Genuinely, I love the goth family so bad, and thinking it would be really adorable if I adding the seraphim into the mix as a little brother of these family dynamics.

I love their alt fashion

The seraphim’s tan skin and light color hair reminds me a little of Gyaru fashion. I think it would be fun to apply it on S-bat.

Some Kozuki draw because ngl, Moria being related to the Kouzuki family is as hilarious as it being kinda interesting, lol

Our next door neighbors were a young couple that bought the land when I was a teenager (there was just a big field there for most of my childhood), they built their house facing towards our house instead of the main road for some reason, then the wife (who was a housewife) would accuse us of "spying on them" and harass my mother over it so much that the last time I visited, she freaked out when I opened the curtains on the side of the house the neighbors' house was facing towards.

The wife was severely mentally ill and her husband was completely checked out, the only thing I know about him was that he complained after each daughter was born because he wanted a son. We never saw the girls, however, because their mother was so controlling, she wouldn't let them leave the house. I think I saw them maybe once, barefoot and wearing white dresses. They didn't have any toys in their yard and they cut down all the trees and everything green when they were building the house so all the kids could do was sit on a blanket on the grass. As to not dirty their dresses, one must assume.

did that "tragedy protagonists" alignment chart for my favorite morally gray / evil ladies of literature. blank chart here.

Putting the post under the line since I know a lot of people are getting into the series with the anime and I don't want to ruin this for anybody. Spoilers for chapter 50, but talking broadly about the whole series.

This is going to be long. The more I think about it, the more I’m just kind of stunned at the extent to which the architecture as grief and haunting and trauma and history book completely doesn’t at all address the fact that the house in question is a plantation. Two story three bedroom houses built in the 1720s in Tidwater Virginia right next to the James River are not anything else.

They talk a lot about how it’s haunted by Virginia history, but exclusively contextualize it in the story of the lost colony of Jamestown and the starving time and the pain of white settlers, which aligns with the house-as-frontier motif that characters like Holloway and Wax fit into. The Navidsons and Holloway and the Jamestowners all go to a new place in hopes that it will change them but instead, it really only reflects them in a positive feedback loop that is ultimately self-destructive. 

There is no mention of Jamestown as the place where slavery started in the United States. There is no discussion over who would’ve built the house built in 1720 even though there’s only one answer.

I think this itself can work as a metaphor for how the state of Virginia deals with its own history in terms of modifying it without acknowledging any of the darkness and evil that it took to build it. The book does straight up do this but again only in the context of white settlers.

The sentiment expressed here about colonial Williamsburg is real similar to how I feel about the Navidsons moving into a plantation house built in 1720 that has been recoded and reinterpreted as a sanitized cookie cutter nuclear family single home whose dark past on that front goes completely unremarked upon. But he’s talking about Williamsburg omitting the starving time and brutal struggle of the British colonial project instead.

I’m still really struggling to wrap my head around why any discussion of slavery or race is omitted in this book about architecture and haunting and Virginia. “There’s an integral part of this house that we do not talk about or acknowledge, but it’s in here with us and we are haunted by it” while living on a plantation feels like a setup that is so obvious to me in a way where I kind of have to wonder if its omission is deliberate. I think if you want to be generous you can make the argument that some of it is metacommentary on the silence of white inhabitants and interpreters of spaces like these?

White academics often have deliberately cultivated blind spots for this sort of thing where in the book thousands and thousands of academic journals are written dissecting every aspect architectural and metaphysical of the house as well as Navidson’s pain and trauma while the pain, suffering, and entire presence of enslaved laborers who built the house is a non-entity in the story. In the universe of the book people have called Karen Green‘s 87 affair partners to ask about her psychological state as a child and no one has written on who built the house. 

I think if we’re talking about space and place it’s also worth pointing out that contrary to popular (white) interpretations of the history of slavery, enslaved people not only built plantation houses, but also inhabited parts of them as well when forced to perform domestic labor in lieu of or in addition to agricultural labor. I say this because who and what is living in the house is a really big element of the book. It’s not just the structure and architecture of the house of leaves that gets remarked on, but also the presences and absences within it. The misconception that all enslaved people lived separately is often used by white historians to get out of having to talk about slavery and architecture altogether. No one in the book at any point considers any of the inhabitants of the house that weren’t previous presumably white owners.

