Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
And while I' not sure if it was supposed to be the cause or effect of how things went for her, but during most of the series Sayaka didn't seem too great at conveying things, even with herself, so I'd trust her more post-death.
I don't think anything warrants a third rewatch though.
Given this it's less surprising that my opinion with regards to Homura was to go fully meta and argue that the author(s) set her up to fail intentionally.
As for the series, it's quite dumb for anybody to succeed in a superhero story because of specific personal attachment rather than wanting to improve the world.
To be honest aside from Hitomi the series is pretty spot on with emotional beats. I don't know why there's such a big disconnect between you and me on this one show.
When she was alive, the strongest indicator of that being her actual dream (or the closest to anybody claiming it to be that) was Mami asking her, and she was only guessing based on something she might sort of recall having happened to somebody else.
But why?
Come on, it stopped being funny already.
Seriously.
What other shows so far do we have this for? Lagrin I know...Cross Ange? though I think you said it just wasn't your thing so you didn't watch it. And IIRC you also said you didn't watch Arpeggio either.
But then couldn't you argue this is the case for anyone who decides things without the explicit consent of those affected? In which case it'd be applicable to a vast number of cases. Like in a superhero archetype story, what if the villain has a different vision of justice rather than seeing themselves as the designated loser whose fate it is to be defeated?
I think I watched Arpeggio before you did, and we talked about it too? I even watched the sequel movie earlier this year (or late last year don't quote me on this).
I distinctly remember you not having watched at least one of AKB0048, Lagrin, Symphogear, Arpeggio, or Coppelion, when I mentioned it to you. And you obviously have seen the first three. Maybe it's Coppelion then.
Magical girls of the "transform and beat shit up" variety are pretty firmly under super hero as much as the various Ishinomori scifi guys or even Mazinger Z. PMMM's premise of magical girls only opposing witches rather than doing general crimefighting is super typical for Japanese super heroes, except that the Witches aren't organized.
And it's hardly unfair when her take on "saving" Madoka amounts preventing her from doing anything that would help people. It wouldn't be good in real life either.
Homura doesn't even have this. Even her objections are grounded in personal attachment rather than a sense of right and wrong. The one time Sayaka's assumptions about anybody turn out to be spot on is when she figures out that Homura only cares about anything in as far is it affects Madoka.
She isn't even slightly sadder at the timeline when Madoka destroys the world compared to when she just dies.
Again, she doesn't even act like anything is wrong or bad, no matter how horrible besides how it would affect Madoka. Like how she's only upset about Kyoko dying because if they can't stop Walpurgisnacht, Madoka will become a magical girl.
Actually, I've never seen this pointed out, but Homura starts acting more confidently after Mami dies, which maybe counts as being affected.
No, Homura's intention is to prevent Madoka from taking a Faustian bargain.
Unless you're going to argue that the Faustian bargain is required to do any good in this world because it's a crapsack world, but at that point I'm arguing that the way the show is written makes it less of a crapsack-but-consistent world but rather an intentionally-crapsack world that intentionally stays crapsack despite characters' attempts to make it otherwise.
Feeling sad is different from recognizing something as wrong. For example, someone could be really jaded from doing something for the nth time already, but that doesn't mean they don't have a moral compass.
And trying to keep someone from taking a Faustian bargain because you've been able to see what harm it can do IS a rather morally upright thing to do.
Furthermore, as I pointed out, Madoka dying and Madoka destroying the world are both failure states that result in the conclusion "gotta try this over again".
After they contract with Kyubey, the rest of them become lost causes because they've already taken the Faustian bargain.
Also,
If I bothered to Venn diagram, this is in the category of overlap between magical girl and super hero.
Hell, super hero is more descriptive in this case since the unifying factor of magical girl has more to do with aesthetic rather than anything like premise. Though I'm not sure if there's a term for the exact "we fight one type of enemy" deal.
She has done neither except specifically in regards to how any given thing affects Madoka.
It's more that this is a fantasy story and staying a normal human lets you do next to nothing.
Also, this crapsack distinction just sounds ridiculously biased unless you make the same judgement that upbeat stories are "intentionally" so and "intentionally" stay that way. Going the way characters want doesn't make things inherently more natural than things not working out for them, especially with how changing the world works in real life, so I'm not seeing how this of all things is where the line should be drawn.
More specifically, nobody in PMMM actually tried to change the world besides Kyoko in her backstory and you know, final timeline Madoka, whom Homura wouldn't have allowed.
I'm not sure how "super hero" is more descriptive than "magical girl". Both seem to be basically premises, possibly with some common plot elements attached. In any case though I'm not sure I associate superhero stories with fighting one type of enemy -- there's often just one evil organization but don't they typically come up with different types of antagonists. Unless it's something like sentai.
