Puella Magi Madoka Magica

I think the karmic burden thing is heavily fate/destiny. And the teenage years are really where a lot of life changes start happening; it's a time where many destinies lie within their grasp, and they have important choices to make.

Teens are possibly also 'best' for farming because they are, on average, far more emotional than adults. And, as was mentioned, more gullible and more likely to take risks. And unlike truly young children, they have enough presence of mind to think they know what they want, without the experience of an adult to actually let them know what they want.

Despair may be such an effective emotion to harvest because in contrast to rage and hate, it's passive. A hateful or rageful (Or fearful) person tends to act on those emotions and therefore probably use up the very emotion the Kyubeys are harvesting. Catharsis is a thing, at least on the timescale Kyubeys are looking at.

As for why girls vs. boys? Girls have a tendency towards passivity (mostly cultural, but rather widespread as a result of childbearing being a female thing)/depression (brain chemistry), while boys tend more towards action/anger for those same reasons.

Given the previous paragraphs, young teenaged girls are most often ripe with the inexperience, high emotionality, depression, gullibility, riskiness, and fate potential to make perfect candidates. Yeah, there are probably specific people, but the Incubators probably don't have time to check everyone in the wolrd all the time, and figured out the rule of thumb that "Basically, go for this demographic. They'll throw themselves at you, and it's all good."

I suspect in the very early years, when there were maybe a few million humans running around, they grabbed a few willing and emotionally unstable/crazy adults or males, but once human growth took off, they had to come up with an heuristic, and the average male/adult was just giving too small of returns. There was certainly a period of learning about human emotionality from the Kyubeys... they found the black box that worked best (teenaged girls), and started throwing all the whatevers in that box.

Also, I'm of the opinion that Kyubey isn't a member of the race he speaks of, but rather a creation/emissary of sorts sent by them, but I may just be misremembering a key line or something.

The karma thing to me was more related at the importance that girl life will impact on another people. A princess or a revolutionary would have heavy karma and because of that great magical power, while girls like Homura that would only affect very few people have little, but to compensate it seems that the main magic talent depends on the wish.

Kyubey mentioned that there is such a thing as "his kind", didn't he? Or something like that. I remember he said something about how emotions don't normally exist on his planet.

Also, @ that humor thing from a few pages ago:

What, seriously? It's only 12 episodes. I'm confident I can go at least 25 without genuine humor. Then again, maybe I'm just weird.

edited 3rd Oct '12 11:18:36 PM by ThatHuman

There was a Jedi Master in the EU with roughly the same body type as coobie. How he held his lightsaber is a mystery.

edited 3rd Oct '12 11:14:42 PM by Bocaj

x5 Seriously though, humanity in charge of coobie-level technology would be freaking terrifying. As a society we're definitely not ready for such a thing, and we won't have anything like a gradual transition period, so even if being human doesn't inherently lead to us fucking it up, humans being as they are now would. The people in charge of the technology are probably ultimately politicians in this scenario. Also uh we might not be able to figure out how to work it, oops.

x4 Kyubey's body is artificial to an extent (its image, the hatch on its back, its ability to collect emotional energy, the replacements), but it calls the aliens involved its own species, so there's something going on there. Possibly every coobie has its soul removed and then connected to manufactured bodies tailored to their jobs, or something.

Reasonable to expect magical girls being the result of Kyubey's heuristic to find which people will give a decent return, I'd say. Kyubey can sense karmic potential automatically, but the amount of time it'd take to filter everyone for specific characteristics would be too high.

Also possibly, contracting cuts one's fate short, and people who contract don't achieve their fate the way they would have had they not made a contract. Contracting everyone with high amounts of fate would lead humanity to stagnate except for wishes, so the coobies only contract a certain subset to allow humanity as a whole to progress. For example, Madoka had enough potential to make a wish in the first timeline, but died before achieving anything beyond magical girl stuff, but her potential had to come from something... on the other hand, historical magical girls.

edited 3rd Oct '12 11:16:46 PM by greedling

Madoka would have taken after her mom and become an alcoholic.

But also she would have invented a new soft drink that would have knocked Coke off the map. The world would come together in harmony over how great this soda was.

