Champignon Witch – Episode 1

Content consideration: Fantasy metaphors of marginalization and ostracization.

What’s it about? Once upon a time, there lived a quiet young witch who loved making medicines and reading books. However, the townsfolk all feared her due to the poisonous mushrooms that often grew in the places she touched. Still, the young witch longed for human connection…and after a simple spell goes awry, her wish may finally be heard.

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The first two episodes of Champignon Witch are up on Crunchyroll, but due to time constraints I’m only reviewing the first. Blame the plague for knocking out two staffers and putting me in a pinch-hit reviewer position.

For the record, I do plan to watch the second episode as soon as I’m able, because this is a lovely, charming, quietly infuriating shojo premiere with a strong eye for scene composition and a good ear for music. I was immediately taken by its fairy tale tone, so I hope to spend more time with it… assuming I don’t throw my remote through my TV at the utter unfairness of this world, anyway.

Despite its unhurried pace and touches of whimsy, Champignon Witch is very much a story about social ostracization and how cultural norms and surface-level assumptions can unfairly relegate people to outsider status.

Our mushroom mage Luna is a kind, patient girl who enjoys making medicine and reading books with her animal-spirit friends. She’s also completely cut off from other humans because her body absorbs pollution (including curses and general “bad vibes”) and converts it into literal poison. Her skin is toxic (a la Code: Realize) and mushrooms have a tendency to spring up on anything she touches.

To make matters worse, the kingdom where she lives has branded all witches loyal to the throne as “white witches” and all those disloyal as “black witches,” leading to witch hunts and executions. And you’ll never guess which side of the divide Luna falls on.

Our poisonous protagonist doesn’t map 1-to-1 to any real-world marginalized community. Her condition comes closest to someone with a chronic infectious illness, but it’s not exactly that. As with most fantasy metaphors, this comes with the usual troubling implications about oppressed people being inherently dangerous, and is certainly something to keep an eye on in future episodes.

That said, Champignon Witch does a better job than most because it doesn’t try to draw a straight line from witches to any real-world group of people, meaning that Luna can resonate without having to represent. It also allows the story to touch on broader concepts, like microaggressions (even the people who are friendly with her treat her like an outsider) or how some people can “pass” while others cannot (there’s a half-spirit bookseller who always appears in human form to avoid the townsfolk’s suspicions), and how that can create hierarchies and prejudices (see below image).

One of this premiere’s surprisingly effective tools is its narrator, a soothing female voice who provides exposition in a way I’d normally find awkward, but in this case helps to establish the fairy tale-like tone while fleshing out the world. In a unique twist, she’s also an unreliable narrator, explaining in one breath how the townsfolk treat Luna like dirt and then following it up with “but that’s just how it is, and they’re not actively murdering her, so all is well.”

All is very clearly not well—Luna’s hat grows thorns when she hears the townsfolk talk about her, she’s hiding from the nation’s authorities, and she’s so desperate for human connection that she’s sketching cute boys who briefly come to life with magic and dance with her. It’s honestly pretty incredible how this premiere manages to be so enchanting and so infuriating and so heartbreaking all at once.

The good news is that the premiere seems to know its world is broken, based on the way it juxtaposes what we see and what the narrator tells us. What’s less clear is where we go from here. The episode ends implying Luna might have a real-life friendship (possibly romance) in her future, but the cover art and ending theme feature a child we haven’t met yet—and the local Romeo is nowhere in sight. I suspect we’re about to get something a lot more complicated than a witch-meets-boy love story.

How Champignon Witch balances its disparate elements and handles its big-picture themes will likely determine its staying power. Still, we’re off to a compelling start, and with such a lovingly crafted production, I’ll certainly be sticking around for the first three episodes.