Me first watching seeing Qifrey in the anime: oh heck yeah I love a morally gray man who would do anything for only the people he loves
Me finished on catching up with the manga: THAT MAN IS AN ANGEL. HES JUST A LOVERBOY. HES A FATHER AND A WIFE AND A MARTYR OF ROMANCE. HES SO PRETTY AND SAD AND HE DESERVES THE WORLD
Iām writing a wha fanfic with original characters made by me! I am very excited because it is coming along. Meaning I am writing it, I am at 10 chapters and am nearly finished with the first arc!
I plan on posting it once I have all arcs bare bones done. I cannot make a short wha because I love the implications. Anyway I will give updates here! (About the writing not the fic)
I donāt think Qifrey is morally gray at like all. Heās good and does some dubious things. I just think that ,for a lot of people, when someone is willing to against the laws it makes them morally gray.
Qifrey is just good, and I mean like if I would describe it in terms of DnD, his alignment would be neutral good. Yes heās selfish but that is because he is running out of time, he wants to stop the brimmed hats as revenge yes, but also because they have and will hurt more people to prove their point.
Though I do think that the author intended for us to talk about this. Because the actions of erasing peopleās memories are dubious at best, but like heās light gray at most.
Maybe itās cause I hate the government and how laws penalize the poorest among us. But laws arenāt my moral standard, my consistency lies in integrity and I think the same is for Qifrey.
Is it just me or do people see Coco as a mini-Qifrey? I in fact see her as more similar to Olruggio. I'm pretty sure in one chapter it has Olruggio saying something along the lines of the fact that he's a witch and he should be able to save people.
Pretty sure it's the center of Olly's arc, so the idea that Coco is naturally similar to Qifrey feels a lot more false. Agott to me seems more like younger Qifrey, because she is just as cold as younger Qifrey was.
Iām writing a wha fanfic with original characters made by me! I am very excited because it is coming along. Meaning I am writing it, I am at 10 chapters and am nearly finished with the first arc!
I plan on posting it once I have all arcs bare bones done. I cannot make a short wha because I love the implications. Anyway I will give updates here! (About the writing not the fic)
āIf I knew what I was... If I knew that I was never meant to be saved... I would've stayed far away from you... The sky's kindest, most radiant star.ā
Itās rare that I like the doomed part of yaoi, but whenever I see Qifrey and Olruggio, one part of me really wants to see what Olly and Qifrey would do for each other.
One part of me wants to see Qifrey constantly tortured by the fact his friend always forgives him. One part of me want Olly to figure it out all by himself and mourn, mourn so deeply it hurts the page.
When they get their ending, there better be tears streaming out of my eyes, regardless if itās happy or sad.
This is my favorite chapter in the whole series I think and I want to ramble a little about it and the stuff leading up to it.
So thereās a lot thatās already been said about this chapter. The big one is of course Qifrey realizing he has become someone who can give love and support to Coco because he received it from Olly, paralleling the myth of the silverwood tree being gifted magic by the star who loved her, and she in turn passed it on to others she loved.
But I would like to briefly dig into some of the visual storytelling at play here, specifically this sequence of panels:
So for the last couple chapters before this, weāve been in Qifreyās POV. Both his younger self in flashbacks and his adult self reflecting on them. In the first couple of flashbacks, Young Qifrey and Olly were even younger than the girls are now, and thatās reflected in both their designs and behavior, like the argument about food in the cafeteria.
Theyāre mostly a two man show, so we donāt see too many shots of them next to adults, but when they are, again, very small.
Even the chapter 90 cover illustration has the child versions of themselves in their oversized adult robes.
Adorable as they are, it puts an extra layer of sorrow on the events that follow. Itās one thing to go through being buried alive, watching who knows how many people die in a natural disaster, and the silverwood scene and memory wipes, itās another thing to experience all that before hitting puberty.
But I think some of this visual language carries over, at least a little, to when weāre back with adult Qifrey. Thereās a very brief scene in chapter 92 where we cut back to him as heās remembering the first time the silverwood sprouted. We get our iconic āradiant starā line, before a fantastic match cut of his hand that doesnāt support my point but Iām including anyway because how could I not.
Then, presumably because remembering the good times with his childhood best friend is enough to provoke the silverwood, Qifrey wades into a lake to trigger his discomfort and reduce the spread of roots.
We donāt see Qifrey without his black shirt very often. Even in his alternate outfit shepherd tunic when he taught the girls about the five trials, he still wore the black shirt underneath. And I think he looks a lot younger without it. Smaller. Frail even. The wide angle of the panels help, as does the visual of his robes hanging from the tree. Said tree is closer to the foreground than he is, creating the illusion that the clothes are much bigger, which evokes the chapter illustration of child-him wearing clothes too big for him. His body is also about as rail thin as the branch itself. The following panels also never show a straight-on view of his torso, either cutting off the full view or showing him at an angle, again making him appear thinner than he already is.
