Very strong first chapter! My favourite aspect of A.H's writing is how she manages to take a central idea and twist it twenty different ways to convey how the 'personal' part of a 'personal philosophy' can handily override logic, be it rational, professional, social or otherwise, and this series already seems to be going all-in with that. Weddings, after all, are both incredibly personal and highly ritualized, and so we see this fascinating contrast between Kashiwai, who can tailor the ceremony to others at a glance, and Tsuzuki, who effortlessly warps convention, morality and even religion around her own interests.
I also love the conflict between Kashiwai's notion of a will to responsibility versus Tsuzuki's idea of the inevitability of hedonism, between a woman who emphatically divides matters into right and wrong to dispel the uncertainty in her heart and a woman who cheerfully absolves herself because pleasure is its own justification. The fact that they're not entirely opposed in a wife/mistress way, but both placed in the liminal category of 'brides' is also interesting, because a 'promise' hangs in the air, capable of transformation, and the vastly contradictory nature of their views on love are ironically enough both valid interpretations of marriage- there's marriages of love and there's marriages of convenience, and it's harder to slot each of them into one category than you'd think at first.
I hope Akiyama twists these women into pretzels. I hope she lights them on fire. I hope she warps the concept of marriage so profoundly that 'Here Comes the Bride' is henceforth played only at funerals and every mention of matrimony in any form of media mandates a content warning. I have faith in the mind that produced Octave.
