Puella Magi Madoka Magica

"In that timeline, Homura is the only active magical girl shown, and she did everything she could to prevent Madoka from encountering witches (by killing them all herself) or Kyubey (by killing the critter before he made contact with Madoka). It was only at the end where Madoka made a contract and shot Walpurgisnacht out of the sky, then immediately becoming Krimhild Gretchen, implying the fact that she does not know anything about being a magical girl other than "make a contract with me and you can save that girl who's getting beat up over there." The contract is made, Madoka fulfills her objective of saving Homura (which shouldn't bring despair in the first place), but witches out anyway. "

Why would Madoka need to know about witches and magical girls for what I said? At the time she made her contract, the entire city had been level including the shelter she was staying which look less than alright. So at the moment she just sees what is going on and decides to save Homura. Afterwards she is left used a lot of her power and is weak and left to deal with the wreckage. It would be no wonder that she would despair and even without knowing fully about what she could have done curse her lack of ability to not do anything and become a witch.

"Further proof that Madoka doesn't witch out due to despair is seen in the second timeline, where she survives the final battle but is writhing in pain, before witching out. At that point, neither she or Homura know what would happen if a magical girl's soul gem darkened completely, and only know that Soul Gems darken because of using their powers, thus their surprise at what actually happens. That also led Homura to the conclusion that they were being deceived"

In the second timeline Mami likely died as she is no where to be seen. They still didn't save Mitakihara and as Madoka's soul runs out of power and her body starts dying from that slowly she screams in pain and that weakens her even more so she becomes a witch.

Like most things in the show, soul gem darkness is some sort of metaphor. Seems to me it represents working too hard without success, or fighting only for someone else without taking care of your own needs; in real life, those are pretty effective ways to get depressed. Sayaka does both of those things with reckless abandon, so she always becomes a witch. Homura's gem rapidly goes dark when she realizes she can't save Madoka and feels that she's just been making everything worse.

Mami and Kyouko never come close to witching out because they're (usually) capable and confident, and remember to take care of themselves (Different Story is another matter).

Madoka had self-confidence in the first timeline, but this was eroded away by Homura's wish (and probably vague memories of death and failure from previous timelines) and Madoka is left only with her obsessive desire to sacrifice herself for the sake of others. So instead of beating Walpurgis and dying happy, her undiluted selflessness turns her into a witch that wants to "save" people. In one timeline she remembers to care about her own fate, and asks Homura to go back in time to save her, and to Mercy Kill her so she doesn't have to turn into a selflessness elemental. In the end, she subverts all that by making her need to save everyone into her source of strength and confidence; and she successfully saves everyone, so she has no reason to feel inadequate anymore, and can erase her own witch. She has her cake and eats it too.

edited 5th May '15 7:23:01 PM by Kotomikun

Pretty much.

It is interesting that even the familiars are shown to have at least some intelligence. Getrud's could speak and tell that Madoka and Sayaka didn't belong there. The familiar that Sayaka was fighting could tell how many lies that person had told in their life. Homura's bird familiar are said in the cards to have the same level of intelligence as a real bird which are known to be smarter than most animals.

And the clara dolls are said to have power and teamwork that can match magical girls. That puts their intelligence at least on the level of primates. And of course the witches show intelligence in their targeting of victims. Targeting physically weak victims is normal for a predators but it shows some intelligence for them to know to target mentally weak victims which requires modeling their minds to know how they will act and think.

Familiar and new born witches are shown to have empty labyrinths that are just twisted versions of their location while slightly longer lived witches have labyrinths that functions to make it hard to reach them and are emotionally meaning full to them. This implies that the labyrinths don't take those shapes naturally but are rather design by the witches themselves. They are quite smart really.

+1 remember +1 This is all my fault

edited 6th May '15 8:47:24 AM by AceOfScarabs

They need to do it again but say it faster.

Just speed it up a little in Audiacity or something :V

But that'd require me to download it. Which is certainly withing my capabilities but nyaaaaaaaaah. *flops on couch*

Needs a version that ends with Homucifer, sort of like this video.

