Witch Protagonist



Witches are certainly odd things.

Once upon a time, they were viewed as vile creatures. The moment somebody suspected anyone of the slightest supernatural feat, they embarked on a massive Witch Hunt and, if successful, Burn the Witch.

Now they're viewed as pretty chill creatures helping around the community. Granted, there are still works depicting wild witch hunts, but now we have a lot more media showing witches as friendly beings with a supernatural ability. Regardless of how witches are depicted, this trope is when the witch is the protagonist of the work. She may be looked down upon, looked up to, or passing incognito. Whatever the attitude towards the witch is, it's pretty clear that having her as a main character opens up some pretty amazing possibilities.

Once you have a Witch Protagonist, there are endless ways of exploring how magic can fit into your work. For example, you can tell a coming of age story about a witch learning magic and moving onto the wider world. You can explore how magic interacts with technology in the modern world. Is magic opposing technology? Is magic working together alongside technology? How has magic changed to accommodate for the new technology? Having a Witch Protagonist is a great way to establish a likeable and endearing character. Oh, if you're a video game developer, please note it's really fun to play as a witch and cast spells everywhere.

Probably used alongside Cute Witch. This is common in Anime and Novels. If there's an anime using Witch Protagonist, you can expect it to be a Coming of Age story.

Also see the list of Witch Works. Witch Protagonist is a subset of that category: all works in Witch Protagonist belong there, but not all works there belong here. This is because the list only requires witchcraft to play a major role in the story. The main character does not have to be a witch, whereas this trope requires the main character to be a witch. For example, Spirited Away and Stardust belong on the list of witch works because witchcraft appears in the story, but they do not belong here because the main characters are not witches.

''When adding examples, please add something about what kind of witch a character is. Add something about what they do, or what they're like. Do not add the name of a character and leave it at that.''

Anime and Manga

 * The absolute monolith of a franchise that is Little Witch Academia features perhaps the least competent (and most enthusiastic) witch out of any on this list: Atsuko Kagari. Thus, the trope is used in the following works:
 * Anime
 * Little Witch Academia (2017 series)
 * Little Witch Academia (2013 film): Akko is still incompetent, just a little less incompetent than herself in the 2017 series.
 * Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade.
 * Manga
 * Little Witch Academia (Teri Terio manga)
 * Little Witch Academia: The Midnight Crown
 * Little Witch Academia (Keisuke Sato manga)
 * The thirteen year old Kiki in Kiki's Delivery Service is an enthusiastic witch protagonist setting out on her coming of age journey.
 * Mary in Mary and the Witch's Flower is a borderline example. Mary is not a witch. Period. However, she does acquire the rare Fly-by-Night flower which allows her to become a witch, with amazing powers rivalling the top students at a Wizarding School.
 * Coco in Witch Hat Atelier was a girl utterly obsessed with witches and other users of magic. Now she's an apprentice learning to use Geometric Magic.
 * Makoto Kowata in Flying Witch is a witch who moved to Aomori for training. She gets lost quite easily.

Fan Works

 * More than a few Harry Potter fanfics shift the focus from Harry to Hermione Granger, making her the protagonist or co-protagonist.
 * The Arithmancer by "White Squirrel" is a good example: here Hermione is a mathematical prodigy who leverages her lightning calculator abilities and knowledge of advanced Muggle mathematics to become a fearsome mistress of arithmancy and its byproducts, and Harry's single greatest resource in the battle against Voldemort.
 * The Harry Potter/Worm crossover A Wand for Skitter by "ShayneT" has a witch protagonist in its version of Taylor Hebert, who finds herself reincarnated into the body of a murdered eleven-year-old Muggleborn girl after the events of Worm play out. Leveraging her years of experience as both a superhero and a supervillain as well as a magical recreation of her parahuman power, she becomes an even greater threat to Voldemort and the Death Eaters than Harry -- and with his help engineers Voldemort's defeat years earlier than in canon.

Film

 * Isabel Bigelow from the 2005 film Bewitched, is an immortal godlike witch suspiciously similar to Samantha Stevens, whom she ends up playing in a reboot of the TV series Bewitched. Unlike Samantha, though, Isabel is not quite familiar with the mortal world, and just a little naïve, which is both advantageous and not.

Literature

 * In Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie Hatter is a witch. She spends the majority of the book not realising it, and when she does she is certainly an odd witch at that. She has the ability to speak life into things via very angry words.
 * Tiffany Aching in the Discworld series is certainly an odd one, learning from other odd witches as well. Thus, the trope is used in:
 * The Wee Free Men
 * A Hat Full of Sky
 * Wintersmith
 * I Shall Wear Midnight
 * The Shepherd's Crown
 * The Kiki's Delivery Service novel--source material for the two film adaptations--features Kiki as a witch going on episodic adventures. The trope also applies to the book's sequels, which are only available in Japanese. No Export for You!

Live-Action TV

 * Samantha Stevens of the 1960s TV series Bewitched, although, arguably, she shares the protagonist role with her husband Darrin, as each copes with the intrusion of their spouse's world into their own. Part of Samantha's dynamic was her intention to live her life with little to no magic, at Darrin's insistence, and her inability to do so due to the supernatural forces which persisted in intruding on their suburban life.
 * The 1977 Spin-Off Tabitha essentially recycled Bewitched's premise, only with an aged-up Tabitha Stevens taking her mother's place.
 * The Halliwell sisters of Charmed and their counterparts the Vera sisters from the 2018 reboot series. A prophesied triad of powerful witches with special abilities beyond those of "ordinary" witches, they spend their days fighting forces of supernatural evil and helping the more "typical" witches in their community.  At least in the early seasons of the original series, there was an interesting tension between the sisters' roles with their powerful instinctive magic, and their initial ignorance of the supernatural and witchly practices.

Newspaper Comics

 * Although she might be more of a Villain Protagonist, the title character of the comic strip Broom-Hilda. A traditional "wicked" witch complete with green skin and a wart on her nose, Broom-Hilda has a colorful past (among other things, she is Attila the Hun's ex-wife and a former United States Marine).  She does little in the way of actual magic in the strip, though, which focuses on her interactions with a cast of characters ranging from an innocently imbecilic troll to a neurotic intellectual buzzard to a darkness-dwelling creature who dispenses insults.

Video Games

 * You know Akko from the Little Witch Academia entries above? You know how she is perhaps the least competent witch listed here? Well, she returns again, in Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time!

Web Comics

 * Pepper in Pepper&Carrot (portrait as trope image) is a witch of Chaosah. The official wiki explains her the best: "Pepper practices Chaosah magic, the base magic of the chaos. She is the sole living member of Chaosah (The other Chaosah witches were re-animated by Zombiah after their deaths in The Great War). Her tools: entropy, gravity, time paradox, space deformations. She has the fabric of the universe law in her hands. She finds reversing time for a second or creating miniature black holes easier than creating fire or healing someone. She can also switch multi-verses and dimensions. Summoning demons or creatures from other worlds is possible to her."

Western Animation

 * The Owl House is a borderline example. The Protagonist Luz Noceda is not a witch. She cannot cast spells in the conventional way, as she lacks a bile sac for magic. However, she is quite quick at picking up magic and learning magic using her own methods by observing the Geometric Magic engraved in the Another Dimension Boiling Isles.