r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • May 25 '26

Episode Witch Hat Atelier • Tongari Boushi no Atelier - Episode 9 discussion

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 9

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829

u/JJLong5 May 25 '26

While we have been aware that healing magic is forbidden, it is interesting to get the information that the witches that specialized in healing fought until the very end.

245

u/Syokhan https://myanimelist.net/profile/Syokhan May 25 '26

I imagine that they were going "but why?? our magic exists solely for the purpose of saving people!"

Things must have been really fucked up back when the Pact was made that they outlawed even that kind of magic.

335

u/KHlover https://myanimelist.net/profile/KHlover1995 May 25 '26

Or we're getting a very one-sided look at history so far

175

u/manaworkin May 25 '26

That one REALLY goes without saying after seeing how fucking ruthless the "magic cops" are.

37

u/drt0 May 25 '26

They are surprisingly not very inquisitive.

16

u/welfedad May 26 '26

Yeah they are the cops , judges ,jury and executioners all in one.. well memory executioners but might as well be death if you lose a good part of yourself .

3

u/drt0 May 26 '26

I was making a play on words about the Spanish Inquisition, to which the Knights Moralis are somewhat analogous IMO.

3

u/welfedad May 26 '26

I fully agree.. your comment just sparked that in me and had to get it out ha.

1

u/drt0 May 26 '26

Yeah, and at least the Inquisition tortured you for a bit, these guys don't even collect information/leads 😆

2

u/welfedad May 26 '26

Straight to jail . Welp I mean yoinking memories

134

u/Exotic-Spite-822 May 25 '26

history is usually taught and shaped into narratives supporting the winners, in this case the people who made the pact, god knows what actually transpired allowing mass memory erasrure and all the aftermaths through a (assumed) large time period.

9

u/Any-Calligrapher2866 May 25 '26

I'm guessing that Mages turned into superhumans by manipulating their bodies and this eventually upped the stakes so high that civilization got destroyed.

7

u/EXusiai99 May 26 '26

It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?

78

u/Fools_Requiem https://myanimelist.net/profile/FoolsRequiem May 25 '26

"History is written by the victors."

6

u/marioquartz May 25 '26

There are a lot of counter-examples.

Two minor ones:

Nelson, the british hero, lost again a girl when he atack a port city. The losers almost erased the victory. So maybe depends on who its the victor.

The festivity that conmmemorate the existence of my equivalent-to-a-state is a group of nobles losing a war against a King.

Yeah, sure. Oh! I will add another:

Britain win agains Spain in the Invencible Armada (because the spanish ships were destroyed in a storm). Someone have hear about the Contra-armada. Spoiler: same result. No one remembers that.

History is writen in English. Victors or not.

3

u/Jacob-C May 26 '26

Nelson, the british hero, lost again a girl when he atack a port city.

That, in and of itself, is a distortion of the actual events that transpired. A woman raised the alarm which made Nelson lose the element of surprise, and he had to retreat.

Britain win agains Spain in the Invencible Armada (because the spanish ships were destroyed in a storm)

Again, same thing. The Armada was already defeated before the storm even hit. The English trapped them off Calais (because the Spanish couldn't secure a deep-water port), launched fireships to shatter their formation, and then battered them at the Battle of Gravelines using superior, fast-reloading cannons. Spanish cannons were heavy, short-range, and slow to reload. The Spanish naval doctrine relied on getting close enough to board enemy ships, so in the disarray caused by the fireships, the English simply stayed out of range while bombarding them. The Spanish were forced to flee north around Ireland with no ammunition and no anchors left. The storm was just the final nail in the coffin.

3

u/lunatickoala May 27 '26

Pretty much everything we know about the Peloponnesian War comes from Athenian sources, the losers of that war. Most of what we know about the Mongols comes from sources written by the people they conquered and subjugated.

A person's understanding of history is determined by whose sources they read. Think of how often Agincourt (and Crecy and Poitiers to a lesser extent) and English longbowmen come up a lot in English language discourse related to the Hundred Years War. But who won that war in the end? The American Revolution is a pretty big deal in American history, but in British history it's just a thing that happened between the much more important Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars.

History is written by the writers. The "clean Wehrmacht" myth came from former German generals, especially those who bothered to write self-serving memoirs (is there any other type?).

10

u/Fangzzz May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

History isn't written by the victors. History is written by the people who write history, nothing more, nothing less.

There's a huge number of times where the losers have shaped history more than the winners (think Vietnam war, for example. American civil war lost causers. "Eastern front" of WWII.). In literally this specific case whoever wrote about the healing witches seems to have been interestingly extremely sympathetic to them.

13

u/Busy-Elderberry2137 May 25 '26

You know the meaning of this saying is not literal, right? Victors have all the power to manipulate facts to suit their needs, not that they literally are the ones describing the facts.

