The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Accidentally in Love: The Witch, the Knight, and the Love Potion Slipup

What's It About? 

Cecily is a romantic who dreams of finding true love—the only problem is that she's a witch! Scorned by society, she gives up on meeting her very own Prince Charming until a chance encounter with the gruff but gallant knight Zeke reignites her dream. She concocts a love potion in secret and brings it to him, but before she can get a word in edgewise, he accidentally drinks the whole thing! Will Cecily manage to come clean about the whole affair? And will this slipup lead to the happily ever after she's always wanted?

Accidentally in Love: The Witch, the Knight, and the Love Potion Slipup has a story by Harunadon and art by Itsuki Azumaya, with English translation by Arthur Miura. This volume was lettered by Jessica Anecito. Published by J-Novel Heart; PublishDrive edition (September 18, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Everything I've read by author Harunadon is different, which isn't always the case for a light novel author. This manga adapts their fluffiest series, and that absolutely carries over from the source material. Zeke and Cecily's love story is as frothy as they come, filled with ridiculous lines and lightning-quick emotions, all wrapped up in what is almost certain to be a monumental misunderstanding. If you like your heroes to spout lines like, “Snow's tongue has touched you before mine has” when Snow is a wyvern currently flying off with Cecily in her mouth, this is the book for you.

The setup is remarkably simple: Cecily is a witch who dreams of true love. When things don't appear to be going her way, she makes a love potion and nearly feeds it to Zeke, the handsome knight captain. Before she can get it away from him, however, Zeke guzzles it down, and now Cecily thinks that's why he's professing his love for her. We readers, of course, can see right through this to the truth: Zeke probably was already in love with Cecily, and being accidentally served a glass of hard cider gave him the liquid courage to say something. The love potion has nothing to do with it outside the confines of Cecily's mind. It's fevered and ludicrous and a decent amount of fun.

It also requires a hefty suspension of disbelief, because it's pretty darn silly. Cecily's only sixteen, which helps, but the manga adaptation ups the pacing considerably from the novel, and that doesn't always help with the more ridiculous assumptions and plot points. Princess Charlotte is a bit of an annoyance, and her odd habit of referring to men as “loins” is, well, odd. (And annoying.) It certainly seems to make giving her remotely natural-sounding dialogue a bit of a challenge, and it's a blessing that she's barely in the volume.

The art is pleasant, if a bit simple. It shines in the little chibi versions of Cecily but also proves that it can do more detailed work in some of the backgrounds, particularly in Cecily's witchy workshop. On the whole, this is perfectly fine, a sweet little bit of escapism that errs on the side of the cheesy. I think I'd still read the novel if I was only going to pick up one version, but this is by no means bad.

As I contemplated what to write about Accidentally in Love: The Witch, the Knight, and the Love Potion Slipup, one word kept echoing through my head: “Mid.” However, the editors don't care for it when I try to invoice for one-word reviews, so let's dig in a bit more.

A clever element is in the story: Cecily grew up reading fairy tales full of beautiful princesses, handsome princes, and evil witches. When she turned ten, her mother informed her that not only was she a witch, but she had gotten Cecily's father to marry her with a love potion. According to witch custom, Cecily is trying to make her way in the city and accidentally slips a handsome knight a love potion. Of course, he falls madly in love with her, and now Cecily has to deal with the fact that she brainwashed a man instead of letting a romance happen organically. I wouldn't go so far as to call it morally ambiguous, but it does invert fairy tale elements in a way that, if well-executed, could create an interesting, almost Utena-esque examination of how people play out their roles according to society's expectations.

That's not what's happening here. Instead of turning a critical eye to anything, it relies on an amateurish use of storytelling tropes that fail to break any mold. Cecily is shy! The male lead, Zeke, is gruff with everyone but Cecily! There's a princess who is shy around men because of her upbringing. She never goes outside because there are icky men out there! Meanwhile, some weird contrivances don't make sense, like Cecily's mother telling her that she can't have both love and marriage or female knights existing but they can't hire any because there's a flirty knight and why not just fire him if he sexually harasses every woman he comes across?

Like the story, the art is… fine. Pleasant enough to look at. The story is set in “the British Regency era, but with dragons,” like so many middle-of-the-road shoujo fantasies are these days. The girls are blandly pretty, the men blandly handsome. The male lead, Zeke, looks like Claude from Fire Emblem but is less interesting. There's also a stiffness to the art that makes them look a little like paper dolls. I'm not sure if it's a lack of skill or the software they're using to render their sketches, but nothing ever looks like it's touching. Even when Zeke puts his hand on her face it lacks tactility.

And you know what happens when two substances never touch? Nothing. No chemistry. No sizzles. You just get two inert substances.

If you can make someone fall in love with you, would you? That seems to be the narrative setup for this manga. Using the word “accidentally” is a little bit funny because the only accident that occurs is when the main character is going to give a love potion to the prince of this story. She was even going to do it out of spite! Now we have the moral dilemma of whether or not it is OK for her to go along with this prince being in love with her by this potion and if she should just come clean and confess everything. Not a typical setup although I don't think I'm a fan of the execution.

The moral dilemma here is we have a character who grew up persecuted as a witch and forced to be alone. She also had a bad parental figure. Her mother is very open about the fact that to get over her loneliness, she just gave a love potion to our protagonist's dad and it's implied that he has been under its control ever since. Our protagonist's thought process regarding loneliness and relationships with others is skewed. There is room for that to be explored later on and I am curious about how that ball is dropped. Right now, I would argue that's not enough to justify the line-crossing that occurs here.

Our protagonist tries to avoid the situation after realizing how genuine of a character the prince is. It's taking a while for us to get to the point where I feel like she justifies the mistake. We needed more time with her loneliness and that disconnect to empathize with the moral dilemma that she is in because otherwise, the way things are playing out makes it harder for me to support her. Maybe it gets better later on but right now this is messy. I see what it wants to do and the breadcrumbs of what it's trying to set up, but it's not executed nearly as strongly as it should.