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Comments
There's quite a bit of foreshadowing though. The actual first scene being the most obvious, but also things like Mami and Sayaka's exchange in episode 3 that foreshadows Sayaka's issues and maybe hints at Kyoko's backstory depending on how you read it.
I'm not sure how pity even factors here. I've enjoyed loads of things while never caring for the characters except as joke fodder.
Related to the foreshadowing thing, but a lot of things are less surprising on second go through.
Even though it's inaccurate, it's hard to blame them when so, so, sooooooo much of the genre just doesn't catch on.
I'm not sure how this is even relevant to the show itself. I think I've at least mentioned that it does follow the closest things that the genre has to rules (which is a different deal to the general image).
This is something even the producer has refuted, so I can't say it's really relevant.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here. It's certainly not as unsubtle as many recent fantasy anime with the compulsion to demonstrate self-awareness by pointing things out.
It's about a small group of people living nearby each other, facing too many problems where they already are. The rest of the world isn't something they can afford to be concerned about.
It's not happy. Mami can't even console Kyoko besides telling her they can only accept how things work. It's not out of nowhere either. This isn't the first time someone pointed out that you're ignoring how much it was mentioned that Madoka could do anything.
And many people would say that the real world is cruel and nihilistic (which aren't the same thing).
I guess I didn't point it out the last time it came up, but you seem hung up on the idea that things "should" get better for characters because they "deserve" it. Which very much a manufactured conceit from storytelling conventions rather than anything that exists in real life (do I need to point out that suffering and pleasure in the real world does not correlate to the actions of people?).
By his own admission, Kyubey has a very poor understanding of human emotion. Whether or not he understands what specific characters are capable of doesn't have any bearing on whether he's right about how people in general work.
Also, just about every universe of "ordinary people can gain magic" has poorly defined reasons for why one group or individual has the innate potential while others don't.
To be fair, the reviewer brought up a comparison to N.G.Evangelion, which I actually never thought of my self. But I did get the distinct feeling that there was a "telling instead of showing" problem as well a feeling that events seemed to happen for arbitrary reasons.
I actually disagree with the reviewer in that I don't see it as a "happy" ending, though the show clearly means to show it as a "less sad" one.
The show does have Kyubey telling Madoka multiple times she can wish for anything, yes, but then again, if we treat Kyubey as an unreliable source of information due to either not understanding human ideas of meaning and/or being intentionally manipulative...
...heck, it's obvious there's a contradiction, because we're led to believe all three of the following:
* wishes can in fact do anything and it's up to the wisher to figure out the right wish
* wishes will always have negative consequences
* the impact that wishes can have is directly linked to the meaning/power/potential of a person's destiny
The second two points directly contradict the first one, because if wishes can in fact do anything, then one could make a wish that is free from negative consequences, and one could also make a wish that has arbitrarily high impact, anytime.
This is what I mean when I talk about inconsistencies within the setting.
I don't think things "should get better for characters because they deserve it"; I simply think that things that happen to characters ought to feel reasonably believeable and more unusual things require more explanation as to how they mechanically occurred given the setting's rules. This setting's rules are poorly explained and inconsistent.
I mean, I'm already saying I'll watch Date A Live (though I'm really just going to put it on my mental PTW) so there's no way I'd watch a dub.
Finished DRAMMurder, it was great throughout and I am really glad I randomly decided to watch it. I also watched the Bad End OVA and I was expecting basically 'Aoba is tortured a lot' but like /there is no thing/ that can prepare you for Data_xx_Transitory.
I kept covering my eyes in embarrassment then laughing in embarrassment then being all 'THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST THING'
For example, in Mink's Bad End, Aoba uses his Scrap power to peek into the day Toue came and decimated Mink's tribe (he's Native American) for their power to influence people's thoughts through their secret concoctions, and Mink shows up and is all "Aoba you are the most important thing to me"
"But I'm 100% sure both of us won't survive"
"So I'm just going to cut your head off now and take it with me because it's the least corruptible bit of the human body"
BUT
Then Desire Aoba (Aoba is great because he has three personas within him and for some reason the True End of the whole game is him dating one of them inside his secret twin brother's body)
Desire Aoba takes over Aoba's psyche and tells Mink "Sure you can take my head but I wanna have some fun first" and then he makes out with Mink for presumably like... a veeeeeeeeery long time before he allows Mink to cut his head off
Proooobably my favorite show since BRS.
I haven't heard that name since I finished Jinki Extend, haha.
Anyway, tell me when you want me to watch the second episode of DAL by.
I have to warn you, I am an adept speedwatcher, especially if I don't really care what's going on.
Also though I have to:
So you'll have plenty of time I think.
Continue? [y/n]
Edit: well, that's the whole episode.
...what the fuck did I just watch?
Well this helps considering I just actually watched the first episode and thought it was not the worst for an MF Bunko LN anime.