And then a clear version would have been introduced and mankind would have ascended to a new plane of existence. Perfection and thus nirvana would have been reached. Oh and everyone would turn into the soda too.

No, she would've invented Morning Rescue! I mean I don't recall the drink actually existing in-show, so somebody's gotta invent it.

edited 3rd Oct '12 11:22:07 PM by ThatHuman

I hadn't thought her initial potential would be quite that spectacular, but presented that way I can accept it as why she was able to beat Walpurgisnacht the first time.

Madoka would have had a very liquid-filled future if not for Qb and Homura.

...

That sounds wrong somehow.

Crystal Morning Lescue: The greatest invention never invented.

I believe Madoka would be a humanitarian, she is kind by default and likes to be helpful to people, a lot of karma in my opinion.

Wow, quite a bit of cynicism in here. Haven't you guys heard? It's for looooosers.

Anyways, I'd be totally fine with Humanity or any other emotionally capable species hijacking incubator tech. Hey, if they end up decimating the coobie homeworld(s), then it's all good by my counts.

I mean yeah, now we aren't really ready for it buuuut: "I wish emotional species everywhere commanded your technology!" "I wish emotional species knew how to make this technology work better than the incubators ever did!" "I wish emotional species everywhere would be ready for this level of technology!"

And you know what? We don't necessarily have the "no suggesting wishes" thing the turds got going on. So we totally could ask each other to wish for a specific thing if we can convince them that it's worth it while still mentioning all of the possible drawbacks, and we'd be fine if they declined, 'cause we'd just move on to the next person. Why would we do all of this? Because for the most part, our sense of fair trade isn't utter shit.

This basically, because people who actually paid attention to the characterization in the show would know this.

Now imagine humans turning this kind of thought against each other.

Making humans ready for coobie technology would require changing the personalities of pretty much every person on the planet. While that wouldn't be worse than letting humans at coobie technology unchanged, it feels rather like killing every human in existence and replacing them with a similar but different person.

If we assume her passivity was just a phase because she's fourteen and one day she would have woken up and been frustrated with the useless life she imagined set out before her and then decided to do something about it, it's possible she would have done something to earn it. Not as much karma as Crystal Morning Lescue though.

edited 4th Oct '12 7:08:43 AM by greedling

I agree about Madoka. She got all jazzed about helping others because she found out it could be dramatic and cool, with pretty skirts and flashy attack names. Then she was scared off for a while and mostly passive and useless, though willing to risk death for her best friends if it got to a point where she had to admit it was necessary. Eventually she steeled herself and decided that no matter how scared she was, if she had the power to end suffering, she couldn't bear not to use it. Even if it meant sacrifice.

All that sounds to me like if she'd had time to grow up, she would have matured out of the need for glamor and special powers to spark her aimless compassion into purpose, just like she grew out of her fear over the course of the show. Anything from a documentary on saints to a guidance counselor (or the Japanese counterpart of that role) suggesting social work to witnessing discrimination could have lit that inner flame.

Madoka passiveness is understandable since she lives with a happy and normal family, but given the oportunity she will help people, like Homura in timeline one. But I can't deny that maybe she would have created that fantastic drink, who knows?

edited 4th Oct '12 7:38:29 AM by asellus111

Fittingly enough, Madoka's desire to be helpful to people was largely untapped potential.

Hey! I invented that one!

While I can't argue with Greedling's logic about the horrible things humanity could do with that tech(though I really want to), I still find great frustration with what feels like the whitewashing of everything they did.

Maybe the universe is more important, maybe they do have a good cause, and maybe they don't have any malice, but...

They may not have created the foundations of the system, but the first witch came from something. The deal isn't fair. The girls may not ask everything, but the Kyuubeys claim magical girls exist to fight witches, when they really exist to become witches so that the energy can be collected. They lie through omission, manipulate, and serve these girls up for this cause...

No. This isn't good enough. I've held back on this for a while, but it's still not a strong enough argument. I just don't get it. I never understood how we can scrutinize ourselves, while the Kyuubeys seem to get a pass. Blue-and-Orange Morality is one thing, but there are somethings that should not be defended.

