Folklore isn’t just stories. While a lot of it certainly can look like nothing more than colorful language or fantastical tales, there’s some truth to most of it, whether in sayings like “red at night, sailor’s delight” or stories about how girls ought not to trust strange wolves. It’s in-world folklore that puts the lie to Rettoran’s caste system, as Kurumi discovers this week because, despite the insistence that only those with the Magumi’s special notebooks can cast magic, she’s been doing it for her entire life – with the “charms” her grandmother taught her.
The central conflict is confirmed this week: the gatekeeping of magic, with the privilege of using it carefully regulated by academies like Rettoran, presumably at the behest of a government agency. It’s been very suspicious from the start, what with Kurumi achieving the highest possible scores on magic tests and then not getting into the magic track at school, and Yuzu’s exclusion also feeling increasingly strange. As Asuka says, there’s a lot that’s “majorly ridiculous” at Rettoran, and who gets to learn magic feels like the most ridiculous thing of all.
That’s driven home by Ms. Suzuki’s lesson. The potato stew is just a vehicle for her to encourage her students to really think about what she’s trying to teach them, and while some ingenuity is shown, only Kurumi passes the test – and that’s because she remembers what her grandmother taught her. Unlike most of her classmates, Kurumi grew up in a rural area, and her grandmother raised her in what seems to be an old-fashioned way, teaching her skills like cooking over an actual fire, among other things. As Kurumi’s trying to figure out the right spell array to draw, she recalls a “charm” Granny taught her to make the flames burn hotter: a small spell array drawn on the palm of her hand and then held towards the fire. According to Granny, it’s something that everyone used to do, implying a tradition of magic being for everyone instead of confined to the chosen few, a tradition that’s been lost in the country’s more urban areas. Kurumi has been using magic her entire life. That indicates that the notebook “Ms. Magician” gave her is, in fact, a magic notebook – just from an earlier time, when magic was drawn by hand.
This puts Ms. Suzuki’s goal of “making magicians” out of her students in a different light. She’s trying to level the playing field, to return to a time when magic wasn’t the province of the chosen few. Does that mean she wants her entire class to become professional magicians, like the Magumi track? Absolutely not – as we saw from Kurumi’s grandmother, magic can help any profession, and that seems to be what she’s striving for. Some may become magic professionals. Still, it’s hard to argue that Sally’s cooking wouldn’t benefit from the fine control of the heat of the stove or Maki’s dancing wouldn’t be enhanced by a little magic.
The bigger question is why anyone would want to gatekeep magic at all. It’s almost certainly a question of social class and power for the self-proclaimed elites. That makes what Ms. Suzuki is doing dangerous. She may be doing it with the knowledge of the head teacher of Magumi – their discussion is either that or him dressing her down – but it’s still a potentially dangerous path she’s taking. The twins are almost definitely involved somehow, as their decision to enroll in two different tracks is now looking very deliberate, and we’ve still got that cat and spaniel to contend with. Kurumi’s goal looks like much more than just her dream…or at least like a dream that someone else hopes to hijack for their own reasons.
