Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

i forgot that homura have glasses ыыыыы

Homura is just straight up one of the weirdest people imaginable. Like, forget about the time loop tragic doomed romance for a bit, I want to see what it looks like if she wins and then actually tries to romance Madoka. She has a massive collection of illegal firearms. She builds her own bombs. She lives in an ultra-modernist white box apartment that she's decorated with a couch made of concentric circles, a giant swinging knife pendulum to remind her of the ever-present flow of time, and a wall of several dozen screens. She communicates primarily in vague and ominous warnings and is more or less incapable of saying anything directly. She addresses everyone she meets by their full name with no honorific which comes across as bizarre and intimidating. If you count time loop years she's 26. She was raised in a catholic orphanage. I want to see her take Madoka on a horrifically bad date and cry in the bathroom partway through when she realizes she's fucking up

This is why Madoka is the ideal partner for Homura. Madoka meets a corkscrew-haired blond dual-toting rifles jumping into void portals to fight paper-mache nightmare manifestations, and instead of fleeing to the nearest authority figure in about a week she is down to enlist herself in the shadow games out of an explicitly-stated fit of "I have nothing better to do" pique. Homura would take her on a first date to a bomb-rigged shooting gallery in space where the targets are crucified porcelain dolls and it would be Madoka's new favorite game in five minutes. No one has ever been down for literally anything the way Madoka is.

To be 100% clear, my issue with Puella Magi Madoka Magica isn’t that I think magical girls going grim is intrinsically bad. Heck, the first season of Sailor Moon kills off 80% of the core cast in the final episode, albeit temporarily, and that was way back in 1992 – magical girl media has done grim.

It’s that, well, here’s a dude with seriously reactionary gender politics and an established history of writing media that displays an uncomfortable focus on teenage girls getting emotionally tortured for the entertainment of an adult male audience, waltzing into a genre that’s historically been targeted primarily at young girls, pulling his usual shit, promptly being lauded by critics for Revolutionising The Genre With His Bold Vision™ in spite of the fact that his material just isn’t terribly original (and much of that critical adulation carries a barely disguised subtext that he’s somehow elevated or dignified magical girl media by ridding it of its more conspicuously “girly” elements, to boot), and ultimately inspiring a wave of tedious imitators that threaten to crowd more traditional magical girl media out of the spotlight.

The fact that much of the show’s run isn’t particularly well written is about fourth or fifth on the list of what’s wrong with it.

(Also, this particular angle probably isn’t going to be super relatable to anybody under the age of 30, but the parallels between the grimmification of post-Madoka magical girl media and the grimmification of American superhero comics during the 1990s are pretty stark. I can’t argue in good faith that Gen Urobuchi is basically the Frank Miller of magical girl media, but their influence upon their respective genres is not wholly dissimilar!)

also, tl;dr bc my arm is hurt, but:

magical girl genre is about girls having power. its frequently grim and horrible and torturous but ultimately plot is driven by young girls and their decisions decide what happens. even when they are manipulated by malicious adults these adults are vulnerable to them just deciding to Not. the whole ‘dark magical girl’ trope is abt how even the antagonists need to have a young girl doing their bidding and her betrayal is a crucial piece in their defeat. sometimes its the power of friendship sometimes its the power of the moon but the point is always that ultimately what they do is what shapes the consequences. their love can kill the universe and creat it anew

madoka is all about how their decisions dont actually do anything. their wishes backfire, fighting witches is an endless cycle, Homura’s loop accomplished the exact opposite of what she was trying to do, and Madoka had to sacrifice her entire existence to make a retcon - the one (1) decision that managed to impact anything at all, and oh how grand it was (and completely opposite of Homura’s agency, too)

disempowerment of young girls is, how do i put this. not new

literally every magical girl show of the 2010s that isnt precure: WATCH OUT because this isnt like other magical girl shows! this show is DARK! this show is a COMPLETE DECONSTRUCTION of the magical girl genre! this girl has a cute wand that shoots hearts but the hearts KILL PEOPLE!

If you want to fight me, you can, but be prepared for a 2k essay on magical girls

tag ur fav one, im chaotic neutral 

let say i disagree with all of those

can i have the essay

pls op

I have to agree actually. I loved how dark and terrible PMMM was but if everything magical girl anime was like that…

Nothing wrong with curling with CCS or Sailor Moon and letting the positive emotions and reinforcement of love and friendship remind you the world isn’t all darkness and evil.

Princess Tutu was maybe a great mix for me but I don’t know where it falls on that spectrum

It’s not even just that the series are gritty or dark, though I agree I would be seriously upset if that were every magical girl anime (which, outside of PreCure is increasingly becoming the case, and I’ve never seen a PreCure series), it’s why they are dark, and the way that they’re dark. It’s about where the darkness comes from. 

In PMMM, Yuki Yuuna is a Hero, and now Magical Girl Raising Project, the dark elements are in-narrative punishments for the choice to be a magical girl in the first place. 

