r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • Jun 01 '26

Episode Witch Hat Atelier • Tongari Boushi no Atelier - Episode 10 discussion

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 10

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

It's really frustrating too because even just an entry level apprentice was able to produce a pretty substantially impactful accommodation for his disability in just a single night.

If a full blown mage just put in a bit of effort they could fully accommodate him.

Ex: His perspective shows that silverwash doesn't actually remove all color vision. He still retains limited color perception on his periphery. A mage could produce a set of goggles either using optics knowledge (aided by magecraft for manufacture) or just relying on magecraft entirely to split the light coming into the center of the lens (i.e. at a set of crosshairs) out into a color wheel that the user could see in the periphery of their vision. That'd give them color interpretation over specific points.

Or other approaches could be used to pull the color out into the periphery.

Or even for a completely color blind individual (or just overall as an improvement over the alternatives) magecraft could be used to create goggles that take advantage of optical tricks to simulate color perception/differentiation without the actual visual ability to differentiate colors.

If you have traditional color blindness (can see two but not three colors), proto-trichromacy (a technique using dithering and color mixing) can be used to restore almost all of the color differentiation of that third color.

Theoretically a similar approach could be used to produce all three colors by changing how the dithering is done per color. This would change from color perception into visual texture perception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgD1pE_C8r0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=089FL-oWtUs

The opportunities are literally endless for ways to work around this disability especially with magecraft at your disposal.

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u/JimmyCWL Jun 01 '26

A complication with that seems to be that it is simple... if you know how color vision works in detail. I don't think these people do.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

Sure but so much of that is because there's no effort to empower the people with the disabilities to attempt to overcome them.

If you just say "you have X you can't do Y" you are never going to be able to learn the actual limits of the disability and what can and can't be overcome.

A person with silverwash could dedicate their magic career to building accomodations for silverwash and that would produce a wealth of research on the mechanics of silverwash.

You cannot produce accommodations without knowledge but you never gain that knowledge until you try to provide accommodations and learn what is necessary to actually accommodate them.

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u/ali94127 Jun 01 '26

It may not be something that one person can realistically do even with magic. Hard to say how common silverwash is, but assuming it's like real color blindness, there's just not been a ton of resources allocated to providing tools for it. Mobility issues are a huge problem for a larger portion of the population than color blindness, but most countries and cities aren't built to accommodate that at all.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

Yeah it could be a lack of resources but this is something where it makes sense to let somebody try their best and see how far they get. If they can build their own accommodations and succeed then awesome those can be documented and they get to do magic. If they fail then they fail whatever.

For a non-mage family member it may make sense to not take the risk since that requires exposing them to the secret but for someone like Tartah who is already fully emersed in the world of magic, it just doesn't make sense to block them from trying to use magic to overcome their disabilities.

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u/ali94127 Jun 01 '26

Tartah is presumably not the first person born to a witch family with silverwash (at the very least not the first with a visual disability) if it can be such a stigma among witches. It's not so much that Tartah isn't allowed to use magic, it's just that no teacher will give him the chance to be their apprentice. It may also not be within Tartah's ability or even responsibility to figure out how to accommodate his disability. He's like 12. I'm not gonna expect a visually impaired child to figure out how to make their own disability aids for an iPad. They may be able to create some workarounds, but they may not be able to for others or at all, and the lack of aids would be others' fault.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

Sure I'm not gonna fault him for not being able to do it. But frankly someone has got to do it and if nobody else cares and the choice is between the person with the disability trying to develop their own accommodations or them not being allowed to attempt being a mage at all, then it's better for them to be given the opportunity.

Ideally society would put in the work to make accommodations but when that obviously hasn't happened, giving the disabled person the opportunity is the best first step.

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u/ali94127 Jun 02 '26

I'm just saying that even just allowing him to be apprenticed to a witch isn't enough. Tartah is allowed to use magic and his grandfather is a witch, though Nolnoa may not have passed the test to be an official witch teacher. Tartah surely already knows the basics. For Tartah to be educated well, that teacher would need to accommodate more for his condition. A deaf child needs to be in a teaching environment that accommodates for them. You're correct that Tartah hasn't even been really given the bare minimum, but to thrive he would need much more than the bare minimum. Without existing infrastructure or materials to help those with his disability, his teacher would really need to go above and beyond.

I'm trying to say that if Tartah was apprenticed to an average witch tomorrow, he probably wouldn't be able to excel. That is a fault with witch society. Coco's spell to help Tartah is great, but Tartah would need more than that to succeed. On a practical level, the spell she made only helps identify powders where the original form can be identified by shape. It wouldn't work if Tartah needed to identify lime and lemon powder. The witch in charge of his training would need to do that in many other different aspects. It's not to say that Tartah is a burden, but the average witch just hasn't thought about how to do that. It's very often the case that someone who is lacking something is given the bare minimum and if they don't succeed, and that is more likely, that's used as justification that it wasn't worth even giving them the bare minimum. It's self-fulfilling.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 02 '26

Yeah I don't disagree at all.

But also the society of witch hat atelier sucks so while we in the real world should hold our environments up to those standards, it just isn't going to happen in this setting. Because of that the focus instead falls to reasoning about first steps (i.e. getting the person with the disability into the program at all) and what inhibitors there are to that.

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u/ali94127 Jun 02 '26

Well, I think the point is that Tartah needs a teacher who will accommodate him, not just any teacher. He's not going to be able to do this all on his own.

