Little Witch Academia is a show with an interesting history. It first started as a half-hour special, introducing us to the major characters and at least a version of the world. Later, the funding was achieved to produce another, longer special which fleshed out much more of a setting and introduced some new characters. It didn’t really contradict anything in the original, but it did evolve the material significantly.
They’re not the
main thrust of this review, but I think it’s important for background
to cover them quickly.
The first special
introduced us to main character, Atsuko “Akko” Kagari, a would-be
witch with a ton of spirit and not a lot of skill. Joining her are
Lotte, the shy nerdy one, and Sucy, who’s kind of creepy and loves
poisons and potions. We also meet a smart bully, Diana, her bully
sidekicks, and their bespectacled teacher, Professor Ursula. The
class goes on small-team expeditions to the RPG-style dungeon beneath
the school (it’s a Trigger production, so just take it) and Akko
finds a mysterious magic rod (which she recognizes as the “Shiny
Rod” used by her magical entertainer idol Shiny Chariot) while
Diana and team accidentally unleash a dragon, which feeds on magic
power (including the spells the side bullies threw at it to torment
the little thing) to grow bigger and more dangerous. The dragon
quickly runs amok, heading for an artifact called the Sorcerer’s
Stone that provides the source of pretty much all the witches’
magical power, and would become invincible if it managed to consume
the stone.
Ultimately, Akko
faces down against the dragon, wielding the Shiny Rod. With the
guidance of Chariot’s voice (as the audience is shown that Professor
Ursula is Chariot in disguise), Akko manages to unlock some kind of
ultimate power in the rod and put the dragon down for good.
The second special,
The Enchanted Parade, introduces us to some new characters (a trio of
delinquents lead by a tomboy witch named Amanda) and more new
concepts. The basic plot is that Akko, her friends, and the
delinquents are put in charge of organizing the school parade, and if
they screw it up they’ll be expelled. Akko’s dreams get too big,
causing her to have a fight with Lotte and Sucy, but ultimately
everyone comes together to defeat a sealed magical evil accidentally
unleashed and make the parade a huge success.
The interesting
thing is some of the world building that’s done in this one. In the
first special, we didn’t get much of a sense of anything outside the
magic school, Luna Nova, other than learning that despite any
appearances to the contrary this is a contemporary setting and not
one in which magic is a secret. In Enchanted Parade, we see the town
around Luna Nova and find out what common people seem to think of
magic. Despite the power and wonder shown off in Luna Nova, it seems
like most of the outside world is a very disenchanted place. Magic
is seen as outdated and worthless, and even so close to the center of
magical learning witches are mocked and derided. There’s a palpable
sense of this as a world that’s forgotten its dreams, and prefers the
practical dull gray modernity. This makes Akko’s positive interest
in magic and how she’s enchanted by its beauty and wants to share
that wonder with others, all the more pointed.
Enter the series.
Unlike Enchanted Parade, which was a sequel to the first special, the 25-episode full series is a complete reboot, telling its own story from start to finish. The characters are largely the same – Akko, Lotte, Sucy, Diana, her hench-bullies, Amanda, the other delinquents, and Professor Ursula/Shiny Chariot are basically the same as they were in the specials, though a couple details have shifted around for better or worse. The world is also pretty similar, but I would say it’s more like if someone wrote it based on Enchanted Parade, without regard for the first special. Gone is the RPG dungeon under the school where students raid for forgotten treasures as class assignments; Luna Nova in the full series is much more grounded.
The story, however,
is all new. We start off with Akko racing to make her first day of
classes at Luna Nova. However, because Akko can’t fly on a broom,
she’s in a bit of a tough spot when it comes to just getting there.
She meets Lotte for the first time and hitches a ride but the two of
them (along with Sucy) have a bit of a transit mishap that lands them
in a creepy forest. Here, Akko finds the Shiny Rod, and helps the
other two fight off a cockatrice (that Sucy wanted feathers from for
her potions), with Ursula appearing to teach her the first magic word
that makes the Rod take on an empowered form. The lot of them get to
school on time, and the main trio even end up roommates.
