A Witch’s Love at the End of the World Vol 1 Review

A Witch’s Love at the End of the World is an exciting and magical yuri-romance manga, by Kujira. It follows a pair of young ladies who have a little more on their plates then your standard school-girl crushes or teenage angst. These girls are witches and there are dark forces at play in their world that may threaten the fate of humanity!

Synopsis:

For many years, witches were persecuted and killed by fearful humans who blamed them for phenomena that they didn’t understand. Some witches managed to survive by secretly pledging their services to people in positions of power. They helped their countries to thrive from the shadows and did all of their work and training in secret, leading the general population to believe that they had died out. Alice is a young witch who is attending a secret school where she is learning to grow her powers and hone her skills, all in preparation for the day when witches will finally have the opportunity to take their revenge on humanity for all of the wrongs that their people have suffered. But Mari, a transfer student who was born of a union between a witch and a human and who only recently discovered that she has powers, keeps insisting that witches should try to live in harmony with humans. Most of their classmates are disdainful of Mari’s naiveté and annoyed with her lack of knowledge – and Alice is inclined to agree with them. That is, until Alice is assigned to tutor Mari and the two of them are forced to spend a lot of time together. It isn’t long before the aloof and cynical Alice finds herself being drawn to Mari’s warmth and optimism, but is she willing to accept the consequences of what will come of allowing her feelings for Mari to grow?

Review:

On the surface, A Witch’s Love at the End of the World has a lot of typical yuri elements; it’s set in an all-girls school and our main couple is composed of a serious and outwardly cold girl from a respected lineage and an outsider whose cheerfulness and openness melts the other girl’s frozen heart. Alice even has an entourage of lackey’s who become jealous of all of the time that Alice is spending with Mari and try to sabotage and bully her. Pretty standard stuff.

Even still, I wouldn’t call this fantasy manga a run-of-the-mill yuri romance. The school the girls attend is training them in hopes that they’ll someday be able to wage war on humanity and crush them for the wrongs perpetrated by their ancestors, and that’s just the start of the dark secrets being concealed at this academy. Alice has readily accepted that revenge is the natural course of action for witches to take, but Mari has grown up amongst humans and, while she knows from first-hand experience how terrified magic makes regular people, she still believes that there is a better way and that humans and witches could one day live in peace. While Alice is drawn to both Mari’s kindness and extraordinary natural talents, she doesn’t seem ready to reject the mantras that have been drilled into her since childhood. There’s one rule, in particular, that she holds very close to her heart: A witch must never fall in love. Why? Because when a witch falls in love, she loses her magic.

Well, that certainly throws a wrench into things!

So, Alice is determined to suppress her feelings and, with all of the dangers that keep cropping up, that just might be the only hope she and Mari have of surviving. But does this rule apply to Mari as well, given that she is half-human and seems to possess powers much more powerful then the rest of her classmates? We’ll have to wait and see since, while she is grateful for how Alice has accepted her and helped her to adjust to her new life, she doesn’t seem to be as aware of her feelings for the other girl as Alice is.

All and all, I found this to be an intriguing start to what is shaping up to be a thrilling manga series. Mari and Alice are cute together and the threat of losing their magic if they fall in love adds some very high stakes to their romance. Meanwhile, the shenanigans going on at the school don’t exactly bode well for the eventual fate of humanity and I’m very excited to discover if the witches ever succeed in getting their revenge, or if the girls can manage to pave a path to a brighter future. Yuri fans looking for a series full of fantastical adventure should give this manga a try.

Final Score: 7.5 out of 10.

What did you think of this manga? Let me know in the comments!

For more information on this series, visit Yen Press’ website.


Be sure to check out some of my other recent yuri reviews:

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