Manga Thoughts: Witch Hat Atelier 6
Oct. 30th, 2020 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe sixth volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga is the second in the series I’ve had shipped to my doorstep, and did sit around for several days before I started reading it. I read it with continued interest, all the same, and got through it faster than I’ve been managing with most other manga these days (not quite at the point where I need to “ration new volumes out.”)
Things had left off on a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the fifth volume, but at the start of the sixth it was resolved by Coco, her fellow apprentices, and their injured master Qifrey being taken to the Great Hall of the witches, magically concealed under the ocean. The story slowed down from the derring-do of struggles against “the Brimmed Caps” and their forbidden magic; some of the conveniences and comforts of the sprawling Great Hall had me thinking of manga set here and now, and I admit it took a second or two to get over memories of ire and high dudgeon seen deployed by some fans when anime series thought to have been dedicated to “fantastic action” send their characters to the beach, the bathhouse, or just shopping.
However, the volume wasn’t all “pastries shaped like pointed caps!” and “when you’ve changed into your bathing wrap.” From the beginning of the story, part of the witches keeping just how to work magic a secret is them being watched by authority, and Olruggio, introduced in a “hey, he’s here too” way a little into the story as a “Watchful Eye” assigned to Qifrey’s atelier, has to skate around some of the particulars of what had happened. (The one danger with this surveillance, I suppose, is the way the story’s particular configuration of ideas can make it seem “necessary.”)
In the meantime, Coco and her three fellow young heroines are being tested by the important witch Beldaruit, who gallivants around the Great Hall on a strange legged chair and demands the apprentices “surprise” him. This makes for a larger puzzle to solve reminiscent of earlier in the story, and moves part of the narrative forward. Near the close of the volume there was a moment that left me wondering about “an obvious draw back into trouble,” but as it turned out things were different from what I’d imagined, and in such a way as to leave me interested in the next volume to come.
Things had left off on a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the fifth volume, but at the start of the sixth it was resolved by Coco, her fellow apprentices, and their injured master Qifrey being taken to the Great Hall of the witches, magically concealed under the ocean. The story slowed down from the derring-do of struggles against “the Brimmed Caps” and their forbidden magic; some of the conveniences and comforts of the sprawling Great Hall had me thinking of manga set here and now, and I admit it took a second or two to get over memories of ire and high dudgeon seen deployed by some fans when anime series thought to have been dedicated to “fantastic action” send their characters to the beach, the bathhouse, or just shopping.
However, the volume wasn’t all “pastries shaped like pointed caps!” and “when you’ve changed into your bathing wrap.” From the beginning of the story, part of the witches keeping just how to work magic a secret is them being watched by authority, and Olruggio, introduced in a “hey, he’s here too” way a little into the story as a “Watchful Eye” assigned to Qifrey’s atelier, has to skate around some of the particulars of what had happened. (The one danger with this surveillance, I suppose, is the way the story’s particular configuration of ideas can make it seem “necessary.”)
In the meantime, Coco and her three fellow young heroines are being tested by the important witch Beldaruit, who gallivants around the Great Hall on a strange legged chair and demands the apprentices “surprise” him. This makes for a larger puzzle to solve reminiscent of earlier in the story, and moves part of the narrative forward. Near the close of the volume there was a moment that left me wondering about “an obvious draw back into trouble,” but as it turned out things were different from what I’d imagined, and in such a way as to leave me interested in the next volume to come.