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*** Actually, there's another implication to TheStinger than just "she's going mad" that one can take away from it. She has put everyone who matters into situations which [[InAnotherMansShoes 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. [[HappyDance Now they can't interfere]] and what will happen afterwards between Homura and Madoka is truly unknown, and she's [[ObfuscatingInsanity prepared for the worst]]. Indeed, Homura's left us and herself with a real [[IncrediblyLamePun cliff-hanger]].
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*** Actually, there's another implication to TheStinger than just "she's going mad" that one can take away from it. She has put everyone who matters into situations which [[InAnotherMansShoes 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. [[HappyDance Now they can't interfere]] and what will happen afterwards between Homura and Madoka is truly unknown, and she's [[ObfuscatingInsanity prepared for the worst]]. Indeed, Homura's left us and herself with a real [[IncrediblyLamePun [[{{Pun}} cliff-hanger]].
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*** 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.
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*** 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.
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*** 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 [[Laconic/ComplainingAboutShowsYouDontLike whining because Homura is popular and that bothers you.]]
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*** 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.''
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**** 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.
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*** 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?
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**** 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 [[labelnote: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[[/labelnote]] 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.
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**** 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 TakeAThirdOption 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.
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**** 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.
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**** 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.
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** 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.
