Headscratchers / Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion

• If I understood correctly, the whole Magical Girl system and Incubators are now under Homura's full control and she has some major benefits from it - mainly, Homura is able to gain the "energy" from despairing Magical girls instead of QB. How the heck does it work? And what's with Entropy?
  • Even without witches as an outlet, the absurd laws of physics that created them still exists, and thus in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Despair, demons form from the emotions of mankind. Magical Girls now fight these demons and extract power from defeating them.
    • Well, it seems Homura doesn't give a damn about entropy. She uses all her power to make sure that Madoka will be "happy" as a "normal teenage girl" and forget about ever being a goddess, where do you see a place for fighting heat death?. But i'm pretty sure that it won't work forever and something MUST go awry, so I expect Season 2. And since we are talking about Homura new responsibilities...
    • Homura's love affected the entire universe. Presumably, it's now either contained in a barrier of unprecedented strength or is otherwise so throughly suffused with magic that it spits on laws of physics.
    • Alternatively: The Stinger shows us the body of an Incubator looking thoroughly dead. Whilst there are millions of explanations for that sight, one is in the the Homuinverse, she uses the Incubators as a sort of AC adaptor for despair - she forces all of the world's despair into and out through them to counteract entropy, maybe with a crossover in between the Nightmares that Homulily made in her barrier and Madokami's magical girl Valhalla concept.
    • Homura said that she had to take care of the demons, with Kyubey's "help", at the end of the movie. Take of that what you will.

• ...what about those countless Magical Girls which were supposed to be purified and brought to "Heaven" after they overload their Soul gem? Is it now Homura's job to cleanse them? Or is it done some other way?
  • Laws of physics have been restructured so that it happens naturally.
  • ...This troper assumes Homura doesn't care about them, considering she's the Devil and wouldn't want to maintain a Valhalla when she has a corporeal avatar to watch over Madoka. Cue Fridge Horror.
    • Wait, but if nobody is taking care of the soul gems that means that girls can turn into witches again! Does that mean that Homura (albeit unintentionally) brought back the Witch system?
  • Nope, Homura maintained the cycle, she just took the part that was Madoka out of it. Soul Gems still get cleansed but its by a physical force instead of a kind little god.
  • Homura yanked Madoka out of the Law Of The Cycle. It's uncertain exactly what that means; one of the witches she already recovered might take over, it might happen automatically, or it might be broken and fall apart. For the time being, Homura seems to not concern herself with this but it remains to be seen whether she took care of a highly obvious issue.
    • Except... how can one just "remove" Madoka from the Law of the Cycle? Madoka IS the Law of the Cycle. Her deal was to erase all the Witches with her own hands. You cannot have a Law of the Cycles without Madoka. I for one suspect Homura may think she's got the system working, but it's going to come crashing down at any moment.
    • More specifically, Madoka's wish was to erase the existence of all witches; she never specified she she wanted to be the one to do it, personally, herself. This tropes speculates that because of how wishes tend to bite back at the magical girls who cast them, when Madoka made her wish, the biggest retribution the universe could think of her was to make her disappear and become the Law of Cycles. Homura also only broke off a part of this Law, which is supposedly Madoka at the end. She was ripped apart, and Madoka the schoolgirl and Madoka the Law of Cycles are now two different things.
    • No, Madoka specifically says:

      Madoka: I want to erase every witch. Every witch from every world, from the past and future. With my own hands.

    • Note that a) Madoka still appears to be deeply connected to the Law, if the last part of the movie is any indication, and b) since Homura somehow 'extracted' her from it and left the rest of the existing Law behind, it's probably the remnants of Madoka's magic making the witches vanish. Madoka's power still being the driving force combined with said power still being at least partially tied to Madoka in some way might be enough for it to count as still being 'with her own hands,' if only on a relatively blatant technicality. That's the only thing I can really think of to justify it without using facts we aren't already fairly sure of.
  • Or maybe Madoka already destroyed the witches. She already exists in all times, and all spaces, and all worlds, so the cosmic interpretation of Madoka (the law of cycles) already dealt with the witches, being, you know, a natural law that always existed. The law of cycles still exists because as of that moment, it is still being maintained by Madoka.
  • Madoka and Madokami are now different people. It's easiest to think of her like this: Ultimate Madoka is God. Madoka, with the potential for godlike power but living a mortal life in a mortal body, is Christ. They're two parts of the same whole; Ultimate Madoka still exists and is still doing her thing, but since the system is rewritten, she doesn't have anything to actually do.

• How was Kyubey's plan was supposed to work? Was he planning to conquer the world with Madoka's power?
  • No. Cosmo-forming. To prevent the universe from decaying into a state unsuitable for life. Or so he tells a little girl; the real answer is probably more complicated.
  • A transcript makes things much more clearer : "If it can be observed, then it can be interfered with. If It can be interfered with, then it can be controlled. One day we will be able to fully strip the power of 'law of cycles'. That way Magic girl will become witches once again, energy collection on a higher level then can be expected. The conversion of energy from hope to despair will be of a level beyond our expectation thus far. From the process of you turning into witches, its value will then be shown."
    • A brilliant line, by the way. While probably lifted from somewhere else, it's a very bold theological statement that explains the lack of observable divine intervention with quantum physics: If someone can gain definite proof of divine power, they may eventually claim it.

• Is Homura's "new world" a fully rewritten universe (like the one Madoka made) or is it simply a witch barrier, only on a MUCH BIGGER scale?
  • It's honestly hard to say. Homura is technically not a Witch, but most accounts seem to describe her as indeed creating a barrier that expands to fit the entire universe, plus her "Dark Orb" seems to resemble a Soul Gem a lot. Kyouko is seen feeding some of her witch familiars in the ending, and Homura doesn't seem to have absolute control over her reality (she had to wipe Sayaka's memories when she found out she still remembered and didn't eliminate Madoka's god powers completely), so one might say that the new world is the universe trapped inside a witch barrier.
    • I mean, you can clearly see it do just that as her purple aura literally expands to encase the entire universe.
  • Something I noticed on a second watching: the moon has a purple aura around it, like the fuel truck and the giant SHAFT missiles from episode 11. It might be that the universe wasn't so much destroyed and then remade the way Homura wanted, it's more like Homura used her reinforcement/parakinesis powers to rearrange the universe fourth-dimensionally. If Homura had simply remade the universe from the ground up instead of just moving the parts around, Madoka, having been born and lived a mortal life, wouldn't need to be sealed away because in that universe, Ultimate Madoka wouldn't exist, and Homura would ascend to the higher plane of existence that Madoka would have to vacate. Instead, Homura exists on Earth and can control reality at her whim, because she has the whole shebang on the Dark Orb's leash.
    • Apologies if this doesn’t make sense, but based on the above theory, could it be theorized that Homura could now have some parallels to the Demiurge?

• How did Nagisa/Bebe/Charlotte came into the picture? If the illusion world is made of Homura's memories, then Charlotte should only exist as a witch that killed Mami (and Homura indeed remembers that). And if the magical girls inside the illusion world are the ones that were sucked into it from the outside world, than Nagisa shouldn't exist either!
  • It's just fan service.
  • Actually, this has been answered - as opposed to Mami and Kyouko, who were sucked into Homura's barrier, Madoka entered Homura's Soul Gem world of her own free will and brought real-world Nagisa and Sayaka along with her as back-up, entrusting her memories and powers to them in order to fool Kyubey. So yeah, partly fanservice, but fanservice with a function within the plot!

• If that's been explained, why was Nagisa ever chosen for this mission in the first place? And how did whoever summoned her even know who she was in the first place? It seems bafflingly stupid that Madoka would entrust the saving of the universe to someone she knows only as the witch that killed Mami. Exactly when did pre-witch Nagisa have any interaction with the main cast, and exactly why did she get chosen over someone like, say, Yuma Chitose?
  • It's entirely likely that Yuma's probably still alive. She's never become a witch in the timelines we see her and for all her youth, she's surprisingly tough physically and mentally.
  • Did you not watch the anime or something? Nagisa was chosen because Homura remembers Charlotte and not Nagisa. The entire point was to fool Kyubey into thinking that his seal plan had worked correctly, so Madoka had to be careful and only bring people that she knew Homura would recognize, which is why Nagisa is Bebe for most of the movie; if Homura didn't recognize Nagisa, Kyubey would know something was up, but since she knew and had a strong reaction to Charlotte, he never suspected. As to the "bafflingly stupid" part, Madoka knows every magical girl who ever existed or will exist and undid the existence of witches, of course she knows who Nagisa is.

• Why fans have so many issues with God-mode Homura? With few adjustments (season two maybe?) we could have a perfectly balanced system - with Madoka as the embodiment of the girls hope and Homura as the embodiment of despair. Homura is bearing the burden of the girls despair and Madoka is giving them hope for the MG heaven or whatever. Homura is happy and Madoka has much less work to do (carrying the countless MG despair while still being the embodiment of hope is quite an arduous task). And since Homura has the incubators completely under her thumb, this time they wouldn't cause any trouble. The only thing that is left is who would take care of the entropy issue.
  • Except that Homura has explicitly made it clear that she would damn the world to give Madoka a normal life and plans to suppress Madoka's god powers and the other Puella Magi's memories as long as she can, no compromises. Throw in the implications in The Stinger that she may be going mad from her Face–Heel Turn, and suddenly a conclusion with the two ruling together seems far off.
    • Actually, there's another implication to The Stinger than just "she's going mad" that one can take away from it. She has put everyone who matters into situations which mirror her own pre-god mode in some way. In Madoka's case, Homura wants her to know and understand why she became what she did, to experience it as opposed to just 'seeing' it from afar like before. Or being told she's very special in some way or has a duty or expectation of her that requires the loss of her identity. At this point, the only way to figure things out with Madoka/the world is for them to be on a completely equal footing (as opposed to being human/magical girl or magical girl/god, or not remembering or remembering, and experiences and etc.) - which, before, was just not possible. Plus, Homura's new awakening/subsequent power took out the Incubators. Now they can't interfere and what will happen afterwards between Homura and Madoka is truly unknown, and she's prepared for the worst. Indeed, Homura's left us and herself with a real cliff-hanger.

• If in the Illusion world every girl lives her perfect, happy life, why is Sayaka not with Kyosuke?
  • Probably for the same reason Kyouko's living with her, if you know what I mean.
  • Since the illusion world is created by Homura, it's natural that this wouldn't play out since Homura probably does not know how much Kyosuke means to Sayaka. In other words, the idealized conditions are established by what Homura thinks would be the Puella Magi's ideal lives. Hence why Kyouko is living with Sayaka instead of living with her family and Mami is still an orphan, albeit a happy one.
  • It's also possible that because of Sayaka now being wiser and more experienced due to her memories of the other timelines and her status as a 'secretary' of Madoka, she still deeply loves Kyousuke but also understands that said love and her desire for said love to be returned does not need to be her top priority, and that he just doesn't truly return her feelings. Also, given that she knows exactly what's going on in half-Witch!Homura's barrier, she might not be affected by that aspect of it. She certainly kept her memories, at least, because of Madoka (as far as I know). I could be wrong though.
  • Word of God has stated, that even if Sayaka got together with Kyosuke, she wouldn'be happy with him. So maybe she's living what would be really her happy life, not what she thought would be.
    • Word of God also stated that Kyosuke is neither good with girls nor guys. Neither of them would be happy with each other in the end.
  • Based on this and the series' ending, the course of human events can't be changed very much without drastically altering the current situation. Madoka's wish rewrites the universe, but we see (through her interactions with Sayaka, natch) that Sayaka's death could have been retconned, but that would mean negating a future where Kyosuke's hand was healed. Showing Kyosuke and Hitomi together while Sayaka still alive is a really good way to show exactly how much Homura doesn't care about the world: Homura, having rewritten the universe, has disregarded all the rules that would make Madoka sad, including the one that says Sayaka must die or become a witch in every timeline where she makes a contract.
    • That might actually make good evidence toward Homura's universe being less "universe" and more "pocket dimension". If Word of God is that Sayaka becomes a witch or dies in every timeline where she makes a contract, and Sayaka has made a contract but isn't a witch and isn't dead, then the only way for those statements to be true is if the Homuniverse isn't actually a timeline in and of itself. That would also explain why Madoka's goddess-powers actually warp the world around her to become her weird pink cosmos effect; the universe hasn't actually changed, it's just an extremely complex illusion inside Ultimate Madoka's magical girl Valhalla.

• I got massively confused at the ending : Homura has separated the normal Madoka from the goddess Madoka - does that mean that we now have the regular Madoka without memories of being a goddess and a goddess Madoka without memories she was a regular girl? Or is it done some other way round? And how exactly does the magical girls system work now? Are they still dying/vanishing/ascending to a higher place/etc. after using too much magic? And with who does they fight with? Can Kyubey still contract new girls? (Geez, looks like season two is a must!)
  • Since Incubators are now forced by Homura to eliminate all witches/demons/whatever they are fighting now themselves, i think Magical girls are no longer needed or at least, not as much as before thus there is no reason to contract new girls. And if the girls are no longer forced to fight evil beings, there is a tiny chance of them dying because of magic overuse - so basically, Law of cycles isn't as important as it was earlier. Actually, I'm not even sure if Sayaka, Kyouko, Mami and possibly Nagisa are still Magical Girls or not. And for the double Madoka - that's a valid theory. Homura somehow split the "Human Madoka" and the "Goddess Madoka" apart - which would mean that the Law of cycles still works somehow, only that she no longer remembers she was once a typical schoolgirl (but should still know what her duties are). The same with regular Madoka. The main point of Homuniverse would be then preventing the regular Madoka from ever meeting the Law of Cycles (and the other way round). Which, taking into account my first theory about much smaller significance of the Law of the cycles now, shouldn't be that hard. Does that sound at least a bit coherently?
    • Sayaka, Kyoko and Mami still have their contract rings (didn't notice whether Nagisa had one as well) so they are probably still magical girls.

• What dance style does Homura and Madoka use in their transformation sequences? I got that Kyouko has a kind of oriental dancing theme (indie?), Sayaka's theme is hiphop, Mami's figure skating (can that be called a dance style?) but i have no idea what theme has Homura and Madoka - some kind of pop?
  • Homura's looked to be ballet foreshadowing her familiars' theme. Madoka's being Japanese pop idol style to emphasize cuteness.
  • I believe that the following styles were used:
    • Mami: Figure Skating/Ballet
    • It's definitely figure skating.
    • Kyouko: Middle-Eastern (Symbolized by the multiple arms, most likely Shiva)
    • Shiva is a Hindu deity. Kyouko's dance is sort of a magically-enhanced hypnotic tribal thing without belly-dancing elements.
    • Sayaka: Break-dancing/hip-hop
    • Homura: Interpretive
    • Homura's is ballet, particularly the folding pose just before the end of her transformation is reminiscent of "death" poses in tragic ballet stories.
    • Madoka: J-pop

• What's with Charlotte being called "Bebe"? It's not like her name's been retconned - when Homura recalls the witches, you can still sort of see runes saying "Charlotte" when she appears in one of the memory circle things. I did see some people saying that Bebe is Nagisa's real name, but that's not mentioned anywhere in the movie. I know Inu Curry did request that she be called Bebe, but I dunno. It's never properly addressed.
  • All there in the pamflet, a strange rule decided by Inu Curry is that a witch never says her true name. Even if someone can decode their accompanying runes or otherwise knows their name, they still won't ever say it themselves. So they just call her Bebe.

