Puella Magi Madoka Magica

I don't think that the Incubators did realize how enormous Madoka's potential was. Her power level was outside of their understanding, because it was caused (indirectly) by Homura's wish rather than by the normal rules governing magical girls and witches. Certainly they knew that she was extremely powerful without any obvious cause, which was an anomaly, but when she actually gets around to making her wish in the final loop, even Kyubey is caught off guard by how powerful she actually turns out to be. I'm pretty sure it's the only time in the series where he's actually visibly surprised.

Kyubey's not caught off-guard by how powerful Madoka is. He's caught off-guard by what she uses her wish for: rewriting the laws of physics and becoming a deity.

Over and over throughout the series, he all but begged her to contract because she'd be the most powerful Magical Girl ever and then turn into the most powerful Witch ever. He knows what she's capable of. But he wasn't expecting her to use her wish to alter the entire universe in a way that would f*ck him and his entire system over.

He tells her repeatedly that she has basically infinite potential and could wish for literally anything ever. He just wasn't expecting her to do something like that. He thought she'd wish for a big cake or something like most Magical Girls do, and then BOOM: quota filled.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 5th 2019 at 3:49:29 AM

His line in reaction to Madoka's wish is "If a wish like that were granted, it could unravel the fabric of time itself! It would go against the very force of destiny! Do you truly intend to become a god?!"

That reads to me less like "oh shit, she figured out a way to fuck us!" and more like "do you actually think you can pull that kind of wish off?!" Of course, he realizes pretty much immediately that the answer is "yes, she can", but it still seems like he was caught by surprise to me.

Actually, it occurs to me that he's still surprised either way. It's just a question of whether he was surprised by Madoka's ability to make such a wish and have it stick, or by her decision to make a wish like that instead of a far more limited one like most magical girls make.

Edited by NativeJovian on Sep 5th 2019 at 8:40:09 AM

I think it was a matter of Gone Horribly Right on the incubators' (and Homura's to an extent) part. It does have me wondering if the little weasels are capable of emotion.

BTW are there any Madoka/Magia Record pictures I can use as a forum icon here?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 5th 2019 at 5:50:33 AM

He literally questions her intentions, not her potential, in that exact bit you quoted. Here's the pertinent bit: "Do you truly intend to become a god?"

What part of that question makes you think he's being skeptical about power levels?

Mostly the phrase "if a wish like that were granted". It raises the possibility that it might not be granted. The only reason that a wish would fail to be granted, so far as I know, is if the wish were too much for the girl's potential to grant — but that gets fuzzy because we never actually see that happen so it's unclear what the mechanism there is.

Personally, I think Kyubey starts with a hypothetical (if it were granted...) because he hasn't considered the possibility that such a thing is possible even for Madoka, and ends with questioning her motives because over the course of two sentences he's realized it is possible and is kind of freaking out.

@MorningStar1337, I would recommend going to Pixiv (just make sure to turn the general filter on!) or go on twitter and search the japanese name of your magical girl of choice. You may have to resize or crop the picture, of course.

Edited by Uninstall on Sep 5th 2019 at 11:07:25 AM

I believe Magia Record has a girl wish for something beyond her power. It results in the girl getting a memory wipe of what she did instead of retconing it.

Edited by doineedaname on Sep 5th 2019 at 11:57:13 AM

@Morning Star: In Kazumi Magica, Kyubey claims that if a member of their species expresses emotion they are considered mentally ill and are cut off from the rest of their kind. As a result, Kyubey expressed interest in interacting with Juubey, as he had never met another of his kind with emotions.

Juubey had special spoilery circumstances as to why they had emotions, though it should be possible for incubators in general.

Edited by Zeromaeus on Sep 5th 2019 at 1:46:26 PM

Ah, so it ends up with a watered down version of the wish instead of just fizzling and doing nothing? Interesting.

I don't think that that person in particular necessarily wished for something beyond her karmic burden. The main issue is that the girl who made the wish at the time was extremely distressed and confused.

Felicia, while trying to play a prank, accidentally started a fire that burned down her apartment and killed her parents. Her wish was "I want you to make it so that this never happened." However, her extreme guilt basically changed the meaning of the wish into "I wish I wasn't the one who was responsible for this", therefore her memories of the incident were wiped and she came to believe that her parents were killed by Witches. It's a pretty fucked-up situation.

Her witch form is a giant eye that closes when it sees something it can't accept and tries to destroy it.

I don't really see the incubators as utilitarian. That's usually about maximizing happiest or pleasure, or minimizing suffering. None of which really factors into the incubators goals.

Part of the problem is that I don't think Kyubey's actions are rational. So only so much can be read into his goals and values. He could try to have Madoka off world, when she turns, and have her and the Earth, but he doesn't even try. Once he knows how she got that strong, being able to do it repeatedly, is way more important than doing it once right away. And until he knows, it's easier to find out, if she's alive.

It also doesn't seem like they're farming humans effectively. They could easily expand the population to dyson swarm levels, given the implied amount of time. This doesn't require that humans have the know how to do it themselves. They don't even need to know that there is a universe outside of their own habitat. And obviously you don't stop at one swarm.

