It’s easy to look down on yourself. Likewise, we all have periods of time when we all get depressed to various degrees. In the case of A Reincarnated Witch Spells Doom, the first volume of one of Yen Press’ latest manga series, the heroine Sena finds herself facing crippling issues that result in her locking herself away not only in her original life, but her reincarnated, fantasy world one. What makes this first volume of the series so satisfying is seeing how she deals with the situations and then seizes opportunities to step outside her comfort zone.
Things begin with a peek at Sena’s new life in the fantasy world, which essentially explains the whole title “A Reincarnated Witch Spells Doom. This new world is filled with people who can and can’t use magic. It seems like Sena can! However, she doesn’t cast spells in the traditional way and is more spitting out curses. She only knows two specifically: Explode and Perish. As a result, she’s isolated in a cabin in the forest following some incidents in her youth when said skills were used with good intentions, but caused Situations. Now that her mother died, she’s all alone.
To juxtapose this, we see how Sena went through something similar. In her real-world life, before she met Truck-kun, she couldn’t bring herself to go to school. There was essentially this mental block. When she did muster the strength to do so, she got hit by a truck because her guardian angel didn’t expect her to ever leave the house. (This, in turn, led to her second chance.) She talked about the school exploding, so she wouldn’t need to go or have that anxiety surrounding it, and being okay with things perishing.
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- Image via Yen Press
What makes this first volume of the A Reincarnated Witch Spells Doom manga so compelling is that Sena is easy to root for. When she got hit by the truck, it was after she got enough courage to actually go to school again. After she arrived in the other world, she wanted to consider a different kind of life in which she’d connect with people and go outside of her comfort zone. For much of the first part, we see how she’s gotten by on her own, until a meeting with a young man named Keith provides the impetus to actually take action. This meeting gives her someone who expresses such a curiosity and offers such potential for insight that she’s tempted into actually venturing beyond her isolated home.
I also appreciate how Sora shows what Sena’s first steps into the outside world go in these early chapters. Yes, there’s a bit of a push to move along the plot. But the execution from there allows us to see the situations from different sides. It also shows opportunities for Sena to still set new goals and grow.
In general, A Reincarnated Witch Spells Doom’s start to the manga is fantastic at making sure we can see elements of ourselves in Sena. We can get feeling so overwhelmed and bogged down that we’d want to stay inside. Her situation ensures we understand why she isolated herself in her new life. More importantly, it provides ample reasons why we should root for her to grow as a person and find happiness.
Volume 1 of A Reincarnated Witch Spells Doom is available now, and volume 2 of the manga will launch on September 19, 2023.
