#and while him surviving is no issue at all the manga itself was leaning into the 'without hiyori he wouldnt survive' a lot

[allegorism]

okay, i read the last noragami chapter a couple of hours ago and while i think it's an overall good epilogue, i'm having some mixed feelings about some stuff

[mahou-furbies]

On Cornelia and Caleb’s relationship

A few years ago I wrote this post on Cornelia and Caleb's relationship for a blog I was going to start (in Finnish). I ended up never publishing it and it looks like that blog will never take off, so here's a translated version.

Re-reading W.i.t.c.h. took a surprising turn when I noticed I was paying exceptionally much attention to Cornelia's romance. In some other situation I might find her love story boring and cliched, but it was so different to the other romances in the series that I ended up taking a closer look at it.

The romantic adventures of the other girls are typical teen crushes and therefore more or less relatable to the readers. Irma is hungry for romance but to her dismay only the local nerd is interested in her, and Taranee has trouble with her strict mother who disapproves of her ex-delinquent boyfriend. Meanwhile Will and Hay Lin find their own nice (and boring) boys-next-door. Compared to these middle school crushes Cornelia's classic romance with the fantasy world denizen Caleb stands out.

The cool and sensible Cornelia doesn't moon over boys like the other four girls. From time to time she may ponder that some dude she sees doesn't look all that shabby, but she would definitely not want to be caught fantasising over a crush. However, in reality she's a bigger romantic than the rest of the girls put together, because her reason for being single is the man she saw in a strangely realistic off screen dream. Cornelia is convinced that the dream prince is The One, and therefore isn't interested in anyone else.

While doing her magical girl thing in the fantasy world of Meridian Cornelia meets a resistance movement, whose leader Caleb turns out to be her dream prince. The other inhabitants of Meridian are various lizard people, but Caleb is of course of course a handsome man in a long flowy coat. He feels like he's been designed to be the dream dude for the readers, as he's a responsible and polite hero from another world who swears love to his sweetheart.

During the short first meeting they gaze into each other's eyes, hold hands and speak deep words about how they were fated to meet. The later meetings continue in a similar dramatic way; the couple has time to be together only for a moment before the plot forces them apart, so they are crammed full of feelings and grandiloquent praise for the power of love. Cornelia and Caleb saw each other a lot less than I had remembered. The relationship is a large part of Cornelia's character in the early part of the series, so I had thought that they had a bit more interaction, but when you really think about it their romance is mostly based on short intensive moments, and the time they spent together can probably be counted in minutes.

Cornelia and Caleb manage to meet only twice before the big turning point in their relationship, where at the end of the first story arc the bad guy turns Caleb into a flower. After losing her beloved, Cornelia is devastated and is left alone with her problems, since she can't talk about her magical adventures with her parents, and while her magical girl friends mean well, they can't properly sympathise with her sorrow and their attempts at helping end up being unintentionally (and also intentionally) tactless. Cornelia isolates herself in her room to take care of the Flower Caleb, and in the end manages to revive him with the power of magic and (of course) love. The reunion is about as passionate as possible for a children's comic.

However, it doesn't take long before Caleb is captured by the new villain and after being freed has to fight for his life in the healing ward. This of course causes more pain for Cornelia, but this time she makes it through with less drama. She also starts to doubt the power of her love when a memory spell makes her temporarily forget about Caleb's predicament. Caleb on the other hand gets strength from remembering his hometown.

When Caleb is back in full health the couple gets to sort out their relationship during the climax of the arc. Cornelia start to question how functional their romance is and brings up a topic which has been under the the reader's nose all the time but which nobody in the story has mentioned: when Cornelia and Caleb meet, Cornelia has always been in her more adult witch form. After seeing Cornelia's true form Caleb immediately starts to reconsider his thoughts about a shared future and starts to ask if Cornelia could be able to keep up with a soldier like him.

Cornelia is offended at Caleb's belittling words, and for a good reason if you ask me. Caleb has spent around a half of the time he's been present in the story as a completely helpless damsel in distress, while Cornelia is a part of the elite warrior team of the universe and has survived quite a many adventures over the twenty comic issues so far. But in the end Caleb makes it clear that the rift between them is too large and that the relationship is over.

