something interesting i noticed reading the "Everything From Mercury" artbook: in the handwritten messages of thanks and congratulations, several of the staff writing out the name of the show write an abbreviated version of the kanji 魔 (demon, fiend) in 魔女 (witch), writing it as the radical 广 with just the katakana マ inside. it makes a lot of sense why someone would do this while writing by hand. 魔 has 21 brush strokes; far from the most complicated kanji out there, but it's tied for the 6th-highest stroke count1 among the 2,136 jōyō2 (regular-use) kanji. for comparison, the other three kanji in 水星の魔女 have 4, 9, and 3 strokes respectively. 广+マ has the same basic structure and indicates the same reading "ma", so especially within the context of the show's title, it gets the point across perfectly clearly with only 5 strokes.
what i'm curious about is how much of a "real" kanji this alternative version is. it's not like there's actually any complete definitive list of kanji, and this kanji clearly exists in practice, there's people writing it right here. i have no idea whether it has any historical usage, though, or whether it has a codepoint in Unicode. and I don't have a good way to look for it; it's not in any of the "search by radical" databases I'm aware of, but there are probably a lot of rarer kanji that aren't included in those. the KANJIDIC Project's data files only cover the 13,108 kanji standardized in JIS X 0208, JIS X 0212, and JIS X 0213. there are 20,912 Unicode codepoints in the "CJK unified ideographs" block, another 6,592 in "CJK unified ideographs Extension A", and another 42,720 in Extension B. so 广+マ could absolutely be in there somewhere and i'd have no way of knowing, as far as i'm aware. regardless, i think it's a pretty neat character :)
-
the most complex is 29 strokes, the second most complex is 23
-
the list of kanji which are allowed in official government documents, and which everyone is expected to learn by the time they finish secondary school
i don't have time to do a whole deep dive but i need to write something or I will explode
there are a bunch of simplified kanji that haven't already been codified in dictionaries (or unicode either), but because of their informal nature and the fact that they are usually hand-written on a board or other transitory medium, it can be hard to get solid information on them outside of sparse anecdotal accounts...
but there is a EN wikipedia article on these fun characters, and 广+マ is included there too as a simplified version of both 魔 and 摩 (check the JA version as well because that has more in it):
i don't think any of these characters are included in unicode (oh, looking back at the the wiki page, 㐧 and a number of others are in fact in unicode, but despite the ubiquity of 㐧 in particular, the standard xp-era msoffice JA fonts didn't have glyphs for it! these informal characters were not granted any kind of "official" status for a while, huh).
anyway, there used to be a nice little software package called 今昔文字鏡 which had hentaigana, variant kanji, and all sorts of other fun stuff (it was really expensive, but my professor gave me a key to install it. my access to it died along with my poor little acer aspire one). it had ttf fonts bundled with it, so you could use it to typeset hentaigana and stuff before a lot of those characters got included in unicode.
I can't remember if this software included 广+マ specifically, but it had a lot of other cool stuff, like 广+K and 广+O for 慶応[義塾大学] (Keio University; there was even a 广+KO character too!!)
take a look through the gallery images of these simplified kanji font packs as well as the huge page of examples linked from the EN wikipedia page for more cool simplified kanji.