• What makes Homucifer a God of Evil, per-say? Maybe this is just coming from someone who plays the crap out of Megaten (and is a Chaos Supporter), but this comes across as more Law (Madoka) vs. Chaos (Homura): the needs of the many vs the needs of the few, as opposed to Good vs. Evil. Besides acting a little loopy near the end, Homura didn't do anything I'd remotely consider "Evil": hell, she went out of her way to give Sayaka, Kyouko, Mami and Nagisa happy lives as well. Both her and Madoka's systems work and apparently work well: they just have different approaches and neither seems perfect. So what makes Homura's actions evil?
  • There's actually some good evidence that Homura isn't truly evil. Apparently, the look in her eyes at the end indicate that she doesn't truly enjoy what she did. She does seem to legitimately want the others to be happy. Heck, there's even a Zero-Approval Gambit theory going around saying that Homura's true objective is the destruction of the entire magical girl system, which requires Homura to play the villain in order to protect Madoka once and for all.
  • If you are a Megaten fan and a Chaos supporter, how could you not see, that what Homucifer and YHWH do exactly the same thing? Sure, the former wants to control only one girl's life, and trampling on the free will of everyone else in cosmos is more like an afterthought (make no mistake, happiness born from reality retcons and memory wipes is exactly that, heck Homucifer doesn't even know enough about what is truly important for the girls to make them happy; that before considering the possibility that what she's done with them is actually meant to be a setup for tormenting them slowly, which is suggested by her obvious acts of petty malice), but the difference lies only in target scale, not methods. Or, to put it another way, treating another person as well, not person, but an object, whose own wishes need not to be considered, and who must be made to conform to whatever you think is good for her, by force if necessary, is a textbook definition of evil.
  • Personally, I think Homura is a God of Evil in term of as a conscious antithesis of Madoka, which actually puts her in a Jerkass Gods class instead of pure evil if not for her intention to play the "evil" part. I disagree with above troper that says she's evil because she oppresses; Madoka also did the cosmic retcon and memory wipe herself at the series' finale, which automatically makes people (especially her parents) happy by ignorance too. What makes her different from Madoka is that she changes the rule as she pleases if the result isn't according to how she wishes it (and that she gloats over it). I would say that all sides fighting in the climax of this movie are all Law route, but the law is depending on whose law and from that, we see that Homura is evil through Character Alignment. Homura's world is far from anarchy after all, but not above tyranny.
  • Agreement. Homura's selfish to be sure, but being selfish isn't necessarily evil: she's a Jerkass God with a Heart of Gold. Rather fitting for her personality in the series, really. She's using her powers to get what she wants, but she's being remarkably reasonable about it. It's not like she's a Yandere who turned the entire world into a Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish Dystopia forced to worship Madoka as God/Big Brother/The God-Emperor of Mankind, building Madokapolis and grandiose Madoka statues with slave labor, establishing an Inquisition to brutally destroy heretics who dare blaspheme against the Cutieness of the God-Empress Madoka, and tying up Madoka herself in an And I Must Scream-state of perpetual bondage, on life support yet with no rights of privacy whatsoever in a padded cell watched by CCTV cameras 24/7, just so she would never, ever kill herself. She's given Madoka free will, and seems only willing to interfere if Madoka tries to actually put herself under the bus.
    
    I think the big problem is that we're using Madoka as the yardstick for good and reasonable. Doing that, yes, Homura's acts come across as pretty unnerving. But it's important to bear in mind that Madoka is messianic in her selflessness and her self-sacrificing nature for the sake of the greater good. Holding her as the standard of morality is lofty, but ultimately unrealistic. "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God," Romans 3:23. Madoka is inhumanly selfless to the point that it makes Jesus H. Christ Himself (The Messianic Archetype, but who can't tolerate people not worshipping Him lest they be burned forever) seem like a narcissistic asshole in comparison. Homura is humanly selfish. I mean, what are her crimes? Rewriting history to favor her goals? It's Homura Akemi. It's what she DOES. People didn't have a problem with her doing it in the series. Heck, that's pretty much what Madoka did when she enacted the Law of Cycles as stated above. Poking the poodle by breaking a teacup and wasting an apple? Petty, in-character when you think about it, and offset by her Pet the Dog moments giving Sayaka and Kyouko a second chance at happiness and giving Mami the companion she was desperate for in Nagisa. Oh yeah, and healing Kyosuke's hand. She had no reason to do that besides the fact it's what someone she dislikes wanted. That's REALLY big of her.
    