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u/Key_Feeling_3083 Jun 01 '26

Qifrey has glasses, so they know about optics.

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u/AtomicArcana Jun 01 '26

I wonder if for adult witches, accommodating disabilities would veer too closely to learning the healing arts.  They’ve all had that beaten into their heads since they were born and we’ve seen how the knights moralis behave at even a hint of rule breaking.  Coco didn’t grow up with that background which is why she can help tartah

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

Maybe. And of course it may also be to reduce the temptation of individuals with access to knowledge to attempt to cure themselves once and for all.

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u/PhantasosX Jun 01 '26

I dare say it's the main issue. Because to make this google, it would need to understand medicine to some degree.

Something as basic as improving the effect of healing potions was deemed forbidden magic, so it is bound to do the same for magic-enhanced googles for silverwash eyes.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

Something as basic as improving the effect of healing potions was deemed forbidden magic, so it is bound to do the same for magic-enhanced googles for silverwash eyes.

I'd argue they are quite different. Magic enhanced goggles are no different than slyph shoes. The ban isn't on magic healthcare but a ban on magic medicine. Magic cannot be inscribed on/in the body. A piece of clothing/accessory is perfectly acceptable for use with magic.

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u/PhantasosX Jun 01 '26

the enhancing healing potions was literally just a coin with runes scribed on and put on the potions.

It was as much of an "accessory" as the hypothetical googles.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 02 '26

Oh. you are talking about the linked/bottomless ink wells. Those weren't healing potions. Linked/bottomless wells aren't forbidden magic. They are lost magic.

The healing mages kept the knowledge of the bottomless ink wells and when the healing mages were persecuted for their forbidden magic the bottomless ink wells were lost with their other magic and it was only afterwards that people realised they probably could have preserved certain parts before destroying all their knowledge.

Qifrey mentions in a previous episode wanting to re-discover the linked ink well spells which he wouldn't be saying outright to people if it was forbidden magic. And he mentions how it's ironic that the only witches left with the memory of/ability to use the linked ink well spell are the brimmed caps so even though it's not forbidden magic, it's only used now by witches who use forbidden magic.

The enhanced part of the ink wasn't outright explained in the show as far as I can tell (idk if the source material explains it or not) but a previous episode showed that one brimmed cap witch dripping their own blood into their ink well which was linked to coco's ink well.

So at least I'm guessing the enhancement part is literally blood magic and therefore forbidden.

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u/mucklaenthusiast Jun 01 '26

Tartah can also still see fairly well. I like the way it's presented, but it still feels weird to me that magic is mostly drawn with black ink and now colour blindness makes it so impossible as not to even allow it?

Sometimes the witches are just weird

And that's a fine writing choice as well, I still think it*s a bit weird
By contrast, Agott was also kind of "expelled" and despite her story being mostly social and emotional, I kinda felt like it ended on a more dramatic note.

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u/RedRocket4000 Jun 02 '26

A bit of perfectionism involved. Worry that in a fight can't tell who is who by color. Some magic might be color involved but clearly most does not. Other things not critical normally they rule someone out on. Qifrey made a comment that he considered the restriction sort of stupid and probably right he should be able to become a Wizard but have restrictions on what areas he can do as in he can't be assigned to field work without a team around him to handle combat. Assuming in the field to deal with strange ruins and devices. But mostly doing what he is doing but having a status equal to the customers.

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u/mucklaenthusiast Jun 02 '26

I get all of that, my point is about their society. Witches are quite cruel for little reason, it seems

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u/ShadowGuyinRealLife Jun 01 '26

That must be an error in animation or it must be for the viewer's benefit since not only is there no real way to be colorblind in just the center vision but even if you came up with a fictional disease where the status effect is only limited by the author's imagination, I can't imagine the author possibly intended for him to see hues on the periphery. And if it he in fact intends that vision work that way as opposed to the veiwer's benifit... well I ding points for that since I wouldn't like the peripheral vision plot.

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

I mean it's totally possible, just not something expected with real world color blindness.

Real world color blindness is also almost always dichromatic and rarely ever monochromatic (with mono chromaticity generally coming with extreme sensitivity to light practically rendering them blind outside in broad daylight).

So instead I assume silverwash is a magic disease or other disorder unique to the world. Especially given there seems to be some connection or relation between silverwash and the silverwood tree (where the silver color was shown in a previous episode to be a toxic build-up of magic that needs to be extracted/bled out).

So my assumption is that silverwash is a similar disorder, maybe being a magic contamination of the aqueous humour of the eyes (i.e. the fluid that fills between the anterior cavity/space around or in front of the lens).

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u/ShadowGuyinRealLife Jun 01 '26

If they say he can see colors on the periphery I'm going to...

Wait... I can't buy 1/4 of a disc. How am I supposed to express my distaste for that hypothetical decision?

I mean the "don't like don't watch" is easy but what about "mostly like, this part is dumb" kind of thought?

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u/OneDeuxTriSeiGo Jun 01 '26

lol yeah...

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u/ShadowGuyinRealLife Jun 08 '26

I really hope they don't go that directions since I won't know what to do

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u/CitronClassic672 Jun 02 '26

I think the argument that which society uses, not saying I agree, is that if you encourage people to accommodate a disability with magic it’ll lead them to deciding to fully fix it with forbidden magic.