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This Week in Anime
Don't Sleep on The Ancient Magus' Bride OVAs

by Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree,

The Ancient Magus' Bride season 2 is still a ways off, but there are OVAs to tide us over. Nick and Steve are here to tell you why you shouldn't overlook these side story episodes.

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Steve
Nick, I have a very important announcement for all of the ravenous bone daddy lovers out there chomping at the bit for season 2 of The Ancient Magus' Bride:

However, in the meantime, why not tide yourself over with a little OVA aperitif?
Nick
Finally. Been waiting for months to have all three of these bad boys up for streaming.

Note: "bad boys" means these episodes. Spriggan's hounds are certified good boys, as are all dogs in this show.
Indeed. Man's, fae's, and skeleton's best friend.
But yes, as a way to both herald the AMB anime's return and hold us over until the new season starts, we've got The Boy from the West and the Knight of the Blue Storm: a side story that technically takes place after season one, but could just as easily have been one of the numerous adventures Chise and her menagerie of mystical companions went on during that run.
Placement-wise, it is weird to have a three-ep OVA spread over a year—especially this close to the second season—but I appreciated it a lot once I started watching it. The fact is, it's been a pretty long time since the first season ended, and having this short reintroduction into Chise and Elias' story helped reacquaint me with the series and why I liked it in the first place.
It is also a story that would have played out differently before season one's last arc, at least on Chise's side. It's not remarked on, but her character has a different texture after all that stuff with Joseph. For one, she's got a cool new hand:
And a forthcoming semester to look forward to at magic school! A school that not only educates on the creatures and phenomena that drift betwixt worlds but also regularly publishes its own admissions catalog.
It's my understanding that British schools are required to have stuffy uniforms by decree of the royal family. It's in the same proclamation that disallows them from seasoning their food or seeing unfiltered sunlight for more than 30% of the year.
Pictured: life in the UK.
That is my one quibble with AMB's worldbuilding. While I adore the amount of research and imagination Yamazaki puts into Celtic folklore and pagan practices, there's undeniably deceitful British propaganda in here. UK meat pies haven't looked this appetizing since before the Norman conquest.
I'll allow Magus' Bride a few creative liberties. I mean, the rest of the setting is wondrous enough that I can forgive misdirections like school kids calling the sport "soccer" instead of football. Or like the absence of parliamentary representatives freaking out over photoshopped screencaps of Lily from Zombie Land Saga.
I can turn the other cheek since part of the moral of this story is that getting out of London is always a good idea.
I also won't turn my nose up at more DIY propaganda. Every anime could use a treehouse made by huge nerds.
So yeah, while Chise and Elias play a significant part in this story, the central character is right there in the title. Our boy from the west is Gabriel, a nerdy kid who's lonely after having to move out of that cluttered dump of a city so its poisonous air would stop worsening his asthma.
And to solve his lack of friends problem, he does what any other boy his age would do: he goes into the woods, finds some cool rocks, and brings one home with him. People drift apart, but geodes are forever.
Hey, it's how I'm making friends in Fire Emblem Engage, and just like in that game, said cool rock brings a white-haired anime character into his home.

Though this kid doesn't look nearly as strong as my punch daughter, Framme.
This mysterious young lad can't do much except fondle his horn and sap the life energy out of everything he touches. But Gabriel is easy to please, and he knows the quickest way to bond with somebody is to roleplay with your Lord of the Rings action figures. That's true no matter what plane of existence you come from.
Unfortunately, we, the audience, know that communing with the fae nearly always leads to discord, intentional or otherwise. Gabe doesn't even know the first rule of the supernatural is that you don't give them your name., and you certainly don't give them names of their own.
Gotta give him credit for how he negotiated his way down to Evan, though. That was a pro move.
Look, there are worse bands a moody teenager could try to name you after. If anything, he's lucky this wasn't the adventures of Gabe and Evan Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way.
Speaking of stuff out of edgy fanfiction, the rest of the Wild Hunt is handling the separation of one of their own as spookily as they can:

I love that while Gabe is busy with his coming-of-age narrative, there's a whole other magical calamity going on off-screen. Like, sorry, forest dwellers, but you'll have to deal with the life-stealing horsemen running roughshod through your home while this kid learns an important lesson about family.
That's a big part of why I love this series. It's so good at marrying supernatural and personal conflicts in ways that don't belittle either of those aspects. Plus, at the same time, Chise and Elias also have their hands full with an even greater calamity.
Poor Silky is just desperate to get this beast out of her hearth and to keep it from messing with the floors.
I don't know what the opposite of "vibing" is, but it's whatever this horse is doing in this living room.
The only one allowed to vibe here is Chise whenever Elias thinks she's sick.
Let her be. She's cozymaxing.