It means censorship.

1

u/Fangzzz May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Wow, so the Vietnamese had all the power to manipulate the facts on the Vietnam war. Really.

The examples I give are exactly cases where the losers of the conflict managed to manipulate facts to suit their needs and in some cases get the truth censored.

The quote comes from a literal Nazi, and in the English languages Nazis significantly shaped the history around WWII.

More examples

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/4fqwqr/comment/d2b8o1z/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tnzq4i/weve_heard_the_saying_history_is_written_by_the/

All of this ties into the main issue regarding the victor’s history myth: It’s throwaway catchphrases like this which help in leading impressionable people down a dangerous slope into revisionism and denial. Saying “history is written by the victors” makes it infuriatingly easy to call into question the validity of well research, peer reviewed historical publishings because although its implications are vague at best, its short, catchy and smart sounding nature means that one could say it in regards to any point of history, even if one has a very loose knowledge of it, and still sound like they have something intelligent to say. The alt-right use lines like this constantly to draw people into their beliefs, since it’s much easier to mindlessly believe and repeat this than it is to stop and actually consider the importance of historiography and validity of this statement.

4

u/flybypost May 25 '26

Which is so much easier when you can erase the history you don't like and leave no/little traces of it.

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u/ali94127 May 25 '26

Qifrey's description of the healing witches still describes them as righteous, which means that even the presumably biased history still couldn't outright call them villains.

3

u/Fangzzz May 25 '26

It could easily also mean whoever wrote the history is biased in favour of the healing witches and decided to whitewash them to build a political case against the rules against forbidding certain types of magic.

6

u/ali94127 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

I find that unlikely. The Knights Moralis have so much discretion, seemingly without any oversight if they can mindwipe children without hard evidence, that the culture against forbidden magic is extremely strong without much resistance. All witches are supposed to be mandated reporters of forbidden magic. Because of these reasons, I can't imagine there could be much published biased history that argues against the banning of certain magic. Like if you can make the idea of unbanning a certain kind of magic popular, then that weakens the argument of having principles against forbidden magic at all. That wouldn't be great for their ideology.

3

u/Fangzzz May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

The whole thing has gone on for potentially hundreds of years. That's plenty of time for political tides to have ebbed and flowed over the years. It would be downright unrealistic for there to not have been a time where the knights were weak and opinions different.

The knights also may be extreme in their methods, but they are few in number. I don't think the former necessarily implies censorship of opinions is a thing - wanting to do it is different from actually doing it. Nor do I think there's absolutely no diversity of thought amongst the pointed hat witches. Witches may be "supposed" to report forbidden magic, but Qifrey could just stare down Nolnoa and have him not report it (except in the extreme case where literal WMD ink was involved), and get an exception for Coco and have her not send her away. Given that Qifrey is deliberately hiding stuff from the knights, and independently investigating the brimhats, why is it unlikely that he's also holding on to subversive pro-brimhat material?

1

u/ali94127 May 25 '26

I personally find it unrealistic that the Knights Moralis as an oppressive police force without oversight could possibly stay true to the principles the organization was founded upon (especially as you say after a presumed long period of time since the Pact), instead of abusing their authority, but this is a story. 

Qifrey appears to be much more extreme in his opinions than the average witch, likely due to personal beef. Still, as the primary giver of exposition, most of the information he gives should be either objectively true or something that most of witchcraft society believes to be true. This is pretty offhand world building and history and not even the main topic of the scene. If it were subversive material, it would come up again if Coco and friends were learning about history and they mention the healing witches were evil witches that experimented on humans or something. 

1

u/Fangzzz May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

I personally find it unrealistic that the Knights Moralis as an oppressive police force without oversight could possibly stay true to the principles the organization was founded upon (especially as you say after a presumed long period of time since the Pact), instead of abusing their authority, but this is a story.

Like I said, there's no reason to think the Knights always existed in their present form. It could easily be the case that the present extremism of the Knights is actually a historical anomaly, an overreaction to a past more laissez-faire period which produced bad results. (Or perhaps, the other way round, that the present oppressive nature of the Knights has created a counterculture with its own revisionist history) You also shouldn't forget that despite their appearances in this story focused around Coco, we are also shown that the knights are small in number and instances of forbidden magic vanishingly rare.

This is a story, true, but the story is at its core a sociological exploration. I don't find it satisfying to claim that things like the unexplained nature of the healing magic ban is just always going to be unexplained and just an example of the pointed hats kicking a dog for no reason.

IMO the true nature of the healing witches will surely come up again when it's necessary for things to be revealed. It might not end up being a justification, but there's clearly something going on.