And for that matter we haven't seen most of the time she's spent doing things.
But having to die by becoming a force of despair that drives people to suicide unless stopped by someone else who's taken on powers that result in them dying by becoming a force of despair that drives people to suicide unless stopped by someone else who's etc. is not exactly a good thing either.
It's not so much "going the way the characters want" as much as it is "going the way the characters want given that they have done sufficiently clever things to actually deserve it".
I'm just drawing a line that the setting should feel consistent in ways that make sense in-universe, rather than by decree of the needs of the writers. It's like, if you gain superpowers that do a certain thing, they should be able to do that thing, rather than introducing new barriers to doing that thing without good reason.
Well, unless "proving that it was impossible anyway" is good enough reason.
A Faustian bargain -- or more precisely, a "deal with the Devil" -- is gaining great power from some external source that gives a catch, usually by way of the Devil or other antagonistic force rigging the system against the person making the bargain. Thing is, such a bargain does actually have a win state -- it's just hard to achieve because the scenario ends up being rigged against the person.
The show appears, in my opinion, to be written such that Homura's wish does not have a win state -- the win state is actually not achievable at all.
Now we can take an alternate formulation of the Faustian bargain (one that's closer to its namesake) -- where it's gaining great power at great price. Generally speaking this means actually gaining the power specified, and then having to pay something else for it. This is essentially the way the magical girl system works -- you get one wish fulfilled, but you massively screw up something else in your life because of it. (A similar system with a horrible catch was used in Mai-HiME.)
Thing is, Homura's wish never actually gets fulfilled. Sayaka's and Kyouko's wishes do get fulfilled, albeit with nasty unintended negative consequences. However, Homura's wish is never fulfilled, yet she is nevertheless saddled with the unintended negative consequences. So even if we see it that way, Homura's still getting a rawer deal than usual.
The bad things that happened with Sayaka ar due to her later actions than the wish itself, considering that Kyosuke doesn't end up doing anything bad, unlike Kyoko's father.
That's definitely not the case. From the beginning it's always about Madoka. She barely even acknowledged Mami until she tried to kill her.
PMMM's plot elements have more in common with like, 2000s Kamen Rider than say, Tweeny Witches or the early Bewitched derivatives, so no, they're not equal here.
(though there's the weirdness of how much it has in common with Utena despite not sharing much of the premise)
Sure, but assuming she never did something she was never shown to do (or even be interested in) is a bigger stretch than to assume she didn't.
Sentai also tends to be the "establish one villain group at the start and they're responsible for basically every enemy the heroes face" kind. Though I guess it's not so much "one kind" as "one group", with looser definitions of "group" over time. And this is pretty much a Japan-only thing from what I could find.
Nobody in PMMM is exactly clever.
Also the defintion of Faustian bargain I've found on dictionary sites isn't that it's rigged against the Faust figure, but that it's immoral or short-sighted on the Faust figure's part to agree. Dictionay.com also stresses that it's about how much Faust is willing to sacrifice to satisfy his desire with no mention of whether or not Mephistopheles rigged it.
Touyama in real life is actually her character from Magical Girl Raising Project. Maybe this explains something.
Fair enough, but simply sharing plot elements doesn't really say how one thing should or shouldn't go. Furthermore, you may feel that this feels like a superhero show, while I think that this feels like a character drama. That's basically subjective.
The Faustian bargain or the deal with the Devil definitely varies from story to story, as Wikipedia's description notes. (And one of the possible variants does involve the "Devil" losing the bet.)
I finished Black★Rock Shooter and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I love it
i don't care that everyone said it was bad
i don't care that i'd probably agree with them if i tried to look at it objectively
my heart tells me it was great and that's all i care about
i love the characters and their super intense but fundamentally relatable emotions
i love the action scenes that make no pretense of being anything but super cool looking fights on cool looking environments with cool looking characters, to represent the characters' feelings
i love the plot that just gets completely bonkers halfway through for no reason
and it doesn't mean anything, but i was crying for like the entirety of the last two episodes.
aaaaaaahhhhhhhh but
well i still don't know if this means i recommend it to other people in general but like, objectively: the action scenes are a big part of the show and are cool and heavily stylized so it's probably worth watching even if just for that, and at least for the first half the characterization is basically like... might as well have been a WIXOSS subplot, so there's also that aspect for those for whom that's their thing.
i'm going to look back at this post in like, a day, and wonder why i ever liked this show but for now...
it's good.
thank you for reminding me
Thoughts as of episode 4.