    Overthrowing the Law of Cycles? Again, that's based off the notion of Madoka as the yardstick to measure what is 'good': Homura's system doesn't seem to have any glaring flaws for the moment. I mean, it's not the Witch System. It may be opposed to the Law of Cycles, but that doesn't make it 'evil' in its own right. Hell, I like it better to be honest. From a moral standpoint, Homura's actions don't seem to come across as inherently 'wrong' but inherently ''human''. Opposed to the Messianic Archetype figure that is Madoka Kaname? Yeah. Selfish compared to her? Hell yeah. But evil? Well, compared to someone like Madoka, we're ALL pretty much self-serving bastards, aren't we? I think what it comes down to is shock: shock that Madoka's beautifully selfless act was opposed and overthrown by a character that we all trusted, for an admittedly self-serving reason, and we've let that color our opinion on it. Think on this: rather than the Law of Cycles, what if Madoka had enacted Homura's system at the end of the series? What would we think of it?
  • While I don't see Homura as necessarily evil, per say, I do see her Pet the Dog moments under a bit more cynical light considering she did disregard the teacup and apple. The softest interpretation is that giving Mami and Kyouko happy lives is a bit of a off-hand whatever; it would probably be easiest for her to model her new world based off her illusion one. The 'eek' interpretation? As long as those two are happy, they're not going to notice anything off about the world, nor will they try to change it. That's what happened in the illusion world. And there is no effin' way that the new world will not have major, major issues with it.
  • I'm in thorough agreement that the new system will have issues that will be the backdrop to the inevitable season 2. But I'm not quite getting what you're saying about keeping the others happy so they don't fight back. I guess the big question regarding is "how in the fuck would they do that?" Homura is capable of rewriting history on a whim, erasing memories, taking command of the infrastructure of an advanced alien race, and SUPPRESSING GODOKA'S POWERS. What kind of threat would Sayaka, Kyouko, Mami and Nagisa pose that would have Homura worried enough to try to keep them hopped up on happy?
    • Homura doesn't seem to have absolute power; Sayaka shouldn't have remembered anything to begin with, and right before when Homura erases her memory, Sayaka swears to keep some of her original feelings. Not to mention that it looks like Homura's going to have to periodically check on Madoka to make sure the Goddess powers stay suppressed. If Sayaka (any maybe some others) manage to remember but play along for awhile (like she and Nagisa did in the illusion world), they might figure out a way to fight back. And since Homura is physically on earth, she can't see everything going on at once and something might slip past her.
    • It's notable that what Homura does essentially robs magical girls of their meaning and their agency in the universe. In Madoka's system, magical girls make wishes for themselves, then fight the wraiths that arise from human suffering. In exchange for a miracle, they protect humanity, and when they die, they earn a final reward in a magical girl Valhalla where they become agents of Ultimate Madoka, instead of whatever else comes next for ordinary humans. In Homura's system, magical girls have nothing to fight and nothing to die for (as evidenced with Sayaka and Nagisa, who are alive and well, having never been led away by the Law of Cycles and thus never having depleted their magic). Based on what we know about how hope and despair act as energy in this universe, Homura is basically building a false paradise: it's the world that would make her happiest, but even in the most generous interpretation of how she's handling curses now (that either she purges them directly, or forces the Incubators to clean it up themselves) it's still going to damn the universe because the source of the increasing distortions will never be removed. And since we may not ever get any new magical girls, because Homura's selfish love won't allow her to grant any new wishes for anyone but herself, the whole thing may turn out to be pretty grim indeed.
    • In the first place, the incubators' goal wasn't to "remove the distortion", as you said, that's physically impossible, but to slow down the change in entropy. New magical girls most probably will still be created, seeing as the energy gathered to fight the negative change in entropy came mostly from the girls themselves in the old universe, more precisely, it, in my opinion, came mostly from the very moment the magical girls turned into witches, aside from the moment the girls made the contracts, the accumulation of energy during the two states of magical girl and witch and the added despair from the human victims (a possible explanation for this in layman's term is best expressed by this formula: deltaG = deltaH - T*deltaS. Delta G is the change in the degrees of freedom. Delta H is the change in enthalphy, which here, for simplicity's sake, could be roughly interpreted as heat. If deltaG of a process is smaller than 0 then the process happens. Based on this, I made an educated guess. If you could somehow rig deltaS to be super negative, an impossible feat, enough to win against the positive change in enthalphy - the epitome of the universe's heat death, then deltaG of the "death" process would be positive, as in, the universe's death would be delayed. As a result, the best Homura, Madoka and the incubators could do was to slow down the change in entropy, making it less positive). In the Madoka's universe, the magical girls still existed, but they disappeared just as they were on the verge of witchification, the demons were presumably the physical manifestation of humanity's despair. This means that the only sources of energy to fight entropy were the energy gathered at the moment the girls made the contracts, the accumulation during the magical girl state and the destruction of the demons. The main driving force behind the incubators' old means of fighting entropy - energy that was supposed to be gathered when the girls turned into witches were now gone, thus lowering the effectiveness of the process significantly. However, the girls still were the fuel of the whole machine, so to speak, albeit with more human rights than before. Now, in the Homuniverse, magical girls also exist for whatever reason. Because we don't know the exact state of the Homuniverse, we can only speculate using the world inside Homulilly as a basis. While the existence of the dream world must obey the thermodynamic laws of Madoka's universe, inside the dream world itself though, those laws were thrown aside in favour of the ultimate law of that world: Homura's emotional state. As such, the existence of magical girls inside that world was rather unnecessary in terms of thermodynamics. Considering the return rate of fighting nightmares, it was unlikely that the dream world got anything out of the deal. Thus, the only reason the concept magical girls existed was that Homura willed them to do. The interesting part about the dream world was its other fuel source: the nightmare themselves. While both demons and nightmares came from humanity's sufferings, since the origin of demons were unknown, we can assume that they came from actual despair instead of some more mundane emotions of teenage girls who wanted their boyfriends to spend more time with them. This means that hypothetically, in a world with both demons and nightmares, as was presumably in the Homuniverse (Homura was explicitly shown to "remake" the Madoka universe by encasing it within her barrier. In reality, she only edited it a bit instead of destroying the previous universe and creating a whole new one with one's own set of laws like Madoka did.), between the nightmares - direct products of human negative emotions, even the slightly negative ones, and the demons - indirect products of humanity's sufferings, the nightmares would outnumber the demons. For a magical girl, it would be more profitable to fight nightmares instead of demons. While the productive energy gathered to fight entropy per nightmare was infinitely smaller than the energy gathered per demon or witchification, the number of possible nightmares could cover the difference and most probably even yield more productive energy per capital than the other 2 methods. With the only problem that came with nightmares being their immense destructive capacity (I mean, one shot from their canon hands can destroy a building!) temporarily settled by the magical girls, the hypothetical Homuniverse could be said to be almost stable and definitely more cost-effective than the other 2 models. In this model, the magical girls' role and meaning would be the only and last line of defense against nightmares, the protectors of humanity from total destruction instead of sacrifices, of mere fuel for the universe. This made sense, since it would be in Homura's best interest to create a universe as stable and content as possible without extensive incubator interventions, just as it's in the capitalists' best interest to improve both productivity, all in the name of profit, and the living condition of the work force, all in the name of FURTHER profit, from a Marxist's point of view. Really, the only problems with the Homuniverse were that it was made by trampling on Madoka's sacrifices, imprisoning her in a gilded cage, Homura's depression and possible insanity. As a general rule, emotionally and/or mentally unstable people shouldn't become absolute dictators. That tends to end badly.
    • The problem with the above premise is that Nightmares are not, and were never, real, and everything that happens in the movie before Homura's ascension is removed from the rest of the world's cosmic balance. None of it is actually real so it has no impact on the real world, so any equations you might do to figure out how it compares to any of the previous systems for harvesting grief is not only impossible, but completely irrelevant. The distortions themselves have nothing to do with the Incubators, but they are the incentive for magical girls to fight. Magical girls don't fight to heal the universe, they fight to protect the world from the byproducts of suffering no matter what universe it is. In the original one, the byproducts of suffering are witches, and in Madoka's new universe, the byproducts are the wraiths. It's also not "explicitly" shown what Homura does, because no one knows exactly what she did beyond take control of the universe and reorder it somehow, but she does explicitly state (and so does Kyubey) that she is not a witch... which means whatever she did in the end, she didn't take the world into her barrier. She's not a witch, so she doesn't have one. The only result we have at the end of the movie is that the magical girls are all alive, Madoka is only just barely contained in Homura's new world, and Homura herself is being driven mad (if she isn't out of her mind already). We don't even know if Homura's world even has the kind of distortions that witches and wraiths represent, let alone whether those distortions are comparable to the distortions in any of the other universes, and more to the point, we have no way of knowing whether Homura herself even knows that the heat death of the universe is the Incubators' motivation for doing all of this or what she's doing about it, if anything at all. It's a lot of very interesting math, to be sure, but it's based on speculation about things that are nothing but petty illusions a witch cooked up to keep herself busy. Any conclusions to be drawn about the efficiency of grief harvesting by comparing the Nightmares to Witches or Wraiths is meaningless, it's the same thing as trying to determine the most cost-effective approach to dental care by comparing an orthodontist to the tooth fairy.
    • Something that might be good to note: even if everything else in Homura's world is fake, the girls she invited inside are real beings. Whatever else the Nightmares might've been, they did appear to genuinely cleanse the girls' non-imaginary Gems (only Homura's was ever indicated to be a fake, which is consistent with her no longer being a magical girl, though it's possible Madoka, Sayaka and Nagisa's Gems were fake too), which would indicate that they could have some sort of potential to effect non-imaginary change for grief harvesting if Homura chose to reproduce them in her new world. Now, this could be total crap - it might be that the Nightmares were just doing the same thing as Juubey from Kazumi Magica was doing and polishing the surfaces of the Gems without actually removing the taint, or what Kyouko did in The Different Story by creating the illusion of a cleansed Gem, but I hesitate to think that that kind of placebo effect would keep the girls in the fairly good condition we see them in for the whole month or so they were inside the barrier. Of course, the fact remains that Homura has no real reason to bring back Nightmares that we can see, and there are hints to suggest that she's rejecting the magical girl system entirely.
    • I think the premise that we can speculate based on the world inside Homura's Soul Gem is incorrect. It's a self-contained, entirely imaginary dream world that has no laws of physics, it only acts as if it does because that's what Homulilly expects, in a Your Mind Makes It Real sort of way. Also, there's no indication that there will be any more magical girls because Kyubey is not in a position to be making any more contracts and, whatever other powers she may have, there's no indication that Homura has access to their Sufficiently Advanced Technology and can make contracts herself, and even if she does, she has no incentive to actually make them: if there are magical girls, they will eventually use up their magic or otherwise darken their Soul Gems, and Ultimate Madoka will be called to defeat the growing witch before it's born. The Incubators did have a hand in correcting distortions, though, because distortions (discrepancies between the reality created by wishes and the previous reality) manifest as grief, which they consume to heal the universe's entropy; correcting the distortions isn't what they were going for directly, but it was a byproduct of their actual goals. The wraith system is inefficient compared to the witch system, which is why Kyubey wants to bring the witch system back, but Homura's system has nothing to suggest that anything is being done about the issue of entropy in the universe (and there's a good chance she has no idea that's what the Incubators were doing, since only Madoka was around to hear that speech) unless Homura is directly staving it off herself.
• She's abducted the object of her affections and is forcing her to live her life the way Homura wants it lived, even going so far as to threaten her if she tries to make a choice Homura disagrees with - telling her, paraphrased, "If you insist on putting duty before your happiness, you and I will become enemies." Homura has effectively put Madoka in a box in which she has free will to do whatever she wants as long as she doesn't do anything Homura doesn't want her to do. She's keeping Madoka in a gilded cage and convincing herself that it's for her own good, but it's not; it's for Homura's good, because as much as she lies to herself and says she's making Madoka happy, when you cut off a bird's wings, it will never be happy no matter how much birdseed you throw at it. She's stripped Madoka of the right to choose, under the pretense that she'll be happier if she just does what Homura wants her to do instead of what Madoka wants to do. Seriously, this is classic domination abuse.
  • Considering Madoka doesn't remember anything, Homura seems to be acknowledging that their ideologies will inevitably clash more than threatening her, especially considering the phrasing ("Is that so...if that's the case, someday you might become my enemy") and what she says in the very next breath: 'she doesn't care' if that happens, so long as Madoka is happy. She's acknowledging that the world she created will inevitably explode in her face. But I suppose it could be interpreted both ways.
  • Keep in mind, Madoka literally asked Homura to go back and save her from being tricked by Kyubey. Homura starts out going back to save Madoka from ordinary death, but when she finds out about what witches really are, she begs Homura to go back and stop her from becoming one. That is when Homura decides she'll go back as many times as it takes. In Rebellion, in the flower garden scene, the real Madoka (who is missing her memories, but Homura didn't know that) tells her things that Homura misinterprets as Madoka telling her that she would never want to become her goddess self. Think about that: Homura (who is being consumed with despair well beyond human limits, remember) thinks that Madoka was tricked by Kyubey in the end, and regrets the result of her wish. Homura had a lot less power when she heard that the first time and she was a lot more mentally and emotionally sound, and she would do literally anything for Madoka's sake. By the time the color of love has filled her Soul Gem, Homura has all but gone insane trying to keep Madoka safe at her own insistence, it's really not surprising that she'd eventually give in to the selfishness of loving someone who, after a hundred timelines and two universes, is never truly happy with the results of decisions she makes and never listens to the voice of greater experiences until it's far too late. What Homura is doing when she's stealing Madoka out of the Law of Cycles is an apocalyptic version of "I'm trying to do what you want; you won't listen and you won't let me because you never remember, but I will never give up because it was you who asked me to do this." Of course it's bad of her to do these things, she knows it's bad of her to do these things and that's why she's suicidal, but she's harboring the pain and irrationality of being a witch while being overwhelmed by selfish love. It is seriously not fair to any of the characters in this story, or the complexity of the world-building done across the franchise, to just brush it all off as being as petty and mundane as garden-variety domestic abuse.
    • I think it's important to remember that Madoka might not have been in her right mind when she told Homura to stop her from becoming a magical girl. Sayaka's and Homura's examples demonstrated for us how the corruption inside a Soul Gem twists a girl's mind even before they become a witch - the second you become a magical girl, despair and magic expenditure doesn't just weaken you and bring you closer to a Fate Worse than Death, it directly and quantifiably deteriorates your sanity without a Grief Seed to purify the taint. Madoka made that request under duress, with the threat of Witching within minutes hanging over her, with her Soul Gem (soul) dripping with corruption, and apparently also in incredible pain from her wounds; contrast Timeline 5's decision to contract after all, where she faced arguably a roughly comparable level of trauma as Timeline 3's version but without the above factors affecting her judgment. Just as the fandom generally is willing to entertain the idea that Madoka's confession in the flower field is invalid given Homura's unwitting manipulation of the situation, we should also take TL 3 Madoka's desire with a grain of salt. This isn't to say that Homura is evil for taking Madoka seriously - it's completely understandable, and admirable. But whether or not Homura's actions are justifiable based on what she's going through doesn't necessarily come to the same answer as whether or not what she did was justifiable overall, if that makes sense.
    • Except for the part where the Incubators have made a goal of controlling Madoka and bringing back the witch system? Homura didn't just arbitrarily kidnap Madoka because she only wants to own her like a pet, she kidnapped Madoka and re-ordered the universe because that was her only means of keeping her from being enslaved by Kyubey, which is explicitly what Kyubey wants, and keeping her from being isolated and suffering forever, which is what she thinks Madoka's life as the Law of Cycles is like (based on a misunderstanding, but that's still what she believes). By the end of the story, Homura is being consumed by guilt because she knows that what she's doing is wrong, but she's still doing it, because she believes it's necessary, and she's right. Madoka's Wish didn't change anything for the Incubators or their goals, and Homura knows better than anyone how ruthless they are. Yes, what she did was wrong, but what was the alternative? Letting Kyubey and his people eventually control the Law of Cycles and bring back the Witches, thus enslaving or destroying Madoka and consuming the souls of countless others until someone else manages to find a way to change the rules, which won't matter because the Incubators will already have the means and knowledge to control God. Yes, Madoka is in a gilded cage and that is Homura's fault, but that's why it's called Rebellion and not For the Evulz.
    • The alternative would be to trust Madoka to take care of herself. Especially given that all of the shit that's endangered Madoka since her ascension has been Homura's fault. No, really - the Incubators only pulled the isolation field crap because Homura told them everything they needed to know about Madoka in what was quite possibly the most idiotic and OOC move ever. If she had just left well enough alone, Madoka's wish would have succeeded at changing everything because even if the Incubators decided to look into the Law of Cycles, they wouldn't have known where to start without Homura's story. Anyway, it's made pretty damn clear that Madoka was a step ahead of Kyuubey at every turn in the barrier, so Homura's insistence on continuing to protect her against her will just smacks of possessiveness and distrust.
    • If you're going to blame Homura for everything Kyubey does because she blabbed the secret, then Madoka, Sayaka, and Nagisa are equally at fault for bringing the familiars, Octavia, and Charlotte into the isolation field and letting Kyubey see a real witch.
    • No, Homura is not to blame for what Kyuubey des in a moral sense, but telling him was still an enormous mistake with no clear reasoning behind it. The point of bringing that up was to estabish that it's hypocritical for Homura to assume that she knows better than Madoka how to keep Madoka safe when in this instance Homura is the one who put her in danger in the first place. Meanwhile, Madoka needed backup, so she had to bring Sayaka and Nagisa, and Sayaka and Nagisa are Oktavia and Charlotte. They also needed the familiars as backup because they wouldn't have had the manpower to beat Homulilly's army without Madoka's Law powers otherwise. At that point, Kyuubey already knew all of the important things about magical-girl-to-witch from observing Homura, so bringing in the purified Witch powers was not revealing anything new.
    • Madoka was never "a step ahead" of Kyubey because the only thing she was trying to do was defeat Homulilly. She can't fail at defeating any witch under any circumstances because that's what the Law of Cycles is, it's an immutable principle that defeats witches before they're born. And despite all of her, Sayaka, and Nagisa's efforts, she still failed at evading Kyubey's notice because, once he's seen her and realized what she is, Kyubey's got exactly what he wanted: proof that the Law of Cycles exists. At the end of the series proper he even explicitly states that the Incubators don't know why Soul Gems shatter, which means they were aware of the issue long before Homura blabbed the big secret (which was dumb, yes, but not abusive or tyrannical), Homura only gave Kyubey the idea for how to construct the experiment that would get him the proof wanted. By the time the fight against Homulilly is over, Kyubey has all the information he was trying to get by putting Homura in the isolation field, and the next step is figuring out how to control Madoka, and there's absolutely nothing to indicate that, with enough time and effort, he couldn't do exactly that. He walks away knowing what her powers are, what she looks like, how she travels, and how she appears. He'll have infinite chances to capture her as long as magical girls exist, which means that although it might take him a few hundred or thousand years to do it, the chances of him succeeding eventually jump to a hundred percent. Also, Kyubey being a bastard doesn't make Homura an abuser by proxy, everything he does is his own responsibility, not hers.
    • Addressing this bit by bit:
    • "She can't fail at defeating any witch..." If we accept that Madoka cannot fail at destroying a witch under any circumstances, the whole idea that Kyuubey could do anything permanent to her to bring back the Witch system (which was the whole reason they were trying to control her) becomes moot, because Kyuubey doing that should be impossible under those rules.
    • Nope. Rebellion shows us exactly how Kyubey can sidestep the issue because that's how Homura does it: Madoka defeats a witch before it is born (ie, before it emerges into the real world). Homulilly exists, she just doesn't emerge from the Soul Gem (which is also why Octavia and Charlotte can exist), and the whole last third of the movie is showing that Kyubey and Madoka can both interact with the reality inside a Soul Gem. If the Incubators can figure out how to make use of a Witch within that inner world but without breaking the Soul Gem, then Madoka's wish becomes meaningless. We see this with the ending: with devil-Homura creating circumstances that prevent witches from ever forming in the first place. The exact method is kind of ambiguous, but Homura proves that a Soul Gem can be forced to evolve if it accumulates enough grief without shattering, although it's not clear what would happen if a regular magical girl did it and not one with a couple of universes' worth of karmic significance.
    • But again, this is a lot of assumptions. Maybe Kyuubey can interact with a witch that doesn't break out of a Soul Gem, but is she producing energy at all comparable to what a witch that fully develops out of a Soul Gem would? If not, is whatever energy that is produced worth the energy that is presumably lost in maintaining the Isolation Field, and the energy the Incubators are losing from keeping that girl from living her life as a magical girl and harvesting Grief Cubes? Since the Incubators were not content with the situation in Homura's barrier (they even called it "running around in circles meaninglessly" - and remember, also, that Homura was partially Witched that entire time, even before she looked like one), we can infer that the answer to these questions is probably no, because otherwise why even bother trying to control Madoka if they can just keep repeating the Isolation Field situation for the same effect? "The exact method is kind of ambiguous, but Homura proves that a Soul Gem can be forced to evolve if it accumulates enough grief": Exactly. We don't know that an overload of grief is what caused Homura's ascension, it could've been the Logic Bomb that came out of trying to defy the Law of Cycles in the first place, it could've quite literally be 'love' which she and others specifically identify as not the same as grief/despair/curses, it could be literally anything, but the one thing we do have confirmation of is that it was a different force than what produces witches.
    • In this case, the difference doesn't matter because whatever it is, it's more efficient than the cubes, because in the Wraith system, Soul Gems only shatter, they don't become refined fuel; for Kyubey, a shattered Soul Gem is nothing but a complete waste of a magical girl, so any system that makes a Soul Gem capable of generating grief rather than just collecting it would be an improvement. But he's not even trying to do that yet, the goal is just to prove that the Law of Cycles is the product of his own tech and therefore something he can work around. We do know that an overload of grief is what caused her ascension because she explains that: because it was suffering for Madoka's sake, even despair became dear to her because she had infinite tries to get it right. I know trying to explain fictional abstracts with math is an idiot's job and I really, really hope anybody reading this forgives me for being this obtuse about it, but I'm prepared to be that idiot for a minute. They don't really give us numbers for it, but we do know how all these emotional items sit in the function of Kyubey-tech to the point where you could vaguely express it as a mathematical equation/formula. If you assume that ^{these values are true} K being the Karmic Destiny of the girl, W being the Karmic Weight of the wish, M being the total magic/energy yield of a Soul Gem/Grief Seed, H being Hope, D being Despair, and L being Love a regular magical girl is something like "(K + W) + (D + H) = M + 0" that eventually solves itself down to zero because K+W = M, M = H, and |H+D| = 0, at which point she witches out as Despair ends up the only thing on her side of the =. Homura's wish gives her something more like "(K + W) + (H + D) + L = M + 0" where L = D. Every loop gave her an amount of Love to serve as a bulwark against the despair that would have made her witch out ages ago, we even get to see this in the original series when her Soul Gem goes from perfectly clear (despite a HUGE amount of magic being used against Walpurgisnacht) to near-black in a matter of seconds, only to instantly freeze when Madoka touches her hand. In the new universe, where Madoka never existed but Homura is unchanged except for her wish (we don't know what it was, but given her bow and her labyrinth, it seems obvious the wish she got was "to remember Madoka"), all the timelines that were tied into Madoka's magic are now part of Homura's. Once she starts doubting her memories, starts to believe she failed after all and Madoka is still trapped in regret, that's when her despair starts ramping up, and that's when she Witches out. I think it's important to note that when Homura was dying on her altar in the real world, she was perfectly calm, which strongly implies that the Law of Cycles was going to come get her initially because she maxed out her magic, not despair. At the time it should have been depleted and shattered by the Law of Cycles, Homura's Soul Gem was still full of a universe-altering amount of AI YO that Kyubey may understand even less than what it means to pull a trick. I know it's never spelled out that explicitly and obviously there's no way to apply real numbers to those variables, but that's what we're given.
    • "She still fails at evading Kyuubey's notice..." It worked long enough to set up a situation where they could get Homura out, which was the objective, but point conceded.
    • "(which was dumb, yes, but not abusive or tyrannical)" Nobody said this was abusive or tyrannical. It was just dumb. The tyranny and abuse came in when she ripped Madoka in half and (with varying degrees of success) brainwashed the universe.
    • Which was still better than letting Kyubey walk away with what he knew.
    • "Homura only gave Kyubey the idea for how to construct the experiment that would get him the proof wanted" Which was the only reason the events of the movie happened, especially because Homura was the only person they could've used for this experiment, so yeah, let's not try to downplay this.
    • Downplay what? She did a dumb thing and talked about her experience in a previous universe, she didn't give him blueprints for the isolation field and say "Here, do me a solid, drive me insane so I can keep God in my pocket forever".
