Manga Thoughts: Witch Hat Atelier 11
Oct. 25th, 2023 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith the strength of my interest in Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga, I did get to thinking I was dallying on getting a copy of its eleventh volume. Once I did have a copy, I took it out of my “waiting to be read” pile ahead of a few titles that had been there longer. Picking it up I was conscious it felt a little thinner than the average manga volume, and at a certain point reading it I might have been dwelling on a few small “cartoony reaction faces,” but all the rest of the art, and the unfolding story, wound up catching me up in it again. In general I’ve been reading through my manga a bit faster in recent weeks than I’d come to the point of before, but I just about inhaled this latest volume.
The cliffhanger at the end of the tenth volume, with Coco hitting a wall trying to come up with a really impressive spell on a deadline to win a royal audience not for her own sake, was resolved with Agott fighting back dark thoughts (even as she thought at one moment things weren’t as bad as they could have been) and offering some advice that did seem to have bearing on “creative block” in general. The mechanism of magic in this series, more quantifiable to readers than many others and being theoretically open to all while not amounting to “you just have to believe,” does have pretty obvious resonances to drawing. This help also put into words how far things had come since Agott had been pretty much an antagonist in the opening of the story. She did dwell a bit on what she might not see as “Coco’s main character status,” but Coco returned the favour later on, confronting some of Agott’s own past problems while saying something about the problems with mere “copying” and thinking of her own bad experience with it.
With that, the ominousness that had gathered through the past few volumes lifted (but not altogether) as the long-anticipated Silver Eve procession began. A small note from a previous volume about a spell “good enough to be dangerous” gets addressed with the problem-solving spirit of this story. Coco’s own solution at first doesn’t seem to impress the normal folk, and that in itself seemed an important thing to happen. Sudden aid and a bit of showmanship adds a missing piece, though.
In that moment of apparent resolution, things go awry off in the distance. This involved some witches locked in an apparently magic-proof tower dungeon. I had to go back two volumes to remember who one of them was; as for the other and more enigmatic contributor to this sudden cliffhanger, I still haven’t figured out if his reason for being locked up had been established before or of an explanation will follow. In glancing back and daydreaming about reading through all of the manga to date, I did at least wonder about the previous preview page had tried to mention what had just happened, not what was about to. That at least has me hoping to see the story continued again.
The cliffhanger at the end of the tenth volume, with Coco hitting a wall trying to come up with a really impressive spell on a deadline to win a royal audience not for her own sake, was resolved with Agott fighting back dark thoughts (even as she thought at one moment things weren’t as bad as they could have been) and offering some advice that did seem to have bearing on “creative block” in general. The mechanism of magic in this series, more quantifiable to readers than many others and being theoretically open to all while not amounting to “you just have to believe,” does have pretty obvious resonances to drawing. This help also put into words how far things had come since Agott had been pretty much an antagonist in the opening of the story. She did dwell a bit on what she might not see as “Coco’s main character status,” but Coco returned the favour later on, confronting some of Agott’s own past problems while saying something about the problems with mere “copying” and thinking of her own bad experience with it.
With that, the ominousness that had gathered through the past few volumes lifted (but not altogether) as the long-anticipated Silver Eve procession began. A small note from a previous volume about a spell “good enough to be dangerous” gets addressed with the problem-solving spirit of this story. Coco’s own solution at first doesn’t seem to impress the normal folk, and that in itself seemed an important thing to happen. Sudden aid and a bit of showmanship adds a missing piece, though.
In that moment of apparent resolution, things go awry off in the distance. This involved some witches locked in an apparently magic-proof tower dungeon. I had to go back two volumes to remember who one of them was; as for the other and more enigmatic contributor to this sudden cliffhanger, I still haven’t figured out if his reason for being locked up had been established before or of an explanation will follow. In glancing back and daydreaming about reading through all of the manga to date, I did at least wonder about the previous preview page had tried to mention what had just happened, not what was about to. That at least has me hoping to see the story continued again.