Ojamajo Doremi Dokkaan! Episode 50 Discussion

What did you think of this episode?

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Jan 3, 2014 4:53 PM

Fronzel

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Jun 2010

1863

THIS IS AN ANIME ONLY DISCUSSION POST. DO NOT DISCUSS THE MANGA BEYOND THIS EPISODE.
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I'm a little surprised they didn't address the issue of witches "living in a different time" than humans. The girls may have accomplished their initial desires without magic, but deciding not to bother doesn't really follow from there, especially after all the good things they've done with magic while they had it. Not wanting to outlive everyone they know many times over is something they might push them away from the idea.

Speaking of motivations, Momoko's problem with having to leave her friends behind in New York came quite a long time after she began an apprentice. I recall her back-story was that she went through all the tests (and then lost her crystal by casting forbidden magic) while living in New York, something that apparently takes about a year. The writing for Momoko is a little wonky right to the end.

Feb 19, 2014 11:18 PM

NFH

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Jul 2010

188

Fronzel said:

I'm a little surprised they didn't address the issue of witches "living in a different time" than humans.

Did you skip the part where Doremi says:

"I know that you can live a long time as a witch and using magic is convenient, but I want to stay as a human. I won't live as long as a witch, but I'm sure I can tell my children and my grandchildren about my experiences".

"Our generation won't last very long. But our children and their children will probably be able to accept witches and magic."

Not to mention they had entire episodes dedicated to the issue (like episode 40.) The Queen explicitly told the girls last time that they had to rethink this point so what else were you expecting? A 15 minute long speech about the disadvantages of ceaseless life or something?

Fronzel said:

Speaking of motivations, Momoko's problem with having to leave her friends behind in New York came quite a long time after she began an apprentice. I recall her back-story was that she went through all the tests (and then lost her crystal by casting forbidden magic) while living in New York, something that apparently takes about a year. The writing for Momoko is a little wonky right to the end.

For God's sake, Momoko never states that was the reason why she became an apprentice. The only ones who said so were Hadzuki, Aiko and Onpu. Momoko only says that she was separated from their friends when her father got a job transfer and she thought she could use magic to see them again. That's it. She most likely meant that that was the reason she accepted the Queen's proposal of helping Doremi and the rest last season after the death of Majo Monroe and the lost of her magic crystal.

Please, pay attention to what you are watching, for Christ's sake.

Jun 9, 2016 7:17 AM

Papde

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Dec 2011

124

I love how everyone forgot about their fairies. ''Oh yeah, we have to part with them too!''
As if they have used them for something other than a free ticket to skip class all year. Dokkan is the only season where the fairies weren't in the OP, and it truly shows.

／人 ◕ ‿‿ ◕ 人＼ Make a contract with me... ／人 ◕ ‿‿ ◕ 人＼

Jun 9, 2016 5:49 PM

Fronzel

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Jun 2010

1863

Papde said:
I love how everyone forgot about their fairies. ''Oh yeah, we have to part with them too!''
As if they have used them for something other than a free ticket to skip class all year. Dokkan is the only season where the fairies weren't in the OP, and it truly shows.

This show has had a constant parade of gimmicks including new characters, new magical powers, and several "plot coupon" scenarios. There's ultimately so much that old ones get forgotten which is a shame in the case of the fairies as they're supposed to be characters in their own right. One of the weak points in an otherwise generally quite good show.

Nov 22, 2017 5:31 PM

w7n

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Apr 2014

Fronzel said:

The girls may have accomplished their initial desires without magic, but deciding not to bother doesn't really follow from there, especially after all the good things they've done with magic while they had it.

Even after the rebuttal of #2 this point still stands. Let's write some continuations to poke fun at the thoughts and ideologies in this and related episodes:

Continuation 1: The girls gave up magic using the justification 'now that we found that the issues that made us become apprentices can simply be solved without magic'. Decades later, Hazuki's son dies in an accident before her eyes and she finally came to realise that there indeed are some things that CAN'T be solved without magic. Had Hazuki not given up magic, she could've saved her son just like how the Witch Queen saved Hana from being crushed by Pao in Ep33.
(Actually, use some logic. There exist things that can be solved without magic. But the inverse 'there doesn't exist things that can't be solved without magic' is blatantly false. Exactly as the OP stated, the previous seasons have numerous counterexamples.
In the previous seasons, on some personal issues magic only brought the girls trouble. But that's totally due to the girls being naive. If you make kids carry knives it would result in more trouble, and that doesn't mean we should just ditch knives altogether. Later on in Ojamajo Doremi 16 the girls have already learnt to utilise magic properly, but for some reason the novels seems to be still stuck with the old ideologies.)

