I love your "they ring the same bells for weddings and funerals" tag bc I work as a bell-ringer at one of the few churches in my city where you still have to ring the bell manually. and we do ring the same bell whether it's a wedding or a funeral! but ☝️ we also ring it if the local sports team wins at sports (the secret third thing that is neither a wedding nor a funeral)
the three universal human experiences: love, death, and sports
I rarely feel the urge to share my thoughts on any media. Mostly because it’s so rare for a story to strike a chord so deeply that I just want to talk about it non-stop. A long, long time ago, Pandora Hearts was that story for me. It seemed like a pretty unremarkable manga at first, but then the scale became so insanely mind-blowing that it just completely destroyed me.
And now... after all these years... a new contender has appeared.
Recently, a certain video platform (cough) recommended a short clip of an anime adaptation that had just started airing. My initial reaction was: "Oh, this character has a neat EN voice actor and a pretty cool personality." Bookmarked for later. Then another clip popped up. And another.
My self-control snapped. Right before heading out into the woods, armed with snacks and anticipation, I managed to binge all available episodes in one sitting (the last dubbed episode had just come out!).
And that was it.
RIP me, no one has seen me since. After finishing the anime, I immediately jumped into the source material—the manga. And... what can I even say...
Having read all the chapters released so far, my mental state is currently somewhere between: "I need to hug every single character, buy every physical manga volume, and scream at the top of my lungs" and "HELP, I cannot survive another series that will leave me emotionally ruined for the next three years."
I don't know how I missed this masterpiece for so long. I don't know why so few people seem to talk about it. But I'll say this: if fate kept me away from Witch Hat Atelier until now, it was for a reason. And if people aren't talking about it enough, then I WILL (while this post was in drafts, everything changed and now I heard a lot of WHA, lol).
Because I foresee just as many buckets of glass and pain as Pandora Hearts had, which means at least someone who loves this kind of stuff (especially deep lore and magic systems) will be interested. I'm not sure, but I know I'm going to be rambling about this for a VERY long time.
So expect a whole wave of my ramblings in future posts—most of them will probably focus on Qifrey, because why not, he completely stole my soul. I'll make sure to put everything under spoiler cuts, because some (or honestly, all) of this lore is best experienced after reading the manga, at least up to chapter 88 (don't even ask me what happened in chapter 88, I will just squeak stupidly and run away).
If you need to insult something else to say a compliment that's not a compliment, that's a rant to a random artist that you started by complimenting them. I promise no one gives a fuck that you hate a random ship.
my mythology pet peeve is when someone describes a scenario in which they keep nearly getting something and then having it snatched away, and everyone's like "one must imagine sisyphus" no!!! one must imagine TANTALUS!!! sisyphus = being made to perform a pointless, aggravating task over and over without ever making any progress. tantalus = being offered a glorious reward only for it to vanish as soon as you reach for it. they are NOT the same
Grandma and Grandpa had a shotgun wedding when Grandma was 19. Grandpa went off to Vietnam which left her, a severely mentally young mother, alone. Never heard a complaint about her side piece Jeff. He seemed to make her happy and for that I salute him.
what's that one thing where they asked how ripely from alien was so realistic and believable as a female character in scifi for once and they were like "well we just took the dude from the original script and made him a girl and changed nothing else. it works bc men and women are the same?" and people were like "woah no way" and then didn't learn anything from that for 20 years
"how do you write such believable men as a woman?" "how do you write such believable women a man?" and the answer people who are good at it always give is "i just write people. were literally the exactly the same. do you think the opposite sex is some sorta totally different animal???" and people respond "woah that's wild. yea i do. and im not gonna stop thinking that goodbye :)"
Go to a furry convention dressed as an 18th century fur trapper. Longrifle, jawtraps, chains, fur hat, big coat made of sewn-together pelts of different polyester neons...
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
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