Meg the apprentice witch gets up in the morning, makes tea for her master, Ms. Faust, and feeds all the pets. Then her master drops this bombshell: “You are going to die in one year.” Apparently, Meg has a curse (which isn’t a hostile attack, but more like a congenital magical health condition), and it activated today, on her seventeenth birthday. Meg receives a magic bottle and is told that the only way to break the curse and avoid dying next year is to collect people’s tears of joy in it—a thousand tears will be enough to craft something that can save her life. Soon Meg embarks on her first mission: helping a little girl get flowers for her mother’s grave. With her magic, Meg ends up helping the bereaved father and daughter find peace.
Okey-day, I’m still traumatized by Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina, to begin with. It’s an anime about a young witch that starts out with a heartwarming first episode but swiftly veers into some very dark territory (I dropped it, but from what I’ve read, it only got darker from there). I can’t shake the fear that this show, with its heartwarming opening episode about a young witch, will pull another bait-and-switch on me and end up similarly grim. Am I just paranoid? I hope so. Because the premise here really is promising. This episode touches on the topics of life and death, the intersection of joy and grief, and emotional healing. Yes, it’s a bit of a tearjerker, but not in a grimdark way. The melancholy tone and the way Meg pursues her own healing by helping others find healing actually reminded me just a little bit of Violet Evergarden. Also, the story seems to be set in a world very close to our own, rather than an entirely original fantasy world; we see pictures of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. I don’t know if the narrative will make much use of that setting, but it piqued my interest. And Meg is a likeable and somewhat goofy protagonist who helps bring together the lighter and weightier aspects of the story. If this anime continues to be about Meg helping others find joy and healing, and this episode isn’t just a front for a horror story, I think it could be really good.
Once Upon a Witch’s Death is streaming on Crunchyroll.
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[…] Meg is legit doomed. She is faced with a ferocious curse that will age her at breakneck speed to the point of death upon her eighteenth birthday, and the means of escaping said curse are more or less untenable. There’s no way she can collect a thousand teardrops of joy by year’s end when she’s only managed two properly joyful tears after weeks of trying. Even if other types of tears are accepted, the statistics don’t lie: Meg is going to die. So why not just accept it? Why fight the inevitable? […]
[…] who has enough on her plate just trying to stay alive beyond her eighteenth birthday, thanks to a curse that clings to her. As the wall of water speeds toward shore, Meg and her Sage friends concede that the best they can […]