Continuation 2: The girls said that they should go back to the human world to make more people accept magic. And this dialogue follows: 'Magic really, really, REALLY exists! Please believe me!' 'Gee, grow up already.'
(How can you make people accept magic if you can't even prove its existance?)

Continuation 3: Just a few words would make Hana gladly accept their choice -- or so it seems. Instead, soon afterwards Hana turned into an extremely disobedient girl.
(This, in fact, would've been the CANON continuation... if not for the cheap justification in Ojamajo Doremi 16 volume 3 that totally subverted Hana's intentions, probably just for not ruining Hana's reputations. But in my humble opinion, if Hana did get disobedient, it's not entirely her fault. You get the point.)

Continuation 4: The Witch Queen wanted humans to understand magic properly. But soon evil arose once again in Hana's reign, and she came to realise that magic isn't even well-regulated in the Witch World.
(Double standard. In fact from a sociological perspective, to make humans widely accept magic a system that regulates magic properly must be devised. This problem should be left to the Witch World first.)

Now among the major reasons which made the girls give up magic
1. Issues with longevity
2. Things can be solved without magic
3. Going back to the human world to make humans accept magic,
Nos. 2 and 3 have already been rendered nonsensical (Note: Going back to the human world doesn't necessarily mean giving up magic either, there are several pieces of counterevidence). That leaves us with only

NFH said:
the disadvantages of ceaseless life

Hmm, I do know the disadvantages. As in, if you stay as humans while Hana stays as a witch, then Hana will outlive all of you, and will of course be devastated by your deaths.
Wait what, Hana-chan? You mean, by then you could get over these, since you would already be at least 50 years old and already mature enough?
... Well, this makes the point. Think about it:
>IF people can't get over outliving closest people, then it works the other way around, in that Hana would be saddened by the other girls' deaths. Maybe the history of the former Witch Queen would even repeat itself.
>IF people can get over outliving closest people, this so-called disadvantage just doesn't make sense
So what is the usual case in real life? The latter. My grandmother is like 89, and her spouse and one of her daughters has already passed on before her, and she still lives on fine. Not able to get over that is, instead, a symbol of immaturity.
In fact it's not really something like ceaseless life either (worst case scenario, you can give up your own life). Plus that, among humans, living too long means you would be tormented by pain and disability after your age reaches triple digits. Not in the case of witches.
And hey, we haven't even talked about the pros yet! You can learn more and experience more things as you wish! You can stay adorable and healthy for a couple of centuries!

That leaves us with the final straw, the false identity problem.
In my opinion even that can be ignored on the whole. Just don't use that whatever false identity. As long as science cannot detect magic, you would only be considered a medical wonder, and you can just reject media and scientifical research and claim you just want to live a peaceful life. You can even use magic to solve some of these problems when necessary.
But let's just assume that it can not be perfectly solved, and ignore the possible alternative of staying as an apprentice and live a normal lifespan. In that case it's one con of becoming a witch. But what about all the pros:
>Being able to be with Hana and assist Hana in her reign
>The advantages of using magic, as long as handled properly
>The advantages of living long (and healthy) itself
etc.
In fact, one moral conveyed in the story via exploiting magic, is to not just think about your own purposes but others as well. However, the 'disadvantages of living long' thing is actually selfish in nature, and since the 'outliving people' issue works the other way around for Hana, it falls short to me especially compared to all the pros of becoming witches.

In hindsight the whole deal gets more laughable when
> In the episode immediately following this, Doremi got upset about her own decisions
> In Ojamajo Doremi 16, when the girls had to utilise magic AGAIN to solve their problems.

w7nNov 22, 2017 8:20 PM

All hail Great Firewall of China.

Nov 24, 2018 6:18 PM

MetaThPr4h

Offline

Jul 2015

5111

So many goodbyes one after another, this isn't good for my heart.

