One time someone asked me a question about Madoka, and it was an interesting one. The problem is that the question itself is a spoiler for the series, so I can't put it out in the open. And necessarily the answer is also a spoiler. So the question and my answer are both below the fold.
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And perforce, any comments must be spoilers too.
The real question is, how dumb is he, exactly? It's clear that he doesn't have a filter on what the wishes actually do. The wish Madoka made... it wouldn't have been any more difficult to say "I wish Kyubei's species ceased to exist" or something like that. What, are there no vindictive magical girls in the world? Would you bet your life?
Of course, most magical girls don't find out about the nasty/ugly bits of the equation until well after they've made their wish (if in fact they ever find out!) Kyubei put a lot of cards on the table in his clumsy effort to recruit Madoka, and if she was just a little bit less nice, she could have utterly destroyed him (and, by extension, all his; even if he has no personal fear of death, being unceremoniously ripped out of existence is probably not on his to-do list of the day.)
I can't even envision cue-ball being such a master of human emotions that he manipulated the situation to turn out that way. Honestly, there are any number of places where he could have sucked Madoka into it with an honest appeal to help out - she'd have signed up for no wish at all! But he sticks with intimidation tactics ("uh oh, you're in trouble now, better become a magical girl right away!") and that's a lot less effective on Madoka, mostly because she gets scared and freezes up.
But if that's the case, then doing what he's doing is like taking pieces of sub-critical radioactive material and banging them together to make sparks. Taking young girls (not a group normally noted for its emotional stability, which is of course why they're suitable) and subjecting them to extreme stress, than hoping none of them resent you for it enough to do anything about it... is this a valid long-term survival strategy?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 27, 2011 03:38 PM (pWQz4)
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Or as I said, back around episode 8
"Everything he does seems to have expediency at its core — if he acts
friendly to puella magi, it’s because that works better than being
indifferent. If he’s helpful, its because it works better than ignoring
the puella magi. Is looking like a "good guy†is just a tool that he’s
developed by years or even centuries of trial and error?"
In other words, no, he's not a classical villain, as he lacks the important traits we associate with villainy. But that's what makes him even greater -- he is an epic antagonist, without being a villain.
In a genre so full of hack writing that there's an entire website
dedicated to classifying the tropes, that is an incredible achievement
-- the very one that places the series in the ranks of the great
classics.
Posted by: ubu at September 27, 2011 04:17 PM (GfCSm)
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Sigh... I really need to sit down and watch this, but my initial impression is:
Nyarlathotep
...only with slightly less active enjoyment of malevolence and cruelty just for entertainment.
Posted by: BigD at September 27, 2011 05:35 PM (u0/7E)
I think stressing his Alien-ness really hits the nail on the head: what understanding would an alien race have of our ideas of "good" and "evil," anyway? I am interested that you describe deliberate and unnecessary cruelty as evil -- that articulates a delineation I've not been able to put into words.
I really liked the pernicious straightforwardness of QB. I thought it was brilliant.
As far as worrying about vindictiveness, I suspect it could just be a blind spot. Like how Ender beat the Bugger Queens: Queens are to be checkmated, but never killed. The very idea of killing a Queen just isn't fathomable, so they don't account for it.
For QB, the idea of such a Wish might be likewise unthinkable.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you write about this anime. It is quite possibly the most brilliant series I will never watch again.
Only he forgot the spoiler tags.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 28, 2011 10:25 AM (+rSRq)
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I'm the one who asked that question. I'll try to include additional spoilers for eps you might not have seen yet.
The question came to me when I noticed that Kyubey seemed to be the most hated character in anime. Danbooru has a pool called "Everybody Hates Kyubey", with 24 pages of violence being done to him.
Going into the heuristic, starting with comprehensibility of motive. Basically it's self-preservation. The heat death of the universe will spell extinction for the Kyubey race, so they want to find an energy source that can reverse entropy. Whether this is possible and what form it would take is unknown. Note that Kyubey says nothing about other races benefiting. Spoiler for ep 8:
It's hard for us to think on a scale of billions of years, but Kyubeys are a hive mind instead of a society of short-lived individuals. Because they have no emotions and therefore no empathy towards individuals, they act with what we would consider sociopathic disregard to the suffering of others as long as their goals are met. Spoiler for ep 10:
They don't have much concern for the fate of the human race as a whole, either. In a way, Kyubey is more comprehensible than Cell. How would destroying the Earth have benefited him?
