To Life – Once Upon a Witch’s Death Spoiler Review

This is a show that legitimately scared me, when I was just approaching it. Not because it was conventionally scary or even related to the horror genre, but because it had some creative DNA that I know backfires far too often.

This is the pitch for Once Upon a Witch’s Death: on her seventeenth birthday, apprentice witch Meg Raspberry is told that she only has a year left to live before a horrible curse claims her. There is an out, but it’s not easy: she needs something called a Seed of Life, and according to her mentor, the only way to make one of those is by collecting a thousand tears of joy in the time Meg has left.

For those keeping score at home, that means she has to average three tears a day.

So, why do I find this scary? Because it threatens you with the “feel good” loop. In my mind, there is a loop, associated with media ironically described as “feel good”, that all too often has the opposite effect. In essence, it’s the fiction writing equivalent of an abusive relationship, where a character will be beaten down (often senselessly and beyond all reason) only for the audience to “feel good” when some tiny bit of this suffering is redeemed right at the end. I personally dislike this pattern almost as much as I dislike prophecy plots, and a lot of writers will try their hand at said manipulation.

I’ll skip ahead a little to say that my fear was not well-founded here. Once Upon a Witch’s Death doesn’t really go there. True, for Meg to get a tear, someone has to be suffering or in a bad way somewhere along the line, but the show doesn’t tend to wallow in misery. Most of the tears we actually see Meg attain are either for navigating small acts of kindness or, oddly enough, dealing with comparative action set pieces.

It also hopes that Meg doesn’t wallow in her own potential tragedy. It does wear on her at times, but she’s noted as being a very positive person, she points out early on that there’s a degree to which the whole death by horrible curse thing doesn’t feel real, and perhaps most importantly… she’s kind of a goober.

I actually like that Meg feels like she’s written like a teenager who has had, up until this point, a fairly happy life. When she puts her mind to something, she gets it done, and she clearly does understand the gravity of her situation, but she’s still the kind of person who has a rather particular brand of answer when asked her future plans

Now, there is a fair degree to which the show is grounded in vignettes. They interconnect to a degree, forming a full world, and some of the people Meg bonds with come back, but there’s also… not an overarching central plot that’s easy to recap in a linear fashion. I’ll try to hit the high notes.

Meg’s quest starts slow. She does some research to learn what flower a late mother wanted to show her daughter, and uses magic to make a display. That’s a tear from dad and daughter. She helps an old woman facing death connect with her family. I think she got a tear out of it too?

Moving on, we start to introduce more of magic society. This world is implied to be very much like modern Earth. Even some countries seem to exist, with Germany being called out in the first episode for watchmaking. But it’s not a masquerade setting – magic is deeply integrated into the world’s society and always has been. Meg’s teacher, Faust, is one of the seven greatest witches. I mention this because some of her peers come calling. One is Inori, the Witch of Wisdom, who works in the pharmaceutical industry and comes away from some time babysitting Meg wanting to headhunt her. A second is Sophie, the Witch of Blessings, who actually hates magic until Meg befirends her and shows her more wonder (helping a wolfman from the Otherworld and his human girlfriend hook up while managing the annual festival that connects the worlds briefly).

After this, we get a bit of a time skip with an episode that was sort of the last threat: Meg has been having some success gathering tears – offscreen – and has gotten a bit full of herself, so Faust wants her to not use magic for a bit. During a day out on the town she finds that while everyone now knows and likes her, she can barely remember some of the people she helped, in turn realizing that it’s probably not great to try to farm tears without really considering where they come from. This was a dangerous episode because it teetered on the edge of being too ham-fisted when, frankly, Meg did need to up her game. But they pull it back by having her go big on the bratty attitude and singling out that, and not her actions, as the problem.

We then start to get episodes that ramp up the intensity. Skipping over a more quiet one, Meg’s next big outing happens when she discovers (with her abnormally good magical sight) that a man has marked his own wife and daughter as sacrifices to a devil. Meg intervenes despite Faust insisting she not stick her nose into anything devil related (because it’s that dangerous), and while Faust does have to save her at the last minute, her actions kept the intended sacrifices safe.

