Thread 281437035

Just caught up with this series, it is really quite good.
Pretty solid as a modern take on the Harry Potter-spirited-away-into-the-magical-world formula, you even have a lot of the same merch potential in things like custom witch hats for kids.
One of the better fantasy manga in recent years and the artwork is genuinely gorgeous almost without exception.
The magic system is nicely creative and plays well with the common meaningless spell sigils you see in a lot of fantasy manga/anime.

I don't see very many threads for this series, ever, so I'm just going to dump a lot of my thoughts on here, if anything just to save them in the archive for later.

Coco as the MC is probably the best part of the series, which is always a good sign. She was never really annoying, but regardless broke out from being a bland self-insert into having an actual forceful personality of her own, satisfyingly, so far.
I assume everyone also loves Qifrey, as he is probably the most important non-Coco character and checks all the boxes for a ikemen heartthrob and lovable tormented mentor figure. He is of course great and always shines whenever he's on page, and he contributes well to Coco's development as both mentor and peer. His justified self-sabotaging edginess regarding Olruggio's (or others') help was a good move.
The side cast is generally okay. No one is bad, but most are fairly simplistic or very rote. Agott is the tsundere rival-cum-best-friend, and doesn't really break out of that. Richeh is the hard-headed loner, and mostly sticks in that role. Tetia is the cheerleader and frivolous type and stays there. They aren't bad, but they mostly feel like construction materials that have to be assembled around the given arc focusing on Coco's development, rather than being able to stand alone.
Tartah is pretty well handled, and him not being a perfect cute and supportive boyfriend but conflicting with Coco on stuff was another good choice by the author.

Regarding the world, it clearly isn't attempting to be 'hard' or 'realistic' regarding how magic works or anything of that sort. It is very fast and loose with details and that is just fine for me.
But regarding the people in the world, this is something that I think the author got right. The system set up running the world has obvious logical flaws in it and places where abuse or bad stuff happening is obviously a risk.
And those consequences are shown and handled well. The dangers of the witch-mentor relationship are clearly shown. The dangers of sending out children on their own on jobs or quests are clearly shown. Just because they have magic doesn't change that they're children.

While it is undeniably a pretty sweet series, the acknowledgement of how toxic a magical world can be is handled well and often with some tasteful restraint.

>>281437102
I believe Qifrey is the most popular character, at least outside of the main four.

The magic police and the danger they pose with their ridiculous unchecked power is clearly demonstrated, and the culture of fear they cause in society is also shown off well. The bit where Olruggio activates that one guy's 1984-tier NPC breakdown at the hint of him potentially helping the kid with screwed up ears was great for showing how broken the culture of the witch world is.

On the other hand, the cops are not useless and obviously have a purpose and the people in the organization are not cartoonishly evil, but the systemic problems with the concept are not glossed over at all. And the system giving people with trauma a chance to go overboard with their power over rule breakers is handled where you understand why it happens and sympathize with the cop, but also obviously take in that their punishments and lack of oversight are still too much and go too far.

They're very obviously shoot first, ask questions later types to a fault. And that is probably their largest issue in the setting. There is no rigor and any random dickhead becomes judge, jury, and effective executioner.

I dropped this when they went to Hogwarts, has anything interesting happened since?

Regarding flaws, the Brim Hats have so far been very underwhelming.
The author doesn't even vaguepost about them having coherent larger plans or schemes. They're basically impotent in most cases, or have no higher ambitions other than being sadists or cruel. They don't want magic to spread to the masses, so it isn't a question of isolationist "secrecy for the greater good" vs freedom for everyone, but just a conflict between people that want to be tyrants and basically everyone else.

The issues with the normal witch system being so flawed cause greater conflicts within the cast than any kind of philosophy from the Brim Hats themselves.
They are so far just thugs and psychos that the cast would coincidentally be grouped with if they ever fought against the system. There is no sense of them having a point, that they themselves aren't precipitating through violence and cruelty.
Their plans for Coco seem to go no further than, "if I break her friend's legs and throw him down a well, she'll have to break the rules to save him or something". And then Coco uses common sense and saves them in another obvious way.

As well, I'd say that the festival arc did drag on too long for its own good.
Especially the Custas plotline where you'd have long stretches of everything seeming to come to a resolution, and then Coco would bring him up again, and we'd be dragged back in all over again. His conflict should have been handled in its own arc separate from the Leech boss battle. Together you had too many dueling priorities that got in one another's way.
The resolution was good, however.

Conflict resolution is generally fairly simplistic, but this is obviously written to be a YA series, where that is common.
>>281437224
I'd believe it. He hits basically all the right buttons.
>>281437269
That was pretty early. The big city really isn't that relevant as a location afterwards.

I'm optimistic about the future of this series right now.
Coco's development and the strengthening of her backbone and agency has been very welcome. But I did enjoy the side cast of girls and hope that they don't get forgotten as time goes on.
The cast is pretty tight-knit right now, which is for the better. This isn't a series that would benefit from many disparate points of view.

I'm not going to act like it is a legendary work of literature, but it is very sincere and high effort. And I respect the execution so far and what it appears to have set up.
Thats about all I'm going to text dump for now, I guess.

