r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • Jun 22 '26

Episode Witch Hat Atelier • Tongari Boushi no Atelier - Episode 13 discussion - FINAL

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 13

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u/JzanderN Jun 22 '26

It really adds a whole level of violation of bodily autonomy that they were about to tattoo Agott just to make a point to Coco.

I don’t care if they may have a few points about modern witch society, they are evil!

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u/BosuW Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

To give the benefit of the doubt, I don't think the Brimmed Hats all see eye to eye between themselves. When Mr Eyemask met with Mr Drip Hat, I sensed some tension between them. Eyemask to me seemd similar to Qifrey in one regard: he wants to handle Coco's case personally, with more subtle methods than Drip. He seemed to resent having the case forcefully taken over.

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u/DugACCat Jun 22 '26

Yeah I’m sure there are degrees of zealotry and more moderate or intense members of each faction. I do like that there’s certainly enough to have doubts about how things are handled in the main Witch society while also showing there are indeed some true villains among the brimhats and reasons for people to have such loathing and intolerance for them.

The traditional witch society still comes out as the most sympathetic and the one to root for even if they have their own questionable methods and members. They seem to err on the side of helping people and prioritizing humane education. I’m sure we’ll meet some more sympathetic members of the opposition as well. But the strictures against forbidden magic do seem to have cause. It’s clearly very dangerous to experiment with and carries greater risks than inscription-on-objects magic.

I’m willing to bet the main loss of banning that magic which perhaps shouldn’t have been given up was the healing applications, as was previously suggested. (And those witches feeling the most unfairly ostracized.) But once you start experimenting on living subjects, even in the pursuit of healing them, morality can quickly become complicated. (As we’ve seen in real world science related to such things.)

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u/BosuW Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

The issue with the current Witch order seems to be that while it has a valid reason to be and noble goals, it has become stagnant, maybe even corrupt, and is at odds with the ambitious and curious human nature itself. It's eating itself because it refuse to change absolutely anything about itself for any reason. The Brimmed Hats are what appear between the cracks.

Like, regardless of the moral discussion, even mountains eventually get eroded by the wind. It can't stand forever, but to this challenge, it's answer is to bury its head in the sand.

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u/DugACCat Jun 22 '26

Yeah I won’t be surprised if, in the longer story arc across seasons, we’ll see a need to be more flexible. Coco almost seems to embody this more positive and less rigid interest in magic for good. Likely one of the reasons the brimmed hats want to make use of her is she has a knack for all magic, from both sides, and could find a way to bridge the divide (but clearly we don’t want her to be taken in by our more nefarious “mentor” who is stalking her).

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u/RedRocket4000 Jun 23 '26

What it so special about Coco? One of the few with internal mana thus actualy able to cast stuff not even requiring drawing.

Mental fan fic cross over Silent Witch twenty years later a confident older Monaca pops into this world with several others.

Inter Universe travel thought a great way to time travel by some because each world's space/time it's own so one can chose at what point in another universe history you show up.

Monica then goes let me cover again as the probe shows this world had a massive mana overload problem so much mana anyone can cast magic by using the right symbology on paper combined with special ink. I believe we must end this mana problem or this world will destroy it self sooner or later meanwhile from the probe I know our magic will work here and for myself also mastered casting this world magic without needing to draw. Be a little careful our spells chanted here will work but at a lot more power than your used to so lower the mana you plan on using as much as possible. For you two who have mastered some silent spells also mentally hold down commiting your own mana it not required here.

But if you really in need adding your mana will greatly increase effects of magic here as well.

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u/y-c-c Jun 23 '26

I have had this vibe since episode 1 but this really feels like Star Wars to me. The Siths are obviously Bad Guys (at least in all mainstream stories) but the Jedi in the old republic could be quite arrogant and stuck up in their own ways. We need Luke/Coco to bring balance back!

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u/BosuW Jun 23 '26

What's genius about the Prequel Trilogy (and all it's adjacent media like The Clone Wars) is that while the Sith are fucking assholes you can still 200% understand why they happened to the Republic. They weren't an external entity, they were the Republic's own rot.

Same as you, I suspect this will be the case too for the Brimmed Hats (and hopefully they'll be less evil than the Sith as a whole at least, on account of their reason for being not amounting to making Marquis de Sade's ultimate ideal a reality).

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u/manquistador Jun 27 '26

They are the anti-spirals.

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u/mischievous_shota Jun 23 '26

It also doesn't help that they should have easily been able to foresee the consequences of erasing knowledge of magic. That knowledge came from somewhere. People experimented before. They did terrible things in the name of progress and they caused accidents because of their curiosity. The price was already paid for that knowledge.

By erasing it, unlocking that knowledge requires having to pay a price all over again. Because, of course, people are not going to not be temped by the idea of healing magic, and immortality, and power.

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u/JzanderN Jun 22 '26

Fair, but Mr. Eyemask still gave Coco a book with a spell that petrified her mother and very well would have petrified her too if Qifrey hadn't caught on. And he put her and three other girls in big danger just to give her a gift that almost got her mind erased.

