Witchcraft Works

Witchcraft Works is a manga that just seems aimless. By that I don’t mean that it doesn’t have a plot, but rather that it doesn’t really try all that hard at it or anything else. It’s just very meandering at everything. The central premise of the manga is that the main male lead, Takamiya, is being protected by the main female lead, Kagiri, who is a powerful witch. This is a pretty standard gender role reversal and it isn’t all that uncommon in manga so I don’t think that it’s enough to make the manga interesting. Rather, I think the execution here was rather weak. Theproblem is that Takamiya is a really lame protagonist. Even for a main character whose primary role is to be protected, he’s really kind of useless. In other manga, the protectee usually support their protectors in some way, whether it be as physically supporting them or even just emotionally supporting them. But Takamiya doesn’t really do much of anything. He just kind of goes with the flow being protected and occasionally throwing out generic shounen heroic lines without actually contributing much of anything. A lot of that has to do with how he doesn’t really grow at all as a person. Both in terms of not having a character arc, but also in terms of not really getting any better at magic. Early in the manga Kagiri takes him on as an apprentice and begins teaching him magic, but that goes nowhere, and he never uses the magic he learns for anything all that important. Thus, the only thing that matters is the power sealed inside him. And while that is important plot wise, it’s not really used all that much. And furthermore, when it is used, it feels like less Takamiya is a proper character using the power and more so like he’s just a vassal for the power without much individual autonomy. And that combined with his motivations pretty much just being wanting to be a generically good person, results in him being incredibly hollow and impossible to get invested in. Kagiri doesn’t really fair all that much better. She’s definitely a kuudere, but beyond that she’s a very hazy character. There are different types of kuudere. The type that has emotions but has trouble expressing them and over time learns to do so. The type that genuinely doesn’t have emotions but grows to have them. And the type that’s just genuinely cold and doesn’t care at all about most things. Kagiri seems to flip flop between all three. Now in addition to that, also add in a major yandere streak and it becomes really hard to get a read on her. The two of them also have terrible romantic chemistry. Kagiri has a pretty unique personality, but Takamiya doesn’t really seem to respond to it at all. He has no reaction to most anything she does and ignores pretty much everything strange about her. But it isn’t written as if he’s accepting of who she is. It feels more like he’s just not looking at her at all. On the flip side, there is some background given regarding their past as to why Kagiri is so devoted to him. But there are never really any events in the present where it feels like she’s getting closer to him or loves who he is as a person. There’s not really any sort of relationship arc shown. They’re just kind of in love with each other and that’s that. The ending in terms of romance is fine I guess, but that’s it. I found Takamiya’s younger sister, Kasumi, a lot more interesting than Kagiri. She’s weird as heck in that she’s a major bro-con that doesn’t seem to even understand that she’s a bro-con and considers herself and everything she does as perfectly normal. But that made her fun. I’m certainly not saying that she should have replaced Kagiri, but rather that she in her role as the jealous little sister was better written than her. She was consistent in how she behaved even in the extremes, and was just all around really amusing. The rest of the cast unfortunately was also really weak. There are a lot of characters, but the vast majority feel incredibly underdeveloped. They have very little personality, little to no character development, and no clear purpose in the plot. They don’t really have any sort of major motivations driving them or background that pushes their actions. They just kind of get pulled into whatever else is happening and that’s pretty much it. For example, Chronoire, beyond the beginning where she gives Kagiri a magical candy, does not actively do anything at all for the rest of the manga. And Medusa at some point just starts helping the protagonists for some vague reason and never really stops. This stems in part from how the world building in the manga is really weak. Early on there is some really cool development regarding how there are two factions of witches, workshop witches and tower witches, each with their own rules and philosophies. The conflict between the two seems to be important. But in the end, it doesn’t really seem to matter at all. The magic is also just random nonsense. No one’s magical abilities or the systems that govern magic are even close to well defined. So magic is whatever it needs to be in that particular instance with characters being as strong or weak as they need to be without really any sort of explanation for what’s going on exactly. That results in the action also being pretty weak. While this isn’t entirely an action manga, it does play a pretty important role and thus that detracts from the serious half of the manga a good amount. The other half of the manga is slice of life and comedy. This was good at first, but I feel it started getting kind of trite as things progressed. I do think it improved towards the end a bit though, in that it started taking the serious parts less seriously and throwing comedy into them in ways that felt pretty fresh. The art in the manga I kind of feel got worse as the manga progressed. It definitely improved in terms of quality. However, I feel it declined in terms of style. The style starting out can get really extravagant. Sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. It’s somewhat like a combination of old school scary witches and fluffy and frilly magical girls, which can look weird but also really cool. The mangaka also did some crazy stuff, like just casually drawing strange stuff in the backgrounds with no explanation, like a tank parked in front of the school or a lion just walking around. It felt full of personality. The stuff later on was much simpler and more generic. The way characters were drawn was especially boring. tl;dr: A manga that’s pretty charming early on, but that doesn’t really use any of it’s charm points all that well.