Hubris and Nemesis: Trying to reverse the universe's entropy is pretty hubristic, even if you can do it. Kyubey regards himself as above humans almost as we are above our livestock. He's convinced he can manipulate the situation to get Madoka's energy, even if she becomes godlike. Nemesis would be the panic when he realizes she will become a goddess who can change the universe, and his entire race getting changed by her at the end. Menace: after the revelations about Kyubey and his contracts, his once-cute appearance and unchanging expression becomes scary. Spoiler for ep 7:
He inflicts pain on Sayaka to make his point. Seductiveness: I'd argue he's extremely seductive. Not just in posing as a magical familiar and getting girls to make contracts with him, but his intellectual justifications. In this post, you've not just been tempted to root for him, you actually do in part.
Kyubey can be accused of deliberate cruelty. Spoiler for ep 8:
As the TVTropes page says, he counts on the girls not considering what they really want so their wishes cause them despair and they turn into witches. He considers what happened to Sayaka to be a model success. Spoiler for Puella Magi Kazumi manga:
Grief Seeds aren't necessary to purify Soul Gems. At least one member of Kyubey's race can do it directly. There are also the victims of the witches he's ultimately responsible for, who never made any contract. Whether it's unnecessary cruelty can be argued, but where do you draw the line? A handful of innocent girls, hundreds of victims, a city, the whole planet?
As a fan of James Burke's Connections, I'm reluctant to attribute all human progress to magical girls, even if they have famous people in their number. Taking Kyubey's words at face value is something we should be leery of. It could be his hubris, or he could be trying to dissuade Madoka from wishing Kyubey had ever come to earth, or both. There's also the chance that wishes made the human condition worse, say a Germanic girl wishing her tribe could defeat the Romans. There's no way to tell.
There's also the long run. Ep 10
showed a powerful witch, Walpurgis Night, who required a more powerful magical girl (Madoka) to defeat, who in turn became a witch powerful enough to threaten the planet. Even without that power inflation, magical girl and witch population dynamics (from the wiki) show that in almost all cases, humanity becomes extinct due to the system Kyubey introduces.
Even if Kyubey isn't considered a classical villain, he is a dangerous antagonist.
Posted by: muon at September 29, 2011 11:18 AM (JXm2R)
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Kyubey might not be that alien to human morality, judging by this paper. His justifications to Madoka are even called utilitarian in the wiki.
Posted by: muon at October 02, 2011 08:54 AM (JXm2R)
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Regarding Avatar's question,
the problem is that Madoka's wish is an extreme case.
First, let's consider what granting a wish really means. Kyubey's race is trying to find an energy that can reverse entropy, which their technology can't do. As Homura's and Madoka's wishes show, they can violate entropy and even causality. So the logical conclusion is that the energy comes from the girls themselves. Kyubey's technology acts as a catalyst, and they grant their own wishes. That's why the power and nature of the wish determines the power and nature of the magical girl's powers. Initially, they're limited, probably due to the power of suggestion of being magical warriors. As they get more powerful, they can alter reality beyond their initial powers, such as Mami enchanting Sayaka's bat and Homura fixing her eyesight. So if Kyubey wants the energy, he's stuck with the wishes that are probably beyond his control. Kyubey's race might have some kind of failsafe if a wish is made that directly affects them, but we can't know since no one wished that.
There are factors mitigating the danger that make it worthwhile. As Avatar says, most magical girls don't know about the negative effects. Mami and Kyouko were veterans, but they were unaware of them. Even if there was a vindictive magical girl, it wouldn't matter since she's already made her wish. So avoid making contracts with obviously nihilistic individuals or those who somehow know the truth. Madoka is an exception because of her extreme potential. Another thing no one besides Madoka knows is that Kyubey is actually a member of an alien hivemind. Wishing him dead would just kill the current incubator body. It's unknown whether anyone besides Madoka could affect the hivemind in its home planet. (Dragonball's dragon has a limit of the planet it's on for its wishes.) Kyubey knew Madoka wasn't vindictive and would want to save her loved ones from Walpurgis Night, so her wish would relate to that instead of revenge. She might wish that Kyubey's race had never come to Earth, but he'd already planted the idea that humanity would still be living in caves in that case.
Posted by: muon at October 05, 2011 11:11 AM (JXm2R)
This was the last episode I watched originally, because I was warned about something in ep 3 and decided I wanted to wait until the whole series was out before watching further.