After this, the
show gets into a very “Crisis of the week” rhythm, in which there
are some… curious problems.
For one, Akko’s
competence. Now, the general idea of Little Witch Academia is that
Akko is coming in at level zero, but with all the passion in the
world. However, after a promising showing in the second episode
where she uses knowledge gleaned from her Shiny Chariot-branded
trading cards to prevent the re-introduced Diana from slaughtering
some rare magical butterflies in their cocoons (Diana having
identified them only as parasites on a special tree), Akko is
repeatedly shown to be both incompetent and frustratingly unwilling
to put in the work for what’s supposedly her passion. She’s very
active, but her ideas on what to do are often calamitously bad, and
things that any right-thinking person, even a teenage girl, should
see are terrible ideas. And because she gets random spikes of
competence and then goes right back to horrible schemes and flunking
at her magic, there’s not a sense that Akko is improving from her
experience. I’d be more fine with it if her showings were worse at
the start but got steadily better over time. As it is, Akko in the
second episode is no more or less boneheaded than Akko in the second
to last episode, which contributes to making her something of a
static character. She’s supposed to be learning and growing, even if
it’s slow and painful for her to do the traditional way, but it never
seems like that’s what she does.
And, for a minute,
let’s talk about Diana. Of the characters that were in the original
specials, Diana is probably the most changed. She’s not much of a
bully in the show as a whole (her hangers-on still are) even if her
interactions with Akko are more standoffish or even somewhat hostile,
but the more important shift is that she no longer a star student.
She’s transcended that level, and even the level of ‘normal’ prodigy
characters to be overwhelmingly hyper-competent, and it makes her
miserable to watch for most of her appearances. Not only can she
cast more complex and powerful magic than pretty much any of the
teachers, she’s also has the whole faculty beat in areas of knowledge
as well.
As an example,
perhaps the most egregious one, I present episode 5. In this
episode, a dragon steals the Sorcerer’s Stone, shutting off magic at
Luna Nova. This isn’t like the first special’s dragon, though. This
one is a fairly old and surly lizard who’s actually quite
intelligent. He didn’t steal the stone so much as repossess it,
since he has an old contract (in dragon-script) that details a debt
Luna Nova owes him, and the struggling school (This being the episode
that really kicks the decline of magic as presaged by Enchanted
Parade into full gear) is behind on payments. Akko tries to appeal
to his sense of wonder and win him over with the beauty of magic, but
he’s more interested in his stock portfolio – which is, admittedly,
a pretty good joke. Diana, however, arrives shortly thereafter and
solves the situation. You see, Diana can actually read the draconic
language of the contract, unlike anyone in Luna Nova’s faculty, and
notes that no interest was mentioned, meaning the debt was paid off
ages ago.
It’s a decent
resolution in abstract, but either the faculty is overwhelmingly
stupid, or, as is more the case in the show as a whole, Diana is just
excessively perfect and special.
We also do meet
Amanda again, briefly, in a broom race that results in the release of
a self-powered broom called Shooting Star.
In any case, Akko’s
misadventures lead to her failing forward, getting her magic to the
substandard level that means she’s allowed to stay in the rest of the
show and otherwise generally fixing a bunch of messes she made
herself. One of those messes involves a new character, Andrew, an
acquaintance of Diana and the son of a prominent notable who could
decide Luna Nova’s fate. After verbally sparring with him, zapping
him with magic, and struggling to fix the disaster it seems like Akko
has made a bit of a friend, against all odds.
Some episodes
later, Akko and friends crash a party at Andrew’s place, and Sucy
unleashes a bee with a love potion sting (again, every bit of out of
control insanity this group stops, they probably started) that runs
amok for most of the episode. Along the way, Akko learns that
Andrew, at that point infatuated with her by the bee’s sting, lives a
life with more problems than she might have expected, being pushed
away from his dreams by his authoritarian father. She uses the fact
she has his ear for good, convincing him to not give up on what he
loves (playing the piano, in particular) just because that’s what
someone else wants. He helps her defeat the bee, breaking its spell
in the process, but it’s implied that both Akko and Andrew might be
experiencing a budding romance not founded in love potion bee stings.
