Witch Hat Atelier - Vol. 7 Ch. 38
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Orugio is the best, while giving them a lecture he's still mindful enough to help dry them off 😇
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i'd prefer if coco went to the brimhats instead of staying with the terrorist mages
@Redice yup
@Binary10011 it wasn't "banning" more like a terrorist takeover of the entire world by the "conspirators"(they even call themselves that!) which they now seek and destroy every bit of advanced magic, they're pretty much dark-ages Christian church with inquisitors and burning everything that does not adhere to their obsolete limited knowledge
@Redice yup
@Binary10011 it wasn't "banning" more like a terrorist takeover of the entire world by the "conspirators"(they even call themselves that!) which they now seek and destroy every bit of advanced magic, they're pretty much dark-ages Christian church with inquisitors and burning everything that does not adhere to their obsolete limited knowledge
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@Eliminateur I'd also be more empathetic with brimhats
if only they didn't turn an innocent child into a fucking wolf for funsies experiment
or giving the magic equivalent of explosive to a child without saying what it is
if only they didn't turn an innocent child into a fucking wolf for funsies experiment
or giving the magic equivalent of explosive to a child without saying what it is
Such an interesting and beautiful series. Can't wait to see where it goes.
@Eliminateur
I think you do them and the series a disservice in that it's genuinely a complicated situation and may well be similar to where we are headed in the real world too. I'm a technologist and I'm fundamentally sympathetic in many ways to the brimhats and the potential that advancement has for humanity. I don't see the "human form" as some sacred perfect thing, just a product of evolution that has got us this far. There's lots of "unnatural" things that are glorious and beautiful (not least that we, all of us humans in this forum, are here together able to talk and enjoy art from across the planet).
But there is no denying that advanced technology can be used for harm too, and that sometimes the risk/reward ratio can be very skewed towards risk. Some of the stuff we're heading towards like advanced table top bio/genetic engineering capability raises genuinely terrifying risks. Just look at our current situation: objectively speaking, COVID-19 is in many ways a "nothingburger" of a virus. "Only" a 1-2% death rate, 10-20% complication rate (this is really fuzzy though right now), R0 of maybe 3-6. In disease terms we've seen plenty far worse. Measles for example is ludicrously more contagious with an R0 of up to 18 (eighteen). Yet look at how well the world as done with COVID. What if we got to the point where the tech to brew up a novel measles-type strain with more like a 5-10% damage rate was something easily obtainable by tens of millions?
Ideally of course our ability to counter the risk of new tech would advance at the same rate, and the tech to make new viruses easily would also mean the ability to make counters easily. But there is no guarantee that'll always be the case, and sometimes it may not be possible at all (as with nuclear technology), the strongest spear is always stronger the strongest shield since it can focus energy to one point. All this without even touching on the possibilities of the singularity.
So given the described situation, I can't entirely fault either side. The Duncehats are right that many humans objectively proved incapable of handling that level of power and the harm was immense. Power has risk. The Brimhats are right that the restrictions mean a huge amount of potential wonder and good are lost, and that risk is sometimes worth it. And given that the Brimhats are persecuted by powerful enemies and are decided underdogs, I can't even per @maga_goo even entirely blame them for some of the bad things they do, because that's pretty inevitable when you push something out of regulation and the light of day and into the dark. Ideally some middle road could be taken with the new reset foundation, some way to have special certification for high level art and restrict where/who can use them maybe.
But part of what makes the story so interesting is precisely that everyone is so interesting, and a lot of us readers would love to see Coco pursue either path. She herself seems to be a unique silver not just gray, not pure white nor black. She could shine and bring new insights to either side.
@Eliminateur
I think you do them and the series a disservice in that it's genuinely a complicated situation and may well be similar to where we are headed in the real world too. I'm a technologist and I'm fundamentally sympathetic in many ways to the brimhats and the potential that advancement has for humanity. I don't see the "human form" as some sacred perfect thing, just a product of evolution that has got us this far. There's lots of "unnatural" things that are glorious and beautiful (not least that we, all of us humans in this forum, are here together able to talk and enjoy art from across the planet).
But there is no denying that advanced technology can be used for harm too, and that sometimes the risk/reward ratio can be very skewed towards risk. Some of the stuff we're heading towards like advanced table top bio/genetic engineering capability raises genuinely terrifying risks. Just look at our current situation: objectively speaking, COVID-19 is in many ways a "nothingburger" of a virus. "Only" a 1-2% death rate, 10-20% complication rate (this is really fuzzy though right now), R0 of maybe 3-6. In disease terms we've seen plenty far worse. Measles for example is ludicrously more contagious with an R0 of up to 18 (eighteen). Yet look at how well the world as done with COVID. What if we got to the point where the tech to brew up a novel measles-type strain with more like a 5-10% damage rate was something easily obtainable by tens of millions?
Ideally of course our ability to counter the risk of new tech would advance at the same rate, and the tech to make new viruses easily would also mean the ability to make counters easily. But there is no guarantee that'll always be the case, and sometimes it may not be possible at all (as with nuclear technology), the strongest spear is always stronger the strongest shield since it can focus energy to one point. All this without even touching on the possibilities of the singularity.
So given the described situation, I can't entirely fault either side. The Duncehats are right that many humans objectively proved incapable of handling that level of power and the harm was immense. Power has risk. The Brimhats are right that the restrictions mean a huge amount of potential wonder and good are lost, and that risk is sometimes worth it. And given that the Brimhats are persecuted by powerful enemies and are decided underdogs, I can't even per @maga_goo even entirely blame them for some of the bad things they do, because that's pretty inevitable when you push something out of regulation and the light of day and into the dark. Ideally some middle road could be taken with the new reset foundation, some way to have special certification for high level art and restrict where/who can use them maybe.
