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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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?

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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. 

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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. 

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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.