And that’s as good
a time as any to say goodbye to Andrew. He figures significantly in
a couple more episodes, but in essence he stops progressing, Akko
stops progressing, and he has nothing more to do with the plot. It’s
kind of frustrating that despite headlining a few episodes and having
a number of decent scenes, he’s basically wasted space from an arc
perspective. You could cut him from the show (eliminating his
presence in his first episode and cutting his later episodes
entirely) and you wouldn’t miss much. In fact, you might actually
gain, because the pacing of Little Witch Academia is kind of bloated
on the whole.
Finally,
something like the plot shows up towards the end of the first half of
the show. Diana makes discoveries of important-sounding things like
the Nine Old Witches and the Grand Triskellion while Akko seeks out a
ghost that shows up on literal blue moons. Encountering the ghost,
she rejects an offer to be freely made like Shiny Chariot, wanting
instead to achieve that under her own power. This causes her to
summon the second magic word, and after Akko leaves thinking she’s
banished the ghost gets us a cryptic talk between Ursula (Chariot, if
you recall) and the ghost, who was actually a dryad teacher and
mentor of Ursua, in which more vague plot about awakening the seven
words is spouted.
The
next word comes fairly quickly at a big festival at Luna Nova, where
Akko gives up her chance of being belle of the ball (Moonlit Witch, a
title Shiny Chariot earned) in order to bring peace to a tormented
ancient spirit.
This
marks the end of the first half of the show, as the next episode sees
the arrival of the last and most interesting of the new characters:
Professor Croix.
Croix
arrives at school as a new teacher, and makes a quite massive
entrance. Unlike the other witches, who are hidebound and reject
technology, Croix is a futurist who blends magic and science into her
own blend of magitech, first seen with her “advanced brooms” –
flying disks that she can surf around on and that it took me entirely
too long to realize were “brooms” because they’re meant to be
flying roombas.
In her
introductory episode, Croix has a technical solution to another major
problem. The fading energy of the Sorcerer’s Stone is making it
difficult to both cast spells and support the magic-needing fairy
creatures that keep the school running. Croix proposes a mechanical
system to trap and gain use of a massive amount of otherwise wasted
energy from the Stone, but at first the rest of the faculty rejects
her because… tech. When the fairies unionize and strike, though,
Croix’s magic seems the only solution, and it’s ultimately
implemented. Akko is impressed, but something about Croix, and Akko
and Croix getting along, seems to deeply bother Ursula.
She’s
not wrong to be skeptical though, both because Croix and Chariot have
a history and because Croix is actually the closest thing the show
has to a proper villain. It starts in this episode; if the situation
seems too good for her to be true, that’s because it is, and she
manipulated the faeries to cause the conflict and get her system
installed. From this point on, Croix is at least in the background
doing mad scientist things in most of the episodes. For the sake of
review, because it would be pulling teeth to go through every episode
with how slow burn the main plots are, here’s a rundown of Croix’s
background and plan.
Croix
was a friend of Chariot when they were in school, but was deeply
jealous that the flighty and Akko-like Chariot was chosen to wield
the Shiny Rod, rather than Croix herself who was skilled and
studious. She kept her resentment bottled up, even helping Chariot
into her entertainer career, until the two of them had a final
falling out and Chariot lost both the rod and her qualifications to
use it, resulting in the rod ending up in Akko’s hands. Now, Croix
wants to gain the Grand Triskellion (an ultimate power over magic
that the Rod and Seven Words can access) for herself, and is
dedicated to harvesting a massive amount of magical power in order to
do it.
The
way that Croix hits upon to harness magical power involves converting
the emotions of regular people into magic. Though each individual
draw may be small, if she harvests from enough people, the amount of
power she can gain is enormous. And, Croix finds out, the emotion
with the highest rate of return for harvesting is anger. Once she
learns this, she sets up a social media app that takes the world by
storm, literally harnessing the power of hate-filled internet
arguments to fuel her mad science, not realizing or caring (beyond
what it does for her bottom line) that her app is intensifying the
rage along the way, making people hate each other more and more.