Thereās a lot going on with how he fits into the environment as well. First heās in the blackness of the mountains and lake, pretty clear sinking into darkness imagery. His robes and hat on the branch are mostly in the sky above the darkness with the stars; he is both beneath and separate from them. He feels he doesnāt live up to the ideal witch those robes represent. Then the rest of the panels on this page lack backgrounds entirely. Itās all negative space. The one on the upper left has him sandwiched by inky blackness on both sides, with the only light surrounding the scar from his Romonon injury, which is the first thing your eye is drawn to before his face. Said face leans towards the right side of the panel, where there is mostly nothing. The next two panels have him in the same black void, and even though he technically takes up most of the frame now, the silverwood roots are at the center, the focus once more. Then the last panel is another wide shot where his face is obscured. Instead of pitch black nothingness, thereās a gradient with water ripples. In the context of Qifrey, this feels worse as he hates water, and here he is surrounded by nothing but it. The massive negative space at the top creates the feeling that not only is he physically small, but also that he is helpless against the world around him and the specific problems that ail him.
The water ripples lead us into our first look at when Qifrey was almost overtaken by the silverwood, a moment where he was at his most helpless.
Iām not going to recount every shot of him looking tiny and pathetic caught up in the branches, but there are a few more void shots like this as well.
Once weāre back to adult Qifrey towards the end of chapter 93, most of his shots are still framed like the lake one: wide shots that make him look small against the environment or closeups where heās in a darkened void. A lot where his face is cut off completely as well.
Even that medium shot on the bottom right of the panel above is from a higher angle looking down on him. But the next panel, shot from Cocoās perspective, while heās still small, he stands evenly with the atelier in the background.
Which leads us to chapter 94, and the scene this post is actually about.
First, in the lead up, we get a couple more shots that make Qifrey look like heās swimming in his robes, ass opposed to them making him look bigger than he is.
Then, we get more contrasting imagery of him being in a void separate from the environment, and Coco. Thereās so much negative space in the panels heās in. And that shot of Coco near the vines. In the actual scene, heās right behind her. He should be in the shot but heās not. He doesnāt feel like he belongs there.
But itās cold and snowing, and his priority is Coco, so he stands over her to block the snow. And we get the first of the sequence I shared at the top:
Weāre still in the void, and Coco is in it too, but she is contained entirely within Qifreyās silhouette. Critically, we can also see his thin arm under his robe. He is shielding her, but barely.
Then hereās the full page the second image is from. Qifrey gets a few closer shots, and the environment starts to creep back in, but in that bottom right panel, heās still containing Coco but heās very small. It looks like a stiff breeze could blow him over.
So why am I going in so hard about Qifrey looking like a sad twig? Because the chapters these are from are all his POV. He still sees himself as the weak, pathetic child, powerless to solve the problems around him, who canāt live up to the ideals he believes in. But here, he is able to turn that perceived weakness into a strength, a way to emotionally relate to his troubled student. He admits the ideal he puts up is a front, and one that Coco shouldnāt hold herself to. It is okay to be upset, it is okay to ask for help, it is okay to let others care. And to top it off, he reminds her that even if her hurting is upsetting, itās something he can benefit from.
All of this, both the written dialogue and the visuals, come together in this moment to make the next page, where we shoot back into Cocoās POV for the first time in several chapters, hit like fucking truck:
Itās not just that Coco is breaking down after everything that happened to her. Itās Qifreyās arm and robe making up the whole background. No environment or void, just him protecting her. Big and strong and occupying the space like heās the only other thing in the world.
Weāve spent all this time getting to know how Qifrey sees himself: a pathetic wisp of a failure. But Coco doesnāt know this. To her, even though she knows he might be dying, heās still her protector. The powerful but gentle teacher who keeps her safe and is always there for her. It visually conveys the idea of being a āgiverā pages before he makes the realization himself. Him casting the spell to keep the snow off her mother is a restatement of not only Cocoās love for magic and its kindness, but also his specific kindness. A kindness she we can see she already believes in. A kindness he has always had, even when he saw himself as nothing more than an empty mess.
This is the moment Witch Hat went from one of the best manga Iāve ever read, to instantly shooting up into one of my favorite pieces of media of all time. Qifrey and Coco are also some of my favorite characters, in part because the clear love they have for one another brings out the best in both. I canāt wait to see where this series goes in the future, and all the new ways Shirahama can make me sob in both joy and despair.
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