Three more amazing full-size frame grabs: onetwothree
One of the first things I noticed when I originally watched the show was that everything seemed vaguely surreal. The character art is... odd, especially in closeup. Usually they don't want us to notice the drawing technique. They want to submerge the art style and make us think we're looking at real people. But the characters in this series really look like they're drawn, especially in closeup.
The backgrounds are also off. They don't look drawn, but they don't look real, either. The architecture is strange. The classrooms at the school all have glass walls. Madoka's home looks like something designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on LSD. The city is bizarre. I looked at the (spoiler-laden) TVTropes page on this series and it points out that there are several famous buildings from all over the world presented in the skyline at various times.
But even worse is that the characters don't fit with the backgrounds. They don't look like they belong there.
Originally I wondered if it was just a case of craft failure. When the characters enter areas under the control of witches, they are even more out of place -- but that feeling doesn't totally evaporate once the witches are destroyed. The whole thing is just a little bit off.
Now I know that the creative team did all this on purpose. TVTropes has a term, "Wham episode", which refers to an episode that has a huge reveal in it that forces the audience to completely re-evaluate everything that came before. The last couple of minutes of ep 6 of Dog Days was an example of that.
But nearly every episode of Madoka is like that. Shinbo is famous for subverting tropes and cliches and trying to fool us with our own expectations, but the Madoka series seems to be the one where he takes that to the limit. He's taking everything we think we know about magical girls and turning it on its head.
The unreality suggests an idea to me:
At the end of the series, Madoka completely rewrites reality. She destroys the existing universe and creates an entirely new one, similar to but not identical to the one she grew up in. But maybe she isn't the first to have done something like that. Perhaps the reason the reality she grew up in is a bit strange is that it isn't completely real. (Ignoring the meta-issue of it being anime, of course.)
The basic surrealism of it all also adds a bit to the feeling of discomfort I get from watching it.
I don't mean the kind of discomfort I'd have gotten from watching crap like Otoboku. That's not it.
This is more like a feeling of foreboding. Now since I actually know the story and where it's going, I genuinely have a feeling of foreboding. But even when I was watching it the first time, and even though the first two episodes aren't really very dark, I still felt a little afraid, a little bit off.
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Another possible explanation for the surrealism: the magical girls and witches themselves. The magical girls get wishes which alter reality, sometimes affecting the world long after they make them, and the witches' areas might bleed through their barriers when they affect humans outside of them.
Posted by: muon at October 04, 2011 09:15 AM (JXm2R)
I watched the first episode of Puella Magi Madoka Magica last night. And had strange dreams all night, of magical girls in areas of insanity created by witches.
It isn't very surprising; vivid shows have done that to me before. And this show does really have quite vivid images, which look beautiful in the native 1920*1080 resolution. Here are three examples: onetwothree
I just hope it doesn't eventually give me nightmares.
It gave me the odd dream or two, so I'm not surprised.
And Fungus, FWIW, it's on my "MUST BUY" list. The all caps version, not the mere, "Must Buy" list, which itself is somewhat superior to the ordninary "must buy" list where things like Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya land.
Posted by: ubu at September 27, 2011 10:56 AM (i7ZAU)
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I'm very interested to see what your opinion on the series as a whole is. This reminds me that, since I upgraded my computer, it might be worth my while to find the 1080p batch and re-watch the show.
Posted by: Jessi at September 28, 2011 04:45 AM (Xt7yj)
...and last
Doki came through with the 6th BD rip from Madoka. So when it finishes downloading I'll have the whole thing at 1080p. And then nerve myself up to watching it. (I have to; it's a masterpiece. But it's also horror, and I don't do very well with horror.)
Posted by: ubu at September 25, 2011 07:01 PM (GfCSm)
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That's another one I've been meaning to get to. (In fact, I thought I'd downloaded a complete set, but I guess I didn't now that I've checked.) Still working on my backlog. I just finished DearS and wrote a review.
Posted by: Mauser at September 25, 2011 08:51 PM (cZPoz)
The last BD only came out a couple of days ago, so any "complete" version you may have downloaded was based on broadcast captures.