That sure gives me something to look forward to!
Dunno, we'll see after I watch it.
Also add this to my pile of to do:
Madoka is the only one who is actually capable of getting anything granted. We don't really get the same suggestion regarding anybody else (there's little explicit restriction, but no "you can be more powerful than anybody else"). Wishing to simply be free from consequences is far too vague considering that wishes work by specifying what you want to happen. "Can make anything happen" is not the same as "can make it so that anything unwanted or unexpected never happens". While not explicit, that's almost certainly why Madoka wished to do things on her own. These inconsistencies aren't actually there.
There is not a single event that goes without explanation. That there is little detail is simply because this universe is not in the vein of Harry Potter or Fate/stay Night.
That said, "can make anything happen" would mean that one can specify the results to an extremely fine detail, especially if you're dealing with an intentionally screwy jackass who will look for ways to screw you over in any part that you don't specify, though I guess that could degenerate into a game of whack-a-mole.
And, y'know, given your contention that the world's events change each time loop in ways that are not the result of Homura's actions, I guess we are dealing with a game of whack-a-mole against a screwy jackass. It's only a question of who that screwy jackass is -- Kyubey, the wish system, the setting itself, or the writing team.
As for Kyubey's motives: no, it's not easy to tell what he does/doesn't know or even whether he is lying, unless you go in with a presumption about his motives as a filter to understand him.
Does it really need to be said that the show went with what it did because specifying in detail to prepare for hard to predict consequences would take so much time that portraying it would basically destroy the flow of any scene?
The alternative would be to skip over the details and just make it obvious that the characters went through a lot, but that's self-defeating since you end up not knowing it.
The biggest lie is when he says it's maybe possible that Kyoko could make something terribly unlikely happen because magic, and that can be interpreted as simply playing up a tiny uncertainty, i.e. "well, it's never ever happened before, but that's not reason to dismiss it as impossible". Everything else tends to be lying by omission. i.e., "Soul Gem" being literal.
He does say that terrible consequences are inevitable as a result of wishes being violations of thermodynamics, which is the closest thing to a suggestion of it being a rule, but that doesn't really gel with what happens to the cast (Kyoko's goes horribly because of how it affected her father, Mami doesn't have anything bad from asking to live since there's no way for that to backfire and simply dies from carelessness).
You're definitely seeing more rules than there actually are. I'm not sure if you've realized that basically anything a magical girl says that isn't about a specific case is at best an observation colored by personal experience and projecting it onto the general state of things.
No, my premise is based on figuring out why something felt "wrong" with this story. At least with End Of Evangelion, I hate its story but I can pinpoint why I hated it.
...which actually suggests that that's not a rule, unless the course of destiny changes in such a way such that it always guarantees an unwanted result of some sort for the wisher, which is what I'm contending that it does, despite the fact that this mechanism isn't ever stated in the show, where the negative consequences are portrayed as the fault of the wishers' (and their wishes') flaws.
But by that logic, if Walpurgisnacht has a certain strength, then Homura need only exceed that strength in order to win against it.
What I'm contending is that the show misleadingly makes it look like Walpurgisnacht has a fixed strength and but actually has strength that's simply defined as "greater than Homura's, no matter what hers is".
And Homura's (before getting the bow) never really changes, for a generous definition of "level". She can only throw more non-magical things and nothing really suggests those deal higher damage than anybody else's attacks. Walpurgisnacht shrugging off missiles doesn't require it to be stronger than the version that survived Mami's shots.
Meanwhile, Anime Strike's subs for Washio Sumi wa Yuusha de Aru were so bad that I'm pretty sure the subber basically never watched YuYuYu or bothered to browse the wiki, let alone read the LNs.
Gotta hand it to them for those blank and blank lines, though.
I keep wondering why more than half of the people who watched a first season drop off for sequels, but then I remember GMH hasn't even seen LagRin S2.
I've seen one episode of it!
Main problem so far is that it's lacking Try Unite as the OP.
These shows should take a page from Stratos 4's book -- use the second verse of the first season's OP.
I think that is like, exclusively the realm of year-long kids' shows with no between-season breaks.
Fate/Apocrypha's terribleness hasn't made me hate anybody more, so, something.
Aside from Yu-Gi-Oh VRAINS and, I can't think of an airing 50 episode anime with just one OP (Fairilu did do it last year, but it doesn't seem to be on track to repeat it).
GONIN NO CORABO SAIKYOU DESU will always be my favorite Sentai OP though.
2. where's that sense of a fleeting but stunningly vivid experience? instead it's replaced by sitting on a B major chord
Are you sure you're not thinking of something else?
Also hopefully Fuu can finally punch a Taisha.
This is all I want Gokumi. You can screw everything else up, just give me those two things.
There's more info about Mahou Shoujo Site but the current promotional campaign is very confusing (and potentially NSFW).