>>281437316
I assume the Brim Hats being assholes despite having a point is a deliberate choice to avoid making the world too morally grey and so that Coco can clearly be the one to find a synthesis to the issue of availability of magic as opposed to having her side too closely to either them or the Pointy Hats. I feel the author wants to keep the story relatively straightforward.

>>281437398
You didn't answer my question, so I'm going to guess the answer is no.

>>281437519
Yeah, that is basically my read on it.

This isn't a story where conflict is meant to be complicated as much as one where the protagonists use their common sense to break through to obviously silly ideologues.
Some of the schemes the girls come up with are actually pretty clever, in general the magic is actually quite fun, and you appreciate the smarts of the characters and writer for sure at times. But the reasons they have to do so are often contrived and rely on all of TPTB in the world to be cranks.

Kill yourselves. I hope this actual cancer is absolutely butchered then unusable from shitposting.

>>281437655
Depends on what you consider interesting. I have no idea what you like in a story.
Coco is changing a lot as a person, and Qifrey's backstory dump only gets more sad over time.
The entire last arc was a giant action set piece with multiple factions causing a clusterfuck. Politics between the witches and normalfags gets leaned into more.

>>281437504
>I'm optimistic about the future of this series right now.
The anime is most likely fucked though, delayed due to production issues, made by a studio infamous for that and its director went to work on something else.

>>281437741
When I read into the manga even a few chapters in, any hope I had for the anime to do it justice was gone.
The story is undeniably simple, but the presentation of it all is so good and ornate, and it carries the entire manga so strongly, that you really couldn't do it justice without Ghibli money or something of that sort.
Even if it wasn't a Bug Films production, outside of a miracle or a genius as the director it'd at most be mid, compared to the source material.

>>281437035 (OP)
The brim hats are both right and have better hats.

>>281438420
Their designs are too good for how lame they are so far.

>>281437224
He's basically this series' Kakashi or Gojo, and also the only attractive male around most of the time.
If he wasn't a big draw, there must have been an error.

>>281437663
The biggest boon you spammers have is that these threads are ghost towns, you better pray the anime bombs hard because any real traffic in genuine threads will drown you out entirely.

Only thing I know about this series is that the art is good but story kinda shit and slow, and the creator is a woke tranny who thinks giving someone the equivalent of the death penalty is appropriate for peeping.

>>281441488
At what point did you misunderstand that the Sorcerer Stasi are in the right?
The leader of the group that wanted to mindwipe the peeping tom literally goes berserk and starts attacking his own boss and literally every random person he can see and almost gets thousands of people killed for it.
The woman cop is on an obvious realization arc where she becomes aware of how her organization is way over the top and unreasonably brutal.

The point was to show the 'why' of why someone would join a group like that knowing what kind of group it is, and what would drive them in it.
Her friend as a child was raped and she was punished for fighting back against a paying client. When she got the chance to punish people and defend justice she jumped on it hard. Against people like the peeping tom, general sex criminals, particularly so.
Even if what the Knights Moralis do is unjustifiable in most cases, the people that are members of it are rational humans that have a reason for being there.

>>281441773
Sounds like a typical woke faggot who thinks the ends justify the means and wants to have his cake and eat it too.

>It's either a super controlling police or anarchists
Both sides suck, I would learn magic and then fuck off in the forest

>>281442281
The ends very obviously don't justify the means. Coco as the PoV character fought and defeated him and argued against his view and actions in a very obvious way.
Beldaruit did the same, and even the top leader of the Knights Moralis criticized him for ridiculous violent zealotry.
It sounds like you caught a single page from that chapter absent of context or any other knowledge about the manga and then made up a person in your head to be angry about and now are too locked in to let that go regardless of what is demonstrated to you otherwise.

>>281442448
The Brim Caps aren't even anarchists.
They're just assholes. They don't want magic for everyone, they just want to be able to use magic for whatever they want themselves.

>>281438420
true

>>281443100
I mean that's not that irrational, if everyone had access to magic you'd get a ton more coco incidents, and worse. Iguin (eye hat guy) did seem to be at least somewhat interested in distributing magic also, given that he was peddling spellbooks

>>281438420
They fuck things up more than anyone else.

>>281437035 (OP)
Very good manga, truly a great story for all ages (which is why /a/ hates it).

>>281444744
Things deserve the fucking up

>>281437102
>>281437035 (OP)
People don't make many threads for this because the author is a bootlicking schizo and the MC should have been a brimbro from the start

>>281445665
It's funny because those things are usually their own bodies.

>>281445946
Fo you know how "schizo" it's actually used or do you just use for "people who's opinions I don't like"?

so is this still in festival namek?

>>281446143
> a serious mental condition of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation
Perfectly describes the author

>>281446241
Thats over.
We're in the aftershocks of that now.

>>281437035 (OP)
Is it gay?

>>281446248
No, it doesn't.

>>281446338
There's background gays, but the MC has a straight pairing.

>>281438775
Strawwitches from jackboot authors.

>>281446363
ty

>>281446353
>N-nuh uh
I accept your consession

>>281445946
>brimbro
Why would they invite you to the party?

>>281446395
>Claim insane thing
>"No. That's dumb"
>HURR DURR I ACCEPT YOUR CONSESSION HURRR!"