Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Racist.

Well, no one ever does "just trust" Kyubey, do they? Normally he goes after people in desperate situations, who aren't likely to stop and think about whether he has some hidden agenda. Lack of alternatives isn't the same as trust. That's pretty standard for Deal with the Devil situations, for the exact reasons you're talking about.

For Madoka and Sayaka, he manipulated them. He made sure they met Mami so they'd ask her all the hard questions and wouldn't get any terrifying answers. Businesswoman-ness isn't genetic; Madoka's pretty clueless early on, though she learns quickly.

I'm sort of bemused by people who can look at the human race and sincerely say "yep, they're all completely rational and always think things through and never do anything really stupid or impulsive." I mean, c'mon. People make mistakes but "not these kinds of mistakes"... uh. People make exactly those kinds of mistakes (to Kyouko, Kyubey was analogous to a loan shark; Sayaka is overdevoted to unrequited love, surely I don't need to point out how common that is... etc.).

I'm guessing you just expect characters to be more idealized, more like how optimistic people see themselves. Nothing wrong with that, but I find characters like that pretty hard to relate to.

edited 5th Feb '15 12:45:49 PM by Kotomikun

It's a common genre thing as well. Usagi gripes at Luna a bunch initially and is in disbelief at first, but she ultimately believes everything she says. Nagisa and Mepple behave the same way, but Nagisa still follows his instructions. Nanoha trusts Yuuno completely despite him not being very honest with her. You just have to roll with it and accept that teenage girls are not and have never been the brightest bulbs out there.

There are just to many alarm bells. While Mami didn't really have a choice, but to contract. She didn't have to trust Kyubey afterwards.

What keeps people from just walking away with the wish? Why is this all a secret? How is this a secret? Why middle schoolers?

Kyubey's reaction to Mami losing her head should have required some excuse.

The who business of Kyubey not being human, isn't really common sense, even if it makes sense after it's explained.

Human brains are built according to genes that have reliably build something workable after being reshuffled again and again. We couldn't model other people even as well as we do if our brains weren't so similar as to allow as to walk in each other's shoes.

Are values don't come from being semirational minds they come from our evolutionary history. Kyubey clearly isn't closely related to us.

If anything, I believe the person who would trust Kyubey the most would be Mami, seeing as without Kyubey, Mami would be dead. Since Kyubey did keep his end of the bargain, Mami would be more trusting of the white critter.

It makes her breakdown when the Awful Truth about the nature of Puella Magi is revealed to her have more sense, since everything she has been told to be true turn out to be a lie.

The saying "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" exists for a reason.

Also, most interactions are derived from the expectations that the other participants will behave with at least some decency.

Also, Kyubey chooses who he targets and has mind reading abilities.

Why wouldn't she have. He A) essentially saved her life and B) gave her something to live for, namely Witch Hunting.

Reason B is especially compelling given that otherwise Mami'd be all alone with nothing to distract her from her thoughts. And in the game it's loneliness that ultimately drives her to despair.

Song of the Sirens

...Isn't that what he wants though?

So by keeping her company, wasn't he kind of fucking up big time?

He's not cruel exactly. He creates the conditions that lead them to witchification, but he doesn't personally drive them towards it. For whatever reason he has no problem with helping them and keeping them happy. He probably thinks that they'll witch out eventually anyway, so he might as well study these strange humans as much as possible.

edited 5th Feb '15 4:11:03 PM by Sterok

He doesn't understand human emotion, right?

Song of the Sirens

I'd expect him to pick up some stuff over the years, but I doubt it would come easily on account of being so foreign to him.

Unnoun touched on this a little already, but in most speculative fiction with people who are not human that is the villain attitude. The unstated assumption that a generic nonhuman is less trustworthy than a generic human is the thought process of the rabid military guy who attacks the benevolent aliens, the vaguely-religious hunter going after peaceful fairies, the thinly-veiled Nazi analogue. In most stories, the Genre Savvy thing is to not be that guy.

1. The fact that the beneficiary isn't enough of a jackass to renege on a contract that got them a wish, for one. The fact that they want to be a hero, for another.
2. Isn't that how these stories always go?
3. See above.
4. See above.

Should Harry Potter have kept the fuck away from Hagrid when he tried to tell him he was a wizard? Hagrid, beyond being a damn intimidating motherfucker in person, had just broken into their current domicile after a series of letters more insistent and unrelenting than Kyubey ever was, the addresses of which demonstrated that the sender was stalking the hell out of a minor. There were fucking floods of letters, and the mysterious person sending them was keeping tabs on what room Harry slept in. Stranger danger! The same logic that says that the megucas-to-be shouldn't have trusted Kyubey also say that Harry shouldn't have trusted Hagrid. Supermerlin's questions about how and why it's a secret certainly apply. Yet trusting Hagrid was unequivocally the correct choice, both because Hagrid's a trustworthy person and because if Harry didn't go off with the giant who'd just kicked down the door and tried to curse Dudley for something Vernon did he would have stayed in his crappy mundane life for a few years until Voldemort killed him for his blood and took over the Ministry before the Order knew he was back. Because that's how these stories work.

Basically, I think higurashi and supermerlin are expecting the megucas and pre-megucas to be Genre Savvy for a story that is working very hard, at the outset, to appear like a different story. Which seems like a tall order, considering I understand the bulk of the fandom was fooled until the infamous Episode 3. Else it wouldn't be infamous.

On a more personal note, I would have trusted the hell out of Kyubey at their age. Both because I was then, and am now, a trusting and optimistic-about-people person in general (I note here that none of the meguca seemed very cynical when they started out), and because he was giving me superpowers and a wish! Score! Why would he give me all that if he meant me harm?

Actually we want them to act like they think they're in real life. Granted generalizing from fictional evidence isn't unheard of real life.

