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Comments
If you call Madoka this then TTGL is got to be the idea epitomized.
Eh. The "bad Sayaka, you get nothing!" thing was going to happen anyway, really.
In that case, it was on Sayaka to really stress how much love she had for Kyousuke; if Hitomi just saw a crush that was on the same level as hers, it would be marginalized. Instead, Sayaka was like, "okay, I guess this is how it's going to be", allowing herself to be happy for Hitomi, though in part because she was already deep into her own existential crisis. Events could have unfolded differently, and I don't necessarily disagree that there wasn't room for foreshadowing of this--hell, the show was good enough with other minute details that I'd imagine SHAFT could have pulled it off--but at the same time, I wasn't like, "oh, okay, then Urobuchi. I see how it is". I mean, I was sort of like that, but without the reprimanding tone.
Because we'd spent so much time with her before? If she'd gone through the whole series as a paragon of some ideal or other, I'd start wondering why the other Puella Magi, who were universally more broken than that, wouldn't turn to her to try to help them in some way. I liked that she turned out to have conflicting motives.
Well, sure. It was a turn of events that Sayaka would have never considered when she made her wish, so it hit that much harder, and, really, it would have probably weighed on her about as heavily once she eventually went into her depressive spiral.
I don't think the onus is on any given work of fiction to nudge the viewer/reader towards a certain outcome. That would make it needlessly simplistic, and so hope spots are offered in such a way that you know that the writers have such a capacity that they could make things better, and so they get greater emotional reactions out of the viewer by making it hurt more.
Hmm. Either I'd have to go through the SA thread again (or finish it) or admit that I used a wrong word here, but . . . Hmm. Well, there were lots of subtleties--for instance, in episode 4, Homura was talking to Madoka about the nature of Puella Magi, and while discussing Mami, she slowly twists the top off of a jar of sugar, or something, as she goes to pour tea. And when the OP played at the end of episode 10, you might notice that the lyrics were actually talking about Homura the entire time, which sort of solidifies Homura's role as the deuteragonist.
I'll retract "symbolism", but it was all very carefully calculated, to the point where it could very well take tones of people to notice everything. I wouldn't say that this is less true of the other things that are often considered "genius", but I don't know if Madoka is less of a contender.
I would have liked to see that, but TTGL failed to make me care in a lot of other ways. Though that could just speak to my other sensibilities; maybe it doesn't meet my criteria of "genius". The same is true of FMA as well, and I know I'll get chewed out for saying that in most conversations.
Okay, I admit. I would totally watch the shit out of that. I have a soft spot for muppets.
It hits hard but still feels a cheap shot. No, nevermind, it hits hard precisely because it's a cheap shot.
I won't argue that point further.
blah
All the time we spent with her before portrayed her as such, even if she was only in the show for a minute prior to that scene, it still betrayed her
It was a turn of events that would drive Sayaka off the deep end. It had nothing to do with Sayaka as a character (mostly because there wasn't much of one in the first place), it was seriously Mr. Urobuchi going "Now how horrid can her fate get!?"
Example: Pokemon will never have a sad ending, and Psycho Pass will never have a terribly bright ending.
The episode where Ash let Butterfree go.
The guy released pokemons like no tomorrow! He even got robbed of his Primeape!
Vandro it's been confirmed that you have a heart of stone. Any more compressions and it will collapse in on itself and become a black hole. So this Christmas you will be visited by three ghosts who will kinda road trip your past present and future life and oh god I really wish Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison would write a Christmas Carol plot.
Cute-bittersweet at worst.
I found it genuinely sad.
That's not really a sad ending so much as a sad segment, though.
It was a sad ending to the episode.
Not really. It just showed us a side that we didn't get to see, or that, perhaps, she was even hiding, for Sayaka's sake. Maybe I'm theorycrafting too much, but I could see it being a matter of, "okay, my friend really likes this boy, so I'll try to bow out", but later realizing that she can't. That would be fairly consistent with what I remember of her.
