Champignon Witch

Episodes 1-3

It is a persistent myth that fairy tales are happy. We can probably blame Walt Disney and Wilhelm Grimm in equal measure for that; the latter started cleaning up oral folktales for children, and the former continued that work. But most fairy tales are dark, sad, and upsetting. They're warnings and explanations – stay out of the woods, or the witch will eat you, stay on the path, or the wolf will get you. Be careful what you wish for lest it come true.

Although Tachibana Higuchi isn't retelling any specific fairy tale listed in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, Champignon Witch owes a lot to the fairy tale canon. Luna, the eponymous mushroom witch (“champignon” is French for “mushroom”), seems to carry the curse of the Unkind Girl from ATU480, best known as either “Frau Holle” or “Diamonds and Toads;” based on their “kindness,” two girls are either blessed or cursed, with the unkind girl damned to have frogs and poisonous snakes leap from her mouth every time she opens it. Luna may not bear that burden, but wherever she walks, poisonous mushrooms grow, and her skin carries their taint so that anyone who touches her sickens. In both the ending theme and the second episode, she wears a red-hooded cloak, evoking another fairy-tale girl punished for perceived transgressions: Little Red Riding Hood. And across all three of these opening episodes, Luna behaves in a way that can be seen as selfish – first she endangers Henri's life by continually drawing soul portraits of him and then the world entire by refusing to relinquish the boy she found floating in the river.

It's not hard to see why she'd do these things. Luna is a profoundly lonely young woman – she can't really interact with anybody human because of the danger to them, and she spends most of her time with Merino and Minos, her animal companions. If she's lucky, Claude, the Bird Witch's nearly-human crow familiar, comes to visit, but it looks like that doesn't happen often. When she first draws Henri after seeing him in town, his joy at finding his soul able to meet and touch her is a magical experience in many ways. When she has to give him up for his own good, it's heart-shattering. So when the boy appears in the river, dying, to Luna, it looks like a second chance. She saves him; shouldn't she get to keep him?

And then there's the fact that when the other dark witches come to take her to task for her actions, the Water Witch reveals that Luna was like the boy: a cursed youngling. According to Claude, the seeds of the world's destruction will grow in the boy. If Luna was once like that as well, it seems likely that her present powers as the Champignon Witch came from her cursed status. She can still destroy people, but no longer the world, by which logic it seems likely that the boy can also be defanged. Maybe the other witches just aren't willing to risk it; they don't seem to know about Luna's “master,” a large mushroom god of some sort. But maybe, just maybe, if Luna can convince them, she can do the same for this boy.

I said in the Preview Guide that this feels a little like Tachibana's previous series, Gakuen Alice, if the heroine, Mikan, were missing. Mikan changed the world of that series because she wasn't supposed to be there, and Alice forced change to a degree. But that character isn't here this time, at least not in these first three episodes, and that gives Champignon Witch a much sadder tone. It's probably too early to analyze that further because the first two episodes feel like the prologue to the rest of the series, something I'll be able to better assess as the story unfolds or my copies of the manga (it's out in French!) arrive. But there's an underlying sadness to this that aligns with many fairy tales that center on isolation, like “Maid Maleen” or “Sleeping Beauty.” (Although let's be honest, the Italian version of that is basically horror.) There's no guarantee that this will have a happy ending, but it should be an interesting path to follow through the woods nonetheless.

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Champignon Witch is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.