Ininia: Coco's Biggest Rival, or Next Friend? (Witch Hat Atelier Spoilers)
"Will you be my friend? How would you know if that spell made me happy? You don't even know me." Honestly...SOMEONE had to tell her.
As devastating as chapter 87 was, I love it for bringing to attention to one of Coco's biggest flaws, with Ininia being the first to do it. Back pedaling a little, this response from Ininia was due to Coco offering the same solution that Agott gave to her.
Coco tackles the situation by imagining Ininia as herself in ch61-62--someone struggling with a spell that simply needs to be helped by a friend. She shares with her the same reasoning Agott gave her. However, this completely disregards the nuance to Ininia's situation and her much different experiences. Coco criticizes the effectiveness of the silverwood prosthetic before even knowing that Ininia one possesses one herself; in fact, it seems to have been working out for her (considering she has had it at least longer than custas and has not sprouted before).
Coco makes this same mistake with Custas further back. In ch56 she says "He's just like me" and breaks down crying because of it.
She's empathetic to his decision to become a brimhat because she can reflect on her own experiences and determine that she would have done the same thing. This itself is not a bad thing.
However, her solution is to turn him into a pointed hat. To be fair, this does have functional benefits: it humanized him to Luluci and the people at the medical spire later on. However, the implication seems to be that Coco thinks that he should join the pointed hat society just like Coco did after she cast forbidden magic. If that were to happen, it would not have gone well for Custas, if he even agreed. A solution that worked for Coco's life ignores the gap in privilege they have. Custas grew up in a life of poverty where access to magic would have been life-changing. Later on in life, he continued to struggle with pointed hats giving out limited help because of the rules they must follow. Being told the pointed hats' secrets by the brimhats led to an explosion of mistrust, and he couldn't simply hop into this society.
Custas is from a much different world than Coco. While they can both relate to going from unknowing to witches, Custas always had a unique lifestyle of being a nomadic traveller. They had to be self-sufficient in a way, which is why Custas is strongly against unknowings having to be dependent on secretive pointed hats for magical aid.
Coco's transfer to the magical world was difficult, but the atelier life wasn't as different from her previous seamstress life. On the other hand, if Custas joined a group like our atelier, he would completely lose the culture and lifestyle he shared with Dagda--the importance of this is reinforced by Dagda dying to preserve Custas' memories of their life together.
Off of that, let's look at Ininia's view of Custas. And what I find interesting is that what she criticizes Coco for is not too unlike herself.
Ininia saw him as her "he's just like me" as well, and saw for herself with her own eyes that she was wrong. In parallel to how Coco wanted Custas to join the pointed hats since it worked for her, Ininia wanted him to become a silverwood brimhat since that solution (mostly??) worked for her. She was unprepared for the situation of him sprouting because she didn't consider how different his experience with the silverwood would be.
Unlike Coco, we are not told Ininia's experiences, not even if she used to be a witch or unknowing. We don't know how different her previous life was before dawning the brim. She claims that what sets her and Custas apart is her deeper resentment towards the pointed hat, which keeps her from sprouting. My interpretation of her gaze towards Custas and Dagda as she sits in a blank, isolated panel is that she simply does not have a family member that would bring her to the needed amount of comfort. I really have a feeling that if Ininia had her own "Dagda," then she would sprout all the same. However, if I firmly held that belief, I'd be perpetuating the same cycle of misunderstanding.
Because of that, the unraveling of Ininia's character and how it will develop her relationship with Coco is one of the things I'm most excited to see. At first, I thought they were opposites, but they are really reflections of each other. I also think Ininia and Tartah will become friends, but that's for another post.
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