the idea is this: the central protagonist lies to you. all the fucking time. the story starts out with her claiming to have gotten her powers over the summer, and that her powers are foresight. however as time goes on you notice inconsistencies in her story, as timelines for her bleed together, until the end of the first season, when all of her friends die and she resets the timeline again.
you learn that she has the ability to go one year back in time, and goes back to the first day of school to try to save her friends from the coming apocalypse. the apocalypse comes in the form of a giant, terrible monster that they’re supposed to kill, which is eventually revealed to not just kill the protag’s friends but also be able to destroy the entire world.
the magical girls are granted power by a god who wants to stop humanity from dying at the hands of these magical monsters. in the first timeline, the protagonist convinced her friends to take up the offer, under the hopes of saving the world. she gets time travel powers because she wanted the ability to be able to save her friends. they fight and have a great time and defeat a bunch of monsters until the apocalypse occurs the first time, and all the friends she made dies on the battlefield. the protagonist resets the timeline, and continues to do this over and over, hoping to save the world, but more importantly, her friends.
her memories of the timelines begins to cross when she hits 200, and she begins to slip into madness as her desperation reaches new heights. betrayals from her og friends and the friends she makes along the way all culminate into immense paranoia and fear, as well as the looming anxiety of the apocalypse, and the beginning numbness over seeing her friends bodies. but the sunk fallacy has kicked in, and she refuses to give up.
okay here’s the plot twists. eventually they reveal these key things
the god is malicious: he doesn’t want humanity to survive, and is actively trying to cause the apocalypse. he doesn’t have enough power to create an apocalyptic event, but he can give some power to the magical girls. magical girls then have the ability to harness and grow that power into things stronger than he could ever imagine. essentially by using their powers over and over again, the magical girls can cultivate his magic into more and more potent forms. the more they use the power, the more powerful they become.
tbh I’ll probably come up with a better reason but the god wants to destroy humanity because either a) he wants to live on earth so he’s cleaning out the “infestation” b) he’s mad no one believes in him anymore or c) is mad that the other gods preferred humans to him or something.
the masked magical girl: there’s a magical girl assassin who hunts the protag and her friends no matter the timeline, and is revealed to be the protag two hundred resets in the future, reaching the 500th mark and completely snapping. the assassin wants to kill her past self for causing this chain of events, because she has learned the ultimate truth…
the ultimate truth: the apocalyptic monster is the protag. the goal of the god is to create a magical girl powerful enough to cause an apocalypse; which means every magical girl is destined to become a monster themself, once they sink into despair over the finality of fighting. eventually, the protag realizes defeating the monster is impossible, and gives into utter despair. because she’s used her power so much with all of the timeline resets, she’s become the ultimate monster, who can destroy the world. transcending time, she’s able to appear in every timeline, but only on the day she’s eventually created (the last day of school).
the god created a contract with her because he knew she would be so blindsided by determination to save her friends that the culminating grief and despair after hundreds of attempts would creat the ultimate apocalypse causing monster.
the protag can’t defeat the monster because the monster is still several hundred timeline resets after her, so it’s been able to accrue massive, massive power
all of the protags efforts have created a paradox. she won’t ever not become a magical girl, because she can’t undo her contact, and because of that, she’s destined to become the monster she’s been trying to destroy this entire time.
i imagine it ends somewhat like this. the butterfly effect saves the day, causing this information to reveal itself, and the protag goes off the handle for a bit realizing she’s destined to become the monster she’s been trying to kill, and has killed all her friends.
i imagine she considers becoming the monster she was condemned to become, sinking into that despair, given that she was meant to become it anyway, but her friends pull her back from the despair, and it ends in two potential way
instead of fighting her future self, she soothes her future self. she heals its broken heart and adds hope to the despair her future self feels. that she doesn’t have to fulfill the cycle, she doesn’t have to fulfill the prophecy, that she doesn’t have to become the bad guy
protag decides to willingly transform into the monster, but uses this power across time and space to erase her contract with the god. i imagine there’s a fucking kick ass fight scene with the god as well since she can travel across time and space so i imagine she fucking kills him after all this
im not sure how bittersweet of an end this should have: if the protag, after rewriting her own story, lives out a happy life with her friends and finally lives to see the day after the last day of school; if the paradox erases the memories of all that occurred from everyone including the protag so she gets an actual normal life; or if the strain of messing with time and fighting a god causes her to fade from existence, which then hits the fork in the road of if her friends should remember her or not. i also like the idea that it’s uncertain if the ending is actually “real” given the protag’s tendency to lie, out right or from memory confusion…
the general idea is the horror of realizing a self determined fate, as well as probably insane gore. but i like to think that despite all the despair in the series it will end on a hopeful note.
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