Witch Hat Atelier 11
by Kamome Shirahama
2023
In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, we met a new witch who uses forbidden magic, a young witch who could easily pass for a fellow student. She threatened Coco and Tartah unless they can get into the Silver Eye parade and cast a spell that impresses the king enough to earn a private audience. It's a seemingly impossible request, especially since the parade is the next day! But Coco agreed to try, and then immediately started worrying herself sick over the difficulty of it.
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated; the assignment got sprung on at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial.
We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.
But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better.
There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work.
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated; the assignment got sprung on at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial.
We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.
But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better.
There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work.
Flush toilets and sanitary sewers are also emblematic of a certain way of thinking about what people need, and deserve. Access to clean water, the ability to go to the bathroom when you need to, and a way to dispose of wastewater so that it doesn't sicken you or contaminate your drinking water - these things are literally vital to human health, to life itself. They're also generally considered impolite or embarrassing to talk about. Milan Kundera devotes a whole chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea that you cannot truly love humanity unless you also love shit. You can't really help people if you're only willing to help them when their problem isn't distasteful or unsavory.
In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.
In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.
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