Originally posted at the DL February 2016
So this finally happened.
I think the series has a strange interest in convincing you Madoka is the least interesting member of the cast. The other four girls each get to set the tone for part of the series, while Madoka is generally cast as a bystander. Which is true, but...
Actually, going through the cast down the line seems like the best approach.
Mami's episodes are almost entirely about deceiving the viewer. Can't be an effective deconstructionist work if everyone knows you're playing it crooked from the first minute. Mami herself feels more like a device than a character... mostly. Really there's only two moments in the series that her facade of "Cool, Collected Sempai!!" cracks, and neither of them is when she loses her head even! That one's more of a "Oh. Huh." on her part. But no. One is way down the line in Homura's extended flashback, where she lives to see the proof that yes, you too can become an evil witch! Which works there because when that happens in the current timeline, nobody's really alive to react once it's all over. It's good to have a proper emotional breakdown over that one. But important to the show overall, the other one is just Madoka babbling, talking about what she really wants is to help people... and Mami lets it drop. This isn't glamorous. It's lonely, and dangerous, and thankless, and you just watch people die and hope maybe you can save some of them and one day, you'll finally lose. Really that's when you know (assuming you didn't anyways) yeah, she's dying in about 5 minutes isn't she. Still, there's something I really like about that, they don't go "lol nope ded she was full of it", the let her say it herself, in response not to distress, but to renewed faith: Madoka was someone she could genuinely believe just wanted to help people, the first such person she'd probably ever met.
Sayaka really gets the bulk of the episodes to herself, but purposes of discussion we're calling 4-6 Sayaka focused while 7-9 are about her breakdown and how this compare/contrasts with Kyoko. So first...
Weakest Episode- Miracles and Magic Are Real. Madoka is one of those nice series where there aren't bad episodes, and every episode is important, but this one has the least forward motion and least in the way of character moments. Basically the only important things are...
<Madoka> *wordless scream of existential terror*
<Sayaka> Yeaaaah that's totally fair. But I'mma go be a superhero now!
And then a bunch of stuff that... just kinda happens.
And really that's the meat of this part, Sayaka wants to be a superhero and wavers on whether she can manage and bristles at the other characters for not being superhero enough to match her despite being way stronger as magical girls. We can basically call this the "we have to give you a small window of hope that maaaaybe there could be a happy ending! Otherwise the pain from the last knife twist will linger and numb you to this one." portion of the show.
Kyoko's fun. As raging assholes go. But that's more or less the point, she has to be endlessly cynical but without despair, to contrast Sayaka's downward spiral. Her backstory is strange though, because basically she's someone who had her entire family die as a delayed consequence of her actions... and she has to go "Well... I'm... actually still better off. Man that's messed up. Oh well, hedonism is go!" Strange concept.
But back to Sayaka's downward spiral.
Best Episode- I was stupid... so stupid. The slow motion swan dive into utter despair works so well. I think it's the back and forth of it. Feel utterly isolated, tell off your best friend. Hate yourself for telling off best friend. Try to be happy for other friend starting new relationship, want other friend to die in a fire for stealing away dude you've been trying to support for years. Remind yourself you have to help as many people as possible because it's the only thing you have, be reminded that nobody deserves to be saved. That last part is worth highlighting for being some of the nastiest things I've ever heard in a non-exploitative work, but in a good way. And seems especially appropriate for this show because y'know, I've seen some other anime made in the past 10 years, and more importantly I've seen the fans of those anime. They need some dick punchin'.
Homura of course is where they tried to put all the twisty plot stuff. And in general she's the character with the most overt attention paid to her development, and presumably intended as the fan favorite. And hey, she's cool. Although sometimes they oversell it, the lingering shots on her doing her best impossibly cool hair flip get a bit gratuitous.
It's strange. Like, conceptually Homura is basically awesome but in practice she's very pandering is the best way I can put it. Cool beauty! But secretly she was a nerd the whole time! Awesome at everything... because she tried over and over and cheated the system, like a video game! She can do everything by herself because she has hax! But it's all to save the fair maiden, like a badass knight! YEAH!! And it's unfair, because in reality the obsessive nature she develops and determination to cut out everyone except the center of her universe are pretty clearly shown to make things progressively worse, if not for the ending. The multiple levels of making her the avatar of the fanbase is another bit of misdirection. But they spend an awful lot of time on it and it's a bit off-putting sometimes.
Of course realistically a lot of that stuff exists to set up Rebellion.
Madoka... well now. I almost immediately thought of this exchange when pondering how to approach the show.
They're doomed.
Yes. But a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts. It's a privilege to be among them.
You're unbearably naive.
Well... I was born yesterday.
Substitute 'born' with 'became god', it's really very close to the overall sentiment of the ending. But it's important to remember that this is a compromise; she can't just make the world better. But she can take on the burden of everyone who fell to despair trying. The phrasing Mami has for how Madoka's universe works is very specific, she takes the magical girls when their curses almost equal the good they did. Karma is rebalanced to very, very slightly add up to good.
But the show is very coy about it all. Madoka is always overtly messianic, but for most of the show she's really a game piece, moved around by the other girls. And they want to play this off as her just being hopeful and naive and wanting to believe the best of people when it doesn't make sense. Which isn't untrue, but it's again misleading. Madoka doesn't so much believe that everyone should be nice and kind and being nice means doing everything for other people as... she's someone who's genuinely upset that the world is unfair. Not that it's unfair to her, that her life is miserable and it's terrible that she's no good at anything and she has a boring family and all he friends love her mom except her mom's a raging alcoholic and they silently keep her barely functioning every day. That doesn't even register for her, I don't think. It's the fact that there IS inequity. That something innocent can die pointlessly (One of the surest signs of The Kinda Show This Is: the original wish that lead Madoka to being a magical girl in most of the timelines is revealed... in the opening credits, without any actual explanation or indication of its significance. Yeaaah), that the people trying to protect the world from witches are forced to fight one another to survive, that every wish you can make ends in utter despair. And she spends the whole series chewing on it, everyone around her oblivious to the problem: this isn't right, the world is wrong, there has to be some way to fix it.
She couldn't make the world right. But she could give everyone an honest chance at making it better.
And then when her back was turned a voice said "Get in the sack!"
I'll have to watch Rebellion. But I'm expecting an End of Evangelion scenario.
Rating- 9/10. Sorta on the lowish end of the rating but I have to err high when I spent the whole write-up talking about the cast and not even mentioning the character designs, art shifts, use of lighting, or music.
Oh yes, one more character isn't there.
Bunnycat- A dick.
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