#pmmm meta

[liridus]

It's actually really important to me that one of Sayaka's breaking points was her overhearing men being sexist and gross before absolutely losing it. Because it further emphasizes that Sayaka's main tragedy is not a boy not falling in love with her.

I think you can start applying this to Sayaka's character from when Mami first warns her to be cautious. What Mami tells her about think of why she's making her wish, I think it still applies, but not as her wanting Kyosuke to love her. I think Sayaka wanted to do good for others, but at the end of the day she wanted something out of that, primarily justice, change, a chance to make things better.

Her main tragedy is trying her absolute best to care for people, to be righteous, to use the powers given to her, to carve a better world; but to be given nothing in return. No reward, no foreseeable better future. Just suffering. And her eyes open to the suffering of others just for her to not be able to do anything about. Again and again and again.

And she tries to do this selflessly, like Mami indirectly told her to. To be fine with her efforts not being recognized, to be fine with people finding happiness without her, to be fine with people not respecting her right to make her own decisions. But at the end of the day that doesn't work and it tears her apart.

She wants to do something for the world, and risks her life to do it, the only thing she gets in return is her bodily autonomy being taken away. She's turned into a husk of a soldier without fully knowing what's going on. She's not even the best soldier (like her best friend could be), an average one. And she still tries to use that to keep fighting, because it has to be for a reason. It has to mean something. Because she's essentially given up everything, it has to mean something. It has to help her reach her goals in some way. Right?

It's not just a messed up way to cage her in a system that forces her to add onto the injustice she's fighting against. Right? Right?

(Maybe she calls herself stupid because she thinks she's stupid for trying to change things, for believing that things are capable of change)

[silvermoon424]

Madoka makes her wish with the explicit purpose of letting magical girls smile until the very end. We then see a montage of magical girls smiling after being saved by Madoka and then passing on peacefully. They were able to smile until the very end, just like Madoka wanted.

This is why I will always defend the end of PMMM against people who say that Madoka didn't do enough. She may not have been able to erase all suffering in the magical girl system, but she ensured that these girls get to go out with a smile. And in a cold and uncaring universe where that wasn't the case before, isn't that enough?

[evangelifloss]

I can't prove it but I just know homura IS the Walpurgis Witch from the OG series, and I've known it since the show first aired

[abyranss]

Smile!

In Magia Record's re-run of the Nagisa's Wish event, Yuu has at long last been given a canon design, and she's adorable.

In the past, I drew a design for her myself (here, and here) based on the old silhouette they used and I talked a bit then about the similarities I saw between her and Nagisa's appearances. Have a look at those for context if you'd like, because I'm going to revisit that again here with her new look. Below the cut ↓

To start with, some of the things I pointed out on Yuu's silhouette as being shared with Nagisa's magical girl outfit did not survive to her final appearance, such as the fuzz around the edge of her neck frill, the shorts she wears, and the bows along her tails and across her frill.

Though the tails themselves which I compared to the pompoms hanging from Nagisa's hat did survive, that alone isn't enough to draw a connection.

So it seems unlikely that when Nagisa made her wish, her appearance was influenced by Yuu being the first and only magical girl she'd met up to that point.

We can scrap that idea.

However, the parts of Yuu that I noted as resembling Nagisa's witch form, Charlotte... those do still hold up. When you look closely at Yuu, she has rings in her eyes which aren't present when she isn't transformed, and we now know that she uses her horn as her weapon.

Charlotte has a pure white face and a split open mouth, like Nagisa's mother described her killer. This is the strongest piece of evidence which the rest of it is built upon.

Charlotte attacks with her face as well.

And admittedly, perhaps reaching a little here, Charlotte as a worm has a cone-shaped pointy nose that might resemble Yuu's horn.

They also just both have clown energy.

Huh. Looking at these pictures I'm now wondering if I could draw a comparison between Charlotte's head wings and the bundles of cloth hanging from either side of Yuu's head.

