Маруся
Маруся is a witch appearing in the Magia Record Anime.
Witch Card
ハナミチの魔女。その性質は生還。
他の地域から流れてきた魔女。人間の死体を自身に吸収することで、手下として転生させることが出来る。心優しきこの魔女は、勢力拡大ではなく蘇生手段として死体を吸収して回るが、相手が生きているかもう死んでいるのかを自分けるのがちょっと苦手。結界の中にあるランウェイの下には無数の手下がひしめき合っているが、かつてこの魔女がいた場所では、転生させる素材に困ることはなかった。
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The Witch of flower paths. Her nature is to return alive. A Witch that drifted in from a foreign region. By absorbing human corpses into herself, she can reincarnate them as her minions. This gentle-hearted Witch sets out to find and absorb corpses not to expand her sphere of influence, but simply as a means of resurrecting them. However, she’s not great at discerning whether her targets are alive or already dead. There are countless minions jostling for space beneath the runway in her Labyrinth; in this Witch’s former place of residence, she was never short on material to reincarnate. | ||||||||||
Minions
ハナミチの魔女の手下。その役割は、クランケ。
魔女のよって転生を果たした者たち。ずっと何かを訴えているが、これらの脳は死の直前と直後の記憶を繰り返しているだけなのでどうせ大したことは言っていないし、知らないままのほうがいい。
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Hanamichi Witch's Minions. Their duty is to be patients. Beings who were successfully reincarnated by the Witch. They’re constantly muttering some sort of protest to those nearby, but since their brains are simply replaying their memories from immediately before and after death on loop, they’re not saying anything very important anyway, and you’re honestly better off not knowing. | ||||||||
Trivia
- The 'hanamichi' (花道, meaning "flower path") is an extra stage section used in Japanese kabuki theater. Today, it is used in a broader sense, i.e. to refer to the stage set up across the audience in a variety of venues, such as a fashion show, music concert, or professional wrestling venue. It's also used figuratively to refer to someone's spectacular career, often referring to its conclusion.
- Mapycя's Witch name is presented with a backward R as it is a Ukrainian and Russian (more rarely; in Russian tradition name 'Maria' have other variations as 'Manya', 'Masha', instead of Ukrainian variants as 'Marichka' and 'Marusia') feminine name spelt as 'Маруся' (pronounced as 'Marusia' in Ukrainian and 'Marusya' in russian-like style). The name is one of the derivations of the feminine name 'Maria'.
- This name likely comes from the Ukrainian (in fact, Alexander Afanasyev, famous Russian folklorist, in the notes to his collection of fairy tales, did not indicate the region where this tale was recorded from, but the vocabulary and themes indicate that the original version of the tale has roots in Carpathian Ukraine) fairy tale The Fiend. In it, a young woman named Marusia meets a kind man, they fall in love with each other and she agrees to marry him. Marusia is told to learn more about the man's life and where he lives, and follows him to a church to find him eating a corpse. When he later asks if she saw him at the church, she denies having done so, to which he tells her that her father will die the next day. He repeatedly asks her if she witnessed his cannibalism, and every time she denies it he causes one of her family members dead, until he proclaims Marusia herself will die. Marusia seeks advice from her grandmother, who explains a way Marusia can come back to life, but at the cost of never being able to set foot in a church again. Upon resurrecting, she meets another kind man whom she marries, but who is bothered that she does not attend church. When he forces her to enter one, the first man discovers she is still alive and kills her new husband and son. Finally, with the help of her grandmother, she uses holy water and the "water of life" to resurrect them and kill the fiend (the first man).
- In the Magia Record game, however, the R is not inverted in both her intro screen and the witch archive.
- The Witch's head is in the center of a retractable lotus root. Her Witch's Kiss also resembles this, and a lotus flower is featured on the top of her Grief Seed.
- In the original text, the minions' duty is described as kranke. 'Kranke' is the German word for a sick/ill person, specifically women. In Japan, due to historical reasons, it is still customary to use some German terms (instead of English) in the medical field, including 'kranke'.
- The Witch and her Familiars look very similar to each other, having identical legs and similar cloth-wrapped upper bodies and heads. Additionally, other Familiars, instances of the Witch, or mere decoration that look identical to the Witch proper hang from the trees in her Labyrinth.