Though, with all seriousness, my favorite scene in this entire OVA is her fist-bumping a wooly bug.
I love how casual Chise is now with all the weird little gremlins and ghoulies that she lives around. No need for explanations about who all these weirdos are because so long as you handle them with respect, they're all friend-shaped.
And some are shaped more than others.
Look, we had to throw in something for the horny viewers since there are no scenes of Chise snuggling with Elias as a formless aberration against all known human and fairy decency. So Titania's tittyanias will have to do.
Outside of suffering from a minor Wild Hunt-induced cold, Chise takes it easy in this arc, and we can all agree she's earned it. But that makes Gabriel our relief pitcher for suffering, so he's the one who ends up brushing against the darker side of the other side.
I actually really like that move since it shows us how much Chise has changed from the dead-eyed girl who would throw herself into danger the moment self-sacrifice was an option. Everything that happened at the end of season one didn't magically fix all her trauma, but she's become a confidant for other people battling their magically-enhanced angst.
Exactly! The parallels between her and Gabriel are apparent enough to make the connection immediately, and the narrative trusts the audience enough to pick up on that themselves. It also sets up the eventual resolution, where Chise helps pull someone out of an all-too-familiar spiral into themselves. That's a very satisfying way to exhibit some of her growth in this familiar setting before she ships off to school.
Though Gabe is trying more for a full-on escape into fantasy rather than Chise's indirect suicide approach. But the desire to escape from one's problems is the same, and Gabe finds the offer of riding off into the night and away from all his baggage very appealing.

Flying unfettered through a moonlit sky does look pretty sweet; not going to lie. Just a shame about the self-negation part. This also leads to my second favorite scene in the OVA.

Chise rebuts him with words here, but I like to imagine a version of the scene where she only stares daggers into Elias, and he relents just as quickly. They've come so far.
Elias has grown a lot over the series, but there are still moments where Chise has to metaphorically whap him with a rolled-up newspaper.
You could say he's learned a lot about seeing eye-to-eye with others. Including hell horses.
But I appreciate that lingering part of their relationship, too. They're both in healthier spots and have graduated to equal partners in their little magical household. Still, old habits die hard, and maintaining such a fundamentally messy connection requires vigilant maintenance. Anything promising otherwise probably doesn't have your best interests at heart.

Metaphorically, the fae characters in Magus' Bride, despite their inhumanity, tend to represent these unhealthy attachments. They're cautionary tales, much like many folk stories they originated from. But because Magus' Bride is also about how people can grow and change, you have moments where a person can help someone inhuman and where someone inhuman can do the right thing for a person.
The fae are wild, unknowable, and mischievous but also just enough like us that you can foster a connection under the right circumstances. There's a reason it's AMB canon that every single cat in the world is technically fae.
Drops a dead deer on your doorstep, refuses to elaborate.
I also like that, in the end, all the problems that made Gabe long for escape are still there. He's still got asthma as a barrier between him and any potential friends. His parents are still a little overbearing, and the move still stresses them out. But he knows he'd rather live with those things than lose the good that comes from living as himself, so all that's left is to step forward.
It's a wonderfully nuanced yet optimistic ending to a nice trio of episodes! I'm presuming you won't need to have seen any of this to start season 2. Still, for all the reasons we've already mentioned, I think it's a great little primer to whet your appetite for more magical misadventures and down-to-earth musings on depression.
It's certainly got me chomping at the bit for next season. AMB is a wonderful series in either form and having some anime-only material that's still in line with the strengths and defining themes of the original is a nice treat. So bring on season two, so we can get the good kind of problematic magic school experience.

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