How much more of her did you want to see, then? Would you have preferred that every character make it to the final battle? The plot wasn't such that that would have worked, and I would have had a much tougher time watching through the whole series if I didn't get the feeling that the status quo would change before the end. I mean, sure, it was cruel artifice on Urobuchi's part that the universe could literally be sustained through despair (and this leads to another point that's fun to talk about, but that's tangentially related at the moment), but that's just part of the premise, and in exploring the themes that the show did, not least of which being Faustian self-destruction, people were going to get hurt like that. I don't even know if I'd call the turn of events horrid, as opposed to what I've seen other characters in other works persevere through, so much as just self-destructive in a sadistic way: Sayaka was lost in a spiral, but if a character had intervened and given her something better than Madoka's platitudes, she might have come out of it. But then, given what we saw later, that would just mean that Kyubey's machinations were foiled outright, and so the viewer wouldn't get as much of a sense that anything's changed. tl;dr: I don't see how this is any more "bad things happen for no reason" than anything else, and I didn't really feel like any of the main characters were marginalized; they both served narrative purposes and came across as people in their own rights, to me.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'm curious.
Suddenly, Pokemon. Pokemon everywhere. You people talk too fast.
I mean, I watched that episode back when it first aired here and then never again, sorry for not remembering a whole lot of it.
Anyway, I deleted my original reply because it got ranty, so I'll try to keep cool this time.
See, the thing is, what you're talking about is blind faith. That is, having faith in something without a reason to have faith in it.
That is not always a bad thing, but you argued that the story is a test of faith- and without a reason to have faith, you cannot reasonably expect viewers to have their faith tested,
When I originally watched the show, I got up to episode ten and stopped, because the entire show just felt bleak. Characters were dying senselessly, the suffering was getting greater and greater, and I could not see how the story could reasonably resolve itself into a somewhat happy ending.
When I watched it again, I had the same impression until Episode 11. Now, the story did eventually have a happy ending, but the thing is- the show did not encourage me to have that faith. Indeed, if the show was encouraging me towards anything for 90% of its run, it was towards a feeling of bleak hopelessness.
Essentially, rather than the hope spots building up a sense of faith that the series would have a happy ending, to me, they served quite the opposite effect- making the series brighter for a moment in order to make the darker aspects hit even harder.
The show seemed to be building up to a tragic end, rather than anything that would inspire faith in it, I guess is what I'm saying.
I had plenty of reasons to have faith, personally, not least of which was that Madoka was stated to have latent Godly powers, and when you think about it, the wish could have probably made in multiple different ways in such a way that negatives could be minimized to the point where the ending is decidedly positive. I also had faith, unfounded though it may have seemed, what with all the crying, that Madoka could see how heroic, if tragic, her friends could be, and realize that she has the potential to fix this crap and tell Kyubey what's up.
Really, the fix was implied for quite a while, but given how drastically it would change everything, it would have to take really terrible changes in the status quo to force the person with that power into the spot where they have to make a choice, while at the same time they were given tons of outs to keep the story moving, even though any moment could have been miscalculated and necessitated another time loop.
If the crucial hint had come any later, I would have probably been put off, because it would then seem like it was being forced upon me that there's a reason to have faith, but by having the very first scene be one where a city is being demolished, I get a sense that things are gonna hit the fan before it's all over. And then, by giving us a hint at latent Godliness, the show has more time to let other characters act on this, or, in the case of Kyubey, use it for their own ends. There was time for this plot point to be interesting.
Hell, this is just a not-least-of-which, and I'm already at three paragraphs.
Madoka had already become a Puella Magi several times, and nothing had been fixed, every single other character in the series repeatedly fucked everything up with their wishes, to the point that Kyuubey was gloating that the wishes only made everything worse.
You claim that it is a test of faith, but nothing I saw while actually watching the show gave me any reason at all to actually have said faith.
Instead, I saw experienced Puella Magi being killed as soon as any happiness got into their life, idealistic characters having everything they enjoyed stripped away until they snapped and forced the only damn character in the series I liked to kill them, and one of the biggest characters in the show going through so much trauma that it turned her into a near-apathetic character who barely seemed to give a fuck about anyone but Madoka.
Everything I saw in the series led me to believe that there was every bit as good a chance that the series would end up being bleak and tragic as the chance that it would end up being alright, and that even if the series ending was good, it would only end up being bittersweet.
And there's the thing; even the ending was bittersweet. Yeah, the system has been fixed to not suck quite as much, which is good to a degree, but all she managed to do was insert a measure of hope into an ~abyss of despair~.
Even a show set in the world Madoka created could end up being dark as fuck. I mean, Mai-HiME, one of the darkest magical girl shows out there, had less suckiness in its world, and more of a hope for a happy ending for its characters.