But part of what makes the story so interesting is precisely that everyone is so interesting, and a lot of us readers would love to see Coco pursue either path. She herself seems to be a unique silver not just gray, not pure white nor black. She could shine and bring new insights to either side.
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@zanonyn that's interesting food for thought, i still can't bring myself to like the duncehats because they're just like the church in the dark ages, banning every advancement and branding it as heresy and witchcraft, and from the past story we know it seems it was done out of spite or jealousy more than anything.
@mage_goo jajajaja i love that "for funsies", the thing is that feels like the author forcing them to be the bad guys, like "oh yes, they can't just be healers shunned, but they must be eeeevil"
@mage_goo jajajaja i love that "for funsies", the thing is that feels like the author forcing them to be the bad guys, like "oh yes, they can't just be healers shunned, but they must be eeeevil"
@Eliminateur
Again for comparison, think about nuclear arms control. There is no doubt that the international framework, invented and controlled by the most powerful and existing club of nations, has abused its power on multiple occasions. Other kinds of geopolitics have gotten mixed in, it's been used as an excuse for abuse, it's probably greatly inhibited the spread of peaceful nuclear power around the world and in turn made global warming much worse than it might have been otherwise, etc. Yet even so, nobody serious denies the threat nuclear weapons pose, or wants them to spread any further. Quite the contrary, plenty of people would love to put that particular genie back in the bottle and eliminate all nukes if it was somehow possible. I can see many of them being willing to go to the kind of extremes we see the duncehats go to, including hiding all knowledge of the peaceful uses too. And if any nuclear power ever becomes a failed state and the weapons get out of control and we see a few cities actually get nuked, well, I'd still disagree with them but I wouldn't deny their perspective.
Maybe they're even right.
Anyway, thanks for replying, it's interesting to speculate about and see it explored in a magical setting!
There is a fundamental different though between the duncehats vs the church in the dark ages: witches weren't actually real. The church didn't actually have any special grasp on truth or morality, quite the contrary! As I've gotten older I've come to think that a lot of people get tripped up by a normally justified mental shortcut, and switch "tools" to "principles", forgetting that tools are only agents of a real goal or purpose, not goals themselves. Imagine an alternate universe where there really was dark magic, evil witches/devils, and the church in fact had a point. It'd still be quite believable that the church would go too far there as well, that by branding all magic as heresy they'd set things back a lot if some could be used for good, and that as an institution of power it'd be corrupted to some degree and used for other purposes over time. Humans are humans. Even so, we'd probably look back on it differently.
Again for comparison, think about nuclear arms control. There is no doubt that the international framework, invented and controlled by the most powerful and existing club of nations, has abused its power on multiple occasions. Other kinds of geopolitics have gotten mixed in, it's been used as an excuse for abuse, it's probably greatly inhibited the spread of peaceful nuclear power around the world and in turn made global warming much worse than it might have been otherwise, etc. Yet even so, nobody serious denies the threat nuclear weapons pose, or wants them to spread any further. Quite the contrary, plenty of people would love to put that particular genie back in the bottle and eliminate all nukes if it was somehow possible. I can see many of them being willing to go to the kind of extremes we see the duncehats go to, including hiding all knowledge of the peaceful uses too. And if any nuclear power ever becomes a failed state and the weapons get out of control and we see a few cities actually get nuked, well, I'd still disagree with them but I wouldn't deny their perspective.
Eh? Right at the beginning, chapter 2 pages 13-15 they gave the rough summary at least from their side. Magic could be used by anyone and was just a normal part of life, and some people used it for nasty stuff, and since humans still fought wars inevitably magic was used in wars too which jacked the negative to 11. Maybe they're exaggerating, and maybe there were alternate options, and there isn't any weighing of what good it was doing. But the basic facts on their face don't seem unbelievable. It's a concept that's been explored in scifi plenty, like what if we had household molecular assemblers? It'd be a revolution in one respect, you could consult standard libraries and nanoprint anything from food to medicine to lights that you had the raw matter for. You could also decompile used stuff, so the trash/recycling problem is completely eliminated. Mind blowing potential for good. But unrestricted it's not hard to imagine the ill either, both intentional (both existing and exotic weapons, like printing up micro drone swarms with neurotoxin stingers) and unintentional (someone tries to make a nice helpful living creature that becomes an invasive^100). And if realistically it can't be controlled, many would argue we shouldn't go there at all, at least not until humanity is spread out across the solar system/stars enough that no single bad incident can wipe us out.
Maybe they're even right.
Anyway, thanks for replying, it's interesting to speculate about and see it explored in a magical setting!
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The story does present a moral dilemma about the outright ban of forbidden magic; as earlier posts about the ban of beneficial healing magic have pointed out. However I'm still quite firmly on the pointy hat side because most of the body-altering magic actually practiced by the brimhats is in the territory of "eldritch power that fallible humans have no business meddling with". But I would definitely like if the story explored the good side of forbidden magic, perhaps by introducing a "healer" brimhat faction not aligned with our current villainous brimhats.
Edit: I just went back to chapter 36, page 28 and Beldarut's line really sums up my opinion: boundless power precipitates boundless harm.
On a completely different topic, I really want to see a timeskip in this series for no other reasons than getting character designs of the main girls in their late teens / early twenties. In fact the story is at a pretty good spot for that right now.
Edit: I just went back to chapter 36, page 28 and Beldarut's line really sums up my opinion: boundless power precipitates boundless harm.
On a completely different topic, I really want to see a timeskip in this series for no other reasons than getting character designs of the main girls in their late teens / early twenties. In fact the story is at a pretty good spot for that right now.