Following that, we have what I consider to be a three-part story (though it’s presented as one and a two-parter) that raises the stakes and serves as the climax of the show. All the plots in the arc have to do with magical corruption. Essentially, in this setting, magical energy starts to warp things horribly when it builds up too much, and this magic super cancer is incurable past a certain stage. Bad magic flow is also implicated in climate change, but suffice to say that it hits things great and small.

A great oak that has watched over Meg’s town for centuries is the first victim. It’s too far gone to be saved, but Meg manages to talk with the spirit of the tree, who takes the form of a cute girl and seems to really love the town she’s watched over. Inori (who is helping for this bit) suggests they can help her pass on before burning the tree down, but it’s still a little sad. When the day comes, however… the spirit isn’t doing so well.

The tree also starts running wild, destroying the best laid plans of top-tier witches. Meg, however, dives in and activates a spell rubric right at the end. However, instead of turning the tree’s mana to flame, it bleeds off the excess by reincarnating the oak into a cherry blossom tree of the same size and clean health (the spirit had wished to be a showier tree in its next go around).

This leads to the second episode of the magic overload triad: Meg got her leg royally messed up, and is taken to a city called Aquamarine where a special doctor can heal her. Once there, she finds that the reason is that the doctor known as the Sage of Life has been obsessively researching a cure for magic poisoning (having lost his wife to it), and Meg’s reincarnation magic is the first thing that even resembles a successful treatment. They spend a lot of time doing clinical trials and working on the theory, until a human patient slipping into a critical state prompts them to test Meg’s breakthrough. With the last key – powerful emotion – in place, she’s able to save the kid at the cost of giving him a new pair of cat ears.

I don’t know how the magic phial Meg has, which converts tears into magic tear beads, works, but if proximity isn’t an issue I don’t think there’s a better way to count to a thousand than pioneering a new life-saving treatment.

Before Meg can go home, though, environmental magic badness threatens the city with a mega-tsunami. Meg uses what she’s learned, and a legacy left behind by an ancient witch who saved the city from a similar disaster in the distant past, to protect the city and save the lives of everybody she spent the better part of two episodes (or more – the survivors of the devil ritual moved here) getting to know.

And if that feels like a hell of a note to go out on, it would be, but the show has one more episode to set up where the story would go from here. Meg meets (properly; they crossed paths earlier for a couple lines) Faust’s former apprentice and another of the big seven, the Witch of Disaster. From this encounter, Meg learns that the incident that orphaned her, from which Faust saved and adopted her, was caused by said Witch of Disaster, seeking revenge against mortals. Meg, in fact, may be one of if not the only survivor of an entire country that was wiped off the map.

Her feelings on this are… beautifully complicated. She has no memory of her homeland or birth parents, and considers Faust and even the Witch of Disaster to be her real relatives. But, at the same time, she does want to reckon with her past. Thus, we learn that Meg will be taking a journey, with the magic council not just approving her to go into the exclusion zone of her fallen homeland, but tasking her with exploring and studying other cases of magical taint all over the world.

Even Faust, normally a more stern mentor, sees Meg off with a big damn hug as she goes to learn, help people, and collect tears on a new globe-trotting adventure

The end.

Once Upon a Witch’s Death is a solid show. It’s evocative of several others, but I actually don’t want to name them since I think this show should – and can – stand on its own without being propped up or chopped down by comparisons.

Meg is a fun character. She’s consistent, strong at heart, but young and silly and liable to make mistakes. Most of the people she interacts with are at least a little interesting, but even the more important ones tend to get a single note that they play well rather than actual depth; that’s reserved for Meg and, to a lesser degree, Faust.

The world is built pretty well, but at times it seems odd. We have a bunch of fictional countries and cities, but then Germany is just name dropped. We really have no idea where this is taking place, though somewhere Europe-ish is a fairly safe bet. Is the town of Lapis in England? Who knows, who cares. As such, we don’t see too much of the integration between magic and the modern world. Meg has a smartphone, but most of the scenes she interacts with are vaguely something post-industrial, not really grounded to the modern period.

The art is very pretty at times, but I’m also fairly sure that the studio was doing the best they could with a limited budget, as we don’t put on too many actually impressive displays of magic. And, of course, the story is an odd one, being this meandering anthology but also having a solid and well-defined backbone.

For me, Once Upon a Witch’s Death is worth a B. It’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it’s a solid outing that I can recommend without much in the way of reservation.