Little Witch Academia/Headscratchers

Akko's admittance and isolation?

• Ok, so it's said that Akko comes from a non-witch family line. A trait that many of the students AND faculty at Luna Nova apparently look down on her for. It begs the question though, if they didn't like the idea of admitting someone they call "a commoner" to the school, why admit her in the first place?
  • The obvious answer is that the school is on the decline, so they are considering opening their doors to more girls outside of just witch family lines to begin attending, and Akko just so happens to be a test/guinea pig for said program. The only people in the school who aren't usually seen mocking her or talking down to her for not being from a witch family are her friends Lotte and Sucy (kinda), and the Headmistress and Professor Ursula (of the faculty). Really though, if they want to start opening the school up more, WHY are the others seemingly doing all that they could to make her feel SO unwelcome?

Magic useful in the modern age?

• It's said many many MANY times that magic is becoming less and less useful in the modern age thanks to the rise of advancing technology. Why? Magic seems like it could be used WITH technology to achieve incredible success.
  • The faculty at the academy have been doing very little to integrate magic into the modern age, instead focusing more on old traditions. Yes traditions are important, but they're actually destroying their own culture by keeping magic use seem so inflexible.
  • For starters, if it exists, one of the first uses for it would likely be military applications. That sounds bad, but that's how the world works. There's also mass transit with teleportation and flight, construction (via transformation or moving object magic), energy production (turn garbage or waste into fuel), world hunger/poverty (making food bigger or stay fresh longer without using harmful chemical preservatives), natural disaster aid/prevention, environmental clean up (recycling via transformation magic), and the medical community would be foaming at their mouths to try and find ways for magic to help cure diseases, heal wounds, and save lives.

Expelled for poor grades? But were they really THAT bad?

• One of the episodes shows how exams work at Luna Nova, and Akko struggles with pretty much every single subject. She gets C's or lower, but the odd thing is that they threaten her with expulsion if she doesn't get an A in at least one subject. Why? She wasn't actually getting F's in a single subject (she even got a D- in riding a broom despite being unable to fly at all) so why would they expel her for her grades? At worst, they could've forced her to repeat some of the courses, but expulsion seems excessive.

Sorcerer's Stone Magic Output?

• In the anime, it's repeatedly said that magic around the world seems like its fading and the only places that witches can truly practice magic at "full strength" is when they are in the presence of either "a" or "the" Sorcerer's Stone. That raises SO many questions:
  • If magical energy is THAT low for everyone, how are any of the other witches living around the world able to do ANYTHING with magic, much less make a living using it? (This is conditional especially to the notion of there being multiple OR only 1 sorcerer's stone in existence.)
  • One episode focuses on the fairies who are employed by the witches and working at Luna Nova, and apparently the faculty were unwilling to compromise on the fairies' demands of getting access to more energy from the stone for their own use. The way they said it, witches used 90% of the energy and fairies got 10%. The fairies wanted 10% more energy to use, but the professors said it wouldn't be possible. Now, there's also mention that the school is losing students and therefore funding each year, and that the total number of new enrolling students is a small fraction of the number of students Luna Nova had during the "Magic Golden Age". How then did things work out back then for the fairies and witches if there were even more witches around using up the magic of the sorcerer's stone? How did the fairies not go on strike sooner? Of course signs point to the entire situation with the strike being manipulated by a certain someone, but still...
  • Furthermore, concerning the whole "fairy strike and energy usage deal", there are SO many ways that they could have saved on magical energy AND taken the burden off of the fairies at the same time, and most of it involves pretty simple technology. Such as: electric water heater or a massive boiler for handling the hot water problem, electricity for simple light bulbs (could even install solar panels and receive tax credits), and washing machines for laundry. It's actually shown in one of the episodes that Constance was more than capable of building simple non-magic or rather minimal-magic using machines that could pump up fresh water and handle the laundry relatively easily. There's traditions and then there's self-deprivation.

Diana's Family Hospital No Longer Necessary?

• So... It's revealed that Diana comes from a long line of witches, and that her family specialized in healing and medical-centered magic. They were apparently running a pretty big hospital-esque facility for a long time. However, with the rise of technology it seemingly caused the usefulness of the hospital to decline. Really? You're telling me that the world DOESN'T need more hospitals? Especially charity-based ones? Magic or not, there is never such a thing as "too many hospitals".

