‘Wicked Spot’ Is a Enjoyable, Sapphic Rom-Com That Yeets a Witch Into the Magical World of Influencer Tradition

For years, fantasy has been caught within the mass-produced churn of isekai energy maxing—a mad‑libbed mash of recent life and magic that usually feels extra spinoff than daring, telegraphed solely by these sentence‑lengthy, inform‑you‑all the things titles. Thankfully, the style is lastly clawing its method out of that rut and remembering what it was: a realm of surprise, witchcraft, and worlds that don’t need a stat-sheet HUD to denote character growth or inform a very good story.

Right now, each anime and manga are in a deeply old-school fantasy renaissance, with sequence like Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and Witch Hat Atelier main the cost. But that doesn’t imply the upholstery of the fish‑out‑of‑water method from isekai’s darkish ages has misplaced its appeal. When achieved proper, it nonetheless sings—and Wicked Spot, a brand new manga that blends the witchy, whimsical magic of traditional fantasy with the modern spell of influencer tradition, proves the style can nonetheless really feel each acquainted and refreshingly unusual in a method that completely slaps.

Wicked Spot, by Sal Jiang, follows Sadako, a witch sequestered in a haunted forest that solely foolhardy livestreamers would ever enterprise into within the hopes of getting some good content material out of it… which simply so occurs to be how the story begins out. After scaring the bejesus out of her intrusive houseguests, Sada notices that they dropped a smartphone (or as she calls it, a “glowing little board”) as they fled into the evening. And like putting an iPad in entrance of a kid and watching their little brains soften in actual time in any respect the glowing colours, Sada instantly turns into mesmerized by the glamour of social media and all the beautiful influencers sharing cute pics for likes. After years of feeling unseen, Sada decides to enter town and change into an influencer.

Things are fairly candy for Sada, largely attributable to her Princess Diaries-style glow-up purchasing spree within the huge metropolis, all with out having to pay the excessive costs at shops she shoplifts from as a result of she has no cash—due to her casting spells on cashiers to get a five-finger low cost—and utilizing magic to make her telephone digital camera float so she will be able to get all her finest angles for her rising social media presence. However, her rising fame shortly puffs her up, and he or she makes an enormous mistake by outing herself as a witch. 

While followers take Sada’s ill-advised second of transparency in stride as a joke, her witch confession has the other impact on Hanako, a girl with ogre energy who’s resistant to magic and despises witches a lot that her double-tap thumbs-up on Sada’s posts turns into Twitter fingers, making her Sada’s first troll. Delightfully, as a substitute of changing into a critical take a look at the chaos of social media and online fame à la Oshi No Ko, Wicked Spot goes the enemies-to-lovers route because the goth and pink house meme characters enter one another’s worlds on a wild journey the place the thrill and hazard of social media and witchcraft collide.

What drew me to Wicked Spot is that it’s a enjoyable little manga with a novel vibe, harking back to early-aughts romcoms. If I needed to evaluate that vibe to one thing, it seems like a mixture of Enchanted, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Leslie Hung’s Snot Girl. Wicked Spot effortlessly balances the comedy and drama its premise guarantees with out one overshadowing the opposite. It additionally doesn’t damage that the manga’s endearing Hana‑and‑Sada dynamic is fairly homosexual (appreciative). No must squint, overanalyze, or improve screenshots like different sequence that depart queer followers piecing collectively a corkboard and yarn to attach a queer story that stays of their heads and makes its approach to the web page. 

While Wicked Spot doesn’t get away the airplane runway lights, making Hana and Sada appear like a assured endgame by the tip of its first quantity, Jiang positively does her huge factor, laying down sufficient blushes, stolen glances, and odd-couple spark between them, channeling the identical flirtatious promise as Sumiko Arai’s The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All.

If something, TGSWIIWAGA (“Green Yuri,” for brief) is a picture-perfect twin to Wicked Spot‘s charming, witchy, sapphic vibes. Only, where Green Yuri feels like a high-school-era Nana that actually commits to the sapphic yearning of its leads, Wicked Spot reads like a (somehow) even more yuri-tinged take on Kamome Shirahama‘s slept-on pre-Witch Hat Atelier series, Eniale & Dewiela. Honestly, that’s nearly as good a back-of-the-box quote as any new manga destined to encourage the meme-ready Google search “Does Wicked Spot is gay?” may hope for.

Considering Jiang is already a family identify amongst yuri followers, having written the spicy, poisonous yuri office sequence Black and White: Tough Love at the Office, it’s seemingly that Wicked Spot gained’t depart folks feeling queer-baited over whether or not or not its opposites-attract girlies with horror icon names will ultimately work it out on the remix.

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