For a minute there I thought Witch Watch was gonna go serious this week, but it soon became clear there was no risk of that. The first chapter was a spoof of the “Saw” franchise, which was pretty funny but no doubt would have made more of an impression on me had I seen any of the Saw movies. The four bros (or so it seems) awaken to find themselves in a warehouse somewhere, and a strange guy who introduces himself as “Jig-Jag” pops up on a monitor and tells them their masks will explode if they try and remove them. And he’s holding Nico hostage to boot.
The thing with parody is your receptiveness to it depends in part on your familiarity with (or feelings towards) the original. That was a cipher for me but the overall gag of the death game being lame and overburdened with pointless rules was pretty funny. Especially when it turned out to be Keigo behind it (in the service of trying to create a viral video). Because of course that’s exactly the sort of thing Keigo would do. “Roll the vice” indeed.
Next up is some pure physical comedy as the student council president calls the gang in to tell them the teachers are considering putting the lot of them under surveillance as potentially dangerous. I wonder if that’s a thread that will be picked up again in more serious fashion later, but for now it’s the pretext for a sight gag as Nico tries to use the “Elongen” spell on a stubby pencil and accidentally casts it on the four guys. Kanshi basically turns into a rokurokubi (no sign of Nube-sensei), Moi gets visual kei fingernails, and Keigo turns into even more of a giant hairball. As for Tenryu he gets a mighty arm out of the deal – the hand of which he still refuses to take off his cap.
This is just silliness, but amusing in its way. The bit with the “Student Council President” sash probably made me laugh the hardest, though their attempts to hide their peculiarities turned the quarter into a kind of absurdist hero squad was generally on-point. Nothing too weighty to any of this, but a perfectly fine example of Witch Watch being Witch Watch.
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