In PMMM, if no girl had ever had the ambition to wish for something from an incubator, there would be no witches. Point blank. The problem they are solving is one girls created by wanting things, because girls’ desires are always corrupt or corruptible. The main characters are walking corpses because they are magical girls. They experience physical and psychological horrors because they made a wish.  Literally, their own aspirations and ambitions are the source of their own hurt. It’s a “be careful what you wish for” story, an admonishment of their hubris. 

Except wanting to be a magical girl isn’t hubris. At most it’s confidence, and usually it’s just wanting to be able to make a difference and be seen as strong, which is something that girls rarely get to do. That’s not something we should be punishing girls for. 

Similarly, in Yuki Yuuna (ABLEIST PIECE OF TRASH THAT IT IS), every time the girls use their strongest powers, another part of their body stops working, something that wasn’t told to them when they eagerly agreed to be magical girls. (Eventually one of the characters decides that it’s so terrible living with disabilities that she tries to end the world, and no, I’m not kidding). They main conflict of the series isn’t the external villains they’re fighting, it’s the suffering they have to go through to be magical girls, suffering they wouldn’t have if they had just stayed home. Their own bodies are the price for having power. 

And now in Magical Girl Raising Project, a bunch of kids who grew up loving magical girls and wanting to be magical girls who play a magical girl app game in their spare time because of how much they love it are given their wish. They get to live out their power fantasy. But now in exchange the game is going to start killing off half of them (or make them kill each other) because there can’t be TOO MANY powerful women all at once. Again, if these characters hadn’t wanted to be powerful and strong and magical, there would be no conflict for them. The conflict comes directly from their choice, as a direct punishment for their choice, to be a magical girl.

Girls who choose the ultimate Girl Power Fantasy get punished for choosing that fantasy. 

That’s different from just dark. Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha was male-gaze driven kind of terrible show. Nanoha was literally originally a little sister character in a series of erotic dating sims and OVAs called Triangle Heart. Despite not being a love interest character (BECAUSE SHE IS EIGHT AND RELATED TO THE PROTAGONIST) she developed a large fandom (BECAUSE MEN ARE DISGUSTING), so they created a magical girl spin-off series for her (because that’s what you did with popular female characters in early aughts) and gave it lots of fanservice, of the eight year old protagonist (BECAUSE MEN ARE DISGUSTING). 

ANYWAY Nanoha was also often an incredibly dark franchise. And you know what? I have some small criticism of that because some of that was almost certainly included for literal torture porn reasons, but also the dark narrative elements of Nanoha bother me way less than they do in shows like Yuki Yuuna or PMMM. 

Because the dark elements were external things that Nanoha had to fight against. Not something she created by becoming a magical girl. In the series there’s a character named Fate who is literally tortured on screen by her own mother. There’s a little girl and a sort of book of the damned that’s basically gonna destroy the world. And they fight with giant mecha gun wands. And honestly all those things are still fine by me as elements of a mahou shoujo show.

In Nanoha I don’t mind the dark or gritty story elements as much. Because in Nanoha they aren’t punishments. 

(Reminder: Nanoha is NOT GOOD. It doesn’t hold up narratively and it is full of super gross fanservice)

And I fucking love Princess Tutu. The bad things happening are in no way a punishment for Ahiru. Drosselmeyer tries to make it that way, but he was being a jerk long before Ahiru chose to become Princess Tutu, and his continued jerkiness was not a punishment for her choice. Princess Tutu is ultimately all about it being totally acceptable to want to change the world, no matter who you are, even if you’re just a duck, even if people are telling you you can’t. And it validates that you can do that. It’s 100% serviceable as a power fantasy, even if the story does get unexpectedly dark. 

Because my main complaint is about punishing girls for having power fantasies, not about dark or unsettling storytelling.

I mean, magical girls as a genre are ostensibly still founded upon a genre of children’s shows, so it’d be bad to not also keep the CCS and PreCure variations on the genre. I want little girls to have a safe and happy place to play. I like happy flowers and hearts and glitter. I generally prefer cheerful stories to ~edgy~ ones.

But honestly I’d be A-OK with an occasional grimdark horror magical girl series where things get graphic and unsettling. That can still be a power fantasy. Shounen series do it all the time. Hunter x Hunter gets incredibly dark. But Gon is always a good hopeful kid, and there’s nothing in the narrative that says he’s bad for wanting to be become the strongest hunter in the world, or that he created the darkness in the world by wanting to be powerful. Dark terrible shit happens, hope is still the heart of the series, boys aren’t punished for having power fantasies. 

I don’t want grimdark to be the staple of Magical Girls anymore, but it’s not just that these shows are grimdark. I’d be okay with a mature gritty magical girl series that wasn’t about punishing girls for being powerful. But that’s what this new trend is, it’s in-narrative punishments for girls who have power fantasies. And that’s bullshit. Girls can want to be strong and special and important. They should want to. We spend too much time telling them they aren’t those things. You aren’t evil or sabotaging yourself for wanting to be confident and strong. 

wittyblather replied to your post: “congrats on finishing madoka! did you have a favorite scene or like…”:

I mean, you know, YOU DO YOU. If Madoka is your foundation, more power to you. What I think and feel have absolutely nothing to do with how you should think and feel. You don’t need my approval for a goddamn thing.

