Wicca is a modern pagan witchcraft religion that is based on ancient European traditions. It is a spiritual path that seeks to live in harmony with nature and respect the balance of the natural world. Wiccans believe in a divine power that is present in all things, and they strive to connect with this power through rituals, spells, and other magical practices. Wiccans celebrate the cycles of the natural world, particularly the phases of the moon and the changing seasons. They believe in the concept of karma, the idea that the energy a person puts out into the world will come back to them. Therefore, they strive to live in a way that is positive and in alignment with their values.
Cgi Director: Eiji Inomoto
I ll also note that a frustrating amount of the action in the final episodes occurs inside a sort of secondary reality, like the imaginary world you see in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya , in which the consequences of the battles occurring in this realm don t exactly have much bearing on what actually happens in the physical world, and the fact that the characters are apparently amazing at performing mass memory charms a la Harry Potter on the non-witches in the town adds to this. Witch Craft Works is, again, something of an acid trip of an anime series with a bizarrely kooky ED and a hint of interesting gender politics thrown in, but when the trip s over, you feel hungover, groggy, and a bit like you might just have wasted your time.
Therefore, they strive to live in a way that is positive and in alignment with their values. Wiccans worship a variety of gods and goddesses, which they see as different aspects of the divine. Some Wiccans may choose to follow a specific deity or pantheon, while others may have a more personalized understanding of the divine.
Witch Craft Works
Honoka Takamiya sits next to his high school's "Princess," the exceptionally intelligent but seemingly very aloof Ayaka Kagari, and he doesn't know her at all: anybody who gets anywhere near her gets beaten up by her rather overprotective "fan club." One day, he's alerted to something he never would have guessed at: witches exist, there's more than one type of them, and some of them aren't the nicest people in the world. He's attacked by a group who call themselves the "Tower Witches," only to be saved by a "Workshop Witch". who just happens to be none other than the school princess.
Out of a sense of debt to her, Honoka decides to ask her to let him become her apprentice. She agrees, to his surprise, bringing on the ire of the fan club and, more dangerously, dragging him into a conflict between the different guilds of witches. Not to mention that the two are in fact more connected than they'd thought: it turns out that their mothers were once lovers, plus, it turns out that the reason that Honoka's been targeted by the Tower Witches in the first place is that his body is home to a mysterious, disembodied entity called "Evermillion" that, under the right circumstances, can grant untold power; naturally, people are after him because of this.
Review
I've said this before ad nauseum, but Winter 2014 was a pretty awful anime season. There were three series I really, really liked, and then a lot of shows that, more than just being mediocre or forgettable to me, were just outright crappy: just going from my reviews alone, we got Recently, my sister is unusual, The Pilot's Love Song, Magical Warfare, and one of the most infamously screwed up adaptations of all time. This might have been why I stuck around and watched Witch Craft Works through to the end, since it was watchable by comparison: it had some pretty great art, animation, and costume design as a big selling point, and there was some potential for its handling of gender roles to make this into more than your run-of-the-mill "magic academy with love triangle elements" show. But in the end, I don't think it lived up to that potential. The relationship between the main characters wasn't compelling to me, and there were too many secondary witches and bit players and too little thought put into why these people would all be fighting over the "power" inside Honoka for this to really be that interesting.
According to this show's Wikipedia page, the first volume of the manga has a little blurb saying that our main character, Honoka, was originally written to be a girl, hence why he ended up having the name he did (Love Live! crossover time. go!) Knowing this, I'm really, really torn on how I feel. On the one hand, I'm always looking for more same-sex couples in anime (and I always squee a little bit at cute yuri series), and knowing that the series was "straight-washed" kind of makes me depressed. Not to mention, an important plot point is that the two main characters' mothers were madly in love at one point but gave up on this because "two women can't get married in Japan," and so they married men and promised that if they had a son and daughter, they would get married to "make up" for never being able to be together. This is probably honestly one of the best reasons to legalize gay marriage that I've ever come across: if they'd just been able to live together and not been pressured out of it, whatever children they'd had would never have been dragged into this mess. But honestly, if Honoka had still originally been written as a girl, that would add some poignancy to the story, since if the two of them did get together they'd be able to live in the way that their mothers never got to; it's worth noting, also, that you never do meet either of their fathers, and the near-absence of male characters aside from the re-gendered Honoka is another hallmark of yuri anime, something that makes the mangaka's blurb easy to believe. On the other hand, given that Ayaka directly refers to Honoka as her "princess" a few times, regardless of gender, there's some potential for this series to run away with a Steven Universe-like situation where a male character's femininity and occupying a traditionally female role doesn't necessarily make him any less worthwhile of a person, and indeed, the show goes to some length to point out that Honoka, being shorter and more lightly built than most of his female classmates, is hardly a "manly" person.
