“Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is about as old as old saws get. But like most of them there’s a kernel of truth at the heart of it, and it applies to Witch Watch for sure. It was on hiatus last week thanks to a volleyball tournament (“Haikyuu shanks Witch Watch“?). And one realizes that WW is an important part of one’s anime rotation. Its breed of gag humor is pretty unique in anime at the moment, and in terms of pure comedy it’s probably the funniest show airing at the moment. I definitely missed it.
The return of Witch Watch sees the return of “Uron Mirage”, it’s anime-in-an-anime, complete with the dedicated OP and ED. I like the bit and I like both Kuku and Makuwa-sensei as supporting characters. If I’m honest my preference would be for the “Uron” gag not to take up an entire episode though. I think the gag starts to wear just a little thin by the third act, and I do miss the main cast even if Moi and Nico made an important appearance in said act.
The premise this time is that our intrepid pair of Haimi and Dengeki Melon are prepping their first doujin (for Comic City, or one of its feeder women-centric doujin events). This is not exactly a smooth process, thanks to Kuku’s lack of experience and Makuwa-sensei’s general klutziness with life and self-doubt. Further complicating matters, Kuku has made an online friend and decided to do an offline meet up with them. Makuwa is alarmed – whether because she’s a teacher and that’s highly dangerous or because she’s jealous is in the eye of the beholder. She convinced herself that the “teenage girl” is an oyaji in his 50s, but it turns out she just made friends with her dad’s friends (she likes golf and go) and now talks like an oyaji herself.
If one were to get serious at all – which is probably never a good idea with WW – they might ask whether it’s appropriate for a teacher to have this sort of relationship with her student. But it’s funny anyway, so why get hung up on that I suppose. Obstacles aplenty rear up – the manga has a plot twist which torpedoes Makuwa’s storyline, and she’s a canon purist – but the work forges ahead. Kuku gets a harsh lesson in the realities of manga creation, finding that her naive estimates for how quickly she can crank out pages are wildly optimistic. And then, on the deadline day for the printer, she realizes that one of her pages has disappeared and she moved the file over rather than copying it.
The day of the event finally arrives, but Dengeki Melon has work so Kuku is forced to ask Nico to help out at the booth, and as the bodyguard Moi comes along too (awkward to be a dude at such an event). Furthermore, Sensei has screwed up by accidentally ordering 1000 copies instead of 100, and one of the speech bubbles is blank. For once Nico’s magic doesn’t have disastrous results – well, mostly, as she does bleach Moi’s hair white by mistake. But even that turns out to be a positive, as he looks like he’s cosplaying the new character from the manga. All the doujin event staples are here – the applause at open, greeting the neighbors, the popular circles being moved to the end of the aisle. If you’ve been, you know.
Again, for me this all went on a little too long, even if it was redeemed by Nico randomly busting out the bread language after the event. This is a good subset of the comic catalog if not my absolute favorite, but Witch Watch just has too many comedic weapons in its arsenal to spend a whole ep focused solely on it. That said it was undeniably great to have the series back, and when the rest of the Otogi household gets back in the game next week it will have seemed like forever.