Double posting to say that this is a thing, feel free to contribute!

I'll probably add a character page soon.

Personally, I don't care too much for the spin offs.

I think it's amazing and hilarious that, if the page is any indication, they actually did any fucking research about Joan of Arc.

Including actual reference books.

That's just amazing.

I swear to Madokami, the last page of volume 1 says "reference books used will be revealed in the last volume".

Well, Joan of Arc was a Puella Magi after all.

An interesting bit of WMG. Some of the details are wrong—the countdown thing is at the start of the second movie, not the first (and there's a similar countdown in the series when Walpurgis appears, but that one doesn't look much like Homura's shield), and they don't seem to have cut out any scenes of Madoka crying—but it looks like there's probably some truth to it. Maybe this is what they meant by the movies being a separate continuity.

It's certainly possible but I don't think this changes too much, all things considered.

Didn't know that Homura had a not-familiar called Drosselmeyer. Nice nod to the Nutcracker story.

...Actually, isn't the girl in that story called Clara?

In the ballet, yeah. She's Maria in the book.

Not seeing any Liese, Lotte, or Lillia on either of those pages, though.

Needs to be shared.◊

Maybe I should stop dissing waifus from now on...

By the way, any news about the Church of Madoka?

edited 24th May '15 5:20:57 AM by judasmartel

Huh?

Quick question, and without spoilers from the third movie: Is Kyubey merely a Literal Genie, or does he also qualify as a Jackass Genie whose jackassness comes from a combination of his Lack of Empathy, the literalness of the wishes he makes (e.g. Sayaka's wish came exactly as she had wished for, meaning that her unvoiced hope for favorable consequences from said wish is never accounted for) and how he consistently lies by ommission of crucial information to the girls making the wishes (e.g. the aforementioned literalness, the fact that there is an Equivalent Exchange rule in play, and even just how bad the negative "compensation" of the wish's positive effects can be)?

edited 29th May '15 11:30:23 AM by MarqFJA

The wishes are granted based on both the spirit as well as the letter of the wish.

Mami's wish was to be "tied to life" which is a more metaphorical way of saying the more literal "not die now". Still got granted.

In her specific case, Kyubey completely neglected to tell her that he could, you know, include her very-recently-dead parents in said wish. Yet he completely glossed over it... which makes perfect sense, because the guilt from her later realization of this will make it easier to drive her to the Despair Event Horizon for Witchification.

Kyubey will always grant exactly what the girl wishes for and never really twists their wording. The problem, as Mami more or less points out, comes from the fact that the girls rarely know what they truly want when making a wish. Sayaka is the most obvious example of this since she wished for... Violin-kun's hand to be healed when what she really wanted was for him to love her. She deluded herself into thinking that her unselfish wish would somehow lead to her selfish desire when there was absolutely no reason for it to. When reality failed to meet her delusions, she fell to despair and turned into a Witch.

Kyouko is actually really similar to Sayaka in that regard since all she really wanted was for her family to be happy again. She thought that her father's church succeeding would lead to that and, really, she was right. It's just that she didn't consider the possible repercussions and things quickly went straight to hell. She handled it a lot better, obviously.

I think Sayaka might have ended up okay if she could have gotten Kyubey to reveal himself to Violin-kun (I wanna say his name is Kyousuke but that doesn't seem right) and made the wish in front of him. However, either that's impossible or no one considered it in any timeline given what Madokami says at the end.

His name's Kyousuke, yeah. Sayaka's love interests have practically the same first name for whatever reason.

Revealing themselves to the muggles is against coob policy, I think. But yes, that one completely serious and reliable route of the game confirms that Kyousuke would be all over Sayaka if he knew she was a magical girl (and not that she was a zombie).

Gloss over? What, should he take the time to list all the possible things she might want to wish for while she was bleeding out? He offered her a wish, she asked for the thing she wanted most right then, she got it in letter and spirit.