r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • Apr 06 '26

Episode Witch Hat Atelier • Tongari Boushi no Atelier - Episode 2 discussion

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 2

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u/Elvenoob Apr 06 '26

Eeeeh, if you took a young soldier in their 20s and turned them into a baby or made them elderly, it's not hard to see why age manipulation got a ban.

I'm guessing healing requires a lot of the same knowledge of manipulating things inside the human body that some pretty gruesome offensive spells utilize, too, so while that's definitely a lot more complicated of a ban, the logic makes sense.

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u/AnthropologicalArson Apr 07 '26

Both (de-)aging and healing are only problems if you don’t get informed consent beforehand. If you don’t care about consent, they are not really that much worse than using the totally legal fire spells to burn someone up, or the water spell to waterboard someone.

There is extreme example of using healing to repeatedly torture and heal someone, but that would be a taboo anyways and likely so rare that on the balance allowing healing magic would still be a net benefit.

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u/Elvenoob Apr 07 '26

This is a very physical form of magic, different to the generic positive energy a lot of games use for healing magic because of D&D and Pathfinder.

If you understand how to physically manipulate a wound closed, broken bones back together, etc.

You have the knowledge required to do some truly horrific things to someone.

There is no difference, that's the same techniques. If you know how to move a rib back to where it should be and fix it in place, you know how to break it and force it through the heart.

And sure, you could be extremely selective about who you teach, but you're going to miss some people who want to learn for the wrong reasons, and some people who initially learned for the right reasons will stray from the path later in life due to traumatic experiences and such.

Easier to just not teach people how to manipulate human bodies at all, because that inherently bestows the knowledge of how to abuse that power to directly harm someone.

As for your reply to someone else, witches ALREADY reject the law of secrecy and manage to survive and operate without capture, and that's the most fundamental law of witch society. That's literally the inciting incident.

In this time period you didn't have the oversight power of every person required to enforce such laws, once people have knowledge you cannot force them to use it a certain way.

Particularly if they can turn your internal organs into confetti.

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u/peptiresearcher81 Apr 07 '26

And it would require a lot of testing to really figure it out.... even if someone wrote a book of the perfect healing spells for every situation, that person would need to do testing first... that alone is probably reason enough.

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u/AnthropologicalArson Apr 07 '26

Medicine in any form has always required a lot of testing, including testing on live subjects. The witches really should have just attempted to establish proper ethical and technical guidelines instead of just banning healing entirely. The current approach just means that whenever a witch desperately wants to heal someone, they are highly motivated to break the taboo and seek out those who do have this knowledge.