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Comments
I guess it is not so much a case of "the characters are idiots", but more of a case of "The plot requires these characters to be idiots and it would not work if they were not" that it feels weak to me.
The plot worked quite fine with Mami and Kyouko, after all, and neither of them fell because of their teenagery weaknesses. It ended up feeling quite natural for Kyouko to do what she did, despite what the system had turned her into.
It makes perfect sense for a couple of timeloops, but after the third or fourth time she should have realized she was merely postponing the inevitable.
I don't think that the show was encouraging that sort of faith?
I mean, I guess I am just kind of stupid, but for the longest time, it felt like the show was saying "Okay, things suck, now the characters die and the world sucks and you should just go cry in a corner." Then the finale rolled around, and it didn't really jive with the earlier tone but whatever.
I guess I will just shut up, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
What would you have had her do, though? That is the point of what I posted; what else could she have even done, after she made her wish?
http://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=819983 <-- I never knew pink could look so awesome.
I cannot, confessions just don't come out of nowhere they have buildups, and I have been blindsided by them even a couple times(not directly related to me, obviously), but it doesn't mean that it's merely happening becuase it's convenient to the plot not because of a flow of events that led to that point.
I didn't feel like the show was actively encouraging any sort of ending. I mean, before the last episode all Madoka did was cry and show us she didn't really know what to do with herself and Homura was still doing whatever would (in her mind) further her plans.
Hitomi's confession comes off weird to be because a) what vandro said, b) before this point she'd been shown to be quite a loyal and caring friend, the sort that doesn't just steal other girls crushes.
@glenn: Cure Black isn't all that pink, though...
so
like
details for that buildup about confessions
and more screentime for mostly-irrelevant characters
I feel that this
is kind of unreasonable
because
TWELVE EPISODES
(disclaimer : this is more of me bitching about how 12 episodes isn't enough for a lot of shows than anything else)
I honestly think Hitomi would have worked a lot better if she hadn't known the core cast.
The characters who ultimately lead our main cast to their dooms are irrelevant?
There doesn't need to be a buildup, just show us for even one second that Hitomi liked Kyousuke before she says she does.
^ Agreed.
I think giving Madoka anything more would have turned it into a completely different show. It's not really possible to say "This amount of episodes doesn't work for this show" because a show is (almost always) designed with it's length in mind. If it wasn't and is purposefully shortened to fit into that timeframe then that's not anybody's fault but the writers or executives who mandated it.
Madoka worked fine with twelve episodes, and wouldn't really have worked near as well if it were significantly longer, or so it seems to me.
If only Hitomi had been even hinted with being interested in Violin boy(I will never learn his name) I would have given it a pass.
Hitomi? The things I remember her doing is saying that she likes Kyousuke too and something to do with a bucket that can cause fire.
I guess that could be considered "not-irrelevant" but for all I care the same role could have been done with a nameless, faceless generic.
I guess i'm just too lenient about this sort of stuff by filling in gaps in fiction with assumptions (like how someone pulling a bottle of water out of their backpacks without showing us that they put a bottle of water in their backpacks in a desert doesn't scream OMG SHOW DEVALUING DEUS EX MACHINA to me on the basis of being unable to care that far and just assuming it happened offscreen)
Kyousuke or something, and yes, that really would have been good.
Also, I don't really think Madoka would have worked better being significantly longer either.
The most I could think of it possibly needing would be 2 more episodes to satisfy information eaters or something.
At the same time, there were things like the above that really could have used mentioning.
Character/Plot/Art/Whatever books do exist.
True, it wouldn't have taken more than five seconds to have Hitomi throw a nervous look at Kyousuke, or even get flustered when his name was mentioned.
If an explorer/adventurer doesn't get a water bottle before starting his travels he is not merely idiotic, but actively suicidal and not the same thing.
I do think that shows should generally try to stand on their own, though. Like how a game should teach you how to play it and not rely on you reading the manual that came with it.
But . . . if she did that, the show would have ended badly. Again, it's a story of people being put through dark times and working to overcome it, and that's no less true of many other works of fiction. It feels more bleak because we engage the characters who can't pass that test--Mami and Kyouko were still broken people, even if Mami wasn't really brought there by being an idiot like Sayaka.
Again, that's where those hope spots come in. Madoka was pretty dark, especially for its genre, but I never felt that it was excessive, or disproportionate. I mean, even episode 10, which was very bleak, ended with a very awesome moment for Homura, and the episode itself worked very well because the endgame was really up in the air again.