It doesn't make sense to think of Incubators as good or evil. When a mountain lion mauls a hiker, or a worker falls into an industrial machine and is maimed or killed, you don't make moral judgments. You ask what led to those circumstances and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Incubators are the same way. They will never understand ethics the same way that any human does. They have no reason or capability to evaluate their actions through a human perspective.

This isn't a degenerate human society or a backwards person who believes unconscionable things. When I say they don't think or feel like humans, it does not mean they were raised differently or chose to feel that way. It means their culture, biology, and history as a species all gives them an irreconcilably different perspective on morality, so different that it is hardly recognizable as morality at all.

They're fictional, so you can't punish them or argue with them or learn more about them. But within that fictional world, you still can't really accomplish anything that way. All you can do is work around them. Like Madoka, who would rather focus on ending suffering than beating her head against the brick wall of alien ethics.

The way that I look at it, is if it were any other setting with any other rules that would make it so that the magical girl system is not necessary and the coobies were doing it anyway, then they would be monsters. But according to the laws of the setting which they are saddled with, they are doing what has to be done. If entropy could be fought with puppy farts, the coobies would be feeding beans to dogs. If it could be fought with the laughter of children, they could be coobie-ing for small children as imaginary stuffed animal friends devoted to whimsy, or as best they could manage. But that's not the setting they live in. The one they're in forces them to turn little girls into monsters for the continued survival of everything. We are presented with no alternative other than Madoka's rewriting the laws of the setting or the total destruction of everything. When the rules changed, so do the coobies.

And in the meantime, so much good has come out of their actions even despite the bad. Continued universal existence is nice, I'm pretty sure that 85% of people can agree with that. But also, their influence has led Earth to become what it is today. Its not perfect but we have conquered diseases and the elements. We have created leisure time and boredom. The modern world allows for Madoka to feel unimportant and vaguely unfulfilled when in an earlier era she would have just worried about getting enough to eat.

Good can come out of suffering, even terrible suffering. And all I've mentioned is Earth because naturally we're anthrocentric. But this is an example repeated throughout time and space. With a little help from the coobies, the population of countless worlds have lifted themselves from their humble origins and become something more.

The best example is Madoka. She would have never been in a position to change things for the better if the coobies hadn't been involved at all. If the coobies never started contracting on Earth, its likely that the system would have never been changed.

Its not a pleasant situation but its the one that they and everyone else in the setting were stuck with.

and

...

Of all the times I've brought this up, and of all the answers I've read, I think I like these two the most.

Okay. I can accept that. I just got to let it go.

Yes, inner peace. Yes.

Disappears into shadows.

The truth is most of the civilizations visited by the Incubators likely wound up being overrun and destroyed by the final witch (whether as single super capable of destroying the world like Gretchen or a smaller witch that simply reproduces uncontrollably when no new magical girls are born) when their quota was met.

Either the emotional species experience witchy apocalypse, or everyone experiences ultimate destruction (though it'd take a lot longer). The Incubators chose the most logical choice.

(you'd think they'd find a way to manipulate time loop technology, since that seems more efficient. But apparently few people think of wishing for it)

edited 4th Oct '12 8:50:39 AM by Moth13

Considering that Kyubey doesn't lie I don't think that statistically that's likely. In the dub at least he said "In the future you'll join the rest of the universe. You wouldn't want it to be empty would you?" (paraphrasing but the point is he sounded confident that humans would develop to the point of escaping the planet). If most planets ended up like Earth T4 that would be an outright lie which Kyubey can't do. So I'd have to say Krimheld Gretchen was the exception not the rule. After all I can't imagine the circumstances (character repeats time 50 or so times for the purpose of saving one person in particular without dying or becoming a witch) is that common in the universe. The only other witch that COULD have wreaked that kind of destruction is Walpurguisnaught, which can be contained by two or more Magical Girls.

Well given humanity's rate of technology increase via wishes, and the massive amount of energy Gretchen had, there's a good chance space travel could happen before Kyubey fills the quota and leaves them to their doom.

edited 4th Oct '12 8:54:15 AM by Moth13

Well kyubey did leave the earth in the show, and that's my main problem with the fluffy fellow, QB can't lie but it can surely omit a lot of information and/or distort the facts.

edited 4th Oct '12 9:04:46 AM by asellus111