Sleepless Domain

Cassidy, there's this girl I know, her name's Rue. I think the two of you might have something in common there.

Anyhow, kick her ass, Undine. She's done enough to deserve it.

I like how we don't see Undine's face until those last two panels.

Also note that, despite Undine presumably being upset by this, there's not a single exclamation point in her dialogue. I think we're in Tranquil Fury time, now.

Understandable. Short of a confrontation with Goops, being accused of causing the deaths of her friends with little to no solid reasoning by some girl she sees on a club once in a while would probably be the thing that does it for her.

I suppose it's fortunate that Cassidy has duplication powers to revive herself.

Why do I get the feeling that Cassidy is going to actually end up dying soon, or losing one of her own teammates...

Or possibly already has, but took it very differently than Undine has. Though if that were the case I'd imagine it would have come up by now.

She mentioned her team in her first appearance, I think, so unless she lost them since Undine showed up and we just never heard it, I doubt that's the case.

Unless they're not her original team, but then we'd have to wonder how long Cassidy has been a Magical Girl for, and why we never heard about that in the first place. It seems like something HP would have mentioned to Undine, even if by accident.

...actually, that makes me wonder why we haven't seen more girls who outlived their friends. Can't be that low of a statistic, and you'd think some would reach out to Undine to offer support.

She also could have just lost a single member of her team without losing the whole.

Could be, but like you said, it sounds like something we would have heard about before this.

Reminder that losing a team member is not the only kind of personal loss. Or to put it another way: we know about Cassidy's team, but we don't know about Cassidy's family.

I think Cassidy's about to lose her face.

She might also be about to lose votes in the next popularity contest.

Guess that depends on what else we learn about Cassidy, if anything, before the next poll. It's possible she's got something in her Backstory that will garner sympathy, like a tragic past... though I have to say, I'm not really getting that impression from her right now. This feels like it stems more from inexperience, not "I went through something similar to you and find how you've coped with the loss suspicious".

Right now, this is reading more as her wanting to find something objectionable about Undine. Not just wanting to learn what happened, but wanting to make her out to be some kind of villain. And the thing is, even if Undine had decided to tell her the full story, I don't think Cassidy would have accepted it. Worse, she probably would've started cherry picking details to push forward her pet theory — "Oh, so some of your dead friends were envious of Tessa, but not you? How convenient that they aren't around to defend themselves anymore... and that you picked up a bit of pink right as Tessa lost her magic, too..."

I doubt she'd accept the notion that Tessa performed an unintentional Heroic Sacrifice, accidentally transferring some of her powers to her while trying to save her life. That doesn't fit the narrative she's trying to craft around her. And frankly, Undine's right: she doesn't owe her anything. Especially when Cassidy's just made it perfectly clear that she doesn't have any real intention of listening.

The comic seems to be going out of its way at points to avoid telling us how often or seldom girls die - e.g., Undine switching off the TV just before they tell us how long it's been since 3+ girls died at once. I don't know whether that's because we're being set up for something or Cagle just doesn't want to hammer out logistics.

As I've said before, once the opening act is through, the comic does seem to want to be a fairly cheery take on the Magical Girl concept. Dark moments, sure, but no more than any action series. Of course, in pretty much every action series, friends of friends get minced.

We also don't know just how unique Undine and HP's respective circumstances are, do we? Regarding power getting passed on. We only know that eyes are Windows of the Soul, and that having a different eye color from your hair color can signify that there's something more unusual about your powers... though not always, as Sally had yellow eyes and flame-red hair, and Forte Lead has fuchsia eyes/blonde hair, among others.

Still, Cassidy clearly suspects that the spot of pink in Undine's eyes is very significant... I wonder if she knows where HP got her powers from, and if that's factoring into her suspicions about Undine at all?

Sally's eyes didn't match, but they still complemented her fire theme. I rent HP making the point that completely out of place colors are what signify the oddity, like HP's and Undine's blue and pink combos.

...Thinking about it more, I wonder if there's a specific reason why we saw the cornerside cultist earlier this chapter. I imagine that guy and whatever group he belongs to would find the prospect of Tessa's noble self-sacrifice powering up Undine to be... inspiring. Accidental, yes, but they likely wouldn't treat it that way, would they?

After all, he's already suggesting that the girls being recompensed for their efforts is somehow perverting the whole process. Would they claim that what happened that night was 'fated'? That one or both girls serve as living proof of what magical girls should aspire towards...?

I've already been wondering about whether this has happened before, and fear somebody attempting to replicate the results...

Well, it's good to see a Madoka imitator going the route of "my pets are what all girls should aspire to, every other girl is a stupid selfish bimbo who deserves to die."

It's because constantly going the "LOOK AT ALL THE CORPSES OF STUPID GIRLS WHO THOUGHT THEY WEREN'T PATHETIC WEAKLINGS" route only makes the entire "these girls are too dumb to live, now watch them die so we can laugh at the survivors having PTSD" plot even more nonsensical.

It's a dark magical girl story, ergo every facet of worldbuilding exists purely to torture girls or depict girls as stupid.

Edited by healinfine on Feb 6th 2020 at 4:32:41 AM

wat

I think they're saying you can tell a Magical Girl story with actual stakes and drama without turning into snuff with a frilly dress like most "deconstruction" Magical Girl stories.

Frankly the worst thing Madoka ever did was take a thing for young girls and make it for grown ass dudes instead, and it made a ton of money so then everyone had to follow suit.

Edited by RodimusMinor on Feb 6th 2020 at 7:52:37 AM

But this isn't like that? Like, at all? There's clearly some foul play going on, and shit's definitely kinda fucked up, but ultimately the comic has been fairly optimistic throughout, and the only actual death we've seen was the initial team death at the start of the series, which was kind of a major inciting incident. Things can be dark without being edgy the way some shows go.

The undercurrent of the story remains "girls are Too Dumb to Live."

Because you can't have a dark magical girl story from a Madoka fangirl without shameless misogyny.

I don't even remotely agree but I'm curious as to why you think that.

Where on the surface of the earth did you get that argument from? That's nowhere near what the point of the story has been thus far.

The entire story is bog-standard Madoka rip-off "only the main character is a Good Girl and all others are stupid shallow dolts."

Wouldn't it be great if the genre wasn't overtaken by people who think it's deep and mature to appeal to men who love watching cute girls suffer and die horribly for daring to be heroes?

Edited by healinfine on Feb 6th 2020 at 5:29:22 AM