After thinking a bit about the idea I floated in this update post, I decided to make it part of my old tag, Manga March. (Remember that?)
Meta note before we begin: Last time – back in 2018 (!!!) – I cheated a bit and based the content on what I knew of the anime instead of the manga (such as this one in the case of Grimgar), haha…as suggested in the first link in this post, I am only going to dig out items from my personal collection for this particular iteration of Manga March, whether physical or digital.
Chisato Nesumi’s The Wizard and His Fairy (Kirikagohime to Mahoutsukai) is very much in that nostalgic(?) Disney Princess kind of vein that looks kind of quaint, or possibly even needing of change, to the eyes of progressive society. However, it’s this quaint feeling that is precisely what gives this two volume series its appeal.
“What is it about?”, you ask? Wizard meets fairy, wizard must have fairy for his collection, wizard cares for fairy while her wing heals, fairy helps wizard with his own emotional trauma. Roll credits.
That, and definitely its artstyle (oh, that beautiful artstyle… *sighs dreamily*), lead you to believe it might be a shoujo but…it was serialised in the manga magazine Aria, a josei magazine.
Sidenote: Since Aria became defunct after I discovered this manga via scanlations, for years I thought it was a pipe dream that this series would be translated into English. However, sometimes dreams do come true… (Also, the fact my pseudonym is “Aria” and the fact this magazine is called “Aria” are wholly unrelated, although I appear to have remembered this series because of the connection I’ve made between the magazine and the pseudonym.)
Well, like some romances of its stripe – an angsty version of the Harlequin sort, because we need drama in here (*rolls eyes*) – it’s ostensibly a story about a woman, but she barely exists as a character because even though she’s not human, she’s the reader self-insert, moreso than Kertze (who introduces the series). Or, to frame it negatively, she’s a vague plot device who talks the Byronic hero Nebelhaut out of his issues. “Kirikagohime” may sound pretty, but it means “princess of the mist cage” – the tower surrounded by mist, as well as the literal cage Sti gets locked in near the climax of the story. (…To be fair, the cage thing is framed as a bad thing Nebelhaut’s buddy from his training days, Schreyer, has to yell at Nebelhaut for.)
This is because all eyes are on Nebelhaut and rightly so. He’s quite the power fantasy – commander of magic, able to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants (even if his temper gets him into a bit of trouble at times) and, above all, handsome as hell (because I’m a sucker for that, haha). That said, his thawing “ice” makes him likable and because we never get to see “behind the curtain”, he’s a beautiful mysterious creature as much as Sti is, haha.
Despite all these misgivings, the series as a whole never shows anything graphic and lets your imagination fill in the gaps, allowing the transition from simple to serious go down smoothly – like viewpoint character (and living candlestick) Kertze’s pancakes, it’s light, fluffy comfort food. Hardly enough to survive, but good enough for what you get.
Kirikagohime to Mahoutsukai, I guess, means a lot to me because of the time it represents – the idyllic days before everything went to hell several times over – so trying to analyse it seriously meant tearing it apart, even with my rose-tinted glasses intact.
As for that licence? Check out Kodansha Comics – I believe the series, as of the time of writing this in January, is digital-only from them.
…you’re still here? Still reading, huh?
(Okay, I’m kidding. The extra separator probably gave it away.)
That thing in the title I’m referring to is that you might have seen a little link appear at the right-hand side of the sidebar at the start of the year. (Or, if you’re coming from the future, you might not see it. It depends how it goes.) I wanted to see for a while if people noticed it before I announced it properly.
That’s a link to a Ko-fi. Specifically, mine. You’ll see the little coffee button below appear on every one of these Manga March posts as well, as part of this experiment. If the button breaks, please inform me, but you’re also free to use the link in the top navigation as well.
Sidebar: I will admit originally, I made the Ko-fi to break even on a purchase for a ticket to a stream for the server and the blogging part only really came up when I got stuck on writing a description for it… *sweatdrops while laughing* For
the ulterior motivemore info about why a self-proclaimed cheapskate would suddenly monetise, I wrote an extensive comment about the Ko-fi here and mentioned – in sorta vague words within the reasoning for Saiyuki Reload Zeroin‘s dot point – what the funds could be going towards here.
Now that you know the button exists, you can send your money there if you like my work. However, I want to make it clear I’m not broke in the sense I’ll need this money to survive – the choice of this platform and not Patreon was deliberately because of the “tip jar” nature.
Update: Fixed link.