English Dub Review: Marriagetoxen “Lord Chladni”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Naruko uses his Sound Mastery to dig into Shiori’s insecurities and separate her from Hikaru. When that doesn’t work, he starts manipulating her classmates to sacrifice her to a fake god he invented.
OUR TAKE
It’s the middle part of the Shiori arc! And here’s where we get to see Naruko’s sound powers on full display, and fully out of the realm of realism, as while I can maybe buy creating auditory hallucinations in the right setting and by poking at a target’s known psychological weakpoints, I am less convinced by the idea of making everyone believe there is a giant stone man towering over an entire forest. However, I am turning around on my theory that Shiori’s buff and almost nude uncle is actually working with the bad guy, we did see last episode that he was hypnotized to let her go on this college trip, which I thought would be a cover, but now he’s being used in Naruko’s hallucinations to make Shiori doubt herself and end up dead. So now, if they did reveal him as being part of the murder attempt, it would feel kind of redundant to actually have him be revealed as being against her. I guess that doesn’t actually stop them from doing that reveal, but I’m just saying that my guess about that has changed due to this new information. Plus, it’s clear that the main problem here is the fight with Naruko and Shiori getting over her anxieties to fully take over for her dead father’s company, not who is behind the assassination attempt.
Though let’s not leave out Hikaru in the praise and analysis, as he continues to show that he is quite adept at rolling with the sound punches with his poison abilities. Probably the most notable thing he does in this episode, besides standing up for Shiori and helping her to cool her head despite Naruko’s attacks on her psyche, is using a concoction to help some withering trees grow. Why is that a significant tactic? Well, Naruko was using some of those trees with some sort of violin strings to make a specific sound to help his hallucinations get wider spread, but with the trees regaining some volume from Hikaru’s growth formula, the strings tightened and began to pull apart and fray. Honestly pretty clever stuff! Although Naruko’s last move of the episode is to make the students hypnotized to believe that Lord Chladni, the fake deity Naruko invented, needs a sacrifice of the youngest one of them, which just so happens to be Shiori. And we’ll see next week in the concluding episode how that all falls apart!