The show just didn't present me with any reason to have faith in its happy ending, and provided me with every reason to believe that it would all suck.
I mean, way back at the start of the series, we had a perfect example of what I'm talking about; as soon as things were looking good for the characters, and we had a decent person with a lot of experience to help them out, things went to hell and said character was killed.
It's just... You keep saying that the show provided you with reasons to hope for a happy ending, but to me, the show was providing me with even more reasons to believe that it would end up tragically. There was no reason, as far as I could see, to believe that it would have a happy ending.
But the point remained, with the implied time loops, that it could still be fixed, otherwise the writers wouldn't be showing this plot to us again, if they had already told us what would become of it. On top of that, Homura was a wild card throughout the series, knowing things we didn't, and in the end, we learned why she wasn't just more upfront about it all: it simply didn't work when she tried it those other times. It took a while for certain questions to be answered, but it was satisfying as hell when they were.
The situation was inherently one of grand proportions from the very beginning, though. Suffering on such a scale had a fair precedent. But, even then . . . well, I'll evaluate the test of faith motif from an in-universe perspective: every character went through at least one hope spot at some point, and not every one of them was fortunate enough to pass the first test, and so they tried escaping into their professions with varying degrees of success (Kyouko seemed to be doing pretty well with the "fuck all you guys" mindset until her perception was shattered by Kyubey himself, but Mami and Sayaka weren't able to preserve their sanity like that; Mami was immensely lonely, and . . . well, we saw what happened when Sayaka tried to pretend like it didn't hurt). And with Homura, you said it yourself that she was persevering because she had nothing left, but that requires faith, as well. We're left to have faith in Madoka because it's hinted at multiple times that she's more powerful than the other characters, and that she can actually affect a change that's meaningful to some people, if not as nice as we'd like it to be.
Well, again, we're talking a cosmic scale, and I would have felt shortchanged if the fix for it all was so universal when the darkness was similarly universal and the suffering so profound.
I feel like we're working down to the idea that this is simply a difference in opinions between us. I guess, what I don't get is where people are saying that the story was needlessly negative, or that it was somehow disproportionate or unfitting. I don't think the premise would have allowed for much happiness (hell, it drew on multiple Goethe works (for instance, Sayaka was made to be symbolic of Goethe/Andersen's demonic mermaid, apparently), and Lovecraftian ideas), and, as with the universality issue, I would have felt robbed if the characters had an excess of reasons to be happy about everything, when the situation is every bit as tough as we're feeling.
And I'm not willing to concede that I'm merely the odd one out, here, because I know that there are plenty of people out there who share my opinion on this, and who've also engaged with the work much more deeply than I have. In the end, it just felt right, and I'm not getting how any of this isn't clicking, or how (most of) it was nonsensical.
. . . Well, shit, it's two o'clock in the morning. Hopefully I don't find anything else to debate. I feel like I've said so much at this point that all I could do beyond that is direct you all to the SA thread so that you can read 40+ pages of that stuff like I did. Hehehe. ^_^;
. . . SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT! I told myself I was gonna have Lain finished before break was over. Dammit. I guess I'll get on that, while I'm on the topic of weird, depressing anime.
Okay, I have to agree with you; this is very probably a difference of opinion, and neither of us is going to get anywhere with this, so after I hit the reply button here, I'm not going to respond further.
See, I don't think you're quite getting what I'm saying here.
What you said up there-
- that is exactly what tragedy is.
Showing us, again and again, how it's doomed to failure, and everything sucks, and all that sort of jazz- that's what tragedy is, and that's where I saw the story headed for five-sixths of its run.
Each character's flaws were repeatedly brought to light, and shown to be their downfall. Sayaka's idealism eventually led to her snapping, Mami's loneliness was what distracted her for long enough to get her killed, and Homura's inability to fix the timelines was repeatedly drawn to attention and shown how it was driving her down.
In fact, if Madoka hadn't made her wish this time, I'm fairly sure that Homura would have witchified soon.
The show could have gone on to be a tragedy, and for a large part of its run, that's exactly where it seemed to be headed. You argue that the show was a test of faith, but the thing is- well, I could argue that I had faith that it was going to end up a tragedy.
