The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians

Episode 11

The pieces are coming together, and the picture they're forming is a combination of what we've already figured out and some new information. Was Northern Harris trying to keep magic for the elite few? Yes, absolutely. But he wasn't, it seems, doing it out of snobbery. Instead, it looks a lot like he was engaged in a misguided effort to make magic safer, and he believed that the sacrifices required for that made up for the resultant caste system and inhumane practices. That says a lot about him; somewhere along the way, he came to believe that it was absolutely okay to use people for their life energy if it was for his idea of the "greater good." To me, that indicates both desperation and fear much more than a desire to truly work for the people.

Where does that fear come from? The past, of course, where most things do. As Terry Pratchett said in Johnny and the Dead, the town you just drove through is still there in the rearview mirror, and as far as Mr. Harris is concerned, that town is very haunted. That seems to come back to his student days in Rettoran's Magumi and a girl named Hazel. She's the one with the braids we've seen in the opening theme, a bright, energetic girl who was friends with both Northern and the girl Kurumi has been calling Ms. Magician – who is also very likely Minami Suzuki. But Hazel has been notably absent from the main story, just a figure in the opening theme and Northern Harris' memory. Is she dead? Possibly; my working theory is that she's either Kurumi's mother or her grandmother, artificially aged in some sort of accident. Either way, she's inextricably tied to ancient magic and Mr. Harris' perception that it's dangerous.

That this character is named "Hazel" is very symbolic. The hazel tree represents wisdom in Celtic lore, and its wood was a favorite for making Druidic staves. In English it also has the connotation of the liquid "witch hazel," adding to the association of the tree with magic. In Mr. Harris' mind, the potentially lost Hazel is a symbol of why ancient magic is dangerous and why he believes he's in the right with his plans. We can see that they're wrong and even frame them as evil. He's oblivious to that, at one point accusing Ms. Suzuki of doing precisely what he's guilty of without a shred of self-awareness.

In many ways, this episode really marks what we've been waiting for for eleven episodes. Kurumi is over her block on ancient magic, Yuzu is fully committed to this new path, and the stakes couldn't be higher. It's marred by the fact that it's taken so long to get here. Yes, the show is called The Stories of Girls who Couldn't be Magicians, not Magician Girls (despite the fact that that's my personal shorthand for it), so that does imply a need for them to have less time casting magic successfully than we may have liked. But it also gives this a very rushed feel – ten episodes for Kurumi to get her motivation in gear. The pieces of the puzzle have been well-seeded to the point where the revelation that Hoota was Hazel's familiar is more of an "aha!" moment, but I'm not sure that makes up for some of the drag.

But you know what? If it ends well enough, I'd be happy to forgive it. The inclusion of the theme of how people reliant on modern magic are useless in a crisis feels relevant, if only because a truck hit a utility pole on my street yesterday and I had to rely on candles and my fireplace to see, heat my house, and cook supper. "Modern" and "convenient" don't always mean "better in all situations," and Mr. Harris is allowing his fear to blind him to this fact. I'm not sure he can be made to see the error of his ways, but I do know that our newly minted Magician Girls aren't going to let him get away without trying.

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The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.