    • She talked about a previous universe where she and everyone like her was subjected to a terrible evil with an alien being who was the one doing the torturing in the first place and would do it again in a heartbeat if he had reason to think it would benefit him, was directly involved in remaking the universe in the first place, who has tried to screw her and her friends over over and over and freaking over, who despite being unable to directly suggest wishes has an amazing aptitude for manipulating girls into doing what he wants, who has capabilities and technology beyond human comprehension, who is a master of finding loopholes, and who doesn't care about humanity. These are not things Homura would have to deduce, these are factually confirmed for her. Again, Homura was not evil for spilling, she was incompetent, bottom line, for once in her genuinely amazing track record, and if you also acknowledge that she messed up this time then I don't understand what the point of contention is. The point I'm trying to make is that Homura isn't infallible. Homura is a great character, but that she constantly flip-flops on whether or not she's invincible is a character flaw of hers that gets rubbed in again and again throughout the canon, and it's completely fair to criticize her on that flaw and the hypocrisy that follows from it.
    • Literally nobody said Homura is infallible, the argument is that Madoka isn't capable of protecting herself from Kyubey forever because her existence depends on his technology, which he controls. The issue is that, stupid underestimation or not, Homura had no reason to think that Kyubey could do anything about the Wraith world when she blabbed about the previous timeline to Kyubey because she, much like the original contention in this thread, incorrectly assumed that Madokami is invincible and beyond his reach, but she isn't and never was, her ONLY protection from Kyubey was that Kyubey didn't know the Law of Cycles was once a magical girl. The plot of the movie shows that yes, Kyubey absolutely can interfere with the Law of Cycles, and by his own statement, once Kyubey can prove that he can interfere with it, he will eventually be able to control it. In order to prevent Kyubey from gaining control of Madoka, she took control of Madoka herself. Absolutely nobody said anything about Homura being infalliable, only that with the information available to her and the circumstances at the time, she made the best choice she could have made in a list of bad options. Allowing Madoka to freely exist without any safeguards against Kyubey meant condemning her (and possibly the lives of all the magical girls she saved) to whatever he'd eventually come up with to deal with her (which, on a long enough timeline, is inevitable, because the Law of Cycles is a physical law that Kyubey's technology is fundamentally tied to, because his technology is the only thing that law applies to), which runs directly counter to her single driving motivation and would be completely unreasonable to expect her to do. She broke it, she tried to fix it, and for better or worse, her solution works (however temporarily) and was necessary at the time, because the other option was worse.
    • "Kyubey has all the information he was trying to get" No, he doesn't. Establishing that he doesn't was the whole point of the conversation between Kyuubey, Madoka and Sayaka before the fight happened. He tells Madoka to show the power inside her to save Homura, and Sayaka tells Madoka to ignore him and follow the plan they made, which implies that the tactics Sayaka, Madoka and Nagisa employed in that battle are not the ones that Kyuubey was looking to get intelligence on.
    • Yes, he does, because Sayaka does the same stupid thing that you're blaming Homura for: she blew the important secret just to rub it in his face. The entire point of Kyubey being a threat is that he's immortal, very patient, and very, very good at making observations and following them to their logical conclusions. Kyubey didn't care either way about Sayaka or Nagisa because he had no idea they were also agents of the Law of Cycles, but he does now. The only thing that Kyubey was looking to get out of the isolation field experiment is proof that Madoka exists, which in turn proves that Homura was telling the truth about the previous universe. Everything he can extrapolate from that (for instance, Homura's time magic, which means there's a good chance he knows how Madoka got as much power as she does now) is just icing on a very long-term cake, and that's what he lays out: if it can be perceived and acted upon, it can be controlled. It won't be soon', and it won't be easy'', but he only needs a very simple loophole to defy the Law of Cycles. Keep in mind she appears as a goddess and is a sapient being, but at the end of the day, she's still just a law of physics, and the Incubators are masters of Sufficently Advanced Technology. No, the law of cycles can't be overcome, but even normal, real-life science is dedicated to working within those laws to achieve things that those laws would normally make impossible.
    • The difference is that at that point it didn't matter what Sayaka told him. Everything was going to hell by that point anyway and she and Nagisa had to help in the final battle, there was no way at that point to avoid Kyuubey noticing that they were coordinating the Law of Cycles' forces and putting two-and-two together. And her and Nagisa being part of it and holding Madoka's memories was all she told him - as I said previously, any other intel he might've gotten out of that battle isn't helpful. It still wasn't ideal, but what Sayaka did was, yes, kind of petty, but it was also a controlled burn on a wildfire. Homura had literally no reason to spill. That's the difference
    • "there's absolutely nothing to indicate that, with enough time and effort, he couldn't do exactly that." There's nothing to indicate that he could, either.
    • Except literally everything in the entire franchise? Because Kyubey is the reason that any of this was possible to begin with. Keep in mind that all those limits of his, like always dealing "fairly" with humans, never directly lying, and never suggesting wishes? Those are all limits he imposes on himself, there's no indication that he's actually bound by any kind of natural law to obey that particular code of ethics.
    • "He walks away knowing what her powers are, what she looks like, how she travels, and how she appears." As outlined above, he only knows some of her powers, and they're most likely not the ones he would've benefited from seeing. He does know what she looks like, true, so conceded. Whether or not he knows how she travels is up in the air. Not sure what "how she appears" is referring to.
    • That is, how she can emerge from magical girl Valhalla to collect a dying magical girl, even if Homura is kind of a special trip for her.
    • "He'll have infinite chances to capture her as long as magical girls exist, which means that ... the chances of him succeeding eventually jump to a hundred percent." This statement assumes that his original chances of success were ever higher than 0%, which we don't and can't know to be the case, and as outlined above, there's evidence to suggest that it is indeed not the case.
    • We do know, because he succeeded at getting all the information he wanted to get (and then some) and still has all the materials he's ever had. What you're describing is basically handing a mad scientist a book about how to build nuclear bombs and showing him how to get plutonium delivered to his home, and then letting local kids play in his yard because hey, it's not like he'll ever get that plutonium crate open.
    • Kyuubey wanted proof that Madoka exists. He got it. Proof that Madoka exists, whatever he may have said, is not enough to get rid of her - it's a potential starting point for getting rid of her. It's easy to say that a person can accomplish anything if given enough time, but some things are just impossible. The difference between real-world physics and Madoka s a law of physics is that Madoka isn't something you can just fight against or circumvent they way you would fight gravity or buoyancy or wind resistance, she is a magically enforced logical rule that says witches will not be born no matter what. What Kyuubey did was a workaround but the very fact that Homura was able to, if briefly, return to being a magical girl demonstrates that hers wasn't a true Witch conversion, which means that, again, nothing in the movie suggests that Kyuubey can actually break the Law of Cycles.
    • He can't break the Law of Cycles, but the movie shows us that Kyubey doesn't have to break the Law of Cycles, he can circumvent it by ensuring that when a magical girl starts to become a Witch, she becomes something else instead. He knows it can be done because he watches Homura Take a Third Option when the power of her emotions (which, as Kyubey himself says, has limitless possibilities) forces the hope/despair conversion system out of alignment. He's the programmer that wrote the program, the Law of Cycles is a bug in that program that he's been trying to figure out since forever, and now he knows exactly what it is and why it does what it does: a previous magical girl made a wish that it would be so. Kyubey's technology is the reason any of this is happening, it's more than a little silly to say that Kyubey can't do (thing) when the thing he made has remade the universe twice. If you go by the theory that Homura has tortured him into madness (which for him, means being able to feel emotions), he could be capable of using it to make a wish of his own, and he'd be more powerful than Homucifer and Godoka put together because he made both of them, Walpurgis, and every other witch who's ever been born, killed, died and been unmade, his Karmic Destiny would cover every life on Earth there's ever been, for a hundred timelines and two universes. Maybe he couldn't break the Law of Cycles when he thought it was just a law of physics and therefore an immutable principle that must be worked around, but now that he knows that the Law of Cycles is a magical girl whose powers are expressed by the universe as a physical law, he can now deduce exactly how her powers work and what their limitations are. Homura was able to just grab her by the hands and pull her out by sheer raw power, it's really silly to say that Kyubey could never affect Madoka just because he's seen it done, it's only a matter of time before he can figure out how to do it himself... unless Homura just keeps him locked down so he doesn't have a choice, which validates at least some of her actions. You can blame her for spilling the milk, but it's been spilt and there's no going back: if nobody's sitting on Kyubey, Madoka is in danger, it's that simple.
    • Also: again, the conversation between Kyuubey, Sayaka and Madoka confirms that he didn't get all the information he wanted, because when Kyuubey tries to convince Madoka to use her powers as the Law of Cycles, Sayaka specifically stops her from doing so. Madoka doesn't appear in goddess form until after they leave the isolation field, and if you notice, the Homura-Madoka combo killed all of the Incubator witnesses immediately before. Kyuubey is present again in the "world reset zone" but that's after Homura starts reordering the world, specifically because Homura needed to have a chat with him.
    • Just because he doesn't get every detail from Sayaka, that doesn't mean he didn't get all the information he wanted. He straight-up says outright: he wanted to prove that Kaname Madoka exists, that was the only piece of information he needed to confirm because he could deduce the rest from there, but he's a scientist/magician, of course he'd be happy to have more, anything else he learned is just icing on the cake. He did everything he wanted, because he only wanted to know one specific thing.
    • "Also, Kyubey being a bastard doesn't make Homura an abuser by proxy, everything he does is his own responsibility, not hers." Yes, this is true. But again, Homura's tyranny and abusiveness came in when she ripped Madoka in half and (with varying degrees of success) brainwashed the universe, not before that.
    • Which she did, because it was either that or let Kyubey have free license to come up with new plans to capture her for the rest of time. Sure, she also got what she wanted out of it too, but it's very clearly not the only reason she's doing it, otherwise she wouldn't say she still needed Kyubey. If it was really just about owning a pet Madoka, she could have just obliterated him.
    • She still needed Kyuubey because somebody needs to deal with curses. Obliterate him? That's what she'd do if the priority was protecting Madoka from him. And anyway, you're missing the point: Madoka didn't want Homura to save her. She's confused and worried when Homura grabs her, she's crying out in pain, she's unhappy until she's amnesiac and even then every little vestige of her that vaguely recalls what she's supposed to be doing is trying to escape Homura. This literally isn't even about Kyuubey, bottom line, this is about Homura learning to respect the decisions her friends make. It was one thing during the series, where Homura had to act that way because Madoka didn't rememeber the timeline where she told Homura to stop her from being tricked. But this Madoka knows everything, there are no longer any extenuating circumstances where Homura has more information available, they were on equal footing - if anything Madoka knew more this time - and Homura still disregarded her wishes.
    • Homura believes that Madoka's wish is "to not let (her) be tricked by Kyubey". She was totally okay with letting Madoka go at the end of the series, it's not until she's driven mad by a conversation that neither Madoka nor Homura was in a position to understand because of their respective compromised mental states. That disconnect, where Madoka doesn't remember Homura but Homura has to save her anyway, because Homura, the embodiment of the definition of madness ("Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result"), has nothing else going for her but that. Like, really, do you expect someone who fought something like... what, over a thousand witches, tens of thousands of familiars, countless Incubators, 100 Walpurgisnachts, and then at the last minute, when her soul is literally put into a pressure-cooker to see who comes to take the lid off and she's convinced that the one she loves is trapped in the role of God, find the mental wellness and inner peace to draw the line at fighting God to free her?
    • There's also the fact that Homura got the drop on Madoka in the end anyway, and Madoka is clearly surprised and confused by it. Granted, Madoka trusted Homura and has no reason to trust Kyubey, but it does mean that Madoka's awareness doesn't extend to the thoughts of others. If Homura can blindside her, so can Kyubey, and Homura is the only person that actually knows what Kyubey wants with Madoka in the first place. The memory-and-power splitting plan speaks to this: the only way Madoka could get around Kyubey was to conceal herself from him using decoys in the form of Nagisa and Sayaka, but that plan only worked, could only work, once. She'd have to come up with a new plan to evade Kyubey every time a magical girl depleted her magic, and each one of them would only work until Kyubey found a workaround. Eventually he'd catch her through the process of elimination, because Madoka is a principle that exists solely in the context of magical girls: Madoka depends on Kyubey to exist because without him, there are no magical girls and no wishes; she couldn't possibly be expected to protect herself from Kyubey forever because she's fundamentally connected to him.
    • Yes, Madoka's escape avenues are limited, but so are Kyuubey's. Remember, you can't get into the isolation field unless the witch invites you in, so you would need memories of Madoka to be a valid test subject. On the flipside, if you assume that Kyuubey could find more workarounds to Madoka's strategies, you also have to accept the possibility that Madoka could find more workarounds to Kyuubey's.
    • Why? Madoka isn't any more intelligent or more aware than she was in the original series beyond seeing into multiple timelines. She couldn't foresee Homura's actions, so that proves she's not actually omniscient, and her only major accomplishment in terms of going head-to-head against Kyubey's goals is being truly honest with herself, not with him. Yes, she dropped a logic bomb on him, but that was her way of striking against an unfair system to save its victims, she's never directly opposed him, even when she outright disagreed. Her wish at the end of the series shows that she recognizes that his long-term goal is a worthy one and that he literally isn't capable of understanding why what he does causes the suffering of magical girls. The only advantage she has over him is that she knows more about him than he knows about her, and time is going to bridge that gap. As stated before: it won't be soon and it won't be quick, but Madoka isn't capable of innovation the same way Kyubey is because, as a law, she is an immutable set of conditions triggered by specific events.
    • Except Madoka can and does learn to do things beyond her job description. Her wish says nothing about creating a magical girl heaven for fallen witches, but she does that instead of obliterating them, which is what should have happened if we take her wish at face value. She gives Homura her memories of the old world and her ribbon, another thing that has nothing to do with her Wish. She can dispose of the leftover bodies of the girls she saves, even though the human body pretty clearly isn't part of the forming Witch (see Kyouko saving Sayaka's body). She apparently has a broader power of moving memories around like she did with Sayaka and Nagisa (though that can be handwaved by saying that, as part of the Law of Cycles, they're technically also part of her). She manifests herself and her familiars physically at the end of Rebellion (and we know this, because it's not just Homura who sees her - Mami and Kyouko can too), another thing that wasn't supposed to be possible. And why wouldn't she be more intelligent or aware than she was before? How much time and experience has she gathered, being what she is? I'd guess a lot.
    • All of that is covered under the 'I want the magical girls to smile until the very end' part. A magical girl whose Soul Gem shatters just dies, her magical girl Valhalla may just be the natural afterlife for magical girls under the rules of the new universe, not something under Madokami's direct control.
    • More to the point, though: Homura was able to do exactly what you're saying Kyubey never could, and it's made clear that her approach can't and won't work forever because she's brute-forcing it. It is possible to remove Madoka's consciousness from the Law of Cycles with Witches still existing, we know this because we see it happen. It's not reasonable to assume that just because Homura got there first, it means Kyubey could never get there at all.
    • What? No. Witches don't exist in Homura's world. This is fact. She specifically tells us wraiths are still around, we don't see any witches on screen (Oktavia literally doesn't count), the familiars are implied to be the ones who got trapped like Sayaka and Nagisa, and her explanation of removing Madoka's consciousness from the Lo C was specifically given as a response to Sayaka's "The hope of magical girls... you-" as a 'reassurance' that she didn't bring Witches back.
    • Then what the crap do you call Homulilly?! Witches do exist, they have always existed as part of the magical girl life cycle. In the Wraith universe, those witches are never born into the real world, but (as we see from Sayaka, Nagisa, and Homura) that they're still part of the magical girl as a summoned ally/alternate form type power, which is something else that Kyubey gets to see. The entire reason Kyubey is a threat (and the entire reason that telling Kyubey that Witches are a thing is a dumb move on Homura's part) is because his powers are literally limitless. He created the system that produced every single alternate universe in the series, saying that he can't do something with his own technology with enough time and effort and freedom to act is just ridiculous. It doesn't matter what Madoka wanted because what she wanted didn't factor into anything except her wish. Her wish is final, yes, it means witches can never be born into the real world, but they do still exist, we see them existing in the frigging movie and they exist within the soul gem in a form that Kyubey can, if he chooses to, interact with. Everything you're saying he could never ever do, we see him do it, and the only reason he doesn't continue doing it, is because Homura deliberately took control of the universe to stop him. No one is saying that Homura did the right thing, the movie is literally called Rebellion because she is acting against Madoka and becomes a villain in the process, she literally calls herself a devil and is consumed with suicidal guilt over it, but she didn't do it for shits and giggles.
    • Wait... what? We were talking about the world Homura made after the isolation field at this point ("Homura was able to do exactly what you're saying Kyubey never could, and it's made clear that her approach can't and won't work forever because she's brute-forcing it"), where, yes, Homulilly doesn't exist, and the counterpoint I gave was debunking the idea that Homura's universe that she created contains Witches. Because, yes it doesn't. But to address the rest of this:
    • You mean the world where Sayaka summons Octavia in broad daylight in front of Homura before Homura manipulates her memory? Yes. Witches exist. They don't manifest the way they did in the original universe, but the system that produces them still exists, and so do they. This is not a matter of debate, this is what we actually see in the show.
    • The problem here is that the witches connected to the Law of Cycles function very, very, very differently from the witches we knew in the series, to the point that they really can't be treated as the same thing. Sayaka is Oktavia, in theory, but instead of transforming into it, she summons its image as a guardian. Oktavia doesn't come from or have a Grief Seed the way literally all real witches are supposed to, and we know this because Sayaka's soul gem remains intact the whole way through and because we never see even the image of an Oktavia Grief Seed during her summon process. Witches are insane and mostly independent, yet Oktavia is obviously capable of following directions and complicated orders, which implies either some sort of rational mind or that she's indeed just an extension of Sayaka, but even so Sayaka herself also retains her faculties. There isn't even anything to suggest that Oktavia is fuelled by despair or curses this time around. All the empirical evidence indicates that Rebellion Oktavia doesn't fit the definition of a witch that the Incubators cared about resurrecting. But even if we put all of that aside, it's contextually extremely obvious that Homura wasn't the one who engineered Oktavia's appearance in that scene, seeing as how Sayaka wasn't even supposed to remember anything, and again, Homura explicitly told Sayaka that she didn't dismantle the Law entirely.
    • Kyuubey's system might be what caused the events of the series, but he couldn't have done any of it alone nor were the majority of the big changes things that he planned out. He's technologically capable enough that he can certainly cause trouble with the information Homura provided him, and he can give other girls the right catalysts to change fate under the correct circumstances, but by himself, Kyuubey has no magic and no ability to bend the world in a significant way. Everything reality-shaking he does is reliant on other, emotive species. But this might just be down to a difference in interpretation: I don't think we'll be able to come to a conclusion on just how much power Kyuubey has or doesn't have specifically because a) there's so much material and evidence in either direction and b) he's an alien species specifically plotted to be unfathomable.
    • "Kyubey has no magic" because to him, it's technology that he invented. He literally creates bodies from ambient mana, and he states, very explicitly, that he uses human girls for emotional power sources because he himself does not have emotions. Your premise is that since Kyubey doesn't choose to harm himself for the universe when there are better, readily-available fuel sources, then he must be incapable of doing anything else, and that is straight-up silly when we're talking about a creature that does the things we actually see Kyubey do. Case in point: the isolation field, a form of Incubator technology that he would never need to develop except to test the Witch Universe Theory, which he develops in the time between the end of the TV series and the beginning of Rebellion, implied to be less than a full year. It's not a matter of magical power, it's a matter of intelligence and ingenuity, and he is in full control and understanding of the system that made any of the events of the entire franchise possible.
    • As for "nobody said Homura did the right thing": this offshoot of the original Headscratcher began with the claim that Homura had no choice but to do what she did, because there was no good alternative. If you're going to claim that Homura's decisions are the only ones she could've made - the best possible in the situation, basically - then you are, in fact, claiming she did "the right thing."
    • Er, no. "The best thing in a bad situation" is not necessarily the right or morally correct thing to do, no one said it was. There is a huge difference between saying someone did a good thing and not judging someone for doing something bad when you're aware of their reasoning, and there is an even bigger difference between saying that someone did a morally, ethically-correct thing and recognizing that even morally, ethically-wrong actions can have positive results as well as negative ones. You can pretty much sum up the plot of the movie, including the parts where even Homura acknowledges she did the wrong thing, as "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions". No one is saying that what she did was right, only that from her flawed and selfish perceptions and the overarching plot of the franchise, what she did is understandable and has narrative purpose. That's it.
    • As for "what the crap is Homulilly?!" she's a Witch in the same sense that the apparition of Candeloro in Mami's delusion during The Different Story is a witch - she's a genuine manifestation of Homura's curses, yes, but part of what defines a Witch in the series is that there's no way to return her to her original magical girl form and that she isn't conscious or capable of sane thought anymore. That Homura's able to go back to being a magical girl, and even exist inside her Witch form as a distinct being form it, proves that she was not a true Witch yet.
    • Homulilly is a Witch, there's either Witches or Familiars; Homulilly is a witch, Homura's Soul Gem did not finish its transformation into a Grief Seed and was forced to evolve because her Soul Gem was tainted beyond capacity but not allowed to shatter. There's no such thing as "true Witches", a Witch is just the manifested grief within the soul of the magical girl. Homulilly manifested, she just didn't emerge. And anyway, we see Homura take hold of Madoka and she has the power to do that because her Karmic Destiny is equal to, if not greater than, Madoka's. Kyubey's got more KD than either of them.
    • Why is that the definition of a Witch in the new universe? The point is that Witches, the incarnations of pain brought about by the wishes of magical girls and the byproduct of Grief Seeds, exist and can be interacted with by both Kyubey and the Law of Cycles, we see this happen, this is not up for debate. Magical Girls do not become Witches, that doesn't mean that Witches (and, more importantly, the mechanisms by which Witches are made) don't exist at all.
    • It's the definition because Madoka wished to erase all the witches, not to change their nature. If real witches were to circumvent Madoka's law and return, then they would have to obey the same rules as they did in the old world, because, as you said, they're just being removed from the world before forming, which means their hypothetical existences haven't changed in how they work. Nothing about the Law of Cycles would make the Witch transformation in general go from an irreversible process to a reversible one. The difference between Homura and Sayaka/Nagisa is that Homura's was a case of someone trying to resurrect a real Witch, which is impossible, ergo she only underwent the weird half-transformation that didn't match what the Incubators were looking for and that she was able to come back from. Sayaka and Nagisa can freely use their Witch forms because, being long-dead spirits given material form, they aren't actually magical girls or Witches anymore - as we saw, the transformation/summons is done at will, Oktavia and Charlotte aren't born from curses the way Witches are supposed to be.
    • Again, no one's saying Homura did it for shits a giggles. She did a shitty thing for noble means, sure, but it doesn't change that she did something terrible to Madoka against her consent. "What Madoka wants doesn't matter?" Um, yes, when you make decisions for your loved ones, you do in fact need to take into account what they actually want if you have any kind of respect for them. Madoka wasn't suicidal or stupid for not wanting Homura to take her away from the Law of Cycles, she's risking herself for something valid in the same way that literally every magical girl ever has done, and as outlined, she's arguably much safer than most of those girls.
    • Homura thinks that's what she's doing. She's wrong, but she thinks she's saving Madoka from a choice that she regrets because that's what she's been doing since the series began because Madoka asked her to do it. ("Don't let stupid me get tricked by Kyubey."), she just doesn't have time-rewind powers anymore. Whether she's "right", in that her actions support the greater scope of the plot and have purpose in the mechanics of the setting, may be a matter of opinion, but the conclusion Homura draws in character is very clearly outlined in the movie. She thinks that Madoka does not want to be the Law of Cycles and just doesn't have the capacity to remember anything else. She has always, since the very beginning of the TV series, always acted on the premise that she knows what's best for Madoka because a previous, less-knowing version of Madoka that no longer exists told her what to do. What she does in Rebellion is absolutely no different, except the scale of powers involved is dramatically increased and rather than a previous timeline's Madoka, it's a memory-wiped Madoka. If your argument is that Homura is abusing Madoka by overriding her personal choices, then Homura was abusing Madoka the second she became a magical girl, because the motives for both of those events were exactly the same: Homura wants to protect Madoka, no matter what. Homura has never had Madoka's consent for anything she's ever done, because the Madoka that gave her consent ceased to exist as soon as Homura reset the timeline. Yes, it's clear that Homura crosses a line with the Law of Cycles, but if your objection is that Homura didn't have Madoka's consent to take her out of the Law of Cycles, then you should also be objecting to everything Homura has ever done in the series... unless, of course, you think it's different if Madoka wants to be saved, which is exactly what Homura thinks Madoka wants.
    • If Homura doesn't have sufficient justification to think what she thinks about Madoka, and does have sufficient evidence that Homura's in the wrong, and yet Homura continues to act on the basis of that false premise anyway, then Homura is still culpable. There is a difference between Homura in the series and Homura now. Let's look at it this way. Call TL 3 Madoka "Requesting Madoka A", TL 4/5/etc Madoka "Future Madoka A," amnesiac flower field Madoka "Requesting Madoka B," and Goddess Madoka "Future Madoka B".
      
