Story: Maria the Virgin Witch takes place during the Hundred Years’ War in France, where you guessed it, a witch named Maria is a virgin. She happens to be unique among witches, as she despises war and intervenes is battles, using her magic along with her Succubus and Incubus to put an end to them. This draws the ire of the Archangel Michael, who is against intervention despite prayers being made to God. Michael punishes Maria by proclaiming that is she were to lose her virginity, that she would also lose her magic. He also places the angel Ezekiel to live and look after her to make sure she doesn’t use her magic in front of humans. Stopping war isn’t exactly something Maria is ready to give up however, and the series tells the story of her battles with God, the Church, and trying to keep battles from happening.
Themes: Magic, Medieval, Religion, War
Where and When to Watch: Funimation.com, New dub episodes Sundays at 10:30am EST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct_LeRUjHnk
Review: It’s a rare opportunity when you can’t really say that there has been a bad episode. As the season builds, you see Maria coming into increasing conflict with the church of earth, or that run by the catholic church and susceptible to corruption and it’s own evils, and that of the church of the heavens, portrayed mainly through archangel Micheal, that promotes doing nothing at all, and would like Maria to do the same. While you have all these things working against her, with the village starting to turn against her, there are those close to her that are persuaded by her, even starting to turn Ezekiel. It even gives solid character development to someone the church ends up contracting to rape Maria so that she would lose her magic, painting him as an actual person. They don’t take the easy road out by just showing him as this really evil person who cares about nothing other than war and sex. At 12 episodes, the season is short, but packed with so much character development. Seriously, this show does more in 12 episodes that most do in multiple seasons. This is FLCL level of story development. This doesn’t look to be getting a second season, which is both a shame (based on the quality) and completely fine, because they told a complete story in just this one season.