Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina

 What started as a slice-of-life anime revealed its true color, and boy, the anime doesn’t hold back from showing its gruesome side. 

Note: The following contains spoilers for Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina season 1

The most unpredictable anime of 2020 has to be Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina and, there is a reason legit for that.

From the very first episode, we meet the witch-in-training Elaina, who resembles Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service, but soon enough, the narrative throws the slice-of-life genre out of the window, like it never existed in the first place.

Episode 9 of Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina shifted its narrative from joyous slice-of-life series to a gore and more brute action anime in just nine episodes. Many believe that this forceful shift in the narrative was unnecessary. However, considering the series’s structure, many openings and routes are used to merge two different atmospheres in a single string. 

Fans were shocked to see how Jougi Shiraishi, author of Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina, hinted that the series was dark and twisted from the start. Poor slice-of-life viewers never knew what resided on the other side of the road. 

The first episode was just about Elaina training to become a real witch and travel around the world to gain experience, which was the central premise of the anime, but after the cannibalistic flower field arc in episode three, things started getting serious as the cute series was getting darker by every minute. What surprised the Elaina fandom was the goriest episode nine, which was so disturbing that half the fandom dropped the series after that. 

However, fans should have guessed that anime is no longer a tedious medium as, over the years, it managed to surprise fans with twisted and cruel episodes within the slice-of-life genre. 

Shows like School Days, Higurashi When They Cry start as innocent, but as the story moves toward new arcs, the characters lose their minds and often commit gruesome crimes to justify their goals and feed their hunger. This gruesome method was used in the Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina that caught the anime community off guard.

Another reason why episode 9 was a reality checker is the mixing of realism in the fantasy environment, which forces the characters to make real-life decisions that manifest reality into the two-dimensional world.

The primary purpose of such a shift is for the pure act of introducing fans to realism and how realistic situations can force even the like-minded fictional character to commit crime, murder, and bullying in the name of realism.

Episodic storytelling is a form of art that transcends the word fictional and demands the characters, viewers, and creators to do something memorable and exciting even if they had to sacrifice the whole genre for it. Thanks to this shift, Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina gained even more fans who never touched the series before. Anime creators and mature audiences, including the millennials, praise the anime for breaking the cycle of repetition and dull magic cliche that contributes nothing but cuteness and charm to a travel-based anime show.

Episodic storytelling does not put a character in front of every situation like in the shonen series, where the main characters deal with everything on their own. Instead, the Episodic storytelling forces the protagonist to be another standby character who just witnessed the events happening around him without directly participating in them.

Episodic storytelling is an inspiration for other flat-face anime shows where the character follows a simple script and acts accordingly to it without showing any realism. Even Aristotle describes tragedy as the highest form of literary art. The creators of Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina took the quote by heart by putting Elaina as a bystander who witnesses the good, the bad, and the ugly of this world without changing anything in it.

Conclusion

No matter how bad it may seem but Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina caught everyone’s attention in the anime community. Call it a marketing gimmick or an actual creative writing process. The anime proved itself that genre-bending is a thing, and it can be used to change the narrative of any show at any point in the story. The anime series is getting noticed and among the fall anime 2020 category list, Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina has finally reached its spot reserved.

I’m Edward Lewis. I’m an art director living in 737 Northcrest Shopping Center, Fort Wayne, IN 46805, United States. I am a fan of photography, technology, and design . I’m also Online Marketing Expert with 3 years of extensive and rich experience of Marketing through Social Networking Platforms.

Source : The Journey of Elaina