      Requesting Madoka A asked Homura to save Future Madoka A. Then, Requesting Madoka A disappears, and Homura has Requesting Madoka A's consent to save Future Madoka A, even if Future Madoka A herself never asked to be saved.
      
      In Rebellion, it's similar. Requesting Madoka B asked Homura to save Future Madoka B. Then, Requesting Madoka B disappears (by gaining her memory back and becoming Future Madoka B), and Homura has Requesting Madoka B's consent to save Future Madoka B, even if Future Madoka B herself never asked to be saved. So far, the situations parallel each other well.
      
      However, here is the difference. Both Requesting Madoka A and Future-Madoka-A can both provide consent, but between the two, Requesting Madoka A is the only one able to provide informed consent. Requesting Madoka A knows the consequences of being a magical girl, Future Madoka A doesn't. Even ignoring Homura's own desires, it's completely morally rational that Homura is prioritizing Requesting Madoka A's wants over Future Madoka A's - especially because she clearly does, to an extent, view the different timeline versions of Madoka as being the same person. In her eyes, it wouldn't be one Madoka giving permission for another so much as one Madoka who's giving permission in her best available judgment-making capacity.
      
      In Rebellion, however, the situation is reversed. Requesting Madoka B and Future Madoka B can both provide consent, but this time between the two, Future Madoka B is the one able to provide informed consent. Future Madoka B has a clear understanding of what the Incubators want and what their capabilities are and what tools she has at her disposal for fighting them, Requesting Madoka B doesn't. Future Madoka B has a clear understanding of what being the Law of Cycles means in general, Requesting Madoka B doesn't. Future Madoka B didn't know what procedure would be required to remove herself from the Law, I guess, in that she didn't know it could be done at all, but she still was in a position to deduce more about that hypothetical process than Requesting Madoka B could, given that she was able to warn Homura that she would be torn apart moments before it actually happened.
      
      Future Madoka B is the one most qualified to decide here, because she is the only person who might actually have all of the necessary information to choose correctly - not Requesting Madoka B and not Homura. Homura knows this, because she knows that Future Madoka B is a goddess who sees all timelines. (For bonus points, Homura probably wasn't in a state to hear Sayaka explain the truth about Madoka's memories, which means that as far as Homura still knows, Requesting Madoka B was brainwashed by Homura herself.) That is why Homura's actions here are worse than what she did in the show, because this time, the person she forced her will upon had every ability to make a rational decision for herself. It doesn't matter that Homura thinks that she's saving Madoka from a bad fate because Homura has enough information at her disposal to be culpable for making that bad choice. In real life, you can commit a crime thinking you're doing the right thing and still go to jail and be held otherwise accountable because, like it or not, ignorance doesn't excuse your actions if you had access to the information and means to not have to commit that crime.
    • Being able to give informed consent is not always equivalent to having more knowledge for (or context of) a situation. The Madoka that was human and the Madoka that was a goddess are both still Madoka, so neither has any more or less right to make decisions about her own life. Godoka's decision was objectively better, but that fact does not invalidate the validity of Madoka's decision. Both made decisions for themselves, based on the knowledge available to them, in response to experiences that the other version of them had not lived through. If Homura possessed more (relevant) knowledge of their situation from Madoka, and witheld that knowledge from her, then she would've been taking advantage of Madoka's ignorance to suit her own hero complex. But she didn't.
    • The bottom line is that Homura can't be truly culpable for her actions because she's not mentally well. Judging her for going too far in saving Madoka from the danger at the center of the entire franchise: Kyubey can build technology that defies physical laws. Kyubey wants to subvert the Law of Cycles. The only thing Kyubey has to do in order to do that is find a way to interact with a Witch before it hatches, and he clearly does that in the movie, Homulilly's larval form (I don't know what else to call the version of Homura in her Clara Doll dress) gets a whole sequence of beating on him to show that yes, he's inside the world within her Soul Gem as its beginning to change. Yes, a magical girl would have to invite him in, but so what? Homura did invite him into her barrier, and there's no reason for any magical girl who doesn't know Kyubey's secret to not do the same, and none of them do because in the wraith world, there's no reason for him to hide his goals or bring up how willing he is to hurt other magical girls to achieve his goal.
    • Informed consent... sort of does require you to have all the relevant information. That's why it's called "informed." Also, Homura did withhold a crapton of information from Madoka. Pay attention to the scene and dialogue in the flower field: when Homura told the amnesiac Madoka about her "dream," notice that she never told Madoka why Madoka left. She made it sound like Madoka just up and abandoned everyone for no reason, and conveniently omitted the part where leaving was something Madoka did to help millions and millions of people. She also left out the part where Madoka's statement that she'd "always be with everyone" even as the Law of Cycles, albeit unseen and unheard, which in turn made Madoka think the situation was a lot lonelier for both of them than it actually was. Also, yes, Godoka's decision is better than amnesiac Madoka's in the same sense that your decisions now carry more weight than the decisions you made a year ago, or the decisions you made in the past while intoxicated. You have a right to change your choices when new information and experiences present themselves, if you are otherwise uninhibited.
    • It's not fair to judge a teenager in the middle of an emotional breakdown for not explaining a situation to someone fully when that person has no ability to understand it. Homura is framing her fears as a dream, thinking that this Madoka, like all the other Madoka's she's dealt with, doesn't share any of her memories and would only be disturbed and alienated to hear them in full. Like come on, guys, she's a deeply disturbed and traumatized fourteen year old, driven well beyond the emotional criticial mass of witching out, and you expect her to react to the ruination of everything she gained by cashing in not just her life, future, all her friendships and her very soul, with a thoughtful and well-reasoned, logically and ethically sound moral argument to politely present to a goddess who doesn't know she IS a goddess to respectfully ask permission to save her from the near-omnisicient hive mind aliens that are actively plotting against her a second time? She's been fourteen for twelve years and driven insane to a level beyond human reckoning because she tried to kill herself and evolved instead of dying, cut her a damn break already.
• If Homura was able to figure out that anyone else with memories of the pre-Godoka timelines shouldn’t have been able to exist (and that she was the witch) in her Soul Gem, why didn’t she ever question the existence of Madoka (in magical girl/human form) in her world in the first place? This matters the most for the flower bed scene: assuming that it was indeed the turning point that set her on the path towards becoming Homucifer, how could she have known for certain that those were Madoka’s true feelings, rather than someone else’s projections of them (especially since she admits right then and there that she knows that this Madoka might be an illusion)? Did she want so much to see Madoka again that she willfully ignored the possibility of illusion and accepted whatever “Madoka” said as the truth?
  • She *did* question Madoka's presence in her world, eventually. Realizing that Madoka wasn't supposed to be there is *why* Homura realized that she herself had to be the witch. The reason it took her so long to work it out is that her memories didn't come back all at once; she's still getting them back gradually throughout the movie. (This is alluded to a couple of times, most clearly when she's fleeing Mami's home with Bebe, and again near the end of the movie while talking to Kyuubey about resetting the world.) She remembers pretty quickly that Madoka sacrificed herself to become the Law of Cycles pretty early on, but it takes until the flower field for her to recall enough about what *specifically* happened for her to figure out that Madoka *can't* be present.
• Something also pertaining to Charlotte/Bebe - why was her design changed? Oktavia and the rest of the returning familiars pretty much stayed the same, so why does Bebe's face look so different from the original Charlotte's?
  • Likely for the sake of making her more expressive. It would be a lot harder for her original design to emote to the same degree she was able to in the movie: she didn't even have eyes as much as blank black holes to begin with.
  • If you take a good look at Oktavia, her design is changed too; Her hood become dominant blue instead of green in Ep 8-9 and red in Ep 10. Her armor also loses many of its details and it looks like there are five violin strings decorating the frontal torso. So my guess is that Witches have their basic design determined, but change the other details because of their magical girls' differences when they fall to disgrace.
  • Some of the familiars changed, too, probably because it was Sayaka and Nagisa in control of them as opposed to their original witches. For example, the Anthonies, rather than having their lower bodies adorned with butterfly wings, have fish fins just like Oktavia's tail.

• How did Mami chase down Homura prior to the duel? She seemed to be maintaining the time-freeze and went a fair distance, and Mami hadn't gotten the ribbon wrapped around her.
  • Mami already has her ribbon wrapped around Homura since the tea party; watch as she walks pass Homura and you'll see her ribbon trailing behind. She just makes the ribbon invisible or dematerializes it somewhat to avoid Homura noticing and shooting the ribbon off.

• Where in the world did Homura get all this power? Madoka only managed universe-restructuring levels of power because of Homura's time travel shenanigans compounding her "karmic destiny". Kyubey made it pretty clear that Madoka's potential was unique and far, far beyond anything it had ever seen before. Homura herself always seemed to be rather average in terms of actual magical power. Is it just a consequence of turning into this Dark Magical Girl/Demon thing she's become? And if that's the case, could any Magical Girl who achieved the same gain the same enormous power boost?
  • Probably some kind of combination between The Power of Love, being the personal chosen of Madoka, having been pushed to the limit and nearly turned into a Witch, and possibly using one or all of the above to siphon power from Madoka.
  • It could also be to do with her original wish, to redo her meeting with Madoka and to protect her instead of being protected by her. At the end of Homura's final loop, Madoka once again ended up having to save Homura - without Madoka's wish, it's nearly certain that Homura would have Witched out and/or been killed by Walpurgisnacht. And as far as the events of the world created from Madoka's wish are concerned, up until the events of the movie, Homura hasn't really been in a position to reliably protect Madoka; the latter girl is, after all, a universal law of reality now who can most likely take care of herself under normal circumstances. Even when she does get captured, Homura still isn't exactly in an optimal position to save her, at least not by herself. So in other words, Homura's wish arguably hasn't really come true, even taking into account the times she has successfully saved Madoka, like when fighting Oktavia in the third timeline seen in episode 10. But by overcoming the Law of Cycles, extracting Madoka from it somehow, and transforming both herself and the universe, Homura's wish is finally complete. She can now protect Madoka for eternity, just like she wants. In short, Homura got superpowers at least in part from the resolution of her wish.
  • I believe it's intentionally left ambiguous, but I like to think it was Kyubey's Isolation Field acting as a pressure cooker.
    • Cooking is so fun! Cooking is so fun! Now its time to take a break and see what we have done! "wait a second. what we're doing wasn't cooking at all is it?"
  • It could also be Madoka's wish. Consider what Homura does - she blocks the Law of Cycles. The whole Power of Love color only fills her Soul Gem after she grabs Madoka. Kyubey believed that blocking the Law of Cycles would create witches...but what if he was wrong? If a single witch was ever born, Madoka's wish won't come true. So when Homura interferes with the Law of Cycles, she turns into something other than a witch, which preserves Madoka's wish. A similar line of thinking could explain why Madoka broke apart - Homura didn't break Madoka from the Law of Cycles; the Law of Cycles broke off Madoka to escape Homura's grasp, as Homura was interfering with Madoka's wish coming true. As long as Homura was grabbing her, Madoka couldn't erase witches with her own hands, so Madoka's wish came true by turning Madoka into two people.
  • Fridge Brilliance: In the original timeline (the anime), Homura makes her contract and has normal levels of magical potential, but whenever she resets the timeline, she goes back to a point BEFORE she originally made the contract. Her wish was specifically to go back in time, so her magic has a safety net to prevent her from causing temporal paradox: remember the cutaway where Homura and Madoka switch places when they're being suspended from all those threads of fate? It's because every time Homura negates a timeline, that timeline is scrapped altogether and added to Madoka's magic because they can't attach to Homura herself. When Madoka makes her wish, it causes a temporal paradox (which is why Walpurgis is destroyed even though none of Madoka's arrows hits her; since she's destroying all the witches that made up Walpurgis in the past, she disintegrates) and forces the universe into a reset according to Madoka's new laws. In the new universe, where Madoka never existed, Homura has no reason to make the contract: no Madoka to protect, no Witch to attack her, no Walpurgis to prepare for. Yet, she doesn't go back to being her normal, shy Moemura self, and has a bow reminiscent of Madoka's even though in the new universe, she never met Madoka to base her weapon on. Why is that? Because Homura followed Madoka to the end of space-time and went back to the present as her current self, but her powers are retconned by Madoka herself. This means that Homura, without a Madoka to take on all that karmic destiny from the old universe, has to take it back because she doesn't have paradox-proofing anymore. She has exactly as much power as Madoka did, for the exact same reasons.
  • Or perhaps it's unintended consequences. A big deal is made about witches creating curses equal to the amount of hope their wish added to the universe to balance things out. Homura's wish directly led to Madoka destroying a universe and creating a new one with the power of her wish. All of that hope isn't just a consequence of Madoka's wish; it's a consequence of Homura's wish too. So when Homura falls into despair and becomes a witch, her curses are fully capable of both destroying and remaking a universe as well.
  • Homura actually does give a (very vague) explanation to Kyuubey for where her powers came from (more specifically, why they took a form besides a witch), but it's somewhat nebulous and requires some effort to parse meaning out of: "Because I finally remembered. All the times I repeated history, gut hurt and suffered over and over... all of that was proof of my feelings for Madoka. So now, even pain is dear to me." In other words, the despair and curses that should have risen in response to Homura's original wish became like new hopes in and of themselves. Hoe and despair have to balance to zero, though, which would have in turn had to birth new curses to balance things out, but then those curses would have to contain a hopeful element and would then propagate new hopes and new curses, et cetera. The way the hope/despair system was set up is ultimately logically paradoxical against the infinite escalation Homura's emotions would have led to, because it would be impossible to achieve a proper equilibrium. To resolve it, her Gem forms a new emotion - a variable factor which can modify its own properties to forcibly balance out against wishes and curses - and from there, the other factors that have been named up to now would have artificially accelerated the process to transform Homura into a reality-ruling being.
• The ending conversation between Madoka and Homura, specifically the argument whether "Law" or "Desire" is more important, and Madoka replies that "Law" is better, because it's selfish if people break the rules. Madoka, the girl who took a sledgehammer to a law of the universe, says it's selfish to break the rules. WHAT?!? This is the girl who said, verbatum, that if a rule prevents someone from being happy, she'll destroy it. She'll change it. And then she proceeded to do just that to a LAW OF PHYSICS. And bear in mind she doesn't know what Homura did to the Law of the Cycles. It can't be because of any hypocrisy, with her being on the other end of that philosophy: she doesn't remember anything. All that in mind, I thought she would ask if the law was keeping someone from being happy, and say something along the lines of "I probably couldn't change it, but I'd want to". What the heck is with the flip-flop?
  • Going off of the quotes page, the translation of Madoka's exact reply is, "Uh... well, I think laws are more important. Wouldn't it be bad to just selfishly break the law?" Emphasis there on 'selfishly'. Madoka overturned the original system and became the Law of Cycles to save all of those other girls from that final despair; it also helped people who didn't witch out themselves but were still victims of the system - like Kyouko and Mami, who presumably are alive now because of her. Basically, her point isn't really "don't break the law", it's "don't break the law out of selfishness". Breaking a law for the sake of others, like she did to the Witch system, is something she's okay with. Also, remember that Homura's question was (most likely intentionally) relatively vague; Madoka, who apparently has no memory of anything magical, probably doesn't see any immediate examples of laws that would be okay to break by her own standards, which is why she gives a general answer without going into a lot of details or citing specific exceptions. That's my take on it, anyway, I'm not sure how well I explained my point of view there or if it's agreeable.
    • The important point, in any case, isn't about specific laws; the question is whether it's more important to go after your personal happiness or to serve an abstract ideal. Madoka has always been willing to sacrifice everything for abstract ideals, while Homera has always been willing to do anything for her own personal happiness (even if Madoka is what makes her happy, it's still selfishness — that's the point.) The question is Homera trying to get some sort of validation from an unknowing Madoka that she did the right thing, and failing.

