とんがり帽子のアトリエ 🧙‍♀️ (IMC) - Week 3

She’s the only one who’d recognise the book in question.

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Oooh, that does make sense.

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overall chapter impressions

As others have said I’m loving the world building, also some of the fashion.


I want that shirt!

Very fun idea

I’m curious who is his boss.. and

Yeah, awkward…

And later, what a welcome:

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Ough… I LOVE Witch Hat Atelier, but I’m reading it in English. So I’ll just say, keep reading! This is one of the best manga in recent history!

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chapter thoughts

There seemed to be a dark turn towards the end of the chapter. キーフリー pulls out some sort of communication device. I wonder who he’s speaking with. He seems very kind so far but could he yet have dark intentions?

Really enjoying the world building and the art style. The two page spread just as the chapter starts looks stunning on a digital screen with the two pages joined together.

I wonder who else is at the school. It does seem very odd with just キーフリー and the four girls. Hopefully there’s more people to meet here too!

I presume I’m not the only one who has bought the next few volumes in the Book Walker golden week event!

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I guess given the class segregation in this world, it would have been too much to ask for to have everyone be as openminded towards muggleborn as Tetia and Riche :face_exhaling:.

It’s unclear from the drawing (once again, lol), but I hope you don’t have to draw the whole thing every time. It might be enough to smudge the outer circle to turn the light off, and redraw the missing bit when you want to turn it back on.

p.90

I’m unsure what exactly the Nessie monster thing does. Do you have to board it to get across and somehow you need to be a mage to do so?

p.97

His facial expression sure makes him look shady (literally) in this panel. I wonder if there are any good clues in the text that I missed. If I understand correctly, he tells his boss that they should be glad that Koko is so enthusiastic about learning magic, because sooner or later she has to confront(?) forbidden magic, so it would be a problem if she became scared. Is that all there is to it or did I miss something that might shed more light on his motives?


Meanwhile, he sure seems very determined to keep her love for magic alive, what with the sparkly flower petal rain and all.

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p90

I assumed it was some kind of defensive measure, using the lake as a moat and preventing an aquatic entry. That means that you have to use the bridge to enter (although since many/most/all mages seem to be able to fly, I wonder how effective that would be).

p97

Remember that on page 61 his interest in the “image book” is what seems to convince him not to memory wipe Koko. He clearly has ulterior motives and a deep interest in this book or the magic within it for one reason or an other. He also mentions an enigmatic “彼ら”.

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キーフリー 's agenda

Yeah, I got that much. So far, it looks like 彼ら refers to some group associated with the mage who sold Koko the picture book, and キーフリー and his boss seem to have been hunting them for quite awhile. But what I’m interested in is finding out how ruthless his plans are in regard to Koko. For example, he mentions that sooner or later she has to face forbidden magic. But is that something that’s just necessary for turning her mother back, or are キーフリー and his associates going to use her for doing dirty work that has nothing to do with her own goals?

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Speculation

As is pretty clear from Agathe and to a lesser extent from the reaction of the two you younger disciples, there’s a good dose of elitism/classism from 魔法使い towards 知らざる者(普通の人).

I wonder how much that taints Kirfrir :tm:'s own view of Koko and the way he treats her.

I mean if he had decided to go through with the memory-wiping thing he would probably have left her alone with her mother forever turned into stone. That’s incredibly heartless but he didn’t seem to have any issue going through with it until he considered the value of the book.

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That reminds me - are we going to have another forum battle about how to spell Agatto?

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Ahah, well Agathe is a real name (in France at least) so I thought it was an easy match. Is it not what it’s actually meant to be?

EDIT: are you fucking kidding me: Agott | Witch Hat Atelier Wiki | Fandom

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Kondasha went with “Agott”, for some reason, but in this case I think I like “Agathe” better. The other two are Tetia, which is perfectly straightforward, and… Richeh. Probably the extra H is to stop readers from pronouncing it “reesh” or something, but that kinda hurts to look at.

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I wasn’t even trying to be cute with Agathe, I was sure that was the intended reading. Agott sounds like a tryhard name for a final boss in a bad JRPG.

EDIT: it doesn’t even mach the kana! It’s a ga not a go!

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アガット is Wikipedia’s transliteration for French rugby player Agathe Sochat, so I vote we go with that.

It looks like someone doing a terrible job of spelling eGoooott from memory.

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I wonder how much the translator consulted with the author before choosing the transliterations. I can’t shake the feeling that the author meant for that name to be Agathe and maybe the English translator didn’t catch it?

I know of at least one such example in a very different context: Elnoyle | Final Fantasy Wiki | Fandom

This monster is エルノーイル which is supposed to be French “aile noire” (dark wing) but apparently the translators either decided that French wasn’t cool enough or they missed it completely and went with Elnoyle instead. Admittedly the Japanese kana version is not a particularly good rendition of the French, I suspect that the person who came up with it didn’t know the correct pronunciation (it should be something like エル・ノアール or some such).

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Oh, an other interesting thing: if you look at the wiki page above it says that the Chinese version of the name is 瑪瑙 whose pronunciation I can’t surmise, but those kanji mean… agate.

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There’s also tons of examples of this in Ascendance of a Bookworm, where most of the character’s names are real German names, and the translator gets a lot of them right but turns about 10% of what should have been the most straightfoward transliterations into katakana soup for no discernible reason.

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Look, window based entry is en vogue these days, we also had some in the ABBC this week.

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I thought it was Agate, like the stone :sob: the official translation being “Agott” was a jumpscare fglkhjfk

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I was going to go with Agatha, though I realise it doesn’t fit the katakana.

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