There’s
a brilliant rebuke of social media and the zoo of outrage that it’s
become in this, but it’s not particularly subtle as metaphors go.
More relevant, and possibly the most interesting thing in the whole
show, is the relationship dynamic between Ursula/Chariot, Croix, and
Akko.
Ursula,
who sees herself in Akko (and more besides, but we’ll get to it),
tries to be a good mentor to the girl. She tells Akko what Akko
needs to do, but that isn’t always what Akko wants to hear. Akko is
hot-headed, hot-tempered, and opinionated, and doesn’t take easily to
being told to wait or back down, even if it’s for good reason.
Croix, meanwhile, tells Akko what she wants to hear, lifting her
spirits and pushing her forward. However, Croix also sees a lot of a
younger Chariot in Akko, and secretly (as far as Akko is concerned,
secretly) despises that. Even as she’s being supportive and
uplifting, it’s clear that she doesn’t have what’s best for Akko in
mind, and might be feeling some spite that the Shiny Rod has once
again chosen someone that Croix thinks of as unworthy of its power.
This leads to Akko, who had formerly bonded with Ursula (when Ursula
stuck up for her and offered her guidance and no one else would)
gravitating towards Croix more and more over the second half of the
show. Meanwhile, the relationship between Croix and Chariot is
complex in its own right. There’s a lot of bad blood between them,
thanks to Croix’s envy and her deeds back when they went their
separate ways, but they were also friends for a long time, and that
doesn’t always seem entirely dead. Chariot would seem to want to
mend bridges with Croix, even if she doesn’t know how, while Croix is
more hard-line on disliking what Chariot represents than actually
Chariot herself. However, Croix is committed to her path, and
Chariot to hers, leading them to stand on opposite sides of an
irreconcilable difference.
Honestly,
the two adults are the most interesting and best developed characters
in the show. You feel for both of them, where they’ve been and where
it seems like they’re going, and their excellent rivalry underscores
the vast majority of this act.
Because
of that, there’s a core issue with Little Witch Academia. If you
really enjoyed the first half of the show, that was mostly just
Akko-centric magical mayhem, it’s probably going to lose its luster
after Croix appears because, while there are still some mayhem
episodes that don’t add a whole lot, it is more focused on this main
plot that’s serious and emotional and that largely sees Akko as a
tool rather than a primary actor. On the other hand if (like me) you
thought the first half was unfortunately draggy and directionless,
the second half of the show probably feels like a big improvement.
But the two halves of the show can’t exist in isolation; the first
half has no payoff or satisfaction without the second, and the second
half has no grounding or basis without the first. So, whichever side
you’re on, you’re going to be disappointed by about half of Little
Witch Academia.
Honestly,
I think the show would have been better if it were re-centered around
the plot and trimmed up a bit. Move Croix’s introduction to where we
have the incident with the dragon, cut some needless episodes that
don’t relate to anything and the abortive arc with Andrew, and space
the episodes that are heavy on Croix and Chariot out a little more,
letting Akko spread her wings between them rather than being kind of
overshadowed by her elders.
For
the series we’ve got, though, I do at least appreciate the main plot,
even if I think its pacing was really wonky.
For
important episodes, we have one pair that delves into Diana’s story
as she leaves school to assume control of her family fortune as its
head. The episodes do a good deal to redeem her character, even if
they don’t make up for how grating she was in the past, because we
learn a few things about her. For one, she has a complex situation
(heiress to an old family on the edge of ruin, with plenty of greedy
relatives willing to sell off her heritage. Also, she apparently
lost her magical ability almost completely in childhood and reached
her current god-like status through pretty much nothing but hard work
(explaining why she might have little patience for Akko’s failings).
The evil relatives try to disrupt the ceremony that would allow Diana
to become head of the family, and Akko gets her out of the woods.
