Incorrigible Nerd

What happens literally is that we cut from baby Qifrey reaching for Olruggio and transforming, to adult Qifrey with his hand fisted in his lap, determinedly not reaching for Olruggio. And then he gets up and goes to stand in a lake and trigger his own PTSD to get the silverwood under control.

What happens symbolically is a guy thinks really hard about another guy, gets wood experiences an uncontrollable throbbing growth which fills him with horror and shame, and then he goes and stands in cold water until he can get it under control.

Completely insane scene construction. Yes, I know how the silverwood's growth is literally triggered, but sometimes a train going into a tunnel is the public transport system working as intended, and sometimes it's self-conscious Freudian symbolism.

i don't even want to imagine how horrible this hangover would be

alt

see but the big hole in this is that both to us as the audience and to the characters living in this world, the person who represents the domain of healing and medicine is the peninsular king. so that really overrides whatever sort of tie you could say womanhood and medicine seem to have to each each other in wha at least as things stand.

unfortunately i just kind of feel that insofar as there are any ideas about Gender happening in wha either intentionally or incidentally it's all woefully underbaked. non-witch society in this universe is heavily implied to be patriarchal, but this ultimately doesn't come up as something the narrative is interested in or concerned about. witch society seems to have no or less gendered power structures given that the person in the highest seat of witch law enforcement is a woman, but once again if there currently is or ever was any gendered standards of behavior for witches it's just not something the narrative is concerned with telling us about.

i don't think it's impossible for this to change, but i get the sense that kamome shirahama just is not particularly interested in gender as a topic and wanted to make a world where it was more or less a nonissue. and then in that disinterest she has just sort of blindly carried over a bunch of unexamined elements of gendered society from our own world, which results in the weird vibe of "patriarchy without misogyny" that the witch hat setting has.

so far it really feels like the only plotline that has had any meaningful gendering to it is the stuff surrounding luluci regarding sexually predatory behavior, which has Implications to say the very least. and is a big part of why i feel like she's just in conversation with world gender relations and lacking any concrete ideas about how in-universe gender relations function beyond that.

see in the broadstrokes i do agree with you here but i dont think you can write off the specific angle of gendered sexual abuse from this plot thread because of how the stuff at silver's eve goes down.

unlike her flashback, the adult/child power dynamic isn't really a factor in that confrontation at all. and what was notable to me is that this dude's dialogue in this sequence is the only instance i can remember in the entire text of anyone making gendered generalizations about behavior/desires whatsoever. So i do think it's very telling.

anyway you know what else is awesome. the bit where coco threatens to blackmail beldaruit