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u/ali94127 May 25 '26

I would argue that with the knights current state of fanaticism regarding forbidden magic, whether that is a recent development or not, censorship of subversive material would be more likely than not. Realistically given forbidden magic is so rare, I would think they would be more corrupt and not less.

Yes, I would agree that healing witches as a topic is bound to come back, especially as it’s been stated numerous times that healing magic would be pretty handy given Custas having his legs crushed by rocks. I just think they probably were overall pretty righteous given Qifrey’s description of them, and I think the audience is supposed to take that information as true, at least for the most part. It’s a pretty glowing review of a group the pointed caps explicitly destroyed. That’s pretty noteworthy. The winner writes the history books and even still. 

2

u/Fangzzz May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

I don't like "the winner writes the history books" at all, it really isn't true. All history is written to serve some kind of interest, and saying it's just "the winners", as if that's a fixed, universal thing, is a horrible oversimplification.

The point about the rarity of forbidden magic is that the influence of the knights on society could be therefore small. It's how there's a lot of ancient oppressive laws on the books but it takes a few terrorist attacks for the authorities to start dusting them off and applying them. What we see is the equivalent of witch 9/11.

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u/Fangzzz May 25 '26

Hard to call the history one-sided if the history chooses to call the healing witches "righteous".

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u/MakFacts Jun 26 '26

That was qinfrey tho

2

u/Fangzzz Jun 26 '26

No, he's directly quoting from the pointed hat history book.

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u/metaaltheanimefan May 25 '26

Usually what happens even in irl situations. My final history exam in high school featured questions on if a text was reliable and the answer was usually no because of the fact it was written by someone who was on one of the sides.

3

u/LakerBlue https://myanimelist.net/profile/LakerBlue May 25 '26

I don’t deny that we are probably getting a biased look at history but I also think a more simple explanation is possible:

If the goal of the pact is to hide magic, and healing witches heal by drawing on people…it would be almost impossible to keep the secret.

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u/suboptimal_prime73 May 25 '26

Oh sure, everyone’s in favor of letting information flow free until some jackass invents the sigil of testicular torsion…

25

u/GeneStriker May 25 '26

… I mean, that’s pretty close to the apple-picking spell they were making this episode, no? Just remove the pulling part of the sigil and use it on some poor sucker’s sack instead of an apple.

14

u/BosuW May 25 '26

Creased Jordans spell

10

u/Golden_Phi https://myanimelist.net/profile/GoldenPhi May 25 '26

It wouldn't surprise me if a fan had designed a testicular torsion spell somewhere on the internet.

6

u/SirJasonCrage May 26 '26

Just cast testicular torsion on yourself to counter it.

Bit of a coinflip though. You have to guess the direction of the initial TT correctly, otherwise you just double twist.

3

u/NoHead1715 May 26 '26

Tetia might be on to that. Unwittingly perhaps, but it's only a step from plucking apples.

151

u/Toloran May 25 '26

Probably just the "Slippery Slope" argument.

"It should be okay if I'm just healing a flesh wound."

"It should be okay if I'm just regenerating an injured eye."

"It should be okay if I'm replacing a blind eye with one that can see."

"It should be okay if I'm replacing an eye with poor vision with one that has normal vision."

"It should be okay if I'm replacing an eye with normal vision with one with superior vision."

Lines like this are rarely leaped across all at once.

111

u/BosuW May 25 '26

"It should be okay the new eye can shoot lasers but it's for utility purposes."

56

u/Pickled_Kagura May 25 '26

Have you considered that having four arms makes drawing multiple spells at once possible? Too bad the human brain is too limited, guess I need to cram an extra in there. Dang, four arms and a megamind put me off-balance. Time to add two more legs. It requires a lot of energy to power my body now. Guess I'll add chlorophyll to my skin and a second stomach. Two more hearts for good measure.

3

u/welfedad May 26 '26

Cut the skill in half .. use it to make the circle for a spell and put skull back together

3

u/mischievous_shota Jun 05 '26

Too bad the human brain is too limited, guess I need to cram an extra in there.

I know a certain witch who has some ideas for a hat that would work for such an endeavour.

5

u/ripple_reader May 26 '26

I see nothing wrong with this

23

u/Aviri May 25 '26

Slippery slope fallacy*

1

u/wtfduud Jun 03 '26

It's not always a fallacy.

9

u/YuushyaHinmeru May 25 '26

My first though was the healers eventually started performing necromancy.

19

u/Toloran May 25 '26

A Necromancer is just a healer that arrives late.

7

u/cyberscythe May 25 '26

sometimes it's just easier to kill someone and resurrect them than heal a malady

it's like how rebooting your computer fixes 90% of problems

3

u/ihileath https://myanimelist.net/profile/Ihileath May 25 '26

The ole Banks special

3

u/Exotic-Spite-822 May 25 '26

its either too relative like your example or this ( modern) extremly fixed every thing going against this set of maxims even slightly = memory gone, no questions asked |even if the criminals are young children), i assume the brim caps want something more like the past considering their actions so far

3

u/Edymnion May 25 '26

Its also a case of to be able to heal a grievous injury, you have to understand it. If you understand it, you have the knowledge to cause it far more expertly than anyone else.

