Zagato (The High Priest): The high priest who would rather watch the world sink than lose his princess

In the first episode of the Magic Knight Rayearth anime (TMS, 1994), three middle school girls who have never met, Hikaru, Umi and Fuu, visit Tokyo Tower on a school trip. A light pulls them into Cephiro, a world that exists thanks to the prayer of a single person: Princess Emeraude, the “Pillar.” The mage Clef explains why they are there. The high priest Zagato has imprisoned the princess, and without her prayers Cephiro is crumbling and filling with monsters. They are the Magic Knights of legend, and they cannot go home until they save her. From his fortress, Zagato watches it all. He sends the sorceress Alcyone after the girls and, once Clef is alone, appears behind him and turns him to stone. It is the introduction of a textbook villain: the counselor who betrays his sovereign and lets the kingdom sink. CLAMP, the all-female collective behind Cardcaptor Sakura, serialized the story in the magazine Nakayoshi starting in November 1993. Thirty years later, a new anime from TMS and E&H Production, directed by Yui Miura, has been retelling it since October 7, 2026, with a new episode every Wednesday on Crunchyroll.

// The theoryWhen breaking the norm is right

Almost all of criminology asks why someone breaks norms and takes for granted that the norms are good. Positive deviance asks the opposite question: what if the norm is unjust and the one who breaks it is right? The idea comes from Émile Durkheim, who argued in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) that crime is normal and sometimes useful, because it anticipates the morality to come. His example was Socrates: a criminal under Athenian law whose independence of thought ended up serving humanity. In 1985, David Dodge called in Deviant Behavior for the sociology of deviance to also study what departs from the norm for the better. In 2004, Gretchen Spreitzer and Scott Sonenshein defined it as intentional behavior that departs from a group’s norms in honorable ways. For a transgression to count as positive deviance, three things must hold: the norm must be unjust, the breach must serve a collective good, and later judgment must recognize it.

// The subjectThe villain who let himself be called a villain

Warning: the twist that ends the first part is revealed from here on. For almost the entire first season, Zagato acts like the villain everyone believes him to be. Besides petrifying Clef in episode 1, he handles his minions ruthlessly. In the manga, when Alcyone fails for the second time, he kills her himself. The illusionist Caldina works for him for money (episodes 11 and 12), and he gives the boy summoner Ascot a home for his monsters in exchange for obedience. In episode 16 he sends Lafarga, the captain of the princess’s guard, whom he has brainwashed, against the Knights. In episode 19 he blocks their path with a guardian giant of his own making and dies in the battle. In episode 20 the truth arrives. Emeraude fell in love with Zagato, and a Pillar in love can no longer pray for Cephiro alone, so the world began to sink. In the manga, she locked herself in a water prison so she would not see him, and Zagato kept the secret. Since no one from Cephiro can kill the Pillar, Emeraude called three girls from another world to do it. Zagato knew, and he fought them to prevent it. When the princess begged him to stop, he answered that the only thing he cared about was her, not Cephiro. After his death, grief turns Emeraude into an enemy, and the Knights end up granting her wish.

// The crackA rebel without a common cause

Zagato meets the first condition of positive deviance, because he rebels against a norm the work itself ends up condemning. But he fails the second. His transgression does not seek to free Cephiro from a cruel system; it seeks to save a single person, and the whole world pays for it, crumbling while he holds out. Nor are his methods those of a conscientious objector: he kills a subordinate who has failed, buys a mercenary and controls the mind of a loyal guard. The classic criticism of the theory fits here: almost everyone who does harm for a cause sees himself as a positive deviant, and the theory offers no criterion for telling, in the moment, the rebel who is right from the one who merely has a motive.

The typology of Alex and Druann Heckert (2002) allows a finer reading. It crosses the type of behavior, overconformity or underconformity to the norm, with the social reaction, favorable or unfavorable. What Zagato does is underconformity, and for most of Cephiro, which does not know the truth, it deserves condemnation. It is Emeraude who embodies the other extreme, conformity pushed to the limit. She obeys the law of the Pillar so zealously that she asks to be killed rather than fail her world. That is why the one who breaks the norm with a just outcome is not Zagato but Hikaru, in the second part. Hikaru questions the system on behalf of everyone and changes it without sacrificing anyone. Explaining Zagato is not excusing him. The story proves him right in his diagnosis, not in his means.