...

Yuu was instrumental in Nagisa's transformation over the course of the story, from someone accepting of the abuse she experienced every day into a person seeking to cut ties with her family and create her own freedom, and then Yuu played the part of the person who mistakenly took Nagisa's agency away from her at the end which is what tipped Nagisa over the edge, so I like the idea a lot that Nagisa's grief made manifest from that event took a form that recognises the significance of the Sleepwalking Ghost.

[homuraakemis]

Homura + caring about the other magical girls

[atamascolily]

Rorschach Inkblots in Rebellion

When Sayaka confronts Homura at the end of Rebellion, a series of abstract images--five in all--flash across the screen as Homura explains herself. These are reminiscent of the famous Rorschach inkblots, a series of drawings used as a projective test by twentieth-century psychologists. Given all of the other references in the film to German literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis--from Freud's "Fort/Da!" to Nietzche's "Gott ist Tot!" and Eternal Recurrence" to Goethe's "Eternal Feminine", and the entirety of E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King--it's not surprising that Rebellion would go here, as the Rorschach test was a popular method of measuring the unconscious mind in psychoanalysis and thus fits perfectly with the film's established themes.

However, when I looked a little closer, I noticed that the cards in the film don't match any of the original ten cards in the system (i.e., the ones most commonly associated with the test).

Card #7 (left) and Card #9 (right) of the main Rorschach series, from Wikipedia.

As you can see from the sample above, the original ten Rorschach cards are either all black and white or all colored, but not both, unlike the "hybrid" cards in Rebellion. Why is that? And what do they mean?

I did some more digging, and it turns out that although it's fallen out of fashion in the United States since its peak in the 1960s, the Rorschach test is extremely popular in Japan, where it's used for everything from personality analysis to marriage counseling. In addition to the modified Rorschach systems created by Western psychologists like Samuel Beck and Bruno Klopfer, there are a number of uniquely Japanese systems, including the Karo Inkblot test by Yasufumi Kataguchi, so it's possible that these images in Rebellion are part of one of these systems.

However, because the whole point of these inkblot tests is that the subject's reaction should be spontaneous, the cards in these systems are generally not released/revealed publicly, making it difficult to prove their origins way or the other. So what then?

Ironically, that brings us right back around to projection! Since we the audience have no way of knowing what these images are supposed to mean, we have to construct the meaning out of these abstractions for ourselves, just like a real Rorschach test--which says as much about who we are and what we value as the image itself.

But let us not forget the greater context. As these images flash across the screen, they are accompanied by Homura's voiceover, declaring, (in the official English translation), "I am now an existence known as 'Evil'". Coupled with the abstract images, it suggests a certain level of moral ambiguity--is Homura truly evil or is this a role she has adopted in order to achieve her goals?

In a projective test, there are no right or wrong answers, only the limits of our imaginations and circumstances--paralleling the work of literary analysis and criticism. The genius of Rebellion is that, like the Rorschach test itself, the film provides no definitive answers to many of the questions that it raises, leaving the audience to decide how to interpret them--and even goes to the trouble of providing us these visual cues in order to emphasize the point.

[viobearr]

hot take: homura isnt evil nor a yandere and describing her as such is a disgrace to how multifaceted her entire character is and only works to further misunderstand her intentions and ignore the true nature of a lonely 14 year old lesbian's desperate wish . send tweet

[bonni]

among the holy quintet, mami stands out for a number of reasons: she is the first to die, and unlike sayaka and kyoko, she dies alone; she is the only member with neither a reciprocal romantic dynamic with another character nor a direct foil; she is also the only character who didn't use her wish to save or help another person, and she is the only one who became a magical girl without having a choice. in this way, her feelings of "isolation" are not just a trait of her character within the context of the story, but are habitually reinforced by the structure of the story itself. she is isolated both within the plot (at school, among other magical girls, etc) and metatextually, and this isolation is the root of her mental instability.