There are a lot of white Virginians who have a tendency to pretend like local architecture just kind of manifested itself into the world (see: Monticello getting interpreted as like a Jeffersonian genius brainchild when the blueprints are quite sparse enslaved architects designed the house.) Similarly, at one point in house of leaves one of the sources used insinuates that white settlers just happened to find it in 1610.

Using the history of the house exclusively as a selling point or interesting fact like the realtor who sold the house to them did while they contextualize it as this bucolic white suburban getaway fresh start reminds me of the many plantations I’ve been to in Virginia that recontextualize and commodify themselves for white audiences as other things whether that’s “restorations” that anachronistically reinterpret slave, housing as “sharecroppers cabins” or “guest houses,” or plantations branding themselves as bed-and-breakfasts, wedding venues, or single-family houses. 

But on the other hand, it’s really hard when every other aspect of the house and its structure and its meaning and it’s history EXCEPT its historical context about slavery goes explored or commented on by the Davidsons or the academics interpreting this documentary or Zampano interpreting the academics or Johnny Truant. Why isn’t who built the house a bigger deal?

That being said, I think there are several aspects of the story that are worth addressing in the context of HoL's racial narrative. The first is-- as acknowledged in the OP and in several tags-- that HoL is very much a satire of literary academic writing as a whole and its discourse is deliberately self parodying and self contradictory to that end.

The second is that, although HoL is rather cagey about addressing colonialism directly, its references to American colonialism are far more extensive than might be immediately evident. Zampanó's lovers, for example, are all named for US bases in Vietnam, which both further cements that Zampanó and Navidson are alter egos (Navidson deliberately enlisting in the Vietnam war) and makes more clear the implied analogy between colonialism and sexual violence presented by the House. The House is a yonic/maternal symbol and one that Karen does not want Navidson to enter-- I have always read Navidson's exploration of the House as, if not an outright symbolic rape, then at least an intentional portrayal of his sexual empowerment as a (white) man to humiliate and de-person his wife. Karen refuses to enter the House; when she does, it disappears. Similarly the only Black character cannot enter the House because he is physically unable to do so-- he is structurally prevented from the same empowerment as the white male characters.

The third is the issue of Delial. As mentioned, the exploration of the House is a kind of epistemic violence, one with a racial and sexual bent. Delial becomes an object of fixation to Navidson because it becomes the point where he is unable to deny the exploitative nature of his art. He is epistemically empowered over a colonized Black girl, and he sees her existence as a means of furthering his own ends. Upon realizing this he subsumes the reality of the Black girl into his own personal narrative. He renames her, he obsesses over her image, and he uses her existence as a pretense to further alienate himself from his wife. Though he acknowledges his own selfishness in exploiting the body of a dying Black girl he reacts to this not in a way that grants autonomy to the people whose lives he made entirely symbolic, but by further exploiting it as an engine for his man-pain. (This kind of epistemic violence is echoed in Johnny's narrative, where he invents graphic and objectifying backstories for his exes when he meets a woman who had been a victim of sexual assault.)

Finally, there's the matter of intertextuality. Zampanó is based on a number of historical figures but by far the most important is white Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. The Minotaur of House of Leaves-- and indeed the story as a whole-- derives largely from Borges' short story The House of Asterion, a story which describes a "house" of incomprehensible structure and obscures the identity of its narrator as the Minotaur until the moment he is killed. The element of the Minotaur is meant to be expunged from the narrative-- this is a bit of a joke, precisely because it gives up the game. Borges, it's worth mentioning, was very much in favor of historical Argentinian genocidal efforts against Native Americans. Argentina was exceptional even among Latin American countries for its explicit campaigns to promote white European immigration, and this is in large part why Argentina is one of three modern Latin American countries to have a majority-white population. Borges was rather embarrassed of indigenous Argentines, despite writing some handful of stories about them, and was quite laudatory of European immigration.