@Harry No he shouldn't have, he got lucky.

edited 5th Feb '15 9:15:12 PM by supermerlin100

I think that if I, in real life, started having to deal with magic and monsters and shit, I'd draw on the fiction I'd consumed for guidance. Because my real life up until that point included no experience and no advice to help me deal with those things.

And part of being Genre Savvy is knowing where the verse you're in sits on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. I've been burned by a couple scams, so if Kyubey approached me today I think I'd wonder what his angle was, but at fourteen? Fuck no. I was easily farther on the idealistic side than PMMM, even with the Hope-tastic ending. I took it as a given that people were essentially good and it wasn't going to occur to me that anyone I met was an exception unless they were really obvious about it. This is the part where I stare really hard at the role that running across a couple ordinary people being shitty plays in Sayaka's downward spiral. The meguca candidates were not hard-eyed cynics looking for the catch.

@Harry: The outcome of Harry going with Hagrid was objectively better than the most likely outcomes I can think of if he didn't. Luck or no luck, it was the better decision.

edited 6th Feb '15 12:00:37 AM by rikalous

Also there's the wish fulfillment angle, and not in the Coobie-gives-you-a-wish way. You get to save people from monsters! You get to be a hero! You get magic powers! You become, in short, special!

For a young teenager trying to find their place in the world, that right there is like heroin.

Song of the Sirens

Thank you, rikalous. Agreed.

I wasn't! But that isn't because I'm smart and the characters are dumb, it's because I had no clue what a Magical Girl even was, was not fourteen, and saw the whole thing from a detached third-person perspective. In context, the way they act seems unrealistically thoughtful and mature, if anything. Like I keep saying, Sayaka and Madoka do dawdle a lot and ask questions, just not to the evil little space ferret. They understand that there's a downside (you're stuck fighting witches forever) so they have less reason to be suspicious that there's further layers of horribleness below that.

The Harry Potter comparison is sort of funny, since Harry turns out to be a Soul Jar for the Big Bad, in addition to getting into a lot more danger than he probably expected. As Kyubey points out, contracts have helped human society advance, so maybe they're not totally wrong to go along with it (at least up until a superwitch starts destroying the planet...).

edited 6th Feb '15 1:33:20 AM by Kotomikun

Well I mean sure they ask what witches are, but Kyubey didn't answer. His "answer" actually should have made them more doubtful of him for being vague. A character who's intelligence is level 1 wouldn't be dumb even to trust Kyubey.

When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.

Drawing from fiction isn't sensible, unless there's a reason to expect the fiction to reflect the unfamiliar reality.

I had a bad feeling about Kyubey the moment he said the word "contract". Make a contract with me. Not just, "Make a wish and become a magical girl." No. Make a contract.

Benevolent entities don't ask for contracts, because they don't exist in a world of legalities and careful wordplay. Devils do.

edited 6th Feb '15 8:48:44 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

People were thinking Kyubey was bad since the first episode. Even if assume Madoka and Sayaka were trying to be genre savvy, they would notice at least by episode three that it wasn't being played straight and the fact that Kyubey gives no fucks to Mami's death.

When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.

The entire point of a tragedy is to explore how one or two really horrible decisions, whether they knew they were foolish or not, can screw up a person's life. I don't think anyone could have predicted that tragedies would start getting flak under the claim that people don't make bad decisions...

If I have this right, Goethe's Faust has the hero knowingly make a deal with the actual Devil—as in he knows it's Satan, who wants to take his soul to hell—because he's bored. That's the Trope Codifier for Deal with the Devil, folks. Nobody in Madoka does anything even remotely that stupid. So I guess you'll have to throw out all the other stories with that concept, too?

The "gift horse in the mouth" thing brought up above is important. You may think you'd be businesslike and analytical, but you're seeing things from the outside. Faced with an actual wish-granting genie, who can give you magic powers? I can't imagine you'd really be so rational in that situation. What if your annoying questions make it walk away and never come back? Madoka and Sayaka are a special case, because Madoka is an incomprehensibly powerful magic nexus, so there's no way Kyubey's going to pass up on her; but they don't really know that. (When she does get the full picture, and realizes she's holding all the cards, she exploits him! Are we all forgetting about that part?)

Okay, I want to make it clear that I understand the following comes from two different posters, who are perfectly free to disagree like hell with each other even if they come to roughly the same conclusion. I'm not making an argument at this point, I'm just noting something that amused me. Because we had

and then the very next post said Put them together and you've got "the pre-meguca should have been suspicious of Kyubey because This Is Reality and also contract-making is a devil trope, not an angel one."

edited 6th Feb '15 11:36:15 AM by rikalous

Indeed those statements don't line up. The most you could say is that "contract" hints that the deal is formal and enforcable. Nothing about how supernatural agents operate.

I am not saying people do not make bad decisions. However, people make bad decision while trying to do what is best. Even without fiction it is common sense that genies are not good. Without knowing that the genie possesses all moral values you should not trust it. That is what they are missing. A consistent effort to try to get things right.

Madoka wants to have a purpose in life and makes a contract to save a cat. There is no reason to believe him and once it turns out he can grant wishes that should make him seem more dangerous.

Sayaka seem kind of smart at the beginning or at least more thoughtful. She realized Homura was dangerous(Homura was not evil, but is dangerous) and took action to get away with Madoka. And realizing her life was too good for her to think of a wish to make her life better. After she became a magical girl she sort of threw it away.

Homura had some room to trust Kyubey since Madoka and Mami did. However you would think that when the first thing Kyubey does after Madoka and Mami died to Walpurgisnaught is to urge her to contract and he even mentions his true purpose on the spot.

Kyubey didn't approach Mami until she was in a condition where she didn't have time to think. That does not put Kyubey in the best light.

When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.