After a pretty awesome plot twist with the school nurse actually being the Queen, the girls decided to stay as humans and live their life as it was before, if I were them I would do the same honestly, just thinking of outliving everyone else I hold dear sounds so sad, and the series sure as hell showed us enough of that pain already.

Majorika also finally became normal again! Yay for her.

Everyone will go into different directions in their future, one episode left before the end of the series.

May 29, 2021 11:16 AM

Fangz

Offline

Jun 2011

Regarding the points on giving up magic. My thoughts/headcanon:

1. First and foremost, this is really Doremi's decision. Doremi understood that one way or another, she's really the leader of the group. If Doremi did choose to accept being a witch, then regardless of the others' own true desires, they would have followed her on her decision. Doremi in some senses mirrors Tourbillion, in that she's the one who catered to her friends emotional needs, and for this reason she would know the deep sadness for her friends if immortality forced them to leave her behind.

I suspect that Doremi, of all the Ojamajo, would have been most keen to become a witch, since from the very start she wanted this the most. However, especially with ep 40, she saw the consequences of this way of life, and how it would lead to lingering regrets for every one of her friends. It's not merely that being a witch wouldn't help, it would alienate all of her friends from society and make it impossible to live their life how they wish. But if Doremi had insisted on remaining a witch they would have done it.

This is why even if avoiding the pain of immortality is "selfish", in making this decision Doremi is thinking unselfishly.

2. The core principle regarding magic in the show is not merely that "it's possible to do things without magic", but that the "possibility of doing stuff with magic is bad". There is value in the inability of using magic. Like Majoran said all the way back in Sharp, in the human world if a thing is broken, then it is lost, and that means people value things more. Like how the girls specifically avoided using magic in raising Hana, because doing things properly embodies their love. Like how the Witch Queen says Humans are capable of much more love than witches. Like how everyone's constantly bored in the Witch world. And so on. There's multiple groups of witches that *deliberately* swore partly or completely to not use magic. Those groups are generally correct. Even when the El Dorado witches *all died*, they did so without regrets.

Overall, the effect of magic in the witch world is *negative*, and very plausibly the effect in the human world is negative as well. The actions of the Ojamajo are exceptions, but exceptions that prove the rule - the witch queen specifically sought out the kindest kid in the world (Doremi), and still they mess up a bunch of times. This is not to say that it's impossible to use magic in a way that is only positive, but at least as far as the show's concerned, this is something that has happened only rarely, and requires work for both the humans and witches to reach a point where they are ready for that. And being ready for that would require every other prejudice, war, and so on to the solved as well.

That's what making the human world ready for magic really means. It's not enough to merely have people believe in the existence of magical power. You need everyone to be like Doremi, basically.

(Also, think about how many positive things in the show are driven by the limitations of magic. If they could have infinite spheres, they would never have worked at the Maho-dou. If it wasn't for the witch-frog curse, Majorika wouldn't have made Doremi and the others in apprentices. If Pao-chan *could* suck up Tourbillion's sadness, they would never have found Robbie. The gang wouldn't have made friends with Momoko. They wouldn't have redeemed Onpu. They would never have grown to sympathise with Tourbillion at all if they hadn't been forced to relive her experiences.)

3. It's important to consider what the thematic meaning of all this actually is. What is *magic*, actually? What lesson is this show trying to teach?

Well, the thematic point here, as I see it, is to teach kids to accept loss and failure. Magic is the childish idea that you can have *whatever you want without working to obtain it*. I mean, yes, the gang worked very hard to get their witch status, but after that, the importance of the choice is that this is an end to that. Real kids don't get this choice, and the point of the show having Doremi and everyone turn down this choice is to teach the audience to not resent the fact that they live in the real world. As is established, maturity means accepting that not everything will go your way, that you'll fall down again and again, that your friends might leave you - and that this is a necessary part of the human condition. Doremi *has* to make this decision, for the sakes of the audience, to tell them that their lives without magic is actually okay, that the hard work they have to put in to do everything, to grow up, is exactly why their dreams and their growing up is meaningful.

That they should be glad that they could not actually wave a magic wand, and make what they want come into existence.

That's the point, and that's why there's only one way this could have ended.

FangzMay 29, 2021 11:30 AM

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