I don't see Zampanó as an especially sympathetic figure, and I don't believe that he is meant to be especially sympathetic. I think the conclusion to the Navidson Record-- that Karen and Navidson get married and live in suburban happiness-- is not meant to be a true ending, because the first thing we learn about Zampanó is that he died alone in an apartment full of stray cats. Zampanó-- as Navidson's alter ego-- is at least somewhat aware of his own misogyny (he's quick to claim that negative reads of Karen are usually blatantly misogynistic) but seems content to continue the same epistemic violence that is the driving conflict of HoL. He is content to represent feminist writers through snide caricatures (though I'm no fan of Camille Paglia), he retains his open romanticization of the Vietnam war, and though HoL is in large part about the violence of Navidson's insistence on knowing his own house, he's fine with referencing Karen's possible history of childhood abuse that Karen clearly did not want known.

I originally wrote all this as a response to this post but I thought I'd move it here and make a post of my own.

I think that there is a lot of commentary about the traditional household model in Witch Hat Atelier. When you first meet the witch world through Coco, there is an initial "saccharine" feeling to the arrangements in the atelier since everything seems so idyllic, like a child's paradise. I think that feeling is there on purpose to contrast and challenge the illusion of perfection later on. However, I also think that from the very beginning, the story is very focused on nontraditional family structures that are loving and supportive, and defends them as the better alternative to traditional structures that turn out to be toxic and detrimental to the children.

For starters, basically every familial bond we do see is not traditional. There's a lot of orphans/adoptive parents (like Custas or Coco), absent parents for one reason or another (like Agott, or also Coco pre-magic, with a single parent), or extended family arrangements (like Tartah, who lives with his grandpa). I feel like this is important, because a prevalent theme throughout the story is chosen family, and the way even blood relations have to be chosen as family for them to count as such.

The atelier also definitely serves as a sort of substitute/foster/adoptive home to Coco and pretty much to the other girls, with Qifrey and Olruggio as their guardians, but as Coco grows wiser and learns more, we start seeing that not everything is easy as it seems at first. A sweet beginning is however necessary so we understand why the girls are so loyal to Qifrey and Olruggio, something that matters more and more with each new obstacle they face.

As the story progresses, we can see the happy atmosphere in Qifrey's atelier is an exception. Most of the characters have been victims of or witness to some form of abuse or neglect, even the ones currently living with Qifrey. Kids who live in the main underwater city, for example, have a far more detached experience as the arrangements resemble more a boarding school than a home. Euini is an early example of a child with an emotionally abusive master, too. In theory, witch apprentices have more freedom than children in traditional familial arrangements. They can choose their masters, and could choose to leave them too, if they don't mesh or feel attacked. But Euini is a reminder that these systems don't work in favor of the child if the child believes he deserves the mistreatment. There are other examples too, over and over again, of young witches who attempt to get help as they face all kinds of harm, only to be brushed off by the adults who have them under their care. There is a clear and constant sense of violence and emotional manipulation through fear and shame making up the very fabric of the witch society.

Qifrey himself acknowledges down the line that he made a conscious effort to stay away from that environment, and to make his atelier a kinder and more welcoming place. In fact, he actively chooses students who have proven difficult or unfit in other spaces. The seemingly idyllic set up is in fact a construct (which might be part of why it feels "fake" or over the top at first), designed to protect the girls from a harsher environment that already exists and whom all have experienced. The structured domesticity serves a purpose, to imbue the students with self confidence and to give them a network of trusted adults they can go to with their issues. Unlike the expectations of traditional families, in which this happens because supposedly we are biologically engineered to "love each other", the mentoring from Qifrey and Olruggio is entirely an active choice. The fact they are both men is also, very plainly, incredibly significant. They are not married in any legal sense of the word, and they are both the same gender. Yet they are shown as a kinder and stronger household than many of the other more traditional arrangements we are told to uphold in society.

