Coco the Witch 🌱
Her dress is based on one of Shirahama's amazing illustrations, I wanted to make an Alphonse Mucha styled fanart!
I'm proud of all the details even though it took very long, WHA's art is so beautiful it makes me want to draw the best I can too! I'm planning on turning this into a gold foil print for Dokomi
i love olruggio witchhat so much. he’s a sun-coded black cat. he’s a lethally chronic procrastinator. he’s a girl dad. he lies to the police. his magic is warm. his kids bully him and they’re right. he’s in a decade-long magically induced situationship, but he doesn’t know it’s cursed and he’s in it for love of the game. he’s lowkey a celebrity but chooses to live in a cottage on the countryside with said situationship and their four children. he sleeps on the couch. he was a crazy child. he’s a bit of a picky eater. he has chronic anemia and is two minutes away from passing out at all times. he hates hurting things so much that he struggles to kill a disgusting giant leech. he’s a burnt out gifted kid. he is begrudgingly excellent at one of his jobs and on-purposely atrocious at the other one. he has a baby face and is nearly unrecognizable without his beard. he carries an enormous, inexplicable guilt. he’s the sky’s kindest, most radiant star. he’s the perfect man
I have a sinking feeling about Qifrey and where his story is headed.
MASSIVE spoilers and maybe slightly long-winded theorizing below the cut.
I believe quite certainly that Qifrey intends to reveal the complete truth to Olruggio very soon, and that while he seems to be accepting his fate, he is trying to maintain as much control over the terms of his inevitable end as possible.
Following the events of Chapter 88, after he reveals his nature as a Silverwood host to Coco, he asks to postpone his complete confession, wishing to be able to reveal the truth elsewhere, in a peaceful place beneath a wide open sky where his roots would have room to comfortably grow. He has described the land around the atelier in this way many times before.
Later, when the entire group is finally reunited and Olruggio tells Qifrey they’re going home. Qifrey’s expression looks pained for a moment, before he answers, “Alright then. Let's go home. Our atelier awaits."
His verbal recognition of the atelier as his home is a rather glaring signal that he is beginning to accept his imminent end and has chosen the atelier as his ideal final resting place. This is hinted at early on in a sequence during which Beldaruit spoke to Riliphin of the Silverwoods, and implied that he knew of Qifrey’s condition as he privately worried that his beginning to think of the atelier as his home could be dangerous for him.
At a point during their journey home, we return to the group to find the girls all asleep, while Qifrey has distanced himself from the rest, sitting on the bank of a lake to write in his book. Olruggio joins him and points out how far he’s sitting from the fire.
I think this was probably intentional in an effort to be closer to the lake to keep himself anxious, since it is my personal theory that here, Qifrey is actually writing a letter to Olruggio in which he tells him the entire truth, and that the narration through the next arc is comprised of excerpts from that letter. The lake is intended to be a failsafe of sorts, since of course, we know that vocalizing the truth to Olly is Qifrey’s greatest comfort trigger, while water touching his skin is his biggest anxiety trigger. Given this, it makes sense for him to choose this particular spot to begin to release the truth so he has a means of keeping the Silverwood at bay readily available should he need it, which he evidently does later on.
In the segments that follow, Qifrey reminisces on how he and Olruggio crossed paths at the Great Hall and became close.
Through the end of chapter 91, we watch the story unfold neutrally as though it is happening in real time, with no narration, but in chapter 92, something shifts. As soon as Qifrey’s recount reaches the part of the story that would have been lost to Olruggio’s memory, a past-tense narrator voice begins to cut in, and suddenly, it becomes clear this story is being told to someone, not merely recalled, and not just to anyone, but to Olruggio by Qifrey. This is the strongest evidence that what we’re reading is actually the contents of a letter to Olruggio.
All of this indicates to me that Qifrey is not just reminiscing, but is actively preparing for the end. The telling of the story, the physical and emotional distance Qifrey has put between himself and the others, and his now repeated framing of the atelier as both home and the kind of place where he would want to be forever, are all supportive of that.
As far as we know, Qifrey hasn’t been the one to initiate a full confession since they were kids at the Tower of Tomes. Spilling his guts in a letter written under duress is probably a new tactic, and it’s a smart one, as it ensures Qifrey can get the complete truth out on his terms without the usual interruption from the Silvertree.
We also know that Qifrey would rather die than have his transformation hurt the people he loves, so at this point, I wouldn't put it past him to leave the letter at home where the others will find it before going off to trigger his transformation alone, or waiting until the others are gone to trigger it.
This is what has me especially worried for him now, because Olruggio and the girls just left the atelier, leaving Qifrey there by himself. Maybe I'm projecting (probably), but the thought of Qifrey leaving a note and then going off to essentially kill himself makes my stomach hurt. Painfully though, it does feel in character, especially now that he's vocalized his trust in his students, particularly Coco, to carry on his mission. Olruggio, please go home now, your husband is an active danger to himself!!
