Witch Hat Atelier

I wrote and deleted a whole post about Witch Hat Atelier that consisted of several paragraphs describing ways in which I'm mildly dissatisfied with it--the pacing, the flatness or at least simplicity of characters and their interactions, the way the magic as a metaphor for illustration isn't really up to wrangling with the politics of illustration today. All these paragraphs concluded with, "well, but it's middle grade fiction and I'm not twelve, so what can you do?" It's not a top however-many manga for me, but maybe I expected something different from what it is. Kamome Shirahama knows how to draw a line for sure, and you should give a kid this instead of that other apprentice wizard story. I do, though, have feelings about the ways I've seen people talk about this totally competent work of children's lit as if it's something other than that. I will go to bat for children's fiction when I think it holds up as interesting in its own right. If you dismiss Earthsea as Le Guin's…