• I thought Madoka's wish was to erase all the Witches. Yet despite that Sayaka can summon Oktavia von Seckendorff, Nagisa can turn into Charlotte and Gertrud, the Rose Garden Witch, is implied to exist in the official profile (her existance explains the Anthonies that fight Homulily). How is that possible?
  • My impression is that the potential formation of a Witch was never removed from the Madokami system - something which Homura and Kyubey proved. Becoming a Witch is something inherent in Magical Girls - what Madoka did was gain the ability to remove the Magical Girl from reality before she became a Witch and caused mayhem in the outside world. This would imply she could also allow Witches (or some controlled form of them) to return by inaction. Madoka herself personally intervened with all Magical Girls at the threshold of becoming a Witch - presumably in the process of comforting them in their Darkest Hour she would reveal the purpose of her visit and would in the process explain what a Witch was to them. With Madoka there as someone who would always be with them, at least some of the Magical Girls (Sayaka, Nagisa, whatever Gertude was known as when she was a human girl) would likely be able to harness the power of a Witch without losing control of themselves (which, as scene in the movie, can prove to be very useful), and thus be able to corral it towards a controlled purpose (i.e., saving Homulily).
    • Sounds familiar.
  • Also note that all those sane!Witch scenes refered to all take place within Homura's Soul Gem, which had been isolated from general Madokami power by the Incubators and so Madokami would have been unable to reach Homura directly (and so wouldn't have been able to retrieve Homura like she had other Magical Girls).
  • They're not really witches anymore. They're more like angels.
  • Your premise is incorrect. Madoka's wish was specifically to erase all witches before they were born. When is a witch born? When a Soul Gem becomes a Grief Seed. The witches can exist because they were never born. This is also why Homulilly can exist - she hasn't been born yet.

• Also, I'm not entirely sure where did Mami and Kyouko come from. They were dead at the end of the series, but in the movie they are alive and they don't seem to be just figments of Homura's imagination. Did Madokami's restructuring of the universe resurrect Mami and Kyouko?
  • Yes - this was seen near the end of episode 12. The train station scene where Sayaka became a Witch in episode 8 had been retconned into Sayaka simply running out of magic while fighting wraiths. Mami would not have been Mogu-mogu'ed by Charlotte, as there would not have been a hostile Charoltte in the first place; similarly, Kyoko would not have sacrificed herself for a suffering Sayaka if there was no Oktavia out in the world in the first place.

• At the very end of the movie, we can see Homura's geckons sitting on a roadsign, leading in two different directions. If i remember correctly, one of directions had "Good" written on it but what was on the other one?
  • Assuming I'm thinking of the same scene, I think they read "Good Morning," presumably in reference to Sayaka, and "Country of Sweets," presumably in reference to Nagisa.

• There has been something bugging me at the end of the movie. When Homura starts the new world where everyone is, she is shown to mock all of the other Magical Girls that are not Madoka. For Sayaka, she makes sure she and Madoka are childhood friends. For Mami, she breaks the teacup in her hearing range. For Kyouko, she wastes food in front of her. The last one bothers me. Kyouko is the closest thing Homura had as an ally in this movie. Without Kyouko, she would not have been able to confirm that they were stuck in one area and could not return to Kyouko's hometown. Kyouko helps verify multiple times that their memories were altered. And Homura even apologizes to Kyouko for involving her in this mess. If this is the case, why would Homura need to taunt Kyouko to after all of that? Yes Homura is now a Jerkass God but given how Sayaka and Mami were making things difficult for her inside the witch barrier, taunting them would make sense. Why would she taunt the person that helped her the most though or is Homura really that ungrateful to everyone that is not Madoka?
  • That depends on your intepretation of the scene. An alternate possibility is that, while Homura has decided the world can burn as long as Madoka is happy and as a secondary priority the two of them are together, she may still feel bad about potentially wrecking everyone's futures and is driving the others away out of guilt. Plus, I think Kyouko had turned around before the food got wasted.
  • Pay close attention to that scene. Homura knocks over a teacup, but the motion of her hand is weird. She's not sweeping her hand from side-to-side, she's moving it forward - which makes it look like she's reaching out to Mami. As for Kyoko, think about this way: The familiars are expressing Homura's true or subconscious desires. Homura wants to accept Kyoko's apple. She wants to be Kyoko's friend. But she rejects that desire because of everything that she has done. When she shakes her head, she's not forcing Kyoko to waste food; she's denying her own desire to be Kyoko's friend.
  • Then there's the theory that She was relying on specifically Kyouko and Mami to kill her, which she mentions earlier, pre-transformation. Even when she begs them for death, they save her instead - and, knowing what Kyuubei plans, it: forces her to rip Madoka apart to protect her against them; throws out the sacrifice she had committed to making; and forces her to continue on, instead of freeing her with the release of death.

• How is Hitomi being upset that kyosuke never have any time for her make her petty?
  • Because rather than talk to Kyosuke about her problems, she just pretends like nothing is wrong, and then throws a tantrum afterward.
  • That still seems fairly I dunno normal to me honestly. Maybe it was just like because of the short amount of time to work with movie Hitomi or maybe I just have a very specific idea of what petty is but it still doesn't seem that way. But I guess if it's true that this part of the movie is meant as a sort of Take That! and/or Affectionate Parody of how fans portray Hitomi in fan works I guess that could explain it.
  • Really? People will bend over backwards to defend Homura, claiming that her actions are "understandable" and "human." But Hitomi has a breakdown over barely getting to see her boyfriend and she's petty? She even refrains from letting him have it while on the phone and only vents after hanging up.
    • I think it's because Homura goes through Hell and lets her love for Madoka drive her beyond human limitations while keeping a stoic face, while Hitomi has a much more realistic reaction of pitching a fit because her boyfriend isn't paying her enough attention. We the viewers know that the world is a much, much worse place than the average person in it can ever imagine, so of course Hitomi looks petty over nothing because to us, after watching the universe be destroyed and remade by the strength and maturity of a girl Hitomi's age who actually has seen the kind of real suffering that goes on in this Crapsack World, she's throwing a tantrum over nothing. Not to mention that Hitomi only shows an interest in Kyousuke after she finds out he's set to become a world-class violinist again, and she's upset because he's focusing more on his world-class violin training than on her; what was she expecting, exactly?
    • In all fairness, Hitomi's not one of our leads so we don't really know the backstory with her attraction to Kyousuke. It seems out of nowhere because she doesn't tell Sayaka until after he leaves the hospital, but we have no clue what their relationship was like before that point.

• Since seeing the movie, something always bothered me... Why was Nakazawa brought into Homura's barrier? Did Homura buy into the whole student teacher relationship theory? Did she want Kyousuke to have a real friend? Was some sort of weird offscreen friendship between the two? Everyone else makes some sense... but not him...
  • She literally pulls in every named character in the series. In mythology and fairy tales, knowing someone's name gives a witch power over them.
  • I think she pulled in everyone she was familiar with. With all the times she restarted her first day school, she had heard Saotome-sensei call out his name just as many times.

• Are there, or are there not, witches? Because the Law of Cycles says there shouldn't be. But in the end (roughly 1:51:58) there's that scene, with the witch's labyrinth.... (those cotton balls with mustaches)? Does this mean she actually fully broke the Law of Cycles and witches are back, but Homura is trying to prevent Madoka from realizing? Or.....?
  • It's honesty difficult to determine given how little we saw of Homura's universe. The implication appears to be that the familiars we see are the ones that Sayaka and Nagisa brought in earlier, trapped in that world with them for the same reasons they are. Given that Homura also mentions to Sayaka that there are apparently still Wraiths in the world ("After all of the wraiths have been destroyed, perhaps I will. When that time comes, I suppose I can be your enemy") and that Familiars are technically not witches, I'd assume that the Law is mostly working okay and the witches are still gone.
  • Nagisa is alive, and yet we see one of her familiars. Honestly, it's difficult to tell. All things considered, it seems like the familiars are just doing their own thing and not hurting anyone.
  • Here's my take on it: Homura's new universe, whether it's within a labyrinth-like barrier or it's just been completely remade from the ground up, has familiars running around (but only visible to magical girls, possibly visible to only the magical girls whose witches they come from) and a psychologically devastated Kyubey. This means there are no witches as per Madoka's wish, not because they're defeated by the Law of Cycles, but because rather than being destroyed before they're born, the despair of magical girls is forced into Kyubey rather than accumulating in Soul Gems (check Sayaka when she sees Kyousuke and Hitomi together; she's obviously upset, but there's no sign of it affecting her magic) so it can never begin to form into a witch in the first place. The familiars are manifestations of a witch's inner desires, which makes them also the manifestations of the inner desires of the magical girl, but without a witch, they're basically just harmless weirdos. All this frees Madoka from her responsibilities as the Law of Cycles and gives Homura the opportunity to force her into a mortal shape.

