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.
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