Well, yeah. But every plot needs to apply certain constraints to itself so that it doesn't collapse in on itself. Part of how I view perfection, in this case, is how tightly everything locks in, and by the end, everything locked in very tightly, to me. I don't feel that it counts against a work of fiction that certain events have to play out in a certain way.
Mm. True enough. The only problem (and, in fact, one that someone pointed out the last time we debated Madoka) is that it would have removed the impact of the whole scenario. If we'd had previous precedent for Hitomi wanting to confess to Kyousuke, we wouldn't have felt as badly for Sayaka, and so we wouldn't have to come back up from such a downer.
She gave Sayaka her chance, though. She had her own feelings for Kyousuke, but she still went to Sayaka and told her that she had this conflict of opinion. And she would have backed off if Sayaka felt that she could confess first. But by that point, she'd already been grappling long and hard with the realization that she was essentially a zombie. I guess I just don't see why there's so much fuss over a simple surprise.
The ending was left ambiguous, but why do we ever watch something with an uncertain outcome? Most of us would say, we want a happy ending. The show wasn't encouraging one thing or another, and that's good, because it let viewers think about what they wanted from it, and in the end, it worked to reward the people who could handle the tough times.
Hmm. I guess I don't really know how to feel about the Hitomi confession thing, myself, and I'll grant that there was probably a better way to handle it. I just don't know if this moment was really that huge a deal, in how poorly executed it was (or even if it was that poorly executed; I didn't think so, and there are many ways where it could have been handled worse), because I can at least think on my own and rationalize it to myself.
Also, I'm sorry, but information books should not be used like that.
The show is standalone, but in the case of information eaters wanting to know even more stuff about the world and characters that's not immediately relevant to the show itself.
Because friends totally throw each other under the bus for boys? I mean, unless Sayaka explicitly told Hitomi that she wasn't going after Kyousuke and that she'd give her her blessing, she really should have just found another boy. It makes her come off as very selfish (which is the way she wasn't portrayed before), and this just happens to co-inside with Sayaka jumping off the Sanity bus?
I didn't feel bad for sayaka precisely becuase of this. If it had been hinted I would have been like "Things are so stacked againt her!". What I felt with that character reveal was "Hi, I am Hitomi and I'm Urobuchi's mouthpiece, you wanted the guy to get his arm back so that he would come to love you! Bad sayaka! You get nothing"
I do have to disagree, once again. Blah, I hate doing this because it makes me feel stupid.
The show does have hope spots, but many of those hope spots are used to make you feel better- just so that the next dark thing that happens hurts even worse.
In fact, a lot of fiction does this. In making something genuinely good happen to the protagonist, darker things that happen make you feel worse than if they were just suffering through sucky stuff all the time.
I mean, in the end, when I watch the show, I don't get the feeling that it's edging me towards a happy ending. I get the feeling that everything just sucks.
And, yes, in the end everything does get better, but the show wasn't encouraging me towards feeling that.
That's something different because no one reads manuals anyway.But then it may raise some picky questions, like...
Where did he get the water bottle?
Did he have the money to purchase one? If not, did he steal it?
Why is the water safe to drink without checking? (Unless it isn't and that causes some annoying sickness later, and if the water not being safe wasn't foreshadowed, then it shows up out of nowhere, causing bad writing!)
and other crap.
also I can't be expected to think of characters as being smart enough to bring water bottles by default at this point because of the sheer lack of preparation I tend to see...which is rarely made mention of too. (It's like they don't have a need for food and water to start with...)
Actually, that's basically how I felt. I think I even said so earlier :C
^ Same.
ah, the memories~
(well, that's just based on my friends' complaints about how shitty and two-faced their friends are, rather than anything I had to put up with personally, but yeah)
You know what? I propose the Jim Henson test as a way to see if an anime is relying too heavily on moe. The test is simple - if the plot was unchanged and all the characters were muppets, would a sizeable amount of runtime over the series be lost due to the inability to show things like panty shots and cute girls falling over or stumbling?
Now I'm imagining E7AO being muppetified, complete with muppetified FLOW singing a theme song infront of a white background cause there's no robot budget for muppets.
So, All Nines, could you elaborate a bit on Madoka's symbolism?
@fourteenwings: Oh, fine, pink and orange-yellow.