• Homura's plan to protect Madoka from the Incubators. She mentions that she'll complete her transformation into a witch, and then rely on Mami and Kyouko to kill her at that point, thus preventing Kyuubey from observing Madoka/Law of Cycles. But... as we saw before and after that, Homura can't die inside her barrier even from breaking her soul gem since her actual soul gem is fine in the real world, and her witch transformation and subsequent defeat likewise didn't damage her real soul gem (presumably it'd already been corrupted to breaking point when the Incubators put their Field around it). Though the fight did end in everyone escaping the barrier, that happened because Madoka and Homura attacked the 'ceiling' and put a hole through it, not because of death on Homulilly's part. Furthermore, Homura didn't do anything to ensure that Mami and Kyouko would keep Madoka out of the battle - even though her whole motivation for trying to fully Witch out is that she doesn't want Kyuubey observing Madoka's powers any further... So my question is, if she wasn't capable of killing herself in magical girl form while in her barrier, why would she think killing herself as a Witch would work? And how was she expecting the final battle to play out?
  • She was expecting Mami and Kyouko to kill her. She never actually attempted to kill herself as a Magical Girl; she faked out to trick Mami once, and she destroyed a fake Soul Gem to confirm her Witchhood (And, yea, her Witch card indicates she can't actually kill herself through her execution plays, but presumably this doesn't include outside interference). Presumably, her plan was that if the two of them actually killed her, then the soul gem would basically implode, since they sort of killed the soul containing it. Then again, her plan doesn't HAVE to work, or be logical. She's a WITCH.
• No matter how I look at it, it seems to me that the events of the movie contradict Madoka's wish from the series. Even if we ignore the middle part of her wish (about crying and smiling), the last sentence prevents anything from interfering with her power ("If any rule or law stands in my way, I will destroy it; I will rewrite it."). Seeing as the rule of Homura's "world" that makes her lose her memories prevents her from "erasing all witches before they are born" (at the very least, it does once Homura does become a witch) - and her wish is explicitly that she WILL do this, not that she is able to - it is, according to her wish, destroyed. Hence, she doesn't lose her memories, and the events of the movie do not happen (or happen differently). For the same reason, the trapping device should be utterly ineffective; her power applies to "every single witch, in every universe" - neither Homura's body, nor her Soul Gem have left the universe (and even if they had, the rule would still apply, as it applies to all universes), and Madoka never specified that people inside barriers were exempt. Hence, we have a rule that violates her wish, and hence is destroyed. What exactly would happen when she is split is a bit unclear, but strictly speaking, both parts are Madoka, and therefore both are subject to Madoka's wish. In any case, though, that point is moot, as the earlier events are already impossible. Effectively, the last part of her wish is the Rule Zero of cosmic laws, and cannot be overcome (at least, not without a more powerful wish).
  • Her wish is part of the old universe, which no longer exists. She is now a law of physics, which is how her wish was granted. The universe has already been rewritten so that she will always defeat a Witch before it is born. The entire movie is showing us that there is a window of opportunity to affect a Witch before it is born, which proves that Madoka exists and Witches can be interacted with while they're unborn within the Soul Gem. Madoka will always defeat a Witch before it is born, but if the Witch changes form before she can defeat them, all bets are off.
• Actually, none of the events of the movie contradict Madoka's wish.
  • Madoka's wish is to defeat all Witches before they are born, and that's exactly what happens. Madoka and her agents defeat Homulilly before she emerges from Homura's Soul Gem. That's what Mami talks about at the end of the series, saying that Madoka's wish means that she will be fighting eternally, and that's what she means. Madoka still has to fight the Witches, her wish just makes it so that she can't lose when she confronts the Witch within the Soul Gem. Note that after Homulilly is defeated, Homura is still alive and in a human form.
  • The isolation field isn't a rule or a law, it's Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and it didn't work. She divides up her memory and her powers between Sayaka and Nagisa because she didn't want Kyubey to be able to quantify her, but the isolation field was no different to Ultimate Madoka than ordinary plastic wrap. Sure, Kyubey knew she got into it because it was broken, but she had no problem getting through it. She had to put the effort in to actually do it, but again, her wish ensures her success, not instant gratification.
  • When Madoka is split from her goddess form, Homura has taken the reins of the universe. Because her world apparently doesn't collect grief inside Soul Gems anymore, there are apparently no more magical girls besides herself, and when she couldn't become a Witch, she had to become something else, and that's how we got Devil!Homura. No magical girls means no soul gems, no soul gems mean no witches, no witches means Madoka's wish is already granted. She wished to defeat all witches with her own hands before they are born, but if witches are never even conceived, there's nothing for her to defeat and she's on eternal standby until another one comes along.
• A lot of fans talk about the ending as though everything would have been just fine if Homura hadn't intervened, but that doesn't seem quite right to me. I mean, even if the Incubators weren't able to observe Madoka in action this time around, what's to stop them from trying this whole thing again in the future and eventually hijacking the Law of the Cycles, after all? Am I missing something?
  • Consider the explanation Kyubey gives of how people enter Homura's barrier. They can't just wander in like with a normal witch's barrier, the Isolation Field means that the only way inside is if the Isolated Witch invites you from within. Since Homura is the only person in the universe who remembers Madoka, Homura's the only person in existence who would want to admit Madoka into her world. By using another girl, either the Law of Cycles would never be able to enter the barrier to begin with, making the whole exercise useless and leaving the Incubators to have to look after a Soul Gem that's never going to fully transform, OR the Incubators drop their Field and thus don't get to see anything more of the ascension process than they normally do. From this we can deduce that once Homura was freed and absorbed into the Law, the Incubators would have had nobody else to use. Sure, they could have tried, but at the end of the day the attempt would be fruitless and they'd have no reason to waste energy to keep girls as half-witches indefintely if the experiment wasn't working and they were getting nothing out of it.
    • They may do something just like that: considering how far-gone they are by this point, I could see them holding the Magical Girls hostage. "They'll be stuck like this until you come to help them, Law of Cycles. So you do what we want and show us exactly how you work." After all, they know that the Law of Cycles is sentient, and can't stand to see others suffering...
    • But that's just it, it's not a matter of choice; unless the test subject was Mami, Kyouko, or maaaybe a contracted Hitomi, Madoka CAN'T enter the Field period.
  • I'd thought about that, yes, but then it occurred to me that while Homura WAS the only one who remembered Madoka, there are now( or rather, there would now be) a few others who know about her: Kyouko, Mami, the Incubators themselves, and possibly the non magical girls who were brought into Homura's barrier. So, the Incubators could a) do the whole thing again with Kyouko and/ or Mami b) contract Hitomi and attempt the same with her or c) find some other girl elsewhere in the world and introduce her to the idea of a friendly, pink haired girl named Madoka Kaname who watches over Magical girls so they can use her as a guinea pig. It would probably be more difficult for them, especially since Madoka and the others would know what their goal is, but still within the realm of possibility. And since they're a tenacious bunch...
    • Fair point, and you're probably correct. My only suggestion is that it seems like the only reason Madoka had to give up her memories and wait around for a month was because they were exercising caution about what they barrier would be like (I know Kyuubey originally stated that the memory losses were caused by Homura, but Sayaka and Nagisa explicitly state later that Madoka willingly passed her memories to them and that all three were unaffected by Homura's power) On subsequent times through saving girls from barriers, they wouldn't need to exercise that kind of caution, meaning that breaking through Fields would be much easier, and once Mami and Kyouko are gone that'll probably be it anyway. Besides, part of the issue is that Homura obviously didn't trust Madoka to take care of herself against the Incubators even though she clearly outwitted them at every step of the way. (Yes, I know that the main factor was Homura's love for her, but since we're on the subject I only wanted to address the part that mattered. I can almost buy Homura resetting the universe because she wants Madoka to be safe and happy, not so much that it was anything to do with Incubator plots.
    • Madoka's wish makes it impossible for the Incubators to stop her from reaching a soul gem. The idea with the isolation field was to create a barrier that couldn't be passed by anyone not invited by the witch within, but it fails. Kyubey's success in that regard was a hundred percent dumb luck on his part, because Homura had never met Nagisa and couldn't have invited her in. That's why Nagisa spends the whole time in her Charlotte form: otherwise Kyubey would realize Homura had no idea who she was, but since Homura definitely recognized Charlotte, he never caught on. The Law of Cycles is a fundamental law of physics that the wraith-universe was built upon, nothing can deter it (even Homura only manages to squeeze a mortal Madoka out of it, she doesn't repeal it). Madoka split her memories and powers up between Sayaka and Nagisa because she didn't want Kyubey to see her as a goddess and try to gain control of her power, but there was no chance of her ever not getting through the field no matter whose soul gem it was placed on. Homura may have done it for all the wrong reasons, but once Kyubey got a look at Madoka, it was inevitable that he'd one day harness the power of the Law of Cycles because he'd be able to identify her whenever she appeared... and she appears to every dying magical girl.
    • Except there's no reason that Madoka's wish would need to bypass the field to come true. The entire point of the loophole the Incubators found was that the field allowed a witch to exist inside the gem without breaking it open, ergo it isn't actually being born, and this is why the fact that Homulilly existed did not violate Madoka's wish. Therefore, there's no need for Madoka to break in because technically there's no danger of an actual Witch birth until the field comes down, and if there's no need, then her ability to enter the field would logically be decided by the same criteria as everyone else's. You could argue that, if this was the case, Madoka should've been forced to just ignore Homura's plight, and I'd accept that as a valid case, but since she apparently exists everywhere anyway, it doesn't seem like entering the field would affect her ability to otherwise do the job she's been mandated to do (beyond what happened after, but it doesn't look like Madoka has future sight, and since there are apparently no witches in Homura's world, the wish is still upheld). The fact that Madoka could take a detour with Sayaka to watch Kyousuke's performance in episode 12 shows that, while she can't interact with the physical world without assistance, she does nonetheless get a degree of leeway in how she operates - another ingenious little quirk of how Madoka worded her wish.
    • Except it does, and they explain how and why in the movie. The isolation field is not a physical world in and of itself, it's a barrier that Kyubey designed so that he would be made aware of everything coming to interact with Homura's Soul Gem. Madoka did have to go through it in order to get to the Soul Gem, but it had no power to actually keep her out. She comes in to defeat witches at the point that they're going to be born (shattering the Soul Gem before it becomes a Grief Seed), and she does succeed in defeating Homulilly. Homura does become something else, but that's where everything gets weird; before that point, it's all in line with how Madoka's wish worked.
  • Uh. You could argue that it doesn't need to, I guess, in that you can't prove a negative, but she did bypass the field. That's half the plot of the movie. Even if you chose to ignore all that, did you miss the end of the Homulilly fight where they break through the "sky" of Homura's mental world and see the field?
    • Maybe I'm just not understanding this response, but I'm not really sure why that's relevant. Nobody was saying that she broke the field open early, so of course it's still there. Yes, she bypassed the field, but like I said she was invited by Homura so that doesn't tell us anything about what would happen with a girl who didn't know her, because her wish doesn't guarantee her success in that regard, because until the Soul Gem is actually in danger of breaking Madoka's wish is upheld, Witch or no Witch.
    • AGAIN: We know Madoka bypasses the barrier because of Nagisa, who got in because of Madoka's powers. Homura had never met Nagisa and could not possibly have invited her into the barrier, and to cover it up (because Kyubey would have known, if someone appeared in the barrier that Homura did not recognize), she has to remain in her Charlotte form, even though Homura would never actually invite a witch into her barrier, because that is what would distract Kyubey. They go over this in the movie, why is this even a question? The barrier had no meaning to Madoka at all, she and Sayaka and Nagisa were only playing along the whole time.
    • Um, no, they don't go over that in the movie. Madoka giving Sayaka and Nagisa her memories is brought up and Sayaka and Nagisa operating covertly is too, but all this about why Nagisa specifically chose to stay in her Charlotte form the entire time is never discussed or explained - what you're saying, as much sense as it might seem to make, is just popular Fan Wank, and Nagisa' reasons for taking that approach aren't discussed. You could just as easily use that as evidence in the other direction to claim that Nagisa assumed her Witch form so that Homura would recognize and admit her, and staying in that form in the role Homura created for her was easier than trying to switch back to her magical girl form and integrate into the group. Why would Homura invite a Witch into her barrier? Idk, same reason she created the Nightmares or invited Kyuubey in? Homulilly wasn't above using creatures who normally would be her enemies as pawns to keep herself and her pals busy. You also have to consider that Sayaka and Nagisa, despite maintaining their individuality, effectively existed inside the Law of Cycles the same way all fallen witches did, so it stands to reason that as long as Madoka could get in, she'd be able to call upon them from within herself after the fact regardless of whether Homura knew them or not.
    • Your logic there is flawed. The Nightmares exist in Homulilly's barrier because, like Sayaka says (and like we see at the end), Homura wants her friends to be happy, and her idea of that is a world where she and her friends can be a fun, colorful magical girl team, fighting monsters that aren't really dangerous and saving innocent people without having to worry about magical byproducts like miasma, or wraiths, or witches. Kyubey exists inisde the barrier because he's inextricably linked to Homura's understanding of magic (and that's assuming he didn't just let himself into the barrier before he put the isolation field up, the same way you can lock yourself into a car). Nagisa is the only character who appears inside the barrier that has absolutely no reason to be there because Homura did not know she existed, and although she doesn't directly state that's why she appeared as Charlotte, that is the point of that conversation: Sayaka and Nagisa appeared and acted the way they did in order to distract Kyubey without disrupting anything until the time was right. You can argue about the specifics if you want, but all details aside, they do state their reasoning.