Draining magic?

• MAJOR SPOILERS It's revealed that some of why Akko struggles with magic so much is because not only does she NOT come from a long line of witches like pretty much everyone else at the academy, but also apparently during her childhood, when she saw Shiny Chariot's show, her and the other audience members' dreams were converted into magical energy used by Chariot. This is apparently also why Akko is unable to fly on a broom, because her "natural magic talents" were drained. This raises quite a few questions:
• 1- Diana was also in the audience during that show, and yet she is the top student to have attended the school in years. HOW did she manage to pull that off? Even if she came from a line of great witches, how would it not have drained her like Akko since THEY WERE BOTH CHILDREN AT THE TIME!?
• 2- What does it mean to strip someone of their "natural magic talents"? Akko wasn't from a witch family, so she shouldn't have had any to begin with by the way the rest of the people talk about magic potential in other people.
• 3- How can someone be drained of their magic talents and be completely unable to either return them, recover them, or overcome them?
• 4- Croix uses her devices to drain/acquire magical energy from people as well. At one point she takes energy from the fairies and uses it to restore one that was weakened. Does that mean that there IS a way for energy that is taken from someone, such as their "natural magic talents" to be transferred back?

Shiny Chariot and the Sorcerer's Stone(s)?

• MAJOR SPOILERS Eventually, we see flashbacks to Chariot Du Nord, aka Shiny Chariot's past. In said flashbacks, we see that she desired to use magic to make others happy with entertaining performances. At first, she started out performing for a few people on the street, then to crowds (again, as more of a street performer), but eventually a stage manager approaches her and convinces her to make her "shows" into large-scale performances. This went ok at first, but she was still limited to the scale of magic she could perform on her own without any Sorcerer's Stone or other source of magical energy. It got to where her short-lived seemed about to fall through when Croix presented her with an alternative source via the Dream Eater Spirit. It made her performances HUGE successes, but when she found out what the exact cost of using it was, she resolved to never use it again, so her shows went back down to the minimal scale they were before. The crowds kept asking for more however, so she got frustrated and ended up misusing the Shiny Rod. Her actions ended up leaving a sizable mark on the moon, and she lost her rights to wield the Shiny Rod, and from then on, she went into "hiding" and never performed again. Here's the question: If there are apparently multiple Sorcerer's Stones which there ARE since we actually SEE one at Diana's home, and the headmistress talks about how other witches and alumni from the school operate their own farms and factories using stones of their own... WHY didn't they get a Sorcerer's stone for Chariot when she was doing performances? If they had, imagine how even MORE elaborate her shows could have gotten since normally, we see Sorcerer's stones supplying magic to numerous witches. Imagine how much she could've done with an entire stone's output for JUST her, so again... Why didn't they get Chariot a stone of her own?

World Changing Magic?

• MAJOR SPOILERS So the entire grand mission of the wielder of the Grand Triskellion aka the Shiny Rod, is to recite the 7 words to access the "world altering magic" in the Forest of Arkturus. This raises several questions:
  1. WHY did the original 9 Great Witches seal it away in the first place? Especially since some implications point to the idea that when they sealed it away, it began to have world-wide effects on magical energy and it making magic weaker on global scales. Why do that?
  2. What IS "world altering magic"? No seriously. What does it actually DO that alters the world? Croix gets the "wand" to use it, but only causes bubbles to appear. Akko gets it (the right way), and uses it to cover the entire forest with... basically another forest's worth of plant-life that makes it all beautiful. That's nice and all, but what does it actually DO that does what they say it would? How does covering a forest with another forest's worth of plants and such... in another dimension that almost nobody can regularly access on purpose... Actually help the normal world?
  3. Is the stick/wand that is found when accessing the world altering magic supposed to be a twig taken directly from Yydrisil the world's tree which they said actually existed in their world?
  4. How did the original 9-great witches manage to seal it away in the first place, AND what was the idea behind the Grand Triskellion, aka the Shiny Rod? Did they make it themselves?
  5. What is the exact role that Professor Woodward (the "Blue-Moon spirit" entity) in all this? Test those in possession of the wand? Sure, but what else? Was she one of the original 9-great witches, but is now in spirit form? Was she at this even before the original 9? On who or what's authority does she have the rights to do what she does?

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