Novasilvae - ✨My Little Space✨

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babe wake up october 2024 just dropped

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“Let’s change the things we can change”

Reading Witch Hat Atelier ch43…

..I can definitely hear Iguin chanting in the distance “thaaaat’s my girl, the Brim Hats’ hope”. 

So yeah anyway, can I say how thematically incredible it is that Coustas’ misery up until this far crossed the path of Coco (a girl who wasn’t born a Witch) and Tartar (a Witch but born with an eye affliction making him unable to be trained the usual way)? Because obviously, as sort of outcasts in their own community, they’re indeed the most likely to challenge the rigid views of such community. 

As we were discussing with @aspoonofsugar​​​, it is very appealing that Shirahama-sensei would finally take the time to address the series’ worldbuilding by, for once, showing that not everyone is born with privilege. Coco and Tartar were the most prominent examples so far, but amongst Witches, while Coustas and by proxy Dagda illustrate an even sadder reality: 

I don’t know for other readers of WHA, but personally, this chapter totally changed my feelings about the first time we met Coustas and Dagda, when they were about to drown in that raging river.

Back then, the focus was more on Agathe and Coco, who were about to help non-Witches for the first time and how difficult it was to protect the secret of their powers. So Coustas clearly endangering himself to retrieve some of his and Dagda’s belongings really struck me as obvious and foolish, only set up to introduce the concept that medicine was indeed Forbidden™ to be practiced along with magic.

Now though, I just can’t picture it in the same way at all. Knowing that Coustas and Dagda are travelers who lived with barely a thing and who lost literally everything because of this incident (leaving Coustas unable to walk and to earn his meals while Dagda started undertaking mercenary jobs to wage enough for both of them), I can only see it as tragic and saddening. T_T

That being said, it also depicts an even more striking (and grim) picture, considering all the examples we’ve seen so far of young witches who were dumped upon adults’ consideration that “they were not good enough” to honor the same craft. 

Thinking about Agathe here (dumped by her own family), or even Riché (dumped by her first master) and of course Eunie (considered not confident enough and who ended up cursed by the Brim Hats). Meanwhile, we have Dagda the father figure of Coustas, a non-Witch kid, who’d rather endanger himself doing risky work in order to pay for Coustas’ long rehabilitation rather than giving up on him. 

So… isn’t this bitter and unfair? On the one side, the Witches who are indeed privileged compared to people like Dagda and Coustas, but who face a crushing pressure by their peers in order to belong within the magic community, their world all the while being set in stone by rigid rules that no one shall defy. And on the other, people like Coustas who would benefit from breaking said rules, but at the stake of endangering the world’s peace like in previous times. 

As such it wouldn’t surprise me if most of the Brim Hats actually chose this path, specifically because they were victims (in many different and subjective ways) of this unfair world. 

Not that I think them promoting chaos makes them the right side to choose, but clearly if they seem to believe in Coco, it may be because she’s the one who’s eventually best fit to understand all of this, which means there is also a side of truth to learn from their beliefs. 

All that to say that Coco steadily grows and learns: she learns from Qifrey, she learns from the Brim Hats, she learns from Tartar and now she’s learning from Coustas’ circumstances.

So I can’t help but love her decision to (indirectly) support Tartar’s violation in order to help Coustas, when the Knights Moralis (and so the magic community overall) deemed it all Forbidden™.

WHA is really a very good and deep series. I thought, until I read this chapter, that what kept me to this story was Coco’s and, in parallel, Qifrey’s predicaments with the Brim Hats, but it is without a doubt all related to the worldbuilding and the sad reality that the wonderment of magic seemed to hide from us readers so far.  

I’ll conclude this post by saying that, while I love Coco and Tartar’s mutual decision this chapter, I think it was definitely foreshadowed as risky and will certainly not be an easy feat to achieve. After all…

..if this part of the chapter isn’t a metaphor for Coco and Tartar’s current situation, their young knowledge balanced between their magic community and what Coco experienced through the Brim Hats, I don’t know what is. x)

A m a z i n g chapter! Can’t wait for what’s next!

It’s an amazing manga, please give it a try!

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Apothecaries -- another piece from my solo show at Nucleus Portland. Prints and originals available here

Art by Brain Brain Studio