To say that The Ancient Magus Bride was a breath of fresh air for fantasy in anime may be an understatement. In a medium flooded with the isekai genre, having a genuine fantasy, even if it is the kind that exists in secret underneath the modern world à la Harry Potter, stand out is a feat unto itself. But more than just introducing fresh takes on folk tales and mythologies interwoven into a believable world of magic, The Ancient Magus Bride's heroine, Chise Hatori, was one who was not only not often seen in fantasy anime, but who also seemed to subvert many of the usual tropes her character would normally possess.
It's worthy to note that the original mangaka, Kore Yamazaki, was inspired by the story of "Beauty and the Beast", the only disappointment being that the beast always turns human again at the end. In essence, The Ancient Magus Bride is a subversion all on its own, in that the beast starts as a beast and always remains a beast. Finding inner beauty means accepting what's on the outside as well as the inside, rather than having the outside changed as a "reward" for finding that inner beauty. As for Chise herself, as fantasy anime heroines go, she was appreciably complex and very different in terms of what's expected of her character archetype.
Two Uncertain Souls
In the first place, the obvious: she's not half-clothed and buxom, like Lena Inverse in Slayers for example. In fact, she's never placed in any sexual context. Romantic yes, but even then, it's an innocent, asexual sort. Even to call it romance is stretching it. The closest instance was perhaps her introduction, where Chise was shown having sold herself into slavery in the underground magical world market. However, this would be later shown to have a much darker reason behind it.
Meanwhile, even though the magus who purchases her, Elias Ainsworth, a skull-headed, antlered beast of unknown origin, professed that he bought her to be both his apprentice as well as his eventual bride, in regards to the latter proposal, he really had no idea how to approach the human concept of love. From a certain point of view, it was just his luck that Chise was as inept and uncertain about how any human relationship works, never mind romance. The result is a beautiful story of two beings who are emotionally still children, even with Elias being physically hundreds of years old, broken in their respective ways, trying to figure out how to relate to each other as human beings would, even with Chise being a human herself.
A Dark Past Taken Seriously
In the second place, in terms of Chise's psychosis, it's thoroughly unique to that of most fantasy anime heroines'. It's not just that she's thoroughly depressed, so much so that she's given up on the business of living, but rather than die, decided to give her life to someone else's, hence her having sold herself into slavery. More than that, it's that many of her encounters with magic, as an outsider to it, at least in terms of her upbringing, contributed to her personal growth in more quiet and intimate ways than might be found in a typical fantasy anime. Instead of slaying a dragon, she sits with a dragon as it enjoys its last moments of life in peace before its spirit slips away and its body turns into a tree. Instead of seeking treasure or loot, she finds gems within herself, almost literally, as her first steps into learning magic manifest in small crystals she conjures into her hands after reliving a long-forgotten happy memory from her childhood.
It would be hinted at later that, just as she was something called a "sleigh beggy", a being to whom creatures of the fay are drawn, and she can not only see them, but as a result, her projected life expectancy's troublingly uncertain. Her father appeared to have been something similar. Her childhood was an idyllic one, with her father, mother, and baby brother, until one day her father stole away into the night with her baby brother for some unknown reason, leaving Chise's mother heartbroken and, like Chise, struggling with her possibly short life-expectancy. Pushed to the brink, unable to hold down a job well enough to support her and her daughter, on top of her daughter getting attacked by the strange fay of Japan that she could see, in her despair, she almost let herself strangle Chise to death, before stopping herself and instead throwing herself out of their second-story apartment window.
All alone, Chise had to continue to deal with the strangeness of her life that ostracized her from having a normal one up until adolescence, when she could no longer handle it, and, contemplating suicide herself, was instead discovered by the man who offered her the option of selling herself so that someone else could use her life. Dark backstories are certainly nothing new for any character in fantasy anime, but Chise's was dark in a way that the story took very seriously, and carried to a serious conclusion as she slowly found reasons to live in her new life as Elias's mage apprentice. Very much like Casca from Berserk in that regard, but unlike Casca, isn't even in part framed in a sexual light.
Meanwhile, with the question of love being ambiguous where she and Elias are concerned, another subversion of Chise as the heroine was not just in the lack of a love confession in the traditional sense that would normally occur in a story like this, but she herself conquers the evil of the series' antagonist by working through her own pain, rather than by any conventional sword or sorcery. Subdued in personality, with complex reasons as to why, The Ancient Magus Bride's Chise was an example of well-written subversion of heroines normally found in fantasy anime.