For years, fantasy has been stuck in the mass-produced churn of isekai power maxing—a mad‑libbed mash of modern life and magic that often feels more derivative than daring, telegraphed entirely by those sentence‑long, tell‑you‑everything titles. Thankfully, the genre is finally clawing its way out of that rut and remembering what it used to be: a realm of wonder, witchcraft, and worlds that don’t need a stat-sheet HUD to denote character growth or tell a good story.

Right now, both anime and manga are in a deeply old-school fantasy renaissance, with series like Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and Witch Hat Atelier leading the charge. But that doesn’t mean the upholstery of the fish‑out‑of‑water formula from isekai’s dark ages has lost its charm. When done right, it still sings—and Wicked Spot, a new manga that blends the witchy, whimsical magic of classic fantasy with the contemporary spell of influencer culture, proves the genre can still feel both familiar and refreshingly strange in a way that absolutely slaps.

Wicked Spot, by Sal Jiang, follows Sadako, a witch sequestered in a haunted forest that only foolhardy livestreamers would ever venture into in the hopes of getting some good content out of it… which just so happens to be how the story starts out. After scaring the bejesus out of her intrusive houseguests, Sada notices that they dropped a smartphone (or as she calls it, a “glowing little board”) as they fled into the night. And like placing an iPad in front of a child and watching their little brains melt in real time at all the glowing colors, Sada immediately becomes mesmerized by the glamour of social media and all the pretty influencers sharing cute pics for likes. After years of feeling unseen, Sada decides to go into the city and become an influencer.

Things are pretty sweet for Sada, largely due to her Princess Diaries-style glow-up shopping spree in the big city, all without having to pay the high prices at stores she shoplifts from because she has no money—thanks to her casting spells on cashiers to get a five-finger discount—and using magic to make her phone camera float so she can get all her best angles for her growing social media presence. However, her rising fame quickly puffs her up, and she makes a big mistake by outing herself as a witch. 

While fans take Sada’s ill-advised moment of transparency in stride as a joke, her witch confession has the opposite effect on Hanako, a woman with ogre strength who is immune to magic and despises witches so much that her double-tap thumbs-up on Sada’s posts turns into Twitter fingers, making her Sada’s first troll. Delightfully, instead of becoming a serious look at the chaos of social media and online fame à la Oshi No Ko, Wicked Spot goes the enemies-to-lovers route as the goth and pink house meme characters enter each other’s worlds on a wild journey where the excitement and danger of social media and witchcraft collide.

What drew me to Wicked Spot is that it’s a fun little manga with a unique vibe, reminiscent of early-aughts romcoms. If I had to compare that vibe to something, it feels like a mix of Enchanted, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Leslie Hung’s Snot Girl. Wicked Spot effortlessly balances the comedy and drama its premise promises without one overshadowing the other. It also doesn’t hurt that the manga’s endearing Hana‑and‑Sada dynamic is pretty gay (appreciative). No need to squint, overanalyze, or enhance screenshots like other series that leave queer fans piecing together a corkboard and yarn to connect a queer story that stays in their heads and makes its way to the page. 

While Wicked Spot doesn’t break out the airplane runway lights, making Hana and Sada look like a guaranteed endgame by the end of its first volume, Jiang definitely does her big thing, laying down enough blushes, stolen glances, and odd-couple spark between them, channeling the same flirtatious promise as Sumiko Arai’s The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All.

If anything, TGSWIIWAGA (“Green Yuri,” for short) is a picture-perfect twin to Wicked Spot‘s charming, witchy, sapphic vibes. Only, where Green Yuri feels like a high-school-era Nana that actually commits to the sapphic yearning of its leads, Wicked Spot reads like a (somehow) even more yuri-tinged take on Kamome Shirahama‘s slept-on pre-Witch Hat Atelier series, Eniale & Dewiela. Honestly, that’s as good a back-of-the-box quote as any new manga destined to inspire the meme-ready Google search “Does Wicked Spot is gay?” could hope for.

Considering Jiang is already a household name among yuri fans, having written the spicy, toxic yuri workplace series Black and White: Tough Love at the Office, it’s likely that Wicked Spot won’t leave people feeling queer-baited over whether or not its opposites-attract girlies with horror icon names will eventually work it out on the remix.

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