Strict rules only foster creative expliots

Anime only people stop reading now.

The Brimhats are the inevitable result of a society that makes its rules too rigid to survive contact with reality.

When you build a system with strict laws and no room for exception, you don’t stop people from finding creative solutions. You just guarantee that the only people bold enough to pursue them are the ones willing to break everything to do it. The Brimhats exist because the Pointed Caps left that space open.

The Wise Ones should make it their priority to get ahead of that. Coco is proof it’s possible. Her ideas have already been used to help people within the system.

And the memory wiping really seems to me like a short term solution with a long term expiration date. As society grows, literacy spreads, documentation will become common. How are you going to stop people from writing? Are you going to intervene and inhibit human innovation? You can wipe someone’s memory … what if they successfully hide their notes or worse someone evil finds it. The secret gets reconstructed. The current enforcement model only works in a world that stays small and controlled, add the world grows you would need a million knights and a billion watchers.

If the Pointed Caps don’t start loosening the needle themselves, someone else will do it for them. You don’t prevent more Brimhats by tightening the rules. You just end up creating more ruthless, better hidden version of the same problem. Hopefully they learn this sooner than later.

You are leaving a giant hole in magic to be filled, you can choose what kind of people fill that hole. Foster people like Coco or deal with endless variants of Custas.