Ultimately, though, Diana gives up her chance at proper ascension to
save the ungrateful family members who tried to stop her from being
turned into trees forever, and gets a blessing from an ancestor and
the ability to return to Luna Nova to follow her own dreams.
After
that, we get a big one with Akko, by this point looking for the sixth
of the seven words. Croix tells her that Chariot found the sixth
word climbing the giant tree known as Wagandea, but Ursula refuses to
help Akko go there, as the pollen of Wagandea has some nasty effects
on witches (at the very least, stripping them of the ability to ever
fly again) and it’s soon to start blooming. Croix is more than
willing to pick up the pieces, though, and brings Akko to Wagandea.
Ursula arrives to save Akko (as the impossibly massive tree begins
blooming from the top, meaning that a cloud of pollen is already on
the long way down the implied miles and miles of tree). She first
spars with Croix, who takes this opportunity to give her harshest
rant about her motives, and who seems to have set up Akko to get hit
by the pollen out of pure spite for Chariot, and Akko as her
successor. Ursula manages to disengage and tries to warn and extract
Akko, but Akko blows her off and Ursula ends up taking a nasty
fall… that Croix saves her from. Yeah, it seems that even at her
most spiteful, Croix isn’t willing to just watch someone who used to
be her friend die. There’s still to be no peace between them,
though, and Ursula rushes up the tree as the cursed cloud descends.
She nabs Akko and dives madly for the ground, ahead of the pollen,
begging whatever powers will listen to not steal Akko’s future. They
crash land, and Ursula takes the brunt of the impact. Akko,
realizing how much of a little brat she had briefly become and how
much Ursula was trying to help her unlocks the sixth word, which
allows her to heal Ursula’s wounds, and they flee the area before any
more horrors happen.
It’s
not initially obvious, but it also seems the Ursula was exposed to
Wagandea’s pollen in the process, losing the ability to fly on a
broom. Croix, for her part, simply advances her plans, creating a
magitech copy of the Shiny Rod empowered by her anger-harvesting
magic. With that, we enter the endgame.
Akko
learns about Croix manipulating human emotion to harvest magical
power, and Croix attacks, with Akko narrowly saved by the arrival of
Ursula, who is finally outed to Akko as Shiny Chariot. Croix drives
an extra wedge between them for the reunion, as we finally get the
flashback to Chariot and Croix’s last days as friends and allies.
Chariot
never found the seventh word in her school days, and started her
traveling act while still searching for it. Croix offered to help
provide power so Chariot could put on impressive shows, implementing
a prototype of the emotion-draining system that she uses in the main
line of the show. The older version, rather than feeding off
transient feelings, stole the magical potential of its victims,
permanently as far as anyone knew, meaning that anyone who attended
one of Chariot’s shows would be stripped of their ability to do
magic. Chariot was horrified when she learned the truth (not that
Croix or Chariot mentioned that to soften the blow to Akko of
learning her incompetence was in many ways the fault of her beloved
idol), even as Croix brushed the idea of it being a problem off by
pointing out that Chariot was considered a laughingstock among
witches, and no self-respecting member of a magical family would see
one of her shows, meaning that no one who lost their dreams and magic
would, theoretically, ever miss it.
Still,
Chariot and Croix parted ways over that, and the next show Chariot
put on was her last. Cornered with very little to give in absence of
Croix’s fueling system and trapped in a miserable low point
emotionally, Chariot misused the Shiny Rod for a grand and desperate
display. This cost her the ability to wield the rod (which left
her), but not before she blasted a new glyph into the face of the
moon. After that little disaster, Chariot quit performing and
vanished from the public light, eventually taking on her ‘Professor
Ursula’ persona to teach at Luna Nova.
With
the facts but not the same context the audience is given, Akko is
absolutely devastated, and having to own up to the damage she still
blames herself for means that Chariot is pretty much broken as well.