In addition, though all this is shown as well-intentioned (and effective in many ways!), one of the themes running throughout the manga is this idea that we can't live in a kind lie to avoid an ugly truth. The seemingly saccharine beginning is, to me, challenged most clearly with the silverwood arc. One of the truths we discover is that Qifrey himself confesses that he started the atelier for selfish reasons, and that through magic shenanigans, his emotional attachments issues are personified in an ailment of the body. He literally dies if he feels "at home." Even though he has gone to great efforts to build a home for his students, there is a barrier he has purposefully maintained by never showing his full self to those he loves. The idea that the perfect home is all "fake" or "engineered" reaches its highest point here. Even though Qifrey *wants* to belong, he never can, and pretends this isn't so. Obviously this dramatic situation is enhanced by the fact he is doing it as a promise. Olruggio sacrificed his memory to keep Qifrey alive, and Qifrey's sacrifice is the knowledge that he lies and hurts the person he loves most in exchange. Even the most seemingly ideal or pure bond between characters is tainted with violence and power imbalances, as if having to coexist with magic were violent on itself.

In my opinion all this ties to how witch society artificially builds difference between witches, brimmed caps, and "outsiders." If magic weren't so hidden and elitist, maybe nobody would've hurt Qifrey by poisoning him with silverwood, etc etc. Almost every personal harm the characters experience has come to pass due to systemic problems. To me the most poignant example is Galga and his boyfriend, Atwert. When Galga is forced to a memory wipe in the line of duty, the institution of the Knights Moralis, which had made him a cop in the first place, immediately tries to throw him away in an island of undesirables. The one person who doesn't give up is Atwert, who saves him by turning him into his apprentice. The story so far has made clear that master/student relationships resemble parent/child ones, so this one called my attention. It turns out that this is direct commentary on Japanese laws. I learned recently that in Japan, some same-sex couples have needed to resort to legal adoption to create a legal link between them. This way, the whole "next of kin" issue gets sorted when traditional marriage arrangements and benefits are not available. In WHA, the bonds of magic are more important than those of love, and Atwert uses this to protect Galga from mistreatment by literally adopting him and returning his personhood to him. An extremely unconventional solution to a systemic problem.

In Ideon, as they learn more and more about the power of the Ide, the Giant reveals itself more and more of a god. In fact, it is called a god in mid-season episodes, but they stop that after a while, probably the writers thinking it might be too much on the nose. But still, the characters are constantly debating why Ide allows that, if Ide is testing them, if Ide is good or evil, since it is orchestrating the meteor falls. A curious thing is that we have Ide’s perspective just once, with Bes’s dream – it wants to survive – and the rest of the discussions is what humans believe to Ide’s will to be, like as if they were some sort of amateur theologians.

In the end, they conclude Ide is trying to kill them because it deemed them unworthy of salvation due to their inability of stopping the cycle of war, but, again, this is their interpretation. And, in the end, Ideon is finally destroyed…but it was already established it had infinite energy, so it is kinda certain that it just allowed itself to be defeated.

Ideon is a story of how war is hell, using a super robot in a real robot story. It portrays conflict escalation, hypocrisy of ideals of honor in an environment that gives power to petty people, capable of selling their comrades for a promotion, or committing war crimes without any tactical advantage – it’s kinda obvious the Buff Clan is based on Imperial Japan, while humans seem to be inspired from Star Trek’s idea of federation – and, above all, the process of dehumanization: it starts with a sense of technological pride, impulse by miscommunication, which constantly evolves into incapacity of recognizing the other as anything but insects, and overall mutual hatred. It ended with parents disowning their child, a father trying to kill his daughter for a frivolous reason such as “blood purity” and what essentially was an attempt to make a human sacrifice to Ide (with Sheryl). No wonder, Ide decides that enough is enough, its patience wouldn’t last forever. The series goes out of its way to show that humans and buffs brought that to themselves.

Personally, I don’t think Ide is evil. I feel it genuinely wanted for humans and buffs to live in peace. The way it cares for children isn’t just because it’s an amalgamation of children from the previous civilizations, but because it genuinely likes them and see them as symbols of hope (or else it wouldn’t protect and support the adults as well) or innocence (when it protected the giant worm children). I could tell when Sheryl attempted to sacrifice Lou to make Ide work, it was beyond pissed off, to the point of destroying their homeworlds and colonies. This is why I don’t buy Ide was setting up a trap to kill both species, it could’ve done any time. It still preserved the ones in space, using the last of hope that they could solve their differences, but its hope drained with every advance, so if it wanted to destroy them, it wanted to make clear that if it was destroying them, it wanted to make them understand why before doing it.

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.