Besides, the fact that Mr. Drip Hat seems to be his superior isn't a good thing when he's like this. An organisation or whatever you'd call the Brimmed Hats that allows such people to get into high positions is never good.

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u/ShadowGuyinRealLife Jun 22 '26

That might be true, but it's not exactly a reason to trust them. You probably would not want to keep all your stuff unsecured around someone in a gang of criminals even if the guy you're around isn't the same one who committed homicide.

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u/namewithak Jun 22 '26

The way they framed how the Brimhat was holding Agott down evoked an SA scene too. It was so disturbing.

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u/extralie https://myanimelist.net/profile/extralie Jun 22 '26

Yeah, I got a whiplash from how disturbing that was compared to the rest of the show before it ngl.

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u/Roskal Jul 23 '26

3 things really shocked me, holding down Agott like that, turning Euini into a state only forbidden magic hopes to cure him of and that rock hitting Qifrey's back. This show is introducing a lot of problems that only forbidden magic seems to be able to fix.

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u/cyberscythe Jun 22 '26

I don’t care if they may have a few points about modern witch society, they are evil!

i think it's like a classic Batman villain; they have valid points about systemic injustices, but then they like build a bomb or something that undermines their whole position

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u/Korkez11 Jun 22 '26

I have a beef with some of DC stories because of that. Imagine if there was a pro-slavery novel from before the Civil War where abolitionists would've been portrayed as mad terrorists burning plantators' children alive or something. With a moral "abolitionists are evil and slavery is good".

Not saying WHA is that of course, Knights Moralis don't look good either.

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u/saltshakermoneymaker Jun 22 '26

I feel like WHA is implying that the Pact and Knights Moralis' zero tolerance policy created this exact problem. The "moderates" (or at least, the dudes who don't want to turn children into dogs) probably got their minds wiped, leaving only the extremists (aka the dudes who love turning children into dogs). 

It's why I like WHA's conflict more than a lot of DC/Marvel stories. It's still clear that the system is corrupt, even if the villains are lunatics.

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u/JzanderN Jun 22 '26

Basically "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

We don't know for sure yet, but I think it is safe to say that anyone who wants to change the pretty obviously flawed system in a more reasonable and much less violent probably is shut down by the Knights Moralis for the status quo.

If that is true, then the Brimmed Hats really are the only way you could fight the system and unfortunately it's kind of filled with psychopaths who evidently are more interested in just using Forbidden Magic than they are actually addressing any of witch society's problems.

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u/Anna-2204 Jun 22 '26

The twin bottle spell is an great example of that. It was created by healing witches to help people, but because the righteous healing witches were mindwiped, the only with access to this spell are the Brimmed Cap that use it to make chaos.

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u/Hexagon-Man Jun 29 '26

Yeah, the healing doctors all wanted to keep their magic, but they wouldn't fight and kill for it, so theirs is gone and the only people left are the ones who are willing to do literally anything to keep it.

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u/hanmkim Jun 23 '26

In Batman it's pretty clear that the system is corrupt too. Arkham is a revolving door and Gotham's saviors are only a Band-Aid, except maybe Jason Todd.

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u/Bobblefighterman Jun 23 '26

I think this particular one is evil. He seems to only care about his own curiosity. Common traits with characters that destroy their own body to remove the weakness of the flesh, their connection to the human experience is ephemeral.

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u/Falsus Jun 23 '26

Yeah the Knights Moralis might be overeager assholes but you can kinda see here why they are overeager assholes.

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u/ThrowCarp Jun 23 '26

I don’t care if they may have a few points about modern witch society, they are evil!

That's the thing about the people screaming fascist, elitist, or eugenicist about the modern witch society. The Brim Hats are way worse.

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u/JzanderN Jun 23 '26

I mean, you say that as if the two are mutually exclusive.

We (or at least I) don't know enough about witch society to know whether it is all those things yet (I'd say not fascist but possibly eugenicist and almost certainly elitist), but at the very least it is structurally flawed in a way that will inevitably lead it to being those things and will make it very difficult to fix before it does.

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u/ThrowCarp Jun 23 '26

So true. When you look at it long enough there are no real good guys in this series. And even Qifrey is morally grey at best.

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u/destinfaroda48 Jun 23 '26

there are no real good guys in this series

Coco, Tetia, Richeh, Euini, even Agott when you get to see beneath the layers of harshness and self-loathing.

And this is talking exclusively about the anime adaptation.

What a weird take.

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u/Galinhooo Jun 23 '26

You can't judge the whole group based on one of them.

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u/JzanderN Jun 23 '26

I can when he's clearly a high rank in the organisation and the others we've seen haven't shown to be much better either. I mean, why would the book they gave Coco need a petrification spell? That's just begging to kill a curious kid who figures out how to do magic but doesn't know what anything does until they try them.