The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Hello, I Am a Witch and My Crush Wants Me to Make a Love Potion!

The Good Witch of the Lake's four-year crush ended in heartbreak with a single request from the object of her affections. Wanting to increase what little time she has with Royal Knight Harij, Rose sends him on a wild goose chase for the ingredients for a love potion but gets more than she bargained for when the grumbling knight starts visiting her every day to feed her.

Hello, I Am a Witch and My Crush Wants Me to Make a Love Potion! is based on the light novel series by author Eiko Mutsuhana and illustrator Vient. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

It's often the little details that show whether or not a show has got “the stuff.” It's one thing for a show to look pretty, have a solid soundtrack, and show off some moody and effective directorial choices, though we've got plenty of that in the first episode of Hello, I am a Witch, Etc. The detail that sealed the deal to me was the lettuce. It's just a little scrap of greens that our protagonist Rose is absentmindedly munching on, and while I would personally go for a much more flavorful and nutrient-rich leaf, I get it. Sometimes you just have to give your mouth something to keep itself occupied with while you pass the hours, especially when you live alone in an isolated cabin with nobody to talk to or judge you for your late-night snacking habits.

Then, when the pretty-but-mysterious knight Harij comes by, we see Rose reflexively tuck the hunk of lettuce away in her robes sleeve, because she obviously doesn't want this guy to think of her as a reclusive rabbit that eats plain lettuce just to kill time. The best part, though, is the punchline, where Rose gets nervous and flustered after Harij asks her to concoct a love potion, so she just scarfs the lettuce down right in front of him.

That right there, folks, is the kind of detail-oriented character-work that you only see when an anime is made by very talented people who understand the finer points of timing, editing, and mise-en-scène. That's “the stuff,” in a nutshell. The lettuce is key. The lettuce is everything.

The rest of the premiere is great, too, which really helps, because it honestly would have been embarrassing for me to go on for so many words about a hunk of chewed-up lettuce if the show turned out to be lame. A romance is only as good as the chemistry between its leads, and there are few better ways to build chemistry than for one of the involved parties to look at the other when they meet and think, “What the hell is wrong with you?” I'm not being facetious, either.

Conflict brews heightened emotions and it forces characters to demonstrate how they solve problems and communicate their feelings. Why do you think the whole “Enemies to Lovers” trope is so popular to begin with? Harij is far from Rose's enemy, but he's definitely a bit irritated with the fetch quest Rose forces him to go on for the love potion ingredients, and he clearly doesn't get why this pretty young woman lives all alone in a decrepit shack surrounded by spider's webs and piles of raw, plain lettuce. Yet, of course, there is an unspoken but undeniable attraction that binds these too, which is what makes it fun to watch Harij and Rose banter and bicker.

I'm always going on about the elusive properties of animated chemistry in my previews of romance anime because it really is the most difficult aspect of the genre formula to get exactly right, while also being the most important. Thanks to its sharp writing, lush visuals, and excellent eye for characterization details, Hello, I am a Witch presents us with a pair of authentic human beings who you genuinely want to see smooch each other. That's just about all I can ever ask from a romance like this one.

It's always a special treat when the adaptation of something you read looks exactly like you pictured it. Hello, I am a Witch manages that feat – from Rose's house to the clothing to that smug deer, everything looks how I imagined it while reading the light novels. And since I'm still bitter over Red River, I'm not planning to take this for granted ever again.

More importantly, this fidelity to the descriptions in the books gives us a clear sense of what Rose's life is like. In a word, it's lonely. Since her grandmother died four years ago, the only person she regularly interacts with is Tien, a merchant who trades her potions. She deliberately avoids town and interactions with the townsfolk for the very specific – and understandable – reason that shortly after her grandmother's death, she overheard villagers rejoicing about getting rid of the local witch. It's a horrible scene, especially if you've ever lived through something similar; I wish I hadn't, but I absolutely have. I have very clear memories of my parents taking us out of a store when a salesclerk used anti-Semitic slurs when I was about six, and that was just the first time I can recall. Rose's reaction to realizing that people hate her simply because of her heritage is realistic and upsetting, and it explains why she largely sticks to her island in the lake. Why should she go out when exactly one person ever defended her?

That person, a knight named Harij Azm, is the crush of the title. Rose is flustered when he shows up and aghast that he wants a love potion, immediately assuming that her love is over before it had a chance to begin. I'll leave it to your imagination whether she's right or not, but Harij's entry on the scene lets the anime once again show it understands the “show not tell” assignment. We don't need Harij to vocalize his disgust and horror at how Rose lives in a dusty, cluttered cottage. His face says it all, from his glances at packed shelves to his stunned look when Rose munches down a piece of the world's crunchiest lettuce. He's not necessarily judging Rose, but he isn't pleased with what he's seeing, and that's abundantly clear without him uttering a word.

He also gets the impression that Rose is giving him the runaround with her piece-by-piece ingredient list, though whether he knows why she's doing it this way remains to be seen. He and Rose are more than just pretty anime faces on a screen; they have emotions that are understated but clear, and one of Harij's is that he's getting fed up with whatever game Rose is playing. Hopefully she's not shooting herself in the foot here; since the original light novel series only has two books, we should be able to see their whole story. (And I'd be happy with just a good adaptation of the first book, which is the better one.) Hello, I'm a Witch is off to a good start, and I'm looking forward to seeing more.

So the twist is that Harij is procuring the love potion on behalf of his Lord or something, right? Don't get me wrong, I liked the premiere of Hello, I Am a Witch and My Crush Wants Me to Make a Love Potion! and think it blends its sad-girl melancholy and humor well, but we can all see this “twist” coming from a mile away. I know that a big part of Rose the witch's storyline is likely to center on her building up the confidence and sense of self-worth to ask Harij about his intentions with the love potion and converse with him as an equal, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that much of the tension in this first episode could easily be resolved with a simple conversation.

To start from the beginning, though, Rose is the “Good” Witch of the Lake and lives as a hermit on the outskirts of the Royal Capitol after the untimely passing of her mother and grandmother. In this world, witches are hereditary and necessary to society, but also socially scorned, and they cannot tell lies. The story kicks off when Rose's crush, Royal Knight Harij, who defended her grandmother's honor after news of her passing spread, visits her home late one night to request that she make him a love potion, much to her dismay.

The first episode of I am a Witch is pretty cute in a puppy-love kind of way. Rose giving Harij the ingredients for the love potion one item at a time so that he has to keep coming back to visit her is adorable and also something a young person would definitely do to force the boy they like to spend more time with them. I also got a chuckle out of every “damn bitch, you live like this?” gag, where Rose seemingly subsists entirely on a diet of cabbage and lives in the cozy fantasy equivalent of a sad girl apartment. Normally these kinds of soft, longing-focused shows don't do a ton for me, but these shots of humor (and a deer who seemingly knows how down bad Rose is) do a lot to keep me engaged.

Heading into episode two, I'm curious whether witches not being able to lie is real or just a consequence of Rose's sheltered upbringing. This is probably going to fall shy of being an anime I watch regularly this season, but I think it might have legs once Rose gets off of her (literal and psychological) island and starts engaging more with the world and people around her.