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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Manga Review: After School Bitchcraft, Volume 1, by Yu Shimizu and Kazuma Ichihara


Rating (Out of 5): ~3
Publisher: Yen Press
Release Date: March 2020
Volumes: 2+
Spoilers?: No.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Science teacher Renji Fuyumi is secretly a sorcerer, but after his barriers are accidentally broken by the fashion-obsessed Ririka Kirise, he decides to make her his disciple. Looks can be deceiving in this titillating tale of the occult!

Review:

Honestly, I don't know what I expected with this volume.
Renji has just taken up a high school teaching position, but he's bored to death of the job, and so are his students, since he couldn't care less about them. He's a sorcerer, and he's much more interested in that. Ririka is his student, she's a fashionable teenager, but she also wants to be a vet and thus wants to get better grades since she's struggling so hard. When she goes to Renji for help, he discovers she has some witchy powers in her heritage.
Renji is a bit of an ass, and I don't really care for him. Ririka is a bubbly, naive schoolgirl, who wears very revealing clothing (because they're comfier, even in the woods), and yet yells at Renji for being a perv when he doesn't even indicate interest.
There were moments of this volume where I could see what the authors are doing, and I can see what kind of audience this is for. But I also kind of hated parts of it. Ririka is naked several times in this volume, and her deciding to wear a tiny skirt out in the woods to search for wood for her wand was extremely unrealistic. Her yelling at the teacher for being a perv is also a trope that I've been over for a very long time.
I like the idea of this, but the execution is just not for me. Including how Ririka using her powers made her feel weirdly aroused. Also, the art is kind of odd to me. Mostly just the angles. There are really weird zoom-in angles, like upskirt shots of Ririka when they're talking normally, that were just very odd placements to me. It felt a bit like School Days to me, though maybe that's just a technique in this genre that I'm not familiar with.


A review copy was provided by the publisher, Yen Press, for an honest review. Thank you so, so much!

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