Fortunately, Hiehart and Jujy pay the atelier a visit, but even upon greeting them, he does already seem on edge and uncharacteristically down.
Hopefully, whatever Hiehart has to say will get Qifrey out of his head and convince him to keep living for a little while longer. I'm guessing he's going to ask Qifrey to take on Jujy as his apprentice. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Anyways. To conclude, here is Qifrey’s directed narration/possible excerpts from a letter to Olruggio compiled:
Every day I turned my gaze away from the encroaching dread, and for as long as I was in the dark, I was happy. I greeted each morning with excitement, for with the rise of the sun came another adventure with you. I thought if I could retrieve the past I lost, my joy would be as genuine as yours, and perhaps I would have a real chance to share in your happiness. A child can dream. Like ordinary boys, we would share our visions of tomorrow with each other and we would laugh at how far away it all seemed.
Little did I know that felicity came with forgetting. It was a bliss born of ignorance. If 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.
I once read an old poem that likened stars to boats sailing through the sky. But as far as I know, boats don’t twinkle like stars. The light doesn’t come from the vessel itself, but its guiding torch. Like your pyreball, it burns at the bow. A beacon of light in the dark.
After that fateful day, you would uncover my secret again and again. Each time you would respond with disbelief. Then your face would twist and turn in anguish. And after biting back a few words, you would show me grace, and comfort me and forgive me for lying to you. And then, without fail, the Silverwood’s roots would grow. You would offer me the same path back every time, and I would take it, adding to my mess of sins.
I had often considered leaving your side. I thought that perhaps traveling alone would save me from taking away your memories. But even that minute solace was enough for the Silverwood. I knew then that distance would do nothing but break my promise to you.
So I had another thought: A master never wants for worry with apprentices to look after. The selfishness behind my reason for taking on pupils made me ill, but they’d never have to know that. So I decided to put every fiber of my being toward becoming a good educator. If only I had known then what a joy it truly is to watch your students grow with each passing day.
It’s somewhat rare for a Silverwood to take root in people. Unlike animals, they tend to hold onto too much anxiety. Which is why the tree planted in Custus that gave him his legs raises some questions. My right eye was the only one to sprout during the experiments. It must have some connection to the Silverwood in Custas. For so long, I thought I was the only host, but now I'm not so sure. There could be more victims out there than I ever imagined.
Did I make the right choice?
Would it have been better to throw everything aside and hunt down the brimmed caps?
Doubts like these turn in my head, but the moment I see my atelier, I remember.
This is where my heart is. This is where I want to be.
Thinking about the violence behind the cottagecore sweetness of Witch Hat Atelier’s aesthetic. Cottagecore’s dreamy visions of a depoliticized past exist outside of time and labor and celebrates slow living. It offers a nostalgic alternative to the temporal-spacial collapse of modernity. Of course that appeal often serves deeply conservative movements: Trad wives, nationalist fantasies of some imagined simplistic past, conservative morals fashioned as "family values" and protecting childhood innocence.
And WHT knows that. Its purposeful. This is a story about the literal erasure of cultural memory. A society that hides knowledge and keeps most of its citizens ignorant in order to preserve an idealized vision of society. Everyone with magic speaks earnestly about how committed they are to a life of community service. They talk about the hideous abuses of power in the past that are being avoided by denying access to, in essence, technologies that can change lives. They have locked their society into a specific historic moment rather than letting it live and breathe and meet the needs of the moment. It's not a democratic society. It's a very rigid system with a super powered military with broad judicial authority.
And that is violence. The society built on these conservative principles punishes nonconformity. We see repeatedly how its ablest. We are starting to see how it preserves a highly classed feudal society. It prevents mobility and alternative futures for individuals and the world by hoarding information.
Thematically that gets carried through into various subplots that seem. sweet and benign on the surface but are actually ongoing traumas. The two men who raise the girls cannot be lovers because they are trapped in a horrific world where queer happiness means death and the only solution is the loss of memory. The girls in boarding school are currently being cared for. But systematically we see there is widespread abuse in separating children from their parents and having them apprentice far away from home.
Of course there are more complicated narrative explanations for these plot points. But I love how these themes subvert the artistic style and trouble fantasy.
Which is all to say I think the story is headed into a more fraught engagement with repeated time. It started in the last arc where you could turn back events by one day. But that suggests that more time can, and likely has been turned back before.
Speculation...There is a whole group of people who see Coco as a savior. Maybe she's tried to save them before and each time the clock gets wound back and everyone forgets. The Brimhats are trying to speed time up through their tests. They are trying to kickstart something. It's a fantasy world so maybe we are dealing with a chosen one, child of prophecy arc. But I'm getting Diana Wynne Jones Archer's Goon vibes from this.
dededos
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
baratheonpilled
areudirty
romaincrisis
snowghoul
