![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swatkatThis is to inform you that I have finished watching the remaining six episodes of Madoka Magica, and also to inform you that I now have hearts in my eyes. And tears. And a new candidate for the post of Favourite Tragic Woobie Ever.
See, I have some storytelling kinks. Give me some EPIC
"Every night I save you."
All right, so I just quoted Spike, but tell me it isn't apt. Homura saw Madoka die, and Homura wanted her to live—not just live, Homura wanted to protect Madoka the way Madoka had protected her. Homura wanted to keep her safe. So she made the wish and gave up her soul, and tried to save Madoka over and over again in a hundred different timelines—never stopping, never giving up, never giving in to the despair always threatening to overwhelm every magical girl. With every timeline, they grew further apart, until the unmistakable camaraderie of the timeline where Madoka asks for help disappeared and Madoka barely recognized Homura, but that was okay if Homura could only keep Madoka. And in every timeline, she watched her die.
ASFAGGSSDSG;ASF;;;
I'm sorry, perhaps stories like this happen in anime all the time, but where I come from these storylines are seldom reserved for women, and they certainly do not involve more than one woman except in femslashers' wildest dreams: a little bit of keysmashing is warranted, I think.
I will always have a special place in my heart for tragic heroes, and I love how the plot—which, with the episode ten reveal, became very much Homura's story—unfolded like a perfect tragedy: it wasn't just that Homura would lose Madoka in every timeline, it was also that every little thing she did, every move she made, would push Madoka further and further towards her inevitable end—death, or worse, becoming the most powerful witch ever. That's how Kyubey's system worked. It claimed to 'empower' the magical girl and pushed her towards a self-destructive cycle where she ultimately becomes what she had once fought to destroy. And with every timeline jump, every attempt to save Madoka, Homura added to the burden of despair that Madoka was ultimately doomed to bear (within Kyubey's system). Homura wrote her own tragedy.
And that's why I was pleased with the ending—where Homura's struggle ceases to be a futile one, and becomes instrumental in a larger triumph—even though I wish Homura had got to keep her Madoka too. But it isn't just about an individual tragedy, is it? Homura's single-minded focus on Madoka is also her blindness (her selfishness—note that I don't use the word in a negative sense; more on that later), the reason why Madoka is the one to break the cycle, not Homura.*
*You actually see a bit of this in the Oriko Magica manga, where Homura is all 'I have to save you', and Madoka is like 'Why me? Why not everyone?' It's practicality for Homura, in a way—she can't save everyone, so she's picked one person she can. What she does not see however is that her entire existence as a magical girl has been defined by saving this one girl, and this girl alone.
"I'd see it all again ... do something different. Faster or more clever, you know?"
Kyubey and his species' energy-gathering system is built on one thing: exploiting the many feelings of young women, harvesting their pain in the name of generating hope, pushing them towards a cycle of self-destructive despair until they become what they had once fought, and pave the way for similar exploitation of other girls after them. It comes from a certain understanding of humanity as essentially selfish, essentially full of inexplicable feelings, essentially in love with melodramatic stories about hope and fighting the good fight; humanity as energy-producing cattle with a lot of feelings. It's not an inaccurate reading of human beings, all things considered, but it has one problem—it lacks nuance.
Sure, human beings are selfish and melodramatic, but out of that selfishness come superhuman efforts like Homura's bid to keep Madoka alive, which changed the entire universe. Out of that selfish desire to not see any other girl cry, comes an absolutely selfless wish like Madoka's, which is what allows her to break the cycle and attain nirvana rewrite the rules of the universe. And of course, she couldn't have done it alone—if it weren't for Homura, if it weren't for Sayaka and Kyuoko and Mami keeping her alive in this timeline so that she could make that wish.
(Kyubey thought it was the perfectly scripted tragedy, but by his own admission—he just doesn't understand human beings. He didn't know what they could be capable of. And hence his surprise when the laws of the universe were being re-written. If he were a truly malicious figure, he wouldn't have granted the wish, but Kyubey isn't malicious—he just doesn't care. He is as much bound by the system as the magical girls are.)
"You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman."
I've been peeking around the internets, looking for reactions to the finale, and one of the principal complaints seem to be, 'But what does Madoka get for her self-sacrifice? How is this any different from the same old tired trope of the self-sacrificing woman?' And I don't really have an argument to offer against that, because Madoka making a (very human) selfless wish and transcending the physical body to become a bodhisattva an elemental force makes perfect emotional sense to me. It's very clear in the final scene between Madoka and Homura, where Homura is still talking about things in a human scale, but Madoka is not. She is now hope itself. She sees the value of Homura's human love for her, but she has also gained a lot more and learned a lot more, so that the loss that love and the possibility of more matters very little.
(Of course, the Madoka/Homura shipper in me would rather Homura had got her girlfriend instead.)
Another complaint, from what I see, is 'How is disappearing any better than what things were before?' But that too doesn't make any sense to me, because of course disappearing—dying—is better. It is not, perhaps, a very positive outcome in terms of material rewards, but here's the thing: Madoka's rewriting of the rules allows the magical girls to be just... magical girls instead of sacrifical goats, just your ordinary superheroes who fight for the world and then die for it, without any material reward than the simple reward of being a superhero.
It's a little odd to think that I have all these ~feelings from something that is primarily aimed at a male audience that likes cute little schoolgirls in skirts (or am I wrong and it also targets an adult female audience?), but then I read superhero comics, and look at the feelings I get from that. So, well played, Tumblr. Well played. You know my kinks and you cater to them, and I do appreciate that a lot.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-25 01:02 am (UTC)Oooh, I remember that line. Never would've thought to apply it to Madoka, but now that you bring it up, it just works.
And a hearty +1 to basically everything else in this post =)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-26 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-26 08:23 pm (UTC)The more I talk about the ending in general, the more gushy I get over it. The world they create isn't perfect, but it's one I can believe in, and with respect to the themes and the foreshadowing it all came together.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 05:21 pm (UTC)I've followed some of the debates over the ending - I do get the point regarding the selfless sacrifice that Madoka must make. I'm less familiar with moe and what it implies, so the skeevy factor - as some commenters kept pointing out - makes much less of an impact on me; not having a frame of reference can be nice. That said, the ending makes so much emotional sense to me, tied up in certain ideas about humanity and what it means to be human, that I can't help but be affected by it. Even if it made me cry buckets.