shirahama kamome the mangaka that you are…

picked a good day to catch up on witch hat atelier bc damn i needed this right now

so late to the trend but here's qifrey🧙‍♂️

He's just my silly princess your honour

witch hat colouring

and I wish that I could take his hand /

but where I’m going is for me and me alone

.✨🌒✨.

continued WHA meme selection, orufrey edition :)

Witch hat atelier is good

The ideas about disability presented in Witch Hat Atelier are unusually sophisticated for a work of fiction that isn’t about disability.

im so sorry if this post gets really long, but i finally have weed so i can go fullmetal autism about this. but:

-with the exception of occasional prosthetics, disability aids in fantasy fiction are very rare. i read a lot of fantasy and i write it too, and i think the genre has infinite potential for extremely cool mobility devices; the fact that they’re not common is telling of problems in the genre and society as a whole. witch hat atelier actually draws on that infinite potential, though. like is this not the coolest shit you’ve ever seen?

-the existence of magic mobility devices is cool on its own, but i really appreciate the nuance of having beldarut as contrast to coustas’s experience with disability. beldarut is an extremely powerful witch, both in terms of his skill and his social standing. he may be the least politically powerful of the three sages, but he’s still a sage, he lives in luxury, he is well-respected. as such, his sealchair is not easily breakable, and it can go anywhere an animal with hooves can go, so it has no problem navigating various kinds of terrain. 

-coustas, on the other hand, is a traveling performer whose adoptive father is struggling to pay for his medical treatment, and he is newly disabled. he values his sealchair a lot, as anyone would value their mobility device, but it’s clearly not as sophisticated or durable as beldarut’s. 

-this tears me up ;_; one single accident took away coustas and his father’s instruments–their livelihood–and left them with medical bills that dagda needs to do dangerous work to pay. it’s extremely stressful for coustas, who is painfully aware that his financial circumstances already limited his options in life before he was disabled, and now he has to deal with the disenfranchisement of disability on top of that. it’s a lot of follow-through for a character whose initial introduction seemed so episodic: the witches saved dagda and coustas many chapters ago, and it seemed like that was the last time we’d be seeing these characters, but now we’re facing the consequences of the accident. 

-tartah’s immediate connection with coustas is extremely touching, because to some degree, tartah Gets It. he’s felt that his own life has been limited by his silverwash/argentosis, which is itself shown to be a debilitating condition, particularly since witch society places so much emphasis on visual acuity. 

-coco is able to convince tartah that his future is bright, but tartah and his grandfather are financially well-off in comparison to coustas and dagda. tartah can’t fully relate to coustas’s experience because the economic circumstances are different, and anyway tartah is a witch and has more access to whatever accommodations magic can provide. but tartah can relate enough to be very considerate of coustas’s struggles–so it’s tartah that points out that the town itself is not sealchair accessible:

-that’s why i say the ideas about disability here are unusually sophisticated. not only are there mobility devices, and not only are the mobility devices valued, the problem of inaccessibility for mobility devices in public spaces is addressed with economic nuance. beldarut isn’t shown struggling with sealchair-inaccessible public spaces in the hall, presumably because generations of disabled witches have figured out accommodations, and anyway beldarut is a talented witch who could figure out a magic solution to inaccessibility on the fly if he needed to. but the benefits of magic aren’t evenly distributed. for non-witches, the world is still inaccessible.

-imo it is tear-jerkingly wonderful that coco’s reaction to this is, essentially, “we need to make the world accessible” and not “we need to fix coustas”. in-universe, “fixing” coustas would be against the rule stipulating that magic is not to be done on the body, so there’s a practical reasoning for it. but on a deeper level, it communicates that people don’t need to be “fixed”, they can be accommodated instead. 

;____________; yes please make the world on his side oh my god

hey do u think orugio started making all kinds of kind and useful magic items to dry and warm someone and their clothes because qifrey was afraid of water and hates getting wet just asking

hey what the fuck does it mean that when they designed their adult graduated witch hats they each ended up with the embellishment of the other’s student hat just asking

sorry I’m just lying here staring at my ceiling thinking about witch hat kitchen, an entire spin-off about qifrey and orugio cooking together in peace and coziness after the girls have gone to bed and just kind of the fact that that exists

sleeping in a chair by qifrey’s hospital bed.... orugio......