I have a thing for urban fantasy, books like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, much of Charles de Lint's output, quite a lot of Tanya Huff's work, and so on. Unsurprisingly this has carried over into my anime watching. Adding a dash of fantasy and magic will attract me to shows that I otherwise would have bounced off of.

As with basically every manga I wind up checking out these days, I stumbled across The Ancient Magus' Bride through anitwitter, the general collection of anime people that I follow there. I took a look because it sounded interesting, and it wound up hooking me right away, pretty much straight from its opening.

The Ancient Magus' Bride is not quite classical urban fantasy, but it's close enough; it is full of the same mixture of magic and normality, of cities and faeries and deep otherworldly wilds. And like the best fantasy, it understands that these fantastic creatures are often inhuman and this magic is dangerous. Well, can be; sometimes it can be beautiful. Sometimes it is both at once. And the fae are not the only monsters in the world, because humanity can supply plenty of monsters all on its own. All of this makes Ancient Magus' Bride very much my kind of thing and I've loved exploring more and more of its world and history as the manga goes along, along with the great characters.

I don't know how the recent OVA would come across for people who haven't read the manga, but for me it does a lot to capture the feel of the manga in animated form. The moments that are new to the OVA still feel authentically true to it (which is no surprise, since the manga's author was involved in the OVA). It's not quite the same as seeing the manga animated (the OVA is a flashback story), but it still makes me unreasonably happy and I'm looking forward to the future OVA installments.

(This is a 12-days post.)