Violating people’s autonomy by erasing their very own memories, their knowledge of their own history and culture, as well as their understanding of the very basic mechanisms with which their entire world was built upon, even if under the premise of trying to stop large-scale fatal conflicts like wars, is still deeply horrific. An abuse of power, even. It’s such a utopian (dystopian) solution to a complex problem. Like, imagine if the majority of our world’s population were prohibited from knowing how something like electricity worked because it’s also used to run death machines and share dangerous ideas, and we were prohibited from knowing or even watching how electricians worked, or how electrical devices are created.

Coco has this mix of naïveté and curiosity that is dangerously magnified by how she and the people like her (“outsiders”) had been stripped off of their ability to know, understand, access, and use magic the way witches do. She has an enormous thirst for knowledge about magic, not only because her entire life even as a “normal” kid is so entrenched in it, but also because she’s been so deprived of the knowledge of how it works—something that is so fundamental to their very lives. That desire of hers to explore magic—a trait that is encouraged in actual witches and their apprentices (at least to a degree)—is the very same trait that eventually leads her to pursue knowledge of magic ignorantly and disastrously, because there was no one there to guide and teach her properly, as it is prohibited.

Both before and even after becoming an official apprentice, Coco is constantly put in dangerous situations born from her own ignorance—and in many cases, how was she even supposed to just know the things she needed to know? How, when entire institutions were built to make sure that she doesn’t? She copies exciting spells that she doesn’t understand from a grimoire that she thought was just a harmless children’s book—a fitting, if not a deliberate narrative choice, as I see it, with how deeply intertwined this story is to the topic of censorship—and ends up putting her and her mom in grave danger. She enters a dangerous trial that she was pressured into because she didn’t know that she didn’t have to. She taps Agott while she was drawing a spell because she didn’t know that she wasn’t supposed to. 

Maybe those mistakes would be seen as issues of “common sense” by some witches, but they aren’t to her, because she didn’t grow up with magic the way they did, and she has to learn stacks of information that is already instinctual to others. And it truly doesn’t help that, from what I can tell, Coco has never known about, witnessed, or experienced any seriously harmful magic before unintentionally casting one herself, and a huge part of that is surely because of the fact that the history and mechanisms of magic is next-to-unknown to non-witches, and all the magic she’s interacted with beforehand were completely harmless.