• What is the deal with the lizard/salamander as Homura's animal motif as seen during the latter half of the movie? It appears for the first time immediately after her witch transformation, and then for a second time during her monologue to Kyubey as she rewrites the laws of the universe, possibly on the new Soul Gem. Is there any kind of significance to it?
  • Lots of cultures apply symbolism to lizards, but so far as I can tell, the Christian interpretation is that lizards (and possibly other reptiles) are comparable to the serpent in the Garden (temptation, the devil, evil, etc), but they're also associated with magic/witchcraft. In Proverbs, there's a passage that can be translated as "the lizard can be caught by hand, but is found in the palaces of kings", but St. Gregory reads it as "the lizard climbeth with his hands and is found in the palaces of kings" and has a much more positive meaning. All of these are basically relevant, so depending on which interpretation you go with, it's could be any or all of the following:
    • A creature that embodies magic, evil, and temptation,
    • A creature that may be easy to catch individually, but exists in such great numbers that it can never be kept from going wherever it pleases,
    • A creature that, despite its humble ground-crawling beginnings, can elevate itself through its own effort and perseverance, or
    • A creature that seeks the sun (i.e., the Light of God), that it may bask in its warmth.
  • The lizard may point to a basilisk, the legendary king of serpents that became associated with the devil in Medieval Europe.
    • A basilisk is born from a serpent's egg incubated by a cockerel, becoming a creature so poisonous it twists its surroundings. Homura's Soul Gem was a witch's egg hatched by a winged goddess, birthing something much worse that twists the world.
    • Basilisks are usually depicted wearing crowns or with a similar crest. The lizard is first seen wearing a crown in the second compilation movie. While the lizard is never shown wearing a crown in Rebellion, Devil!Homura's Dark Orb is crown-shaped and has the lizard insignia under it, now with wings.
    • Despite being warmed and influenced by them, the Basilisk's natural enemies and weaknesses still include cockerels. Homura says herself she and Madoka are destined to become enemies.
  • Actually, there's a much simpler answer than all these. Think back to Homura's name—as Madoka says in the show, it means 'flame'. When Homura realizes she's a witch, her world burns. Salamanders are associated with fire because when people would toss logs onto a fire, the salamanders that had been sleeping inside would scramble out—people at the time thought that salamanders were born from fire. This belief goes all the way back to Ancient Greece and salamanders were eventually thought to be elementals of fire like undines were of water. While this is an obscure bit of mythology, it's not unknown in Japan—in the World of Mana games, the player can use Salamander magic (fire magic), so it's not unthinkable that the Madoka Magica creators also found that little tidbit of lore. Also, salamanders and newts have old associates with magic and witches—"eye of newt" anyone?
• How did Homura know she could do that whole grab Madoka's hands become a devil and create a false perfect world thing all of a sudden?
  • And why did she want to if she was going to be with Madoka in the end either way?
    • Because just being with Madoka wasn't enough for her anymore. Leaving aside the fact that Homura has just about been driven insane by the boatloads of crap she's had to endure over the course of her life (including being forced to survive despair well beyond the amount that would have made her a witch), she just gained absolute proof that Kyubey still had the means and motive to create magical girls just to torture them into oblivion for the own purposes. The Law of Cycles doesn't do anything about the problem that Kyubey represents or punish him for his misdeeds, and as a result of a misunderstanding, Homura believed that Madoka was lonely and isolated in a hell of non-existence. In other words, she'd just been confronted with the knowledge that everything she had ever done had been a complete waste, because Kyubey was still free to do as he pleased, Madoka was still gone, and the rules of the universe had only changed just enough to make things sort of fair for magical girls. Being one with Madoka would mean accepting all her failures up to that point, and if there's one thing Homura can't do, it's accept defeat; she probably had no idea what would actually become of her, but that's never stopped her before. If anything she probably figured it out on the fly and only stopped once she couldn't think of anything else to do. Check her face as she's talking to Sayaka at the end; she's outright exhausted.
• Why was it important for Sayaka and Nagisa to hold onto Madoka's memories in the first place? Why was it important that Madoka not remember her goddess status while in Homura's barrier? Since it appears that the Law of Cycles can't work inside the barrier, and that Madoka wouldn't have her powers while within the isolation field, wouldn't it be better for her to retain her memories and motives, enabling her to work behind the scenes? It's not like she could've saved Homura while in the isolation field, so she couldn't have done what the Incubators wanted. It would've certainly save Homura a lot of stress.
  • The idea was that the Incubators were paying much closer attention to Madoka, because she was the element that 100% for-sure could not possibly exist in the universe outside of the barrier. That, combined with Homura's testimony in episode 12, told them that she was the Law of Cycles. This led them to ignore Sayaka and Bebe. Madoka predicted this, so she gave away her memories because she knew that one mistake or slipup on her part could botch the entire operation whereas Sayaka and Bebe, who were not being as closely observed, had more room to operate covertly. (Granted, the fact that Sayaka was supposed to be dead and Bebe was in witch-form should've been a red flag that something wasn't right with them either, but neither Homura nor the Incubators had any idea that Madoka had the power to deploy fallen magical girls like that. Presumably, Kyuubey assumed that those two were just illusions/familiars of Homura's like all the background people.) Besides, we never actually get confirmation that the Law is negated within the barrier - it couldn't breach it from outside the shell, and then once it was inside it was amnesiac and therefore couldn't do anything, but Sayaka and Kyuubey both seem to be under the impression that Madoka could use her powers to rescue Homura from within much earlier than she did if she had been awakened to her purpose. That being the case, the memory loss might have also worked to keep Madoka from being tempted to act too early or use her Law powers.
• So, having just watched the Homucifer transformation scene again, I noticed something. Homura bites her Soul Gem and it shatters, and then it separates into these little sphere things that float away and don't come back. The spool of pink thread changes into the Dark Orb. Everything made sense to me until I realized that the Soul Gem and the Dark Orb aren't just the same object at different power levels/evolutions. She shattered her own Soul Gem and it didn't reshape itself or return. How is Homura not dead?
  • The sphere-things fly outward into a long line of more spheres in the background (Probably actually a circle that we're viewing from the inside.) When the thread hits the line of spheres it instantly begins converting into the Dark Orb (It's basically a jump cut. There is no transition frame.) We see the Dark Orb starting to build itself and a few small sphere-things flying away, the vast majority are gone. The assumption should probably be that the majority of Homura's soul joined with the thread (presumably, the stolen bit of Madokami's power,) and a few shreds were lost in the process... maybe for artistic purposes, or maybe it was just the little unimportant things like "self restraint" or "humility" that she no longer needed.
    • Maybe the shreds that got lost was "love".
• You know what's some fun words. Omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. When Madoka made her wish, didn't she gain or become at least one of those. And if so, how the hell did any of rebellion happen, and how would Kyubey even control her at all. Hell how did Homura take Madoka out of the Law of Cycles. You can't overpower an omnipotent being, you can't outsmart an omniscient being, and you can't remove an omnipresent being. Now, If Madoka, didn't become any of those I understand. But after becoming an apothesis or whatever of hope then she has to have been one of the three.
  • It wouldn't matter either way; Homura ascended to being more powerful than whatever Madoka was. After all, she wished to be strong enough to protect Madoka, instead of being protected by her. If Madoka is a God, there's only one thing left, isn't there?
    • That's a needlessly pithy way to respond to a question without answering it. Madoka was never omnipotent, she had a specific, undeniable function (to defeat all witches before they're born), she states she's aware of all possible past and future timelines in the end of the anime, and she's only omnipresent in the sense that she exists outside of time (and only appears under specific conditions). She's only omniscient, but from the way she describes it, and the way she's afraid and surprised at the end of the movie, she can't tell which timeline she's in at any given moment, she's aware of them all at once. We don't know what wish Homura made to become a magical girl in the new timeline, but it couldn't have been "to protect Madoka" because Madoka, in that timeline, doesn't exist, and regardless, she isn't more powerful than Madoka because she can't keep the lid on Madoka's powers. Homura took over one universe, one timeline, while Madoka is (or was, and could be again) a universal constant across all possible timelines and universes, with the added implication that she is also a sort of Valhalla pocket-dimension for magical girls.
• This one is mixed with Fridge Horror. While Madoka was inside Homura's Soul Gem, what was happening to Magical Girls in the outside world when they reach the brink of despair!?
  • She already needed to be able to be in multiple places at once due to how many people need her, and she transcends time, so she was probably functioning perfectly fine until the end.
• What I can't seem to find is a straight answer as to how Homura stole Madoka's powers. Like she ate a soul gem said some existential stuff and next thing you know she's a god/devil. And has this always been possible, or was it like an out of nowhere Deus ex Machina to give the entire fanbase to argue over for a decade.
  • The short version: Madoka had the power to become a goddess because a hundred timelines were centered on her. Homura had the power to become a devil because she created a goddess. Once Madoka was gone, all her karmic destiny went back on Homura's shoulders because it was Homura's actions that made the Law of Cycles what it is.
    • That literally did not answer the question. The answer is yes it was a Deus ex Machina in order to have another movie and spark controversy for several years. Not a single explanation actually explains what actually happened. "She had to the power to become a devil because she created a goddess" that literally makes no sense. How did she create a goddess, last I checked Madoka did that. How did she take the power, no answer. There is literally no answer to this question that isn't drowned in symbolic bullcrap and non answers.
    • To elaborate, a magical girl's power is based on her karmic destiny — essentially how much influence she has, or has had, over the world. That's why a princess, for instance, makes for a stronger magical girl than a schoolgirl. However, time magic can artificially drive up a person's karmic destiny by causing them to gain the karmic destiny of the past versions of themselves on top of their own. The reason this happens to Madoka and not any other girl is because Madoka's fate is what decides whether or not time is turned back. All of this is explained in the show. Rebellion basically takes this to its logical conclusion — Madoka might be the reason Homura was turning back time, but Homura was the one turning back time in the first place, so logically she should have just as much karmic destiny as Madoka does, because she's the reason M Adoka has that power in the first place.
• I don't understand Homura's betrayal at all. She wanted to be with Madoka, right? When Madoka was coming to get her, she said, "We'll finally be together." Homura was about to get what she wanted so badly, so why did she still betray Madoka?
  • Because at that point, Homura didn't just want to be with Madoka. She wanted to specifically be protecting Madoka. Thus, if she had gone with Godoka, though Homura would be with her, she wouldn't ever be able to protect Madoka again. But, by doing what she did in the movie, that is, splitting Madoka from the Law of the Cycle, she brought Madoka back down to normal again. This way, Homura could now both be with Madoka AND protect her as well.
  • Basically, because of their conversation in the flower field, Homura thought Madoka was having a rough go of being the Law of Cycles, and that it was a much more painful fate than she'd thought it would be. So Homura pulled her back to the mortal world to free her from having to spend the rest of her life fighting alone. It's not clear either way whether being the Law of Cycles was actually that bad - and Madoka clearly didn't actually want Homura to do what she did, based on her reaction - but the opening narration from the Concept Movie implicitly paints Madoka's life as a goddess as being pretty bittersweet.
• So, are Sayaka, Mami, Kyoko and Nagisa still contracted?
  • If we take the Concept Movie as fully canon, most likely yes. If not, it's intentionally left very, very ambiguous. They have their contract rings and fingernail marks, but the actual Soul Gems appear to be missing and so do the runes spelling their names. The implication at the end of Rebellion seems to be that they are still magical girls, but that their powers have been sealed away and wiped from their minds.
• The commonest take (as far as this wiki seems to go) is that Madoka's actions at the end of PMMM were selfless, whereas Homura's actions were selfish. I'm borrowing from a critical study called The Very Soil here, which posits the theory that neither character is entirely selfless or selfish, because in the PMMM universe there is no such thing as an entirely selfless act. Madoka's act, while making a better system, also got her everything she ever wanted: she gets to be a magical girl, and she gets to matter more than possibly any other magical girl who came before, and she says in episode 12 she will be with everyone at every moment due to her ascended nature. This wiki calls her messianic and sets her up as a Christ figure, but the Very Soil suggests she is not a martyr but rather a figure of enlightenment, not Madokami but Madokanon (like Kanon or Quanyin): she has transcended the system, not undergone suffering as a means of redeeming everyone else. That suffering still happens to the magical girls. Madoka has just lessened its effect. Compare to Homura: in doing what she did she loses everything she wants. She will eventually become Madoka's enemy - she cannot be together with her - if it means at least trying to stop Madoka sacrificing herself. Unlike Madoka, she is totally reviled by everyone, even her own familiars and, its heavily implied, by herself. At times it feels as though she's playacting the part of the villain - just look at some of her expressions and gestures after the new world comes into being. As for taking actions without other's consent, BOTH do that, not just Homura - Madoka forces her parents and brother to forget about her in making her wish, just as Homura overwrites everyone's memories. Madoka also leaves Homura unhappy since Homura can remember but never see her again. Just as Homura goes against Madoka's wish in splitting her apart, so does Madoka go against Homura (and what she asked for herself in a previous timeline) by becoming a magical girl anyway. Madoka gives up her self, while Homura gives up what she really wants. I don't entirely understand how the heat death issue stands in Homura's new universe (the movie left a lot up to the imagination as to whether magical girls other than Homura even exist anymore), so I'm not accounting for that. I'm in no way suggesting Homura is a saint or selfless in what she does, far from it, just that the Madoka = selfless saint and Homura = selfish human viewpoint seems like a way too simple a binary for a show like PMMM. TL;DR, but is there really such a thing as a completely selfless or selfish action in the PMMM universe?
  • I mean, I guess neither Madoka nor Homura is entirely selfish or selfless, in that both of them simultaneously benefit and suffer from their actions. I would say the difference is intention, though. Yeah, Madoka "gets to be a magical girl, and she gets to matter more than possibly any other magical girl who came before" ... but was that actually part of her motivation for doing what she did? Madoka understood she'd be destroying herself, she wouldn't have gone ahead with that wish if she didn't, but I don't think she necessarily knew for certain what was going to happen to her in the aftermath until the wish was already underway — at best, she says that she doesn't care what she becomes — so I'm not sure becoming a magical girl or getting to be important factored into the initial decision for her. I guess you could argue that Madoka's wish would have dealt with her self-worth issues, regardless of how things ended for her, but those issues were in and of themselves tied to her desire to help people, not to ego on her part... and let's be honest, getting "sense of self-worth" in exchange for "deleting yourself from your reality" is not exactly an enviable exchange. Now, none of this is to suggest that Madoka is 100% selfless — nobody is. But I would say that her ascension to godhood was more altruistic than Homura's.
  • Meanwhile, Homura may have lost her chance to be with Madoka, but she didn't know that until after she had already remade the world. She thought that she could take back the human Madoka, create a happy world, and things would just go back to normal, because her understanding was that, while Madoka was choosing to be the Law of Cycles, what she wanted was her life back. Since she was overwriting Madoka's memories anyway, she had no reason to think Madoka would oppose her until it becomes clear that her powers aren't totally gone. Homura also isn't reviled by anybody except Sayaka and Kyuubey, because nobody else remembers enough to have beef with her.
  • On the topic of memories: again, Madoka may not have known going into the wish that everyone would forget her but Homura. She knew she'd disappear from the world but the idea that she would never even have been born isn't one that flows obviously from the wording of her wish. Even if we assume that she was aware that that would happen, for simplicity's sake, the only memories that her family would have lost were the memories of Madoka herself. Madoka's family doesn't own her; she doesn't owe it to them to stay with them if she can do more good for the world elsewhere. Yeah, it's still not ideal, memory manipulation in general is kind of an ethics issue, but it's not like Madoka got anything out of making them forget, it wasn't her specific intention to do that to them, and it doesn't change the fact that she didn't think they'd ever see each other again. She left Homura unhappy, but like, again: Homura doesn't own her. Madoka doesn't owe it to Homura to stay with her. Homura, on the other hand, owes it to Madoka to respect what Madoka wants to do with Madoka's life and self.
  • She does respect what Madoka wanted to do, the entire point of her actions in Rebellion is that she thinks that's what she's doing. There's an entire scene in the movie devoted to Homura's misunderstanding and coming to the conclusion that Madoka did not want to sacrifice herself. At the end of the show, she's perfectly content and comfortable with Madoka's decision, it's only after she witches out (ie, she's being driven insane by her accumulated pain and forced to endure it beyond normal limits because she's having new technology tested on her soul) that she hears what she thinks is a confession from Madoka that Madoka isn't happy. I hate this constant complaint that Homura is some kind of mad tyrant for disrespecting Madoka's autonomy when "respecting Madoka's autonomy" would have meant letting someone she loved wallow in existential torment instead of saving her like that loved one begged her to.
    • Madoka *wanted* to stay with everyone but she *chose* to leave for the greater good. That choice is what should have been respected. Also, Madoka said what she said because Homura misrepresented the situation. She left out a) why Madoka was "going away" in the first place, and b) the fact that Madoka had specifically told Homura that she'd "always be with everyone" — she wasn't alone, she had the company of all the girls she saved, and she could also continue to watch over all the non-magical people in her life. Even Tatsuya could see her for a little while, until he grew up! It's understandable that that misunderstanding happened inside the witch barrier, while Homura and Madoka both had their minds tampered with, but Homura's decisions after being released from the barrier don't have that excuse.
    • Wait a minute, Homura's mind isn't any less tampered with once she gets out of the barrier, why does that matter? Homura began to forget Madoka in the new world because she couldn't trust her own memories. The Homura that we see in Rebellion lived a life in that universe even if she remembers the old one, her only choice in life is to either "cling to the memory of someone that everyone else insists never existed and all reality agrees with them, no matter how crazy it makes you" or "eventually succumb to the gaslighting that no one but you could ever think is gaslighting in the first place". It's not reasonable to expect her to literally base her own sanity and sense of reality on a toddler babbling, especially after she's been forced to endure so much despair that she's trapped in a masochistic feedback loop that drove her past crazy and into divinity, it's just ridiculous to expect her to have lived her entire life and expect her to make emotionally-healthy decisions, especially since she'd just been told that her worst fear had come true: that Madoka didn't really win against Kyubey, she regrets and resents her wish as much as any magical girl does, and just like she'd been asked before any of this went down at all, Madoka does not want to get tricked by Kyubey. Homura was fine with it when she believed that Madoka was confident in her decision, it's only when she believes that Madoka wishes she could undo it that Homura tries to stop her. When she hands back Madoka's ribbons, she's basically saying "Well, you can try, but I know better than you how badly you'll regret what comes next, and rather than suffer through your suffering, I choose to make you safe." She knows she's doing the wrong thing, but she believes it's for the right reasons; it's selfish, but it's not reasonable to expect someone as badly mentally damaged as Homura is to make objective, clear and morally right choices under the circumstances that she makes them.
    • Homura's mind is less tampered-with after the barrier, because that's when she finally has all of her memories back. All throughout her time as a Witch, Homura was still slowly remembering the past. That's why it took so long to realize that Sayaka's presence in the fake Mitakihara didn't make any sense, for example. But once she woke up in the real world, she remembered everything. So she should have remembered what Madoka already explained to her when she first became God, and she should've also known that her flower-field conversation was with an amnesiac who barely understood what Homura was even talking about. If you want to say that Homura is just a crazy person who does selfish things and can't be held responsible because she's in despair, fine, but that doesn't make her actions not selfish.
    • Having all her memories back, including the part where she found out Madoka is still at risk because Kyubey is free, which takes her RIGHT OUT of "in her right mind", she spent 24 YEARS protecting Madoka from Kyubey and was ONLY okay with it when she thought Madoka was finally safe. You don't get 24 years of terrified anxiety back in one shot and come out of it happy and healthy. Literally nobody said Homura's actions aren't selfish. They are, that's the entire point of the story, nobody is fighting you on this. But that doesn't make her actions the incorrect option based on what we know, and more importantly, what she THINKS she knows. This is not a complicated issue because we're told everything we need to know by the text: Kyubey states that if he can prove the Law of Cycles is a magical girl (and thus a product of a system and technology that he and he alone understands and controls), which he does over the course of Rebellion, and if he can interfere with it (which he does; he doesn't stop Madoka, but he is able to interfere and force her to act against him), he will eventually be able to take control of her because he knows how to prompt actions in others. The idea that Kyubey "can't" do something because Madoka is powerful is clearly not true, Kyubey GAVE Madoka her powers and knows more about how they work than she does, because to him, it isn't magic. If he can interfere with her, he will eventually be able to control (or at least circumvent) the Law of Cycles from shattering Soul Gems, that is what is STATED in the show, if you're going to disregard it, why watch the show at all? Without Homura's interference, selfish thought it was, Madoka would be in danger, she's a Judas figure as much as a Satanic one. You can choose to ignore that if you want to, but at that point, you're just whining because Homura is popular and that bothers you.
• What is this continued assertion about Homura being an exaggerated, Saturday morning cartoon villain version of a garden-variety domestic abuser for pulling Madoka out of the Law of Cycles? She's not a bastard girlfriend keeping Madoka from going to college because she wants her home and cooking dinner, she literally wants everyone to be happy, that's half the point of the entire freaking movie. Homura thinks that she's saving Madoka from endless torment, and she's willing to throw literally everyone else, including herself, under the bus to save her from it. It's not about "owning" Madoka, or "disrespecting her autonomy", she wants Madoka to not get tricked by Kyuubey into suffering, which is something Madoka literally begged her to do. This isn't a black-and-white issue, and reducing it down to "Homura is an entitled Nice Guy" is just the laziest, most superficial way to read the series.
  • The main argument here is that Homura is "not acting like her true self" which I too, find a confusing argument. I once read a blog post saying that Devil-Homura is "ooc" as she's becomes the devil but I mean like, come on... becoming the literal devil would change anyone. Although they did make a point that during her talk with Madoka she was acting more like herself, I personally believe that she was just acting for the most part. Now that she assumes that everyone, including her once-friends hates her and she's completed her goal, that she should at least act like a villain.
• How did the ending of this movie ever happen? I can understand (though not 100% agree with) the claims that Madoka was Not So Omniscient After All, but how did Homura's ascension ever manage to happen? Yes, Madoka's wish was to erase witches "with her own hands," but on a rewatch (of the series, haven't gotten back to the first two movies yet) she doesn't touch the Soul Gems when she purifies them, so how does Homura grabbing her hands stop her? Unless we're trying to claim that what filled Homura's Soul Gem had ceased to be despair before the Isolation Field was broken, but that seems like a significant enough development that it should have been mentioned by Mami or Kyoko before shit went down, rather than Nagisa noticing it after Homura's magical love-maelstrom kicks up, and if I recall correctly we see the change happen after the field breaks, which would mean that's not the case. All this would come together to mean that the taint should have vanished from Homura's Soul Gem when Madoka's hands got close to it and not waited for her to make contact, since she never does. Any ideas?
  • Homura grabbing Madokami's hands was done in order to strip Madoka from the law of the cycles, thus draining Madoka of her power.
• Has anyone else noticed the representation on the colour green in the movie? It's quite obvious that there have there's been some lights here and there in blue, yellow, red and pink that symbolize the Holy Quintet, but why are there green colours? For example, during the scene where Sayaka confronts Homura there's a green light, and during the intro there's a green arrow amongst the clock that spins along with the other ones. Is it supposed to represent Hitomi, and why?
  • Hitomi isn't a magical girl and has nothing to do with any of the deeper plot, she's just a normal girl who exists to remind the audience that not every girl is a lich. I'd have to watch the entire movie again to pick out every instance of green coloration in the movie, but based on your example...no, it doesn't mean anything, it's just a cool (as opposed to warm) color that works well for night scenes.