It's only sinking in for me now, but The Pact was almost certainly an act of continent-wide cultural genocide
So there is a lot we don't know about The Pact, exactly how the witches went about wiping everyone's memory of magic, what the world really looked like before the pact, what bits are the truth, what are lies, etc.
But given what we do know, about how the memory wiping spells work, and about magic being commonplace for everyone before The Pact, I feel there is a really dark implication that gets kinda glossed over about The Pact.
The Pact would have destroyed not just the knowledge of magic for people, but it would have needed to destroy every bit of art, ritual, belief, religion, or culture that involved magic. The Pact would essentially be a genocide for any culture or civilization where magic was too intertwined into their daily life.
Imagine if there was a people, before The Pact, who saw magic as a way to commune with their gods? Or what about a people who used shapeshifting magic to tell their history? A culture that used magic for their art? We know people used magic for war and healing, but how many other occupations and ways of life depended entirely on the use of magic? How many people needed magic to feed themselves or provide shelter? Beyond just those people that fought against The Pact, how many people would have had their lives and culture destroyed by forgetting everything about magic?
And then what would have come after! We already know the witches either implanted the idea or gaslit everyone into the belief that only witches can cast magic. What other beliefs and aspects of their culture would the witches have wanted everyone else to believe? How much of the current culture of the average person in this world is a total fabrication by the witches?
It's horrifying. Like from the start as soon as I heard Qifrey explain the day of The Pact to Coco, I knew it sounded a bit insidious. But now the more I think about it the more I feel disturbed by The Pact. So much of real human history saw acts of genocide by erasing human cultures and trying to reeducate the victims into the ways of their oppressors. Witch Hat Atelier shows us a world where those horrors would have happened at a massive scale, and none of the victims would have even known what happened to them.
To lose not just your magic, but your culture, your beliefs, your history, your way of life. And to never even know it was taken from you.
The Pact is horrifying.