That’s more than enough for Croix, who moves on towards her win
condition. A moping Akko is approached by Diana, though, who’s
deduced Ursula’s true identity and what happened. She reveals that
when she was a child, she went to a Shiny Chariot show (resulting in
her loss of magic. And, in fact, it was the same show Akko attended
as you can see them just a couple rows apart in the wider shots) but
that it was her admiration for Chariot that gave her the strength to
earn that power back through hard work. Learning Diana’s part of the
story gave both Chariot (relieved to have not permanently and
irrecoverably hurt people) and Akko separately the will to get back
in the action.
Ursula
fails to stop Croix from activating the final stage of her magitech
monstrosity. Croix absorbs an absurd amount of both rage and
conventional magic takes off for the forest the Shiny Rod was first
found in, which is also where the kids get dumped. She forces open
the seal on the Grand Triskellion, and seizes the prize she’d coveted
since she was a child.
It’s a
stick. A magic stick that she can use to invoke minor magic spells,
like a stream of useless bubbles. Croix discovers that she seethed
and she raged, she worked and she schemed, she threw away her
friends, her morals, and really the majority of her life hunting for
something that wasn’t worthwhile to achieve, at least not the way
that she ultimately did it.
Now is
as good a time as any to talk about karma in fiction, and how it
plays into audience expectations, particularly for villain
characters. The reason for this is that, after gaining the Grand
Triskellion, Croix is basically never punished for all the bad things
she’s done and all the damage her actions continue to cause over the
last episodes.
When a
character escapes their karmic comeuppance, at least outside of a
particularly gritty piece of media, it’s often something that enrages
the audience, and drags down a piece overall. In fiction, we want to
see some degree of cosmic justice. The villain doesn’t always have
to be punished by the hero or even proper authorities (just think of
all the bad guys that face no-kill heroes only to get done in by
their own mistakes and a long drop) but we don’t want them to get out
of the narrative without their wrongs being paid for.
All
the same, there are some characters that audiences will basically
forgive. They manage to slip any sense of karmic justice and escape
without suffering in basically any way, and the audience lets them do
it. So, when a character evades punishment, we have to ask: is this
a case that will be accepted? Because if it’s not, that’s a big
problem. And if it is one that will be acceptable, I’m interested in
asking: Why?
One of
the most famous examples of a karmic escapee who most readers let
slide is Long John Silver, from Treasure Island. Thief, murderer,
pirate… but also a good father figure to Jim, so when he slips away
at the end, presumably to a fairly comfortable life, most of us are
essentially OK with that. Some probably aren’t, hence why he often
gets it worse in adaptations.
So,
what about Croix? Frankly, she’s a little on the edge. Like Silver,
she bonds with our young lead character, but unlike Silver that
bonding is largely done in bad faith. On the other hand, Croix is
part of the “Mad Scientist” archetype. Mad Scientists are often
excused from some of the worst consequences of their actions, both
because their major-scale deeds tend to come from a place of general
non-malice and because they are often afflicted with a particular
myopia that renders them ignorant to the more unpleasant outcomes of
whatever they were trying to do. In these cases, Croix does rather
live her archetype. As spiteful as she is towards Chariot and Akko,
we do see that she doesn’t seem willing to let her tiff upgrade to
murder, even by negligence. At the same time, her mistakes do nearly
destroy the world going forward, so it’s not like her misdeeds can be
swept under the rug.
Personally,
I do think that her abject failure here, having victory snatched away
from her is a pretty big punishment, and does serve fairly
effectively as her comeuppance. But I can easily see viewers hating
that she doesn’t get anything worse.
In any
case, after Croix’s failure, her creation goes out of control
berserk, responding to all the rage and hatred it’s soaked up more
than to Croix’s commands. It turns into a dragon and attacks Croix.
Chariot tries to protect Croix despite everything, and gets swallowed
whole by the out of control monster. Akko arrives on scene, and
blasts Chariot free, seemingly defeating the magitech beast in the
process. She manages to unlock the seventh word from that
experience, and levels up the Shiny Rod to a new form capable of
working world-shaping magic by merging it with that twig Croix found.
However,
the rage machine isn’t done. Answering the animosity of the people
who fed it, its remnants hijack and merge with a nuclear missile,
launching itself as an all-destructive dragon missile at a rival
nation.
