mermaid, to which his parents assumed he was high or something and disregarded his rantings. Until said beautiful girl arrived and declared he needed to “take responsibility” and arrived with her Yakuza companions. Nagasumi’s parents were suffice to say, not amused. After declaring he would in fact marry Sun in order to save her from needing to die per the Mermaid law about being seen by humans, the show just gets better and better. The show effectively follows the day to day with the Seto gang trying to low key murder Nagasumi without pissing off Sun (or her exceptionally terrifying mother), and encounters with other mermaids. This includes other people vying for both characters’ attention and even a corrupt antagonistic jerk who tries to leverage his power to split the two of them up for his selfish gains. Most importantly Nagasumi slowly grows from someone who had to be saved by Sun and subsequently married her to save her life into a man who becomes a respectable man on his own merits.

The show has a number of hilarious running gags such as Nagasumi’s (and his mother’s) infatuation with Masa, the balance of Sun and Mawari being friends but obviously opposite sides of the law, and just the continued plotting of Sun’s father and Maki to kill the “fappy bastard” (another joke they never explain but is kept funny somehow). My absolute favorite gimmick is when Sun enters “chivalry mode” where the enka song listed above begins to play as Sun goes on about honor, chivalry, and being a Yakuza, incorporating the words ninkyo and ningyo for chivalry and mermaid respectively. In English, the pun is the tagline above about how “honor among thieves is honor under the seas,” and while always sappy, these scenes are always a hilarious and welcome moment for me. Though to be fair, I know some people I watched this with who absolutely HATED her chivalry mode moments and couldn’t stand the show because of them (pretty sure they were just jealous).

All in all, I loved the mix of madcap humor and unexpected random moments (Killer Whale in a submarine anyone?) and found the show to be a great show for its time. Even now I wouldn’t mind going back to it on Funimation to give it a shot and see if it has completely held up over time. Between the plot that actually ends with real conclusion, to the amazing voice acting choices, to just the clever puns and moments I really enjoyed this show back in college and its definitely one of my favorites I would recommend to anyone who likes comedy or romantic comedies. In fact one of the only issues I had was until recently, I had no idea what the title of the last episode meant and that was really just on me. So did you watch this hilarious show back in the day? Did you too enjoy the antics of the Seto Group or did you hate every time that song came on and Sun was under a cherry blossom tree? Let me know in a comment below and if you liked this article please leave a like and subscribe for more crazy random articles from myself and the others at BAYOG, y’know in order to avoid any sort of “accidents.” I’d hate for you to have to sleep with the fishes, you fappy bastards.