Of course, the series takes the cheap route and has Honoka be insecure of his masculinity, after all. It doesn't help the show's case that basically all of the other girls besides Ayaka beat him up and push him around for no good reason and fall straight into the horridly misogynistic trope of "irrationally angry girls victimizing helpless effeminate boys;" a lot of the show ends up being cringey, because of this. While Ayaka herself never bullies Honoka, her mother Kazane, the school chairwoman (who does have some adorably Sailor Uranus-esque moments with Honoka's own mother, in flashbacks) is very short tempered and perfectly willing to hurt him if it means getting access to his powers, while his younger sister Kasumi pushes him around, a lot, and we quickly learn that she has both a very strong brother complex and the angriest of angry tsundere personalities. Not to mention, Kasumi treats Ayaka as crappily as she does Honoka, making this into an especially painful love triangle to have to deal with. Honestly, most of the side characters in this show are pretty hard to take, and the fan club's behavior takes the cake for cringe-worthiness: even looking past the patronizing, sexist implications of the group trying to protect their princess' "purity," physically assaulting literally anybody who as much as looks at her is just screwed up. So ultimately, this show's gender politics aren't as interesting or as progressive as I'd hoped, plus a lot of the character interactions draw straight from the playbook of harem-comedy tropes and don't develop much beyond that. In fact, both Honoka and Ayaka are pretty badly developed characters, and that unfortunately may stem largely from a plot point that they knew each other at one point but lost all of their memories of this; it's as if Mythos from Princess Tutu, whose role in the show centers around his lost emotions and memories, were at the center of the story without Ahiru and Fakir being around to give the show some personality. Ayaka, also, falls into the archetype of apparently aloof, stoic girls along the lines of Hitagi Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari, who at least had the advantage of also being amusingly snarky, whereas Ayaka is simply said to have "low social IQ" as an explanation for being so apparently emotionless, and while we learn that she's protective of Honoka, I don't really feel like I have that much else to say about her.
So character-wise, Witch Craft Works is something of a mess and a missed opportunity. There are a lot of side players in the series , and if there's something to be said for the various secondary witches, it's that the mangaka clearly had fun with the costume design. While the pointed hats, capes, and broomsticks do make them recognizable as Western "Witches" in the sense of the 1933 Wizard of Oz movie, the witches from the different "guilds" all wear different colors, with the Tower Witches (the nominal "bad guys") in particular being decked out in hats and capes with frills and fur linings and, in some cases, animal heads (who appear to somehow be enchanted, alive, and sentient). While I think it's a bit boring that you can tell that everybody's just wearing their school uniforms underneath everything (I don't think you once see a single character out of their school uniform), that's a minor complaint; overall, it's a beautifully animated and gorgeously drawn show, with some bizarre touches like the witches' familiars, which tend to resemble monstrous teddy bears or rabbits (with crowns, no less) that seem like something out of a Tim Burton-inspired acid trip. I do have to say that I didn't care much for either the OP or the in-show music, but the ED sequence is. worth a watch for the "what the hell did I just watch" factor, if nothing else, not to mention it's a good run-through of the various torture devices used on Medieval "witches" if you find that weird bit of history interesting. But anyway, I'll stand by my point that the visuals in this show are something like an acid trip in that they don't necessarily add up to accompany something that really means anything. It's marvelously weird and eye-catching, but kind of empty, too.