Since I'm no fan of sappy romances, the cynical attitude the series has toward's Cornelia's love story interests me a lot. Just churning out dramatic love confessions to the darling chosen by fate isn't enough when there has been so little actual communication that you don't know even the most central parts of the other person's life. However, the series shows that the relationship wasn't entirely meaningless, when at the climax of the fight the villain's spell is broken by Cornelia's love for Caleb rather than the power of friendship. Which I find peculiar since for the most part the series leans heavily on the friendship between the girls while boyfriends come and go. Though Cornelia's romance had been a large part of the story so I find it should play a part in the arc finale somehow, and probably giving it some attention consoles the fans of the pairing at least a little.

I also find it fun how childish the romance of the noble and proper Cornelia is in the end compared to the more casual love adventures her friends go through. On the surface Cornelia's romance may seem more mature than the relationship drama of the other girls: Cornelia and Caleb talk about their feelings straightforwardly and without getting embarrassed, and thanks to Cornelia's witch form their body language seems more mature. But when you really think about it, Cornelia's instant romance with a dream prince resembles Disney's Sleeping Beauty or some other young girl's daydream about a secret fantasy boy.

While I find the idea for the relationship interesting, I think that the execution starts to worsen towards the end. Cornelia's worry about if Caleb is ready for big life chances for her comes out of nowhere even when there was plenty of time to build it up. Instead half a dozen magazines are spent on Cornelia just yearning for Caleb the same way as earlier every now and then. Caleb's sudden chance of mind is a bit easier to understand when he realises that his girlfriend is actually younger than he thought, but a complete 180 during just one panel and beating around the bush with excuses still make him come across quite a douche. Which is probably the intention: I find that the story clearly takes Cornelia's side rather than tries to tackle the issue in an impartial manner.

The backwash of the relationship is handled with varying quality. Considering how quick the break up was and how burning Cornelia's feelings had been to that point it feels insufficient that we only see her grieving for one page, after which she more or less accepts the situation. But on the other hand I wouldn't care to roll in the angst of a dumped teen for too long so maybe it's better to have too little of it rather than too much. And the scene where after returning to her home world Cornelia conjures a house for a hobo because she wants to do a good deed is beautiful in its simpleness, so I guess the surprisingly mature recovery has its good side as well.

After this Caleb disappears to the background and Cornelia's broken heart is only mentioned in passing but still often enough to remind that a powerful romance isn't forgotten immediately. But the ultimate getting over happens very hastily, when Cornelia and Caleb meet after some twenty issues and the "we noticed we can still be friends!" message is rushed through in a couple of narrator boxes.

A special issue that was published later reveals in the form of a dream how things would have turned out if the couple had stayed together and either Cornelia or Caleb had moved to the other's world. Both cases end in tragedy: despite trying really hard Cornelia can't take the separation from her friends and family, while the independent Caleb can't adapt to a life of hiding from authorities since he has no id card and other documents. I like seeing a story that actually takes the relationship somewhere in this manner, but it feels a little depressing when the failure of the relationship is shown like it was unavoidable fate. Though it's hard to tell how canon the extra stories should be counted (since most of them are activity books and summer diaries etc and the issues that contain actual comics are trivial filler), but it's not like a "what if" dream story like this would affect anything anyway.

On the whole it's difficult for me to deal with the multiple writers of a western comic since I'm very obsessed with canon and in the world of manga I'm used to having only one person in charge of the story whose word is the truth and everything else is secondary. W.i.t.c.h. having multiple writers isn't a problem in this regard since the story doesn't really contradict itself, but it'd still be interesting to know how much of Cornelia and Caleb's romance is from the writer who originally created the relationship and how much is invented by the other writers. Was the relationship doomed from the start? I've seen rumours on the internet about how Caleb appeared in the story when there were demands to make drastic changes to the story from upstairs. So maybe Caleb wasn't a part at all in the original creator's vision.

After the breakup W.i.t.c.h. has over a hundred issues and you can check the internet that both Cornelia and Caleb find a new love interest. For Cornelia it's a romance with an ordinary Earth boy. I'm almost interested enough to check if the fantasy romance left any marks on Cornelia, but due to the overall decrease in quality of the series I predict that the new relationship will tread more familiar teenage crush roads.