Wandering Witch #11 — Comparing Unfavorably to Namek
December 11th, 2020
I would be ready for next season if it wasn't half terrible sequels.
Impressions:
Don't let the screencaps trick you. This isn't a date rape episode where someone releases an aphrodesiac gas over a city and Elaina tries to tongue a window because she is a dangerous narcissist in love with herself. This is a followup to last week's episode where the same antagonists are back. And it follows the same pattern as last week. This supposed gang of magic-tool-using bandits use exactly one magic thing, which is no real threat to anybody, SOMEHOW chaos erupts from it, and then they're defeated offscreen with zero magic or magic-using whatsoever.
This might be even worse than last week simply because there's about three levels of "defeated off-screen." First, we cut to the initial band being rounded up. Then we cut straight to the leader having been captured and explaining that her plan has already succeeded. Then their teachers pop up and say that they took care of all that offscreen too. So that leaves about 10 minutes of girls shrieking at each other that they're in each other's bodies. No hijinks are gotten up to. There are no slapstick jokes about the Freaky Friday setup. Nada. I could make comparisons to any of the zillion other animated shows that have done body swap episodes, from Futurama to Justice League to Galaxy Angel, but this couldn't even find a way to get paste just repeatedly declaring that a body swap happened. Christ, even Dragon Ball found more gags in its body swap nonsense than this supposedly comic episode does.
Next Episode:
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You know, I didn’t mind this show at first and liked it quite a bit even but this really would have been better with a more consistent tone. Not that there’s anything wrong with switching between light-hearted episodes and more sinister ones but it’s more like this has two different shows combined going on and never will they meet.
Elaina is likable until you realize she’s essentially whatever the situation requires of her. There’s being a multifaceted character and there’s having no consistent beliefs whatsoever. With Elaina, I’d find it hard to safely estimate how she would react in a certain situation in a vacuum because her personality traits and decision making don’t stem from any kind of intrinsic personality but the tone of the episode. The writing here is downright shizophrenic right down to the core of her character. Yeah, the selfish-but-likable-confident-but-flawed-cute-witch aesthetic is charming but essentially just make-up. Whatever lies underneath is decided by the episode writing.
Which also feels like tossing a coin. You can have a gag episode on some serial murderer who’s actually just a weird fetishist one episode, then the next episode there’s an actual child serial murderer. Then you have girls being kidnapped and witches being attacked by organized crime the next two-parter buuut it’s all in good fun. It might as well have been not though with this show, that’s just how arbitrary things are.
I guess the overall message is “the world sure is big and travelling reveals that better than anything else” bt there’s a way to do that without writing completely different anime at the same time and it’d be the absolute minimum to have these journeys reflect on the protagonist in any sort of way. Here, you could shuffle around episodes without any issue. What did Elaina take away from her earth-shattering tragedy in episode 09 when she declared herself lacking? Apparently nothing since that Elaina doesn’t exist anymore and was restricted to episode 09 solely. She gets to stay there, never to be seen again.