Witch Hat Revisit
Jul. 11th, 2024 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNoticing some unfortunate, yet still somehow understandable, suspicions of how long the upcoming Witch Hat Atelier anime would “hold together” did get me thinking back to those just as unfortunate cracks that “the trailer’s always the best part of the movie” and the days of OVAs (although I can now think of a few OVAs that didn’t “hold together,” or indeed even reach their concluding instalment). At a certain point, a sort of premature bargaining had me wondering whether there might be an early point in the manga where, should the anime be fortunate enough to “hold together” even that far, you could “cut off there” with some measure of satisfaction. I took the first volume of the manga off my shelves and thought that getting to the moment where Coco is given her witch hat would work for me. Then, I kept reading through the other eleven volumes of manga I have.
With a tendency to look at all the manga I have saved on my shelves and lament about ever finding the time to go back to any of it with manga I haven’t read before always ready to hand, it was quite satisfying to indeed just go through a series again and at a good speed. I could notice a few things I’d taken note of in the latest volume already being explored in previous instalments, although perhaps “Coco finds the conviction that she can confide in her master Qifrey” wouldn’t have had the same impact had I remembered an earlier meditation on how he’d had more a personal interest in going after the “Brimmed Caps” than just being “a loyal field agent,” then transcended it to help his apprentice. One rather minor character did stand out more once I could link successive appearances together.
Somewhere along the way, I did start to ponder the odd question of whether one thing that keeps up my interest in this series is comparing the witches to the Jedi of Star Wars. I can line up any number of differences between them even before confronting the tension between “saga-positive” fans who insist “the Jedi were wrong” and “saga-positive” fans who insist “the Jedi were right,” but perhaps the secret of magic in Witch Hat Atelier, in countering all narratives where “you have to be born with it,” is just more interesting an alternative than “all you need is to believe hard enough and it’ll all work for you in an instant,” and doesn’t read as a pointed objection through going to the work of setting up its own fictional world.
With a tendency to look at all the manga I have saved on my shelves and lament about ever finding the time to go back to any of it with manga I haven’t read before always ready to hand, it was quite satisfying to indeed just go through a series again and at a good speed. I could notice a few things I’d taken note of in the latest volume already being explored in previous instalments, although perhaps “Coco finds the conviction that she can confide in her master Qifrey” wouldn’t have had the same impact had I remembered an earlier meditation on how he’d had more a personal interest in going after the “Brimmed Caps” than just being “a loyal field agent,” then transcended it to help his apprentice. One rather minor character did stand out more once I could link successive appearances together.
Somewhere along the way, I did start to ponder the odd question of whether one thing that keeps up my interest in this series is comparing the witches to the Jedi of Star Wars. I can line up any number of differences between them even before confronting the tension between “saga-positive” fans who insist “the Jedi were wrong” and “saga-positive” fans who insist “the Jedi were right,” but perhaps the secret of magic in Witch Hat Atelier, in countering all narratives where “you have to be born with it,” is just more interesting an alternative than “all you need is to believe hard enough and it’ll all work for you in an instant,” and doesn’t read as a pointed objection through going to the work of setting up its own fictional world.