And the actual plot of Witch Craft Works is more-or-less a two-way conflict between the aforementioned "Tower Witches" and Ayaka's "Workship Witches" who both desire the very awkwardly phrased "white stuff" inside Honoka, that "white stuff" being the power of the entity known as "Evermillion," who manifests as a Mamiko Noto-voiced female spirit, on occasion. Of course, this fast-paced show has a habit of different factions breaking apart and forming on a whim, with these alliances having far more to do with personal feelings than anything; Ayaka and some of the Tower Witches do work together, a few times, to stop Kazane from hurting Honoka (he really can't catch a break, can he). I know that sometimes I can be guilty of spacing out on the politics of a show when I'm starting to lose interest in it, but I do promise that I was trying my hardest to follow the rhyme or reason to any of this, and I struggled hard to really follow it or care, most of the time: the fact that I absolutely hated Kasumi and disliked most of the side characters about as much didn't help, but moreso, the various people fighting over "Evermillion" simply seemed like another simplistic treasure hunt, since it wasn't clear to me what significance Evermillion really had besides being an especially strong power source. I'll also note that a frustrating amount of the action in the final episodes occurs inside a sort of secondary reality, like the imaginary world you see in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, in which the consequences of the battles occurring in this realm don't exactly have much bearing on what actually happens in the physical world, and the fact that the characters are apparently amazing at performing mass memory charms a la Harry Potter on the non-witches in the town adds to this. Basically, I finished the show feeling that a lot of what had happened was inconsequential: Honoka and Ayaka don't develop as characters, it doesn't really seem to matter why any of these people were fighting each other to gain Evermillion, and the universe seems to return to the status quo after the final battle (at least the final battle of this arc).
So in the end, Witch Craft Works was a pretty disappointing show for me. When I first started writing this review, I was ready to dismiss this as just being generic magic-academy harem schlock with a shiny veneer, since I remember feeling miffed when I finished the show, but in truth, there were some interesting character dynamics here and I was frustrated because the show just didn't really do anything with them. Witch Craft Works is, again, something of an acid trip of an anime series with a bizarrely kooky ED and a hint of interesting gender politics thrown in, but when the trip's over, you feel hungover, groggy, and a bit like you might just have wasted your time.
It's not a completely terrible show but it's pretty animation with a weak script, in the end. — Nicoletta Christina Browne
Recommended Audience: The characters searching for "the white stuff" is obviously an innuendo, and there's some mild fanservice in the form of Honoka imagining Ayaka in a nurse outfit, but it's a pretty tame show. There's a lot of fighting and destruction, but very few people (if any) are actually killed as a result of this.
Wicca places a strong emphasis on individual spiritual experience and personal autonomy, so beliefs and practices can vary widely among practitioners. One of the central principles of Wiccan belief is the Wiccan Rede, which states, "An' it harm none, do what ye will." This means that Wiccans are encouraged to act in a way that does no harm to others or to themselves. They believe in the power of intention and the responsibility that comes with it. Wiccans also believe in the practice of magic, which they see as a way to harness and direct natural energies to achieve their goals. Magic is not seen as supernatural or miraculous, but rather as a natural part of the world that can be understood and worked with. Wiccans may use spells, rituals, visualization, and other techniques to manifest their intentions. Overall, understanding Wiccan beliefs requires an open mind and a willingness to explore alternative spiritual practices. Wiccans value the Earth and its natural cycles, individual autonomy, and the power of magic as a tool for personal growth and transformation. By embracing these beliefs, Wiccans strive to live in harmony with themselves, others, and the world around them..
Reviews for "Wiccan Beliefs and Witchcraft: Understanding the Connection"
1. John - 2/5 - I found "Understanding Wiccan Beliefs" to be extremely repetitive and lacking in depth. It seemed like the author was merely regurgitating common knowledge about Wicca without offering any new insights or perspectives. The book also failed to provide any practical advice or guidance, leaving me feeling disappointed and unfulfilled. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a comprehensive understanding of Wicca.
2. Sarah - 1/5 - As someone who is new to Wiccan beliefs, I was hoping that "Understanding Wiccan Beliefs" would provide a clear and concise introduction to the subject. However, I found the book to be confusing and poorly organized. The author jumped from one topic to another without any clear structure or progression. Additionally, the information provided was generic and lacked depth. I was left feeling frustrated and no more knowledgeable about Wicca than before I read the book.
3. Robert - 2/5 - "Understanding Wiccan Beliefs" fell short of my expectations. The book lacked a coherent narrative and instead presented a hodgepodge of information without any clear focus. Additionally, I found the writing style to be dry and unengaging, making it difficult to stay interested in the subject matter. While I appreciate the author's effort to cover a broad range of Wiccan beliefs, I feel that the book would have benefitted from a more focused and compelling approach.
4. Emily - 1/5 - I found "Understanding Wiccan Beliefs" to be overly simplistic and lacking in depth. The author presented Wicca as a superficial and whimsical belief system, failing to acknowledge its rich history and philosophical underpinnings. I was disappointed by the book's lack of nuance and critical analysis. It felt more like a shallow introduction to Wicca rather than a comprehensive exploration of its beliefs and practices. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone seeking a thorough understanding of Wicca.