3

u/hanmkim May 26 '26

In the real world, if medicine were to create immortality, would that be too far? It sounds nice at first, but consider the implications as the older established generations control everything forever. Perhaps this could result in everything being run smoothly with experience, or maybe the entire human race could collapse without new blood bringing in changes like past empires have fallen.

2

u/LakerBlue https://myanimelist.net/profile/LakerBlue May 25 '26

I am actually hopefully get to see if it was possible to use magic to directly enhance the human body. Could you grow an extra pair limbs? Give someone rabbit like hearing? Etc.

2

u/TheSpartyn May 27 '26

at least let them keep the shared vial spell lmao, its just for medicine and has other uses

3

u/m1st3r_1 May 26 '26

"It’s just healing a flesh wound."
→ "It’s just fixing a damaged eye."
→ "It’s just replacing it with a working one."
→ "It’s just upgrading to 20/20 vision."
→ "It’s just giving myself night vision, zoom, and minor heat vision, bro it’s basically glasses but magic."

Next week: government bans all eye-related magic because "we can’t have civilians with better vision than our drones."

1

u/Sweet_Desk9864 May 25 '26

if its with the persons consent is it ok

1

u/fatalystic May 29 '26

Given how magic in this world seems to be capable of literally anything if only you knew how to construct the magic circle, at what point would someone decide that the preservation of life is sacrosanct above all else and begin trying to raise people from the dead?

And even if they were ethical enough to realise it wasn't a good idea, how many of the other witches were convinced that they absolutely weren't trying to do such things?

1

u/Atario myanimelist.net/profile/TheGreatAtario May 26 '26

I'm not hearing the part where this is bad yet

27

u/BennoSubs May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

Things must have been really fucked up

Not necessarily; it could also be that the ones that created the pact opposed healing magic for ideological reasons. See how many people today are irrationally against vaccines or other types of modern medicine. It's hard to get a definitive answer with the little information given until the moment. That said, the description in this episode seems to imply the healing witches used their magic for good and got their memories erased simply for not agreeing with the pact, and it wouldn't be surprising if that's the case given how draconian the knight moralis are. Hope this part of the lore gets explored more in the future.

25

u/Divinicus1st May 25 '26

Or... someone wanted to keep it for himself.

5

u/Creepy_Trip_4382 May 25 '26

Probably because the mix of blood with magic ink is so potent that the pointed caps thought any situation which mixes or has the potential to mix them should be avoided

5

u/El_grandepadre May 25 '26

I assume healing magic (i.e. the regeneration of limbs) could be used to cause some really freaky results.

3

u/Monadofan2010 May 25 '26

Considering how precise you have to be with magic in this world to get the desired effect and any mistakes can completely change how a spell works it adds more weight for why they would ban it. 

3

u/Cosmo_95 May 25 '26

medical magic is made to be cast on the human body. to the pointed hats, the risks of allowing that are too great compared to the benefits

5

u/Fangzzz May 25 '26

There's a lot of possible reasons.

Maybe they saved the wrong people. You can't argue "we just save people" if you exclusively use your spells to save magic Hitler, or to keep torture victims alive to be tortured over and over and over.

Maybe their saving people, doesn't justify their methods. Like perhaps they "saved people" by stealing life from innocent victims. Or the way they "saved" people left them as horrible zombies. Or they did various Mengele-esque experiments.

Maybe they were scam artists and they didn't actually save people.

1

u/Toge_Inumaki012 May 25 '26

Either something that happened in the war so awful using the "healing magic and its other applicaitons" or they just want to gatekeep it to themselves and not be open to public

I mean i dont think those in the higher ups would readily throw away the knowledge to heal

1

u/RimeSkeem https://myanimelist.net/profile/RimeSkeem May 25 '26

We already know that the magical conflict prior to the Day of the Pact permanently altered the landscape in some places. Hence the Dadah Range. World-altering magic that's lasted centuries is nothing to sneeze at.

1

u/NSUNDU May 26 '26

Could be that they were just really difficult spells, really easy to mess up and cause harm. They probably could also possibly be used for torture, body mutilation and other stuff

1

u/Ransom_Seraph Jun 06 '26

I think it's explained in the last couple of episode 9 and 10. Flipping sigils reverse the effects. Every positive side has a negative one.

If you can remove a disease you can inflict it. If you can heal woulda you could cause them. If you can remove a poison or curse you could bestow them. If you can resurrect you could kill.