BUT SINCE YOU MENTIONED IT. I didn’t get that at the end. I got the LIP SERVICE of that, I mean they sure used the word “hope” a lot. But the threat didn’t vanish, the need for magical girls wasn’t erased, it just altered. There were SO MANY things Madokusa could’ve wished for. The incubators to have never come to earth, like I said in a previous post. For them to have emotions, so they could understand the evil they were doing and maybe find another solution to the entropy problem. FOR A SACRIFICE-AND-BATTLE-FREE SELF-RENEWING ENERGY SOURCE TO AVOID THE PROBLEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I don’t buy that Madokusa wouldn’t have been smart enough to figure this out when she seemed to have PERFECT comprehension of her solution which is so fucking complicated as to be laughable. There were perfectly good potential solutions that the story would’ve chosen. Instead, the series demands Yet One More Sacrifice: For Madokusa to fight always forever for all time and yet never have existed.

Which can’t even mean anything in and of itself because Madokusa barely existed to begin. She’s not even compelling as Intensealot’s focus, because it’s functionally “She was nice to me on my first day of school.” Even her power wasn’t because of her. Madokusa more than anyone was a prop in what is sold as her story, and for me that completely guts any possible emotional resonance in her being this figure of all hope. None of it comes from HER, it comes because the story says so, in the same way it said she had to sacrifice herself in the end.

AND I FRANKLY QUESTION THAT EVEN THAT WORKED

The little epilogue at the end is only a glimpse, but it’s a pretty fucking grim glimpse. We go from Intensealot shown with a group of teammates (Fang and Boom Boom still fighting the good fight) and sweeping into battle in the center of the city on wings of light

to her wandering alone through desolation and sweeping into battle on jagged wings of darkness and despair easily recognized as the domain of the witches.

And the very final shot? That despair consuming everything.

We hear Madokusa’s voice and that brings intensealot some kind of peace, but given that it’s Intensealot we’re talking about, I don’t find that particularly comforting.

Obviously there’s no hard answers (in the episode, anyway) about what any of this means. It’s open to whatever interpretation you want to take from it. But for me, the juxtaposition of these two scenes is deliberate. If you end the story where stories normally end, I can get that essence of hope. But if you press on, you get the “real” end, where really nothing has changed at all.

It’s still Homura, alone in a fight that’s impossible to win, with only the ghost of Madoka urging her ever onward.

All this pain, all this suffering, all this sacrifice, and really all anyone accomplished was a change of scenery.

BUT I STRESS AGAIN: It’s very open to interpretation. Even if it weren’t, it doesn’t matter. The give and take relationship we have with our stories is ultimately very personal. I’m correct for me, but that doesn’t mean I have to be correct for you.

YOU ARE SO VERY RIGHT.

I do feel like Madoka has accomplished /something/ - if you assume that the worst part of being a magical girl is then having all good you ever did balanced out by doing evil later, it has changed now, and maybe it's no longer a balance of hope&despair, and hope is winning now.

BUT YOUR POINT ABOUT PREVENTING THE WHOLE THING VERY MUCH STANDS. It wouldn't serve the message the same way, sure, but it just means the conjunction of plot&message doesn't work out. IF YOU FIND THAT A PROBLEM FOR YOUR CHARACTERS CAN BE SOLVED IN A MUCH EASIER WAY THAN IS NEEDED FOR YOUR IDEA, YOU MESS WITH THE CIRCUMSTANCES UNTIL YOU HAVE A BETTER IDEA OR A BETTER PROBLEM, NOT JUST SAY "AH FUCK IT NO-ONE WOULD NOTICE". wtf @ madoka writers

I think the entire time I watched it I waited for Madoka to do emotionally satisfying and investment-worthy protagonist things, but... she just never did. SHE HAD SOLD HER SOUL FOR A KITTEN. Madoka was never anything, and even Homura's crush was never anything explained.

Sure, Homura was great, but she didn't even get it treated explicitly enough for all viewers to get the message without reading into it as deeply as you did (YOU CALLED ALL THE PLOT TWISTS BEFORE THEY HAPPENED GOOD JOB HOLY FUCK)

tl;dr i agree with this post and everything it stands for

I 100% acknowledge this as a criminal act, but it seemed to amuse some people on twittors so I’ll share it here too. I’m so sorry!

My pinterest with all my Undertales (spoiler-filled)

honestly don’t you think the rose/pearl relationship at this point is a little similar to madoka/homura

#the unhealthy you are the only thing that matters and ill die over and over for you#steven universe

oh god you are i think the first person i see point out that homumado was unhealthy too god bless u

also both madoka and rose are pink ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED jk trope-y color coding of the 'innocent and sweet' female character confirmed

On a scale of Madoka Magica to Steven Universe how well do you cope with your soul being contained inside a gem and your body being just a vessel used so you can fight enemies that used to be just like you

this is the worst thing i have ever made

tbh the similarities between these shows are kinda uncanny

you know an anime means business when nobody has blue hair

??????????????????

is that a fucking chocolate fish?

Hetalia is the most serious anime out there trust me I’m a doctor

the best post