Not directly lying does seem like it has to be a part of it. That's on the assumption that we can trust the story. It's not clear whether the rules about not telling people what to wish for, or just walking up and making them magical girls, without even telling them that much, are policy or actually how magic works. I tend towards the latter. Kyubey never says he values humanity existing for it's own sake, only that their treatment of us is better than livestock.

speak of the devil, I just wound up drawing her during a Fate Weave, making her the 2nd of the protagonists to get an unexpected Early-Bird Cameo (the first being Sana, who I've drew...thrice), as I just barely started the chapter where Iroha was supposed to meet her.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 6th 2019 at 5:08:11 AM

Still think that karma still has something to do with it. Tsuruno wishes for 800 million yen, but her implicit wish is for her restaurant to do better. The fulfilled wish from the contract never actually fulfill the implicit intention of the wish, but the way the wish is worded, so Felicia's is a pretty rare exception. The only answer to this is that her karma isn't enough, as her future should she never made contract would simply be her living with her grandmother - which we don't really know anything of.

BTW, I want to ask how many of the franchises' villains are Anti Villains? I t seems like between post Rebellion-Homura, Oriko and maybe the Wings of Magius, there are quite a few running around.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 7th 2019 at 10:54:36 AM

Oriko kind of depends on the timelien IIRC as the extra bonus manga for her shows she'd mostly be straight up heroic if it wasn't for Gretchen threatening to wipe out the planet.

Suzune is basically an Anti-Villain Villain Protagonist

As for the Wings of Magius, I wouldn't really call Touka and Nemu anti-villains, more on the side of Well Intentioned Extremists who lost their moral compass. Mifuyu is more of a coward than an anti-villain, and the Amanes are basically Team Rocket; the three of them defect when they realize that the Magius' plan is too monstrous for their conscience. Alina is a gleeful full-villain, though.

I've had enough time to watch the anime with my mother since I don't have that much else to do.

We're only on episode 4, but I think she's enjoying it. She said she really likes the collage-style animation in the witch labyrinths. I concur that it's a lot easier to follow the fights against the witches in the anime than in the manga, which in hindsight seems to have been made for people already familiar with the anime.

At the end of episode 4, she predicted that Sayaka's wish will backfire, Kyosuke will reject her, and most interestingly enough, that Sayaka "will probably turn into one of those wi- bitter magical girls [like Homura]." I laughed that her near-confusion on terminology nearly lead her to making a perfect prediction of Sayaka's fate.

(As a side note, it just occured to me that Homura ironically looks like a human, anime version of Octavia Melody)

Edited by SantosLHalper on Sep 7th 2019 at 10:23:33 AM

It was always my interpretation that Madoka's wish could have been impossible for anyone else and only worked because of the built-up karmic power she had thanks to Homura.

Homura is herself an example of a magical girl whose wish was never fulfilled. She wished to have the power to save Madoka, and she never had enough power to do it. In fact, fate played a cruel joke and made her the weakest magical girl ever even when she had specifically asked for strength. Her wish was never fulfilled because because she sought to fight death itself with no karmic potential. Even when she learned to compensate for her weakness and used outside means to maximize her destructive potential, she still couldn't fulfill her wish. It is only in Madoka's new reality, where her powers were given by the new god of the universe herself, that Homura gained enough karmic destiny to finally fulfill her original wish.

Sounds to me like she did indeed get her wish, even if it was in a more roundabout way than usual.

Homura's wish was always kinda creepy if you think about it.

"Make her dependant on me"

Edited by asterism on Sep 8th 2019 at 7:19:58 PM

I always thought that the way that Homura's wish played out was a bit of a cop-out. It was "I want a do-over, but this time I want to be strong enough to protect Madoka". She gets her do-over, but she's a magical girl this time so she's strong enough to protect Madoka. She doesn't actually manage to protect Madoka, but that's not what she wished for. But... the wish gives her another do-over anyway? And another and another? The stupidest part is they easily could have just made that her wish — instead of "I want a do-over but this time I'll be strong enough to protect her", make it "I want to do it over, again and again, as many times as it takes until I protect Madoka!". Now her wish makes sense, easy peasy.

Honestly, Madoka's wish was the same thing. Her wish is "I want to erase all wishes before they're born, past, present, and future". Alright, fair enough, we've already seen that wishes can enable time travel and we know that Madoka is the most powerful magical girl ever by a long shot — so she can time-travel to every moment in history just before a wish is created, one-shot it, and then time travel somewhere else.

But nope, apparently she has to become a god, rewrite the rules of the universe, and erase her own presence from reality. Uh, okay? That doesn't follow from the wish at all, but whatever, the story says it happens so that's what happens, I guess.

Question, how ofthen are there Difficulty Spikes in Magia Record? Like would you need to heavily invest in units just to make it to the (currently unreleased in NA) end of the main story without wasting gems on continues?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 8th 2019 at 9:04:08 AM

Magia Record anime coming January 2020.