The Patreon Letter - 5th May, 2019

Hi everyone, Em here. Today I wanted to talk a bit about my revisiting [redacted] [redacted] Madoka Magica in 2019 and my feelings on it now as someone who watches anime much more seriously versus when I saw it in like 2012. If you haven't seen Madoka, my tl;dr for it is that you should absolutely do so because it's very good, no qualifiers honestly. Anyway, let's get into it. As you might expect, spoilers for Madoka inside, but also spoilers for Sailor Moon and Utena, too!

The thing I was most struck by re-watching Madoka is just how it's fabled dark tone was always, from the first episodes, in service of a show explicitly about finding hope out of that darkness in the exact same way every magical girl show does. Many of the Madoka detractors (rightly) point to how the Madoka super-fans give it too much credit in doing things every other magical girl show does, but in reality I think that's its strong point. As someone currently near the end of Sailor Moon R and halfway into the first season (of many) of PreCure, it's really nice to have a crash course in what shows like this are about that puts its subtext right out in front and is in and out in 12 episodes.

Also, Madoka is almost wholly devoid of really gratuitous content. Yes, characters die and those deaths can be violent, but it's not that much more violent than, say, the deaths in Sailor Moon season 1. There's nothing sexually explicit or directly about real life violence against women aside from the two men who are saying really awful stuff about their girlfriends on the train in episode 8. In a world where truly awful edge-lord magical girl content like Magical Girl Apocalypse sprung up in the wake of Madoka's success, Madoka seems positively tame as one of these modern shows. Hell, it carries with it far less content warnings than Utena does, and few people would suggest skipping a classic like that. 

Like all people will full hearts and grim resolve in the face of the world, I am ride or die for Homura. Everyone's favorite over-armed time mage manages to steal an already memorable show by the time she gets her full backstory in episode ten, and re-watching the show it becomes apparent how much effort is spent getting her responses to Madoka and the team just right. She's cold and blunt, but never uncaring. Her responses to Madoka are always more involved than how she shuts down every one of the other girls, even if that isn't apparent on first viewing when she's tilted towards antagonist. 

I remember so many memes about Kyubey as like a supervillain, but honestly I don't see it upon re-watching. He's absolutely a negative influence in the world of Madoka, but so much of his harm comes from his fundamental misunderstanding of humanity and the unemotional ways in which the ends justify the means to him and his people. When his motivations are finally revealed he states plainly that he never lied to anyone, and that he only didn't volunteer information because nobody ever asked, which watching knowing that is actually true. He's definitely eager to coerce girls into contract making, but when he says he doesn't think what he's doing is that bad I absolutely think he's telling the truth. 

In many ways, Kyubey represents the state of the world the plot has him fighting against. He is entropy, the uncaring world that these girls live in, that will chew them (and anyone) up and spit them out on nothing more than bad circumstance. There's no higher power in the world of Madoka, for all its magic and time bending and alien influence; there's a clockwork universe, where all accounts must be settled and everyone suffers as much as they flourish. 

Of course, all of that changes with Madoka's reality warping wish to rescue all magical girls from their fate to be witches, turning her into a literal god spanning time and space to bring hope to every girl who ever utilizes magical girl power during their darkest moment. It's a really good ending, a fantastic capper on a show that doesn't put its main character into the outfit she wears at the opening until the very last episode of the show. The delay in doing so builds it up into a monumental moment the same as that in the universe, which is honestly such a good piece of plotting its worth watching the show for alone. 

(Okay, now time for those spoilers I mentioned.)

But more importantly, it puts her at the intersection of two other stalwarts of the magical girl genre. There is Sailor Cosmos, the far-future nebulously-but-absolutely Sailor Moon ascended to deity-hood, who is locked in an eternal struggle with Chaos itself, the personification of evil in the universe, during the final arc of Sailor Moon. 

And there is, of course, Utena herself, the figurehead of metaphorically charged magical girl anime, who achieves a sort of karmic release at the end of her own show, disappearing and leaving behind those who all loved and supported her, much like what happens when Madoka is erased from causal time aside from Homura's memories. 

In synthesizing the two so blatantly, Madoka feels like a show that wants to honor magical girls more than just mine them for new material, and that's why I cannot take the cynical view towards it that some people take. If shows like Utena and Sailor Moon are long sprawling epics about the power of teen emotion and the stresses of girlhood, Madoka is the movie adaptation, shorter and lacking subtlety but far flashier and far more likely to draw in a wider crowd and teach them why this genre is worth their time. 

Revisiting Madoka reminded me why I like this genre so much, and was a welcome reminder that bad fandoms and unfortunate cultural impact doesn't make a work inherently bad. For all the dark serious magical girl shows in its wake, if Madoka can get more people to check out PreCure, or Utena, or any other part of this genre? I think that'll be worth it.

Until next week!