If Madoka was a slightly different show, it very well could have become a tragedy, in fact. It wasn't, but the show did not show enough during its run to make me have faith that it was not heading in that direction.
Now, I'm going to leave and not reply, because I know that I'm also not the only person who shares this opinion, and many of those people like the show a lot more than I do.
Anyway, SA is currently behind a paywall, and I'm kind of fed up with goons in general, so I would politely ask you to please not.
Hence the could do. :P
I know you aren't going to respond further, but I guess what I'm not getting is the idea that, by spending a significant portion of its time being tragic, the show had spend too much time hinting at any one type of outcome, nor do I get the idea that the show would have absolutely been better if only the main characters weren't so tragic, and so I appreciate the compromise that maybe it's just not for everyone. I also don't like the implication that the pervasive tragedy means things can't get better, or that it completely marginalizes the hope spots.
Maybe I'm more the type to latch onto small hope spots, but I don't want to resign myself to the idea that I just empathize more easily than the more critical viewers, so much as make it apparent that I guess different things resonate with me, and I'll naturally try to rationalize them. I mean, people here more frequently praise TTGL and FMA, but I couldn't give a rat's ass about anyone in the former, and I was getting well and tired of the Elric brothers by the time I reached the end of Netflix's possession of its run, so I don't see where it's just a matter of one work having been written better than the others. Though I'll grant that the show couldn't do everything perfectly, and so my comment that it's a work of genius was unfounded, given how subjective interpretations can be. But then, maybe this is just new for me; I don't usually get to see a work of fiction scrutinized so heavily, or its themes deconstructed and evaluated, with a general consensus by those evaluators being, "holy shit, this is great writing!"
(Not replying to anything about Madoka here.)
This is where I must once again point to Brandon Sanderson.
SA even has a thread about his works, which is one of their only threads I have read. His stories are consistently tightly crafted, and he's pretty excellent on a technical level.
There are a lot of people and works that get praised like this, and Madoka is not even close to being top of the list.
From what I've read of his so far, I disagree with this. He's as prone to distracting amateurisms and overwrought pithiness as anyone else I've read. I won't argue the tight crafting, or the depth of themes and symbolism, or anything, though, having too little experience with that aspect of his writing to comment.
Maybe I'll have to look around, then, but I still hold the opinion that Madoka was exceptional, and from what I've seen of other in-depth discussions (for instance, in terms of threads I lurk, there's tons of good shit in the One Piece thread), there hasn't been anything that made me think, "wow, Madoka's really inexpert in comparison to this." I see something that holds its own, even in spite of a somewhat ridiculous premise and questionable genre trappings (*cough* nude transformation sequence in the OP *cough*).
I'm not sure I'd call anything in the OP Madoka's genre trappings so much as a key part of the two-and-a-half-episode fakeout.
Personally, I think Madoka's strength is its dedication to self-conscious drama, almost like a Shakespearian play. I never felt that it was trying to be entirely considerate of character realism outside of the main relationships and the expression of its themes, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There are only six characters that really matter in the entire thing, but that also provides the show with a great deal of focus and gives its 12 episode run time plenty of room with which to examine its characters and their flaws. Very few shows are as brilliantly efficient as Madoka when it comes to using the time at their disposal, and I felt that there wasn't a wasted moment -- everything comes together to emote and express at all times.
Granted, Sayaka's arc was probably the strongest. Madoka's arc (the first four episodes) were about us observing from the perspective of someone weak and helpless, which sets up the basic premise of the story. But Sayaka's story is where the show hits its stride. Her four episodes are really a traditional tragedy; a character with the best of intentions is exploited for their fatal flaw and is irrevocably punished for it. And all girls chosen to be magical girls in Madoka have a fatal flaw, because it's what allows the "magical girl economy" to actually work. So through Sayaka, we get our first complete story, from rise to fall, and how an innocent flaw caused that. After all, Sayaka only wanted recognition from the guy she loved -- but without it, she grew embittered and hateful, feeling as though her dangerous labours would go unrewarded forever. A reward defeats the purpose of kindness, of course, but a lack of some equivalence is still embittering; having none of her actions or work come back to her in a positive way would have psychologically drained Sayaka.
I didn't feel the last arc was as strong as the first two (bluh time travel lesbians and guns guns guns), but then again I couldn't actually say. I don't remember it much, because the time travelling lesbianism melted my brain.