All Purpose Puella Madoka Fanfiction Thread

But can she still succeed without his imposing and possibly-magical Schwanzstüke?

So this isn't the only thing in the pagetopper, a spinoff of Resonance Days indicates that the species targeted by Incubators include "centaurs with two eyes on stalks rising above the ones in their skulls and bladed tails". Because Animorphs didn't have enough secret child soldiers already.

edited 23rd Aug '14 8:02:58 PM by rikalous

Even without Rasputin, Princess Anastasia is pretty much the perfect historical meguca candidate. Complete with mysterious disappearance in her teenage years.

edited 23rd Aug '14 7:01:10 PM by SabresEdge

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

@Pacific Hom: .... Not interested. Mostly because, as presented in that image, it looks like one of those crappy crossovers where it pretty much boils down to Characters And Plot Of Franchise A, But With Names And Appearances Of Franchise B.

A better crossover would be Raleigh and Mako piloting Gypsy Danger to beat the crap out of Walpurgisnacht. <Beat> Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the first place my mind goes whenever "PMMM crossed with [whatever]" comes up, excepting those times I brought up Evangelion and The Legend Of Zelda Majoras Mask.

I might be a killjoy, but my first thought about any crossover is "would it make good narrative sense?" rather than "how can I maximize the spectacle of [A] plus [B]?"

The great thing about PMMM is that it lends itself naturally to the secret history genre: a historical fantasy that nevertheless conforms with the recorded facts; better yet, it throws light on a historical paradox or puzzle. Tim Powers is the acknowledged master here. For instance, in the aftermath of a particularly intense Walpurgisnacht event (Krakatoa 1887? Galveston 1900?), a meguca makes a wish for no more Walpurgisnachts. Which is fine as far as it goes, but that just means the witches' sabbath is delayed, and delayed, and delayed, and building up power all the while...

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

My crossover thoughts tend to go "characters of A, mechanics of B, what does that give us?" So if I were going to be crossing over Madoka and Pacific Rim, I'd try to figure out either how the meguca would work as Jaeger pilots (all the yuri pairs make who drifts with who really fucking obvious unless I start grabbing characters from Kazumi, Jaegers and Kaiju are based off of witches) or how the Jaeger pilots would work as meguca (Mako's backstory would be adjusted so she was orphaned by some natural disaster instead of a kaiju, everyone is now a little girl, Newt has some creepy monster powers).

Spectacle and narrative sense are both worthy things to strive for.

Disagree there. The first's all right in small amounts to help embellish a scene; the second forms the backbone of the story. Otherwise you get the prose equivalent of Michael Bay's movies, and that's not what I watched PMMM for. Basically, for it to be a great story, it has to engage you as much or more on the second or third read as it does on the first. Pretty explosions or fancy concepts don't do that for me.

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

You've never thought of something that worked solely on Rule of Cool?

That said, I should probably make myself clearer on the "spectacle" part of my previous post. If you're going to do spectacle, then you should do your damnedest to make it as spectacular as possible.

Sometimes, it doesn't need to make sense if it's awesome enough.

That said, however, PMMM is generally not an easy series to pull that off with.

edited 24th Aug '14 4:54:39 PM by EvaUnit01

It's quite a bit harder to pull off when your idea of "cool" is "sustained company-sized combined-arms advance", which, believe me, isn't something that mixes well with witches' barriers. I imagine scenarios like that; whether or not they can actually be integrated into a story that makes narrative sense is another matter entirely. I'm a lot more excited over the prospect of describing how the events unfold and affect each other, and that demands workable premises to go off.

So, "it's cool" might be a valid reason to start working on a story/scenario/what-have-you, but unless you can also include "and it makes sense", nix. "It's cool but it makes no sense" just smacks of laziness.

(I'm aware I may have just committed grave heresy by denouncing the Rule of Cool. Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.)

edited 24th Aug '14 5:40:11 PM by SabresEdge

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

Well, of course the best way to enhance Rule of Cool is when you make it actually make sense in addition to being cool.

I thought that went without saying.

Then again, there's been many a premise that I started out going "hey, wouldn't be awesome if...?" and then a couple of days/weeks/months/years later I still have something of the initial premise I want to work with, but have decided to go in a completely different direction with it, because the new direction makes more sense than the original premise as envisioned at the time.

... come to think of it, most of what I just described can mostly be traced back to 1) TVT, and 2) being introduced to postmodernism and the ideas of subverting, averting, and tearing apart certain ideas and expectations, as well as the idea of building them back in a way that works better.

