Tricks Dedicated to Witches: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes

Manga Details

• Author: Watanabe, Shizumu (Wah-tah-nah-beh, Shee-zuh-muh)
  • assistant for
    • Akiko Higashimura (Princess Jellyfish, MANY OTHER SERIES)
      • Apparently this dude has a shitload of assistants as many as 36 at once
  • Notable assistants:
    • Yousuke Kaneda (Boarding School Juliet)
  • Notable sibling???
    • Ryousuke Asakura (Val x Love, Shikisaki Shimai wa Abakaretai)
      • Younger brother, relation kept a secret until 2016, currently does a (technically) siscon series in Weekly Young Jump
• Author’s other works:
  • Chimes - Boy gamer with no friends plays a mysterious RPG alongside his classmates where if you die in the game you die for real
  • Puberty’s Iron Maiden - Boy who is a pervert follows his childhood friend when she has stomach cramps so he can learn what ‘that day’ each month involves, and gets a big surprise!
  • Real Account - Boy with no life uses dominant social media platform as substitute for anything meaningful, gets roped into a death game by its creators. Chaos ensues
  • Dead Account which just started
• Run dates: Aug 26, 2020 to Apr 7, 2021
  • Series it replaced: Xevec by bose and Ryouta Shimouchi
  • Series that replaced it: Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister by Naito Marcey
• Chapters/Volumes: 31/4

About the Manga

• Plot
  • Harry Makito was trained by his late mother to be a world famous magician, but he’s also kind of a brat that loves chocolate. When a trick goes wrong however, he is transported back in time to medieval Germany where he runs smack dab into Mia, a young woman accused of being a witch. At first Makito is incredibly excited because real magic means he might be able to see his mom again. Unfortunately Makito soon realizes that he didn’t get isekai’d into a video game, but literally real life medieval Germany, which means that Mia isn’t actually a witch she’s just a local medicine woman who’s about to be burned at the stake by the church. Using his understanding of illusion, Makito puts together a magic trick that saves Mia and convinces the crowd that she’s really a witch and he’s the devil. Makito fuckin loves it, and decides to rescue witches to add to his new magic troupe. He gets his next chance when he sees Liese, a blacksmith who’s about to be executed for making metal sculptures that are just too rad for the times. The executioner is a priest that’s pretending to bring people back to life but really he’s just killing twins. Makito manages to save her and they all hang out in the secret basement beneath a tavern. The evil priest is killed for failure by Archbishop Pietro, leader of the black hammers, who seems to possess real magic.
  • 
    
  • Next, Makito and the girls run into Helga, the strongest witch, who loves bacon sandwiches and is being forced to fight and win 100 misogynist gladiatorial bouts in order to save her sister like that girl from dressrosa. She’s being controlled by Dio I mean Father Valery, one of the black hammers who throws telekinetic knives and has filled Helga with internalized misogyny. Makito discovers that his knife trick is done using electromagnets, which obviously shouldn’t exist in fucking 1600’s Germany. When Helga is fighting Valery in her 100th match, Makito appears, undoes his knife trick, and uses illusion to seemingly transition into a hot girl. Makito says trans rights and fills Helga’s head with some of his women-respecting juice, allowing her to easily defeat Father Valery. “Devil” Makito and his troupe of witches escape the arena only to run into father Pietro, who makes the arena explode, killing everyone still there and blaming it on the Devil, and Makito realizes that Pietro is also a magician from the future. Then they all get wasted and party. Next while out in the forest, Mia, Liese and Helga run into a little girl named Brigitte who can talk to animals including a massive wolf. Brigitte’s parents were assholes so the big wolf is her new mom. The witches immediately drag her into their hideout but Makito is such a skeptic asshole about her powers that she runs away, only for someone from town to see her talk to animals and brand her a witch.
  • 
    
  • The little girl is then chased through the forest by Father Lucio, one of the black hammers who seems to have healing powers but really he just poisons them with snake venom and then injects them with the antidote without them noticing. He cures a woman but kidnaps her equally sick husband and brutally experiments on him until he dies. Unfortunately in the process of scoping out the priest, Helga is infected by the poison, known as Witches Palm. Makito successfully leads Father Lucio and his followers out to the woods where they do an illusion that makes it seem like the guy he killed has come back as a ghost. In the chaos the troupe manages to infect Lucio with the devil’s palm to force him to take out the antidote. However the wife of the guy he murdered takes the needle and fatally stabs him with it, destroying the antidote in the process. As he lays dying, Lucio presses a button on his plague mask which releases gas infecting everybody there so no one can reveal the truth. Jokes on them tho, because Mia’s hobby is injecting snake venom in order to build a tolerance, meaning that her blood works as an antivenom and they’re able to save everyone. In the final chapter Makito talks about how diversity is really cool and witch hunts are bad and Pietro talks about how diversity is really bad and the witch hunts are cool. End of part 1. Yeah totally.
• Characters
  • Harry Makito
    • Magician
    • Asshole
    • Mamas boy
    • Makes weird reaction faces
    • Loves chocolate cause of his mama
    • Goes between 200iq and being an idiot like the pendant
    • Ally to women and lgbtq
    • Idk what his sexuality is but it doesn’t involve attraction to women.
    • Only has eyes for magic
    • Cries when he doesn’t have chocolate or thinks about his mom
  • Mia culpeper
    • Witch
    • Works with medicine / poison
    • Death witch what a twist
    • Has low confidence
    • Pun on mea culpa? Maybe? Probably not but maybe?
    • Loves injecting herself with poison like I think she might have a problem
    • Starts to really love performing
    • Invents the bacon sandwich
    • Huge boobs
    • Crush on Makito but I don’t think Makito is interested in women.
  • Liese Ganz (Lee-zə Gahnts)
    • Black smith
    • Strong in the real way
    • Has good aesthetic
    • Deals with racism AND sexism
    • I’m pretty sure she’s supposed to be Roma but the author misspelled it as Rama
    • Says Wunderbar constantly it’s her catchphrase
  • Helga buttgeriet (Hell-gah)
    • The strongest Witch
    • Always hungry mood af
    • Likes to dance
    • Strongest witch
    • The strongest Witch
    • Has to fight to protect her sister
    • Super flexible and loves bacon sandwiches.
    • The strongest Witch
  • Brigitte (Brih-geet)
    • Wolf lady
    • Smol
    • Animal control
    • Victim of parental abuse for being Eliza Thornberry
  • Archbishop Pietro (Pee-eh-tro)
    • Main bad guy
    • Counter magician
    • Creator of iron hammer
    • From the future as well
    • Was a lawyer?
    • Hates diversity. Damn, in Germany? Fucked up if true.

