Nina the Starry Bride

Episode 4

One of the chief problems of adapting a manga series into anime is the decision about how much of the manga to adapt – and that tends to dictate the story's pacing. As of its fourth episode, Nina the Starry Bride is moving very quickly through its source material, and canny viewers who are also readers will have noticed that the storybook in the ending theme contains imagery up through volume seven of the manga. All of this is to say that if you feel like the show is going full speed ahead, you aren't wrong.

Of course, that means that each episode gives us meaningful revelations, even if the speed at which they arrive makes the anime feel a touch melodramatic. We learned last week that Azure isn't the original Prince Azure, but we got an equally important bit of info this week: young Prince Azure didn't die from an illness. He died after his father threw him against a wall, causing a head injury. That means that the affable father we met when Nina first arrived at the Fortna palace was an act: the current king isn't just a terrible father who killed his child; he's also well on his way to being portrayed as a sociopath. He sees nothing wrong with having murdered his son and heir, just as he sees nothing wrong with now trying to remove the substitute he brought in for the egregious crime of being too good at being an effective ruler. Current Azure makes the king feel bad about himself, not because he's awoken to the horrors of what he did, but because he's both a better person and ruler than the king.

While that makes me very nervous for sweet little Muhulum, it also informs Nina's decision to go against what Az wants and her feelings in expediting her journey to Galgada. Neither she nor Azure wants for her to go off and marry another man – and if that fellow who just murdered one of the three women he was in bed with is the prince she's meant to be marrying, that goes double – but in Nina's eyes, that's the only way to save Az. Her thought process seems to be that if she stays, Azure will move heaven and earth to make it so that they can be together, and while she wants that, she also fears that it will put him in opposition to the king. If she goes to Galgada, she can exercise some leverage over the king, as she very nicely lays out for him, and keep Azure safe.

It feels like a tenuous plan. It sounds good on paper, but would it really work to prevent domestic strife? It seems just as likely to make Azure do something stupid to get Nina back, and the way he jumps his horse right over the guards blocking his way speaks to that. Nina's just learning to play this game – shatar, a Mongolian variant of chess – and that means she's at risk of miscalculating. But nevertheless, the scene is shifting, as is beautifully illustrated by the way Az's portrait fades until he has the coloring of the other man in the opening theme. Nina had better hold onto her good memories tightly, because it looks like Galgada is going to make her sale to Azure look like a walk in the park.

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Nina the Starry Bride is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.