The anime of MarriageToxin faced plenty of challenges before it landed earlier this year, but one of the biggest was how to capture the tonal whiplash of the manga. With high-stakes action scenes sandwiched between over-the-top comedic moments, its pacing works well in the manga but felt daunting to the production team at Bones Films. Then they remembered that TikTok exists and decided to lean into the chaos that the social media algorithm can deliver.

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In an interview to promote the upcoming second season of MarriageToxin, the anime’s director, Motonobu Hori, talked about how the pacing of the manga was difficult for him to try to capture in the anime. “The original manga is a work in which the genre keeps shifting within very short spans,” Hori explained. “There are serious moments, gags, touching stories, sad stories — all mixed together, and switching over in short turns. Even while reading the manga, I thought it would be a difficult work to turn into anime.”

Thankfully, audiences have been primed for this kind of issue since long before MarriageToxin became a thing. In fact, YouTube and TikTok, with their seemingly random algorithms for video delivery, embodied exactly the kind of tonal whiplash that made the manga so unique. “But when I thought about it, I realized that in the short-form videos we watch every day, a cooking recipe is followed by footage of an accident, which is followed by a clip of a cute animal. We are used to seeing scenes switch that quickly. If we could capture that same sensation, it would actually make for an enjoyable series.”

MarriageToxin season 2 is out in January 2027.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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