Why it failed

• The pacing is a little weird and some of the writing is a little jolty
• Fuck is with this nude torture scene
• I feel the writing of Mia being some crazy death witch then breaking mentally during her trial was weird and inconsistent
• I can already tell this series is going to sexualize the female MCs
• Some of these chapters do feel long, like did we need 30 pages on a chocolate hunt?
• I do feel the MC is convinced really fast of things
• Some of the things just seem too convenient, like him being able to get his sword faked or participation of all the twinsr
• This takes way too long to get going there hasn't even been a real arc yet
• Escalation is a major issue and there's limits to what other magicians can do

What it did well

• Idk why but I appreciate contemporary manga - set in Tokyo in 2021
• Art is good I love some of the facial expressions
• Mood about the boy genius being an asshole thing
• Fuck I love they have actual magic tricks Araki would love this
• I love the energy of the MC being totally down
• I like the time travel gimmick of the issekai
• I like Harry as a character
• You can tell this author was very good about using his time properly some of the art looks impressive at first but actually isn’t that well detailed but in a way that doesn’t detract
• I’m quite impressed they reealize doing “magic” will make more people think magic is real and kill witches
• Author legit did his research like the joker thing
• They actually show the mc growing in influence
• Oh shit this manga says trans rights

Where it could have gone

• Ok what if he taught everyone about DND and that uses their imagination to stop witches
• Maybe go more into the trauma of the torture they kinda just play it off
• Show more magic fundamentals like the building blocks of how magic tricks are made
• This needed to have an overarching plot as right now he's building a team for no reason
• Really show more character growth of the MC it feels like lazy writing to have flashbacks of him being an asshole but not really seeing it when he first appears
• I’d have liked a more substantial arc without using the MC like we got a taste of it with the snake venom but maybe have them think of a trick using the techniques he’s shown

Misc Thoughts

• Is this the first legit isekai we’ve talked about
• That sleep bomb definitely killed the guards
• It's weird they included pizza when that didn't exist in 1500s
• This makes me appreciate how Dr stones tech tree had built in escalation in it
• So much weird torture porn
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
  • This ended SUDDENLY. Normally a cancellation or ending is announced the issue prior, but not with this. Just a sudden twitter post by Shizumu explaining that it’s on them,saying they were out of their depth. It was even abrupt enough that he included a profile for a character that had barely been introduced, a sort of “they were gonna be like this” thing. Bizarre. VERY rare
  • This series had a crossover set of illustrations with Hiro Mashima’s Edens Zero, with both authors drawing characters from the other’s series. Mashima wished for Witches to get an anime, which… Well, unlikely now, innit.
  • The author ends things on an ‘end of part one’ note, but there’s no guarantee when that happens. He’s already doing Dead Account in Weekly Shonen Magazine as of January 2023, and I’ve seen it with other series like Zetman where a return just… doesn’t happen.
• From tucker, this series uses a lot of actual locations and is geographically reasonable which is cool

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Tucker: At last, a mangaka did research!
    • Maxybee: Made notes, forgot to read it
    • Duderocks: bewitchingly good wish it didn’t disappear | Most based canceled manga ignore ch26
    • Riel: Silly Church, Tricks are for Witches
    • Bird: Long chapters, but absolutely worth it.
    • Chicken Warlord: Peerless Prestidigitator Perishes - Pranks Puritanical Priests
    • Yeti: Isekai'd illusionist implements intricate inquisition interruptions
    • 090Z: Like Dr. Stone, just slightly hornier
    • Meru: Is this your card? (It wasn't)
    • Twolfwood: Sounds good might check it later
    • Sleepy Goodman, the evil AI: And for my next trick: Justice!
  • David: Magic that's tuned to the A-ra-key
    • Dude this author is based AF
  • Jordan: witches are hot and deserve rights
  • Guest:
• Flop or not
  • If flop, what they could read instead
  • If not, how it compares to Chainsaw Man
• Is this the best/worst series we’ve talked about