But yeah, where PMMM is involved, generally I do go more for narrative sense than for Rule of Cool.

Except that time where I had Walpurgisnacht and Kyubey get owned by Simon piloting Gurren Lagann. That one, I have no excuses for. But my other two, more-than-just-a-crack-oneshot PMMM ideas are definitely more on the "ongoing narrative to explore characterization" side of things.

edited 24th Aug '14 9:12:49 PM by EvaUnit01

So looking on ffnet, what Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure gets crossed over with more than anything else is Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

A couple of them are even pretty cool. (both oneshots, focusing on PMMM characters briefly encountering and talking with a JoJo.)

This multi-chaptered fic has an interesting summary, but I haven't had time to read it yet.

I already posted in the recommendation page, but I'd like to call attention for two crossovers:

Grief Science, a crossover with Portal, in which the cores are humanized, and All For You, at least read for Homura fighting Yuno, in their ultimate forms.

My work is here. Current main fic: Tengen Toppa Gurren Solvernia

Yuno?

Man, that really would be tricky to pull off. First off, only infantry can enter labyrinths, it seems. Then you have the whole issue with "normals can't see witches" thing, and even if they're accompanied by a magical girl, directing them to fend off familiars would be dicey - you defintely couldn't be going in with a whole company (not even getting into witch kisses). Once they reach the core of the maze, the witch might be slightly easier to take down - the MG can focus her energies on defending the infantry from witch attacks while they focus their firepower on the beast.

Of course, ideally you'd want maybe three magical girls to pass the grief seed around and defend the assault team.

edited 29th Aug '14 4:00:24 PM by majoraoftime

Believe me, I've thought up several potential setups. They all center around a meguca who is wealthy enough to hire a bunch of troops (a wish for money? Political power?) and then leads them into a barrier. Not quite "company-sized", but a modern or even late-Great War era infantry squad packs a lot of firepower.

The thing is, normals probably can't see barriers from the outside. Once they've been absorbed—or inducted—into a barrier, it's a different story entirely. The way I see it, before they made their contracts, Madoka and Sayaka had a lot of magical potential, but they weren't actively magical in any way. Yet they were able to see the barrier just fine once the witch absorbed them into it. Theoretically, then, the same should apply for ordinary people.

The problem is actually making that into a story. It's a great potential scenario, but wringing a good narrative out of it is a bit more challenging.

edited 29th Aug '14 3:54:50 PM by SabresEdge

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

Yep, the same.

My work is here. Current main fic: Tengen Toppa Gurren Solvernia

edited 29th Aug '14 8:30:35 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

Okay. Have finally gotten around to reading the first chapter of Soul Gem is Unbreakable, and I love the hell out of it.

You know, I had a weird thought about PMMM after binging some horror movies. Are Puella possession-proof? I mean, technically they're corpses being possessed by their own Soul Gem, right? So, are they possession proof, since their soul gem have dibs, or are they more vulnerable?

Hm. So are we assuming that an already-possesed mundane is not going to be able to be possessed by any other possessor, then? Because the most obvious explanation for why that would happens seems to me that it would be that the vessel is too full to permit any other interlopers. In that case, having your soul in a rock wouldn't provide any particular possession protection.

I do think they'd be harder to possess than mundanes, not because their soul's in a rock but because that process gives them magic. Plus, possession effects that require the vessel to be alive would presumably fail.

It's technically alive. When they have their rock, it's breathing, eating and presumably crapping. More like 'the body is already being possessed, does that mean no one else can possess it'? Although this is likely no protection against those capable of MULTIPLE possession...

And suddenly I'm wondering what stories would work for a PMMM/Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service crossover...

edited 31st Aug '14 7:55:19 PM by SCMof2814

Absent a reason that it's invalid to model your standard mundane as a spirit constantly possessing their own body, I don't see why that would be so.

edited 31st Aug '14 7:55:32 PM by rikalous

Well, in possession-based horror movies, no one seems to ever get possessed by more than one at a time.

Which could just be because you can't fit more than two spirits in a body, and only one gets control at a time.

Basically, I'm not sure what would be different about meguca spirits possessing their own bodies as opposed to normal person spirits inhabiting their own bodies. I mean, normal people go around controlling their own bodies all the time. How is that different from possession?

Possession by multiple spirits dates as far back as the Bible. "My name is Legion, because we are many."