Croix
can’t control it and mundane methods can’t stop the missile, but Akko
and friends go flying to the rescue, trying to chase the thing down
in a way that results in something of an aerial dogfight with it.
Along the way, their struggle ends up broadcast to the world,
inspiring normal people, whose positive feelings for them reach the
girls as an extra surge of magic. After the dragon missile is
defeated (and Akko caught from falling by the escaped broom from one
of the first eposides – a kind of funny twist in how much
background material was spent keeping it relevant and remembered) the
Shiny Rod vanishes, having completed its task by rewriting the laws
of magic to Akko’s vision of a world where people can love it, and
that very admiration and wonder ultimately fuels the magical power.
And
that’s pretty much the end. Croix heads out, seeming to turn over a
new leaf and promising to research a cure for Wagandea’s curse for
Chariot, and Akko finally manages to fly under her own power, if only
a little.
So,
how does the show sift out in the end?
Honestly,
Little Witch Academia is a very mixed bag. It’s got the zany Trigger
hallmarks you’d want and a decent story when you get down to it, but
there are some major constructive problems. The pacing is a big one
I’ve addressed. Another that I’ve touched on but haven’t really
talked about at length is the characters. Aside from Diana’s
problems, Akko is very much a static character. I mentioned this in
terms of her skills, but it matters for her personality too. Akko is
supposed to be learning major character lessons from gathering the
seven words, but she rarely feels like she does because the episodic
nature of so much of the show means she gets reset in whole or in
part a good deal. At Wagandea, Akko learns how to give thanks when
Ursula saved her, but she never seemed particularly thankless and the
exact same arc where something about Ursula causes her relationship
with Akko to become strained and then Akko saves and makes up with
her happens right after for the seventh word. The fourth word was
supposed to be Akko learning patience, but she falls for Croix in
regards to Wagandea because she’s still impatient at her core, and
wants to tear off and get her search done now, not when it’s safe.
This kind of thing is all over the show, where Akko relearns a lesson
or shows that she clearly didn’t learn it in the first place, meaning
that her progress is poor.
Honestly,
Croix and Chariot are the best characters in the show. The mentor
and the villain are the ones with compelling arcs, deep struggles,
and the ability to learn and grow through their experiences. Their
relationship is dynamic and the drama of it all fairly meaningful.
The problem is they’re the mentor character and the lurking villain
who only appears past the halfway mark, not the characters you want
to see development for. They’re good characters, but Akko, Lotte,
Diana, and Amanda and her gang (who were painfully underutilized) all
could have used the development more and given us a better show if
they got it, since they’re the lead and her friends.
And
yes, I know I didn’t list Sucy in that. Sucy is a one-note character
but she’s one of those insane Trigger one-note characters. We can
let her just be herself.
At the
end of it all, I offer Little Witch Academia a very confused and
conflicted C+. It was a fine show, and it was entertaining, but it’s
also a complete mess in a lot of ways. I’d recommend it above
something that had no ambition or didn’t try, because at least it
puts a lot of heart and energy on the screen, but it’s hard to defend
it as a full, finished product. Honestly, I think the initial
specials did it better (They’d sit in the B-B+ Range). The original
special was silly and the world was thinly sketched, but it has all
the heart Little Witch Academia as a full thing has already, and is
fulfilling on its own. Enchanted Parade does the world better, and
has a good character arc for Akko that she unfortunately has to go
through several times in the main show. It’s nice keeping it down to
just one.
To be frank, I’d almost recommend watching the special, Enchanted Parade, and then Little Witch Academia from episode 14 (in which Croix appears) onward. You’d miss out on some continuity, though, which is why I’d consider it more an experiment than a case of “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing to do”, and there are some episodes in the first half that are fun in isolation (I’ve got an odd affection for the silly love potion bee episode), but on the whole you’d get most of the experience in a much tighter and more well-paced package with… still some resets out of Akko, but not as many. If you try that out, either having not seen anything Little Witch Academia yourself or introducing someone new, let me know how it goes, I’m really curious about new perspectives.