Manga Thoughts: Witch Hat Atelier 13
Jan. 18th, 2025 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerSeeing a release date for the thirteenth volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga had at once been as welcome as ever and given me the peculiar feeling it had shown up earlier than I might have expected. Willing to hope, I put in an order anyway a little in advance of the date. As it turned out, I was then able to pick up the volume a little sooner than I’d expected to. This time, I didn’t “save the best for last.”
After a magical battle at the close of the previous volume, this one opens with something of a deceleration. For all that a strange monster still looms over the city, Qifrey is able to tidy up and reveal another reason for his victory. This dropped a name that did leave me wondering whether I’d have to go back and read through all of the series again. Some quick flipping through those volumes managed to identify the name instead, but I still haven’t quite sorted out whether there’d been a foreshadowing meeting or something. He also brings an injured Coco to safety. With the back cover blurb referring to “a heavy price,” I’d perhaps just been starting to really confront how that injury sustained in an attempt at rescue mirrors Qifrey’s lasting injury. Some reassurance Coco would be able to recover despite bandages over one eye did get offered, though. I’d also wondered about the blurb suggesting Beldaruit, the sometimes inscrutable but more often playful “Wise in Teachings,” would help Coco go back into action. His solution, rather than being some sort of “sneaky scheme,” had me thinking “of course--how adorable!”
Things still stay a little low-key when the focus shifts to evacuees from the city. The crown prince Eoleo, who’d begun to form an enigmatic friendship with Tetia in a previous volume, happens on a witch only somewhat older than him named Riliphin, who I’d really started picking up on while returning to the manga as not just an assistant to Beldaruit but also Richeh’s older brother. A bit more of their sibling backstory, and just why Riliphin doesn’t quite have it all together, fills in through a flashback that just happens to involve an abusive master (and a warning of that beforehand); in flipping back for the sake of chasing down the name just mentioned I happened to see that unpleasant master had turned up before.
From there things pick up more. A young apprentice witch named Jujy and her master Hiehart had been showing up throughout the crisis without quite linking up with anyone else; now, they run into Custas, who’s applied the forbidden magic I had seen as forming a living nightmare to a whole group of injured people. It seems he’s hit on the same “maybe it’ll be better just to get them to medical help” idea that Coco had thought of earlier, although whether he’d been around when she did that is one more thing I haven’t quite found by looking back yet. He gets to the point of pressuring Jujy to take the same dark leap, but this might also be seen as him trying to convince himself he’s doing the right thing.
I have to admit the next big development had me half-convinced the art depicted a hand being severed before I’d sorted out the latest application of magic and Coco had joined the fray, the spell she’d used before upgraded. She does her best to convince everyone the magic Custas is using is for a noble purpose; I admit I compared her line of reasoning to that somehow more familiar argument “you grownups are hypocrites!” while thinking she had a much more positive way of putting it. It seems to work out, and Beldaruit devises in what seems very little time a way of continuing to apply magic to healing purposes without the risk of it spreading too far. Just as things are looking up and coming together, though, sudden weakness striking Custas and Qifrey alike suggests something is going wrong, and the volume reaches a cliffhanger. It’s altogether possible that when the next volume does show up I won’t have another surprised “already!” feeling.
After a magical battle at the close of the previous volume, this one opens with something of a deceleration. For all that a strange monster still looms over the city, Qifrey is able to tidy up and reveal another reason for his victory. This dropped a name that did leave me wondering whether I’d have to go back and read through all of the series again. Some quick flipping through those volumes managed to identify the name instead, but I still haven’t quite sorted out whether there’d been a foreshadowing meeting or something. He also brings an injured Coco to safety. With the back cover blurb referring to “a heavy price,” I’d perhaps just been starting to really confront how that injury sustained in an attempt at rescue mirrors Qifrey’s lasting injury. Some reassurance Coco would be able to recover despite bandages over one eye did get offered, though. I’d also wondered about the blurb suggesting Beldaruit, the sometimes inscrutable but more often playful “Wise in Teachings,” would help Coco go back into action. His solution, rather than being some sort of “sneaky scheme,” had me thinking “of course--how adorable!”
Things still stay a little low-key when the focus shifts to evacuees from the city. The crown prince Eoleo, who’d begun to form an enigmatic friendship with Tetia in a previous volume, happens on a witch only somewhat older than him named Riliphin, who I’d really started picking up on while returning to the manga as not just an assistant to Beldaruit but also Richeh’s older brother. A bit more of their sibling backstory, and just why Riliphin doesn’t quite have it all together, fills in through a flashback that just happens to involve an abusive master (and a warning of that beforehand); in flipping back for the sake of chasing down the name just mentioned I happened to see that unpleasant master had turned up before.
From there things pick up more. A young apprentice witch named Jujy and her master Hiehart had been showing up throughout the crisis without quite linking up with anyone else; now, they run into Custas, who’s applied the forbidden magic I had seen as forming a living nightmare to a whole group of injured people. It seems he’s hit on the same “maybe it’ll be better just to get them to medical help” idea that Coco had thought of earlier, although whether he’d been around when she did that is one more thing I haven’t quite found by looking back yet. He gets to the point of pressuring Jujy to take the same dark leap, but this might also be seen as him trying to convince himself he’s doing the right thing.
I have to admit the next big development had me half-convinced the art depicted a hand being severed before I’d sorted out the latest application of magic and Coco had joined the fray, the spell she’d used before upgraded. She does her best to convince everyone the magic Custas is using is for a noble purpose; I admit I compared her line of reasoning to that somehow more familiar argument “you grownups are hypocrites!” while thinking she had a much more positive way of putting it. It seems to work out, and Beldaruit devises in what seems very little time a way of continuing to apply magic to healing purposes without the risk of it spreading too far. Just as things are looking up and coming together, though, sudden weakness striking Custas and Qifrey alike suggests something is going wrong, and the volume reaches a cliffhanger. It’s altogether possible that when the next volume does show up I won’t have another surprised “already!” feeling.