Nina the Starry Bride

"Nina the Starry Bride" was the first manga that I read 100% in Japanese, and I read the bulk of it in the span of a week or so, spending hours every day reading. It was so addictive that I would read it even when my head was hurting from reading too many kanji. I could not put it down. And in the following months, while I was waiting for a new tome to come out, I found myself thinking about it again and again. It really is a strange story, too cruel to be a fairytale and yet too impossible and extreme at times to not be one; it is at the same time dark and lighthearted, unsettling and charming.

*The manga follows Nina, a girl abducted to replace a recently deceased princess, Alisha, who was supposed to marry a prince of the neighboring country to prevent a war. Nina hasn't been given much of a choice, really, but her life before has been kind of a hell; she has no one to care for and no one to care for her, so since "nice people" are ~~ordering~~ asking, she decides to go along with it. Her life is empty anyway.*

It's definitely the characters that make this story shine; there's clearly something wrong with all of them, even if they seem fine at first. Watching their relationships grow and change is like watching a train wreck—it's wrong, but you can't take your eyes off it. And these characters have so much unexpected depth that they even managed to fool me.

Our protagonist Nina seems like such a bright and somewhat sillily optimistic character, but her optimism is tinted with desperation. You can't help but admire her strong will and her ability to take anything thrown at her with almost a smile, but that ability comes from her having lived through many traumatic experiences and then suppressing all of them away in her head. She is strong and yet always on the verge of breaking, because this manga gives her no time to pause or reflect. She's so empty and broken that when her captor gives her a mission, she enthusiastically accepts that mission as her life's purpose because she literally has no other purpose or dreams to keep her going. But on the outside, she seems like your regular overly cheery and happy person.

And then there are the other characters. We have Azure, who treats himself and people around him as means to achieve goals he doesn't even truly care about; he is duty-bound yet selfish. He exerts himself for the sake of the country, yet that exertion is somewhat egocentric, as he has merged his identity with his duty to a point where he can't separate the two. He is cold, calculating, and cruel, yet he has a charming streak of kindness and nobleness to him that makes him seem like such a nice guy. Azure is empty, but he was told he has a country to protect, and that phantom purpose almost makes him feel whole.

And then there is Seth, who is just madness incarnated, a black empty void of a person. He's unpredictable and casually cruel; he can kill a person without batting an eye. And yet, in his empty despair, he has the most potential out of all the other characters because he is the only one who doesn't lie to himself. He has given up on everything and everyone and believes he is beyond saving and that the world would be just better off if it burned. He thinks that there can be no real human connection that isn't selfish or obsessive, which is why he's given up on people. He is crazy and cynical, yet refreshingly honest. He also has the prettiest white lashes, and man, it's unfair.

What these characters have in common is that they are all terribly lonely and all feel somewhat estranged from their own lives since everything has already been decided for them. They are encouraged to live to fulfil someone else's goals for the sake of duty or live according to someone else's beliefs. Not only does this estrangement make them mentally unwell, but it also forces them to look for ways to compensate for it, to try to find some personal meaning in the cards they've dealt. It could be by feverishly chasing those phantom purposes that are assigned to them by others or by trying to find fulfillment in the relationships with people around them. Or, in the case of Nina, both. When you are empty yourself, it's easy to choose to live for the sake of somebody else, to exert yourself to attain what you imagine to be their happiness. But that sort of care and altruism is not always as noble as it might seem at first—it might be a form of catharthic self-destruction, because in the end, by striving to make someone "happy," you might end up doing exactly the opposite.

So can this masochistic phantom attachment be called "love"? They say love is blind and all, but why is it blind and how is it blind? Could it be that someone who is very lonely can catch feelings for literally anyone who shows them enough kindness and compassion? Those questions are explored in one of the truest love triangles ever written, which is 100% guaranteed to make the characters and the reader suffer no matter how it ends. What makes it even more intense is that both sides of the love triangle are anti-heroes, and they both seem like horrible people at first glance ~~(and at second, too)~~. And the three of them crave human connection so much that it makes their feelings for each other selfish and unhealthy. But sometimes we can see glimpses of something genuine in this vortex of self-deception, some real connection there, but the story takes so many unexpected twists and turns that it scatters those feelings around and reassembles them in new, confusing ways over and over again.

This manga is truly bizzare sometimes and is full of contradictions — characters' motivations are obviously messed up, but painfully relatable, their feeligns for each other are just tools to compensate for their own loneliness and yet they are fascinatingly contagious and feel real. Nina's feverish enthusiasm for her "life purpose" is somewhat unsettling, and yet her perseverance is admirable. No matter how you look at it, Nina is powerless, the only thing that she has except for her own free will is a name that doesn't even belong to her — and yet it's Nina who drives the story forward, making her own choices even when she's been robbed of all options, constantly re-fraiming her circumstances and finding meaning and the will to live when all seems lost.

I love this story to pieces; it makes me happy and yet breaks my heart all the time. It's dark, but cheery, cruel from the first chapter, but even cozy at times. I should hate some of the characters, but instead I get carried away sympathising with them. This manga is so well thought out, and it reveals layers and layers of meaning with every new tome, making me think that maybe we can change the world and the people around us with nothing but will and wishes, even while chasing silly phantom purposes.