Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 8 by Kamome Shirahama

1 review

pastelkerstin's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

This is still my favourite manga series, hands down. Disability is a topic that has come up multiple times in the series and in this volume it's once again central. There is good commentary on accessibility here and the intersection of class and disability. I really love how unapologetically Shirahama brings up important topics and includes diverse characters in her fantasy world without tokenizing them.

There's an underlying conflict about morality that has been in this series ever since the first volume when you find out that
magic is not something you are born with, but something that every person can learn, a fact which most people have forgotten because of an amnesia spell, and that the witch community's leaders forbid using magic on human beings altogether, even healing spells, because magic that is used on humas is considered too powerful. Furthermore, witches aren't allowed to learn how "regular" medicine works either. This moral conflict is what is at the core of the series in my opinion. It's what makes the villains not just "evil and that's it" characters, but complex characters whose methods might be sketchy, but who at the end of the day, have a point, at least with regards to the ban on healing spells and the study of medicine. In this volume we find out that Tatha has been studying medicinal plants in secret and that he, too, questions the morality of the restrictions on healing and the secrecy of the true nature of magic. Coco seems to be unsure how to grapple with this, but keeps his secret. She's in a unique position as someone who was not "supposed to be" a witch, but now is, and thus has been on both sides of the secrecy. So when Custas talks about the hardships he had to go through and calls out Coco for speaking from a place of privilege as someone who isn't poor and who can do magic, it hits Coco, as well as the reader, like a freight train, because the truth is that he could do magic. Everyone could. Just how the class divide in this series (and in real-life!) is artificially constructed, the secrecy of magic is as well. So even though the witches consider the secrecy to reduce suffering, there is still suffering that is caused or exacerbated by the secrecy. It's compelling stuff and I'm interested to see where the series takes it.


Visually this volume is of course as beautiful as always. Each of these volumes has panels that I'd frame if I could. 
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