This isn't a fan service show, but reportedly they did redo and improve some of the animation for the BD release. And anyway, it'll be higher quality video and audio.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 25, 2011 09:08 PM (+rSRq)
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I didn't mean to imply I'd DLed the BD. As it is, my machine has trouble keeping up with 1080P (I have a faster processor I need to put in when I get a chance). It turns out I downloaded the Chihiro v2 collection at 720. (uTorrent could stand to have a Find feature).
It might be interesting to see what they changed that wasn't fanservice though.
Posted by: Mauser at September 25, 2011 11:34 PM (cZPoz)
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Usually the fansubbers release the BD both at 1080p and downsized to 720p. In this case, Doki also released it downsized to 480p.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 26, 2011 08:08 AM (+rSRq)
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I'm glad you're giving it a try. I've watched so much anime, it's hard
to really surprise me, and that series did, from start to finish. I
found it very rewarding. And Shinbo is the most imaginative director
working in anime today.
Posted by: Toren at September 26, 2011 11:58 AM (Mp233)
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I'm surprised to see you write that you "have to" watch something. That said, I hope you're able to get through to the ending, it is indeed a masterpiece. I didn't really consider it a "horror story", to me it was more of an actual drama, with an appropriate mix of heroes, villains, risks and consequences, with great deeds performed and great sacrifices made.
Posted by: David at September 26, 2011 03:04 PM (ttXyi)
I have watched the last three episodes already, three or four months ago.
Very occasionally a series comes along which transcends the norm and achieves the level of "great art". Haibane Renmei was like that. This series is at that level, too.
I need to watch the whole thing in good faith, so that I can write an honest review of it, and probably give it four stars.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 26, 2011 03:52 PM (+rSRq)
One of the principles of perspective is that something which is nearer appears larger than something which is far away.
It isn't exactly part of the application of perspective in art, but there's a kind of psychological perspective which is equivalent. I kept running into it when I lived in Massachusetts. People had a different idea of what "large" meant, and it drove me crazy.
A "large" tree was a big oak, maybe 60 or 70 feet tall. I grew up in the Pacific NorthWest, where a large tree was a Douglas Fir.
The "tallest mountain" for those people was Mount Washington. There's a road all the way to the top of it. The peak is about 6300 feet above sea level.
Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood is higher than that, and the summit is several thousand feet higher yet. And of course, Mount Hood is small compared to Mount Rainier.
When it comes to mountains, the Japanese have Fuji-san and that's a respectable peak. It's about halfway between Mount Hood and Mount Rainier in height.
But in other ways, you can see perspective in operation. Here's one:
Those are Asian Black Bears, respectively from Strike Witches 2 and Mayo Chiki. Thing is, Asian Black Bears don't get that big. In Ursus thibetanus japonicus(the subspecies which is native to Honshu), females run 90-220 pounds, and males top out at 260.
Understand that like any bear, Asian Black Bears can be tremendously dangerous. But these are being drawn as if they were Kodiak bears (where females range 500-700 pounds and males can reach 1400 pounds) and when one of those rears up, it really does loom that way.
It's a case of perspective. Asian Black Bears are the only bear species native to Honshu, so they're near and they look bigger.
In Mayo Chiki, Jirou's younger sister tried to fight that one shown above, and got away with just a broken arm. If you're talking about a trained martial artist and a bear which weighs about 250 pounds (which is near the top end for a male of the Japanese variety) it isn't inconceivable that the human, even empty handed, might be able to fight such a bear and survive.
But if you tried that with a Kodiak bear, you'd end up as lunch.
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Back in the days of the early Russia, around 800 A.D., a popular sport was to fight the Russian Brown Bear with a spear. The idea was to wag the bear so he's enraged. Then, as he rears, the sportsman digs the rear end of the spear against the ground with the tip against bear's breast in the right place. The bear then impales himself as he tries to crush the man. It was pretty dangerous.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 25, 2011 02:52 PM (9KseV)
A show really botches it when its fundamental conceit doesn't pass the horselaugh test. That's why I never took Mayo Chiki at all seriously.
This has to be the least convincing cross-dresser since Otoboku. No man (or boy) would wear his hair like that. I have long hair, but I just wear it tied back in a simple pony tail. But braids? Draped like that? Not a chance. Not even gay guys wear their hair like that.
And yet, supposedly everyone is fooled by it. Wrong.
I'm not sure I can even force myself to scan it for top rotation grabs, this idea is so stupid. But given that this buxom babe is part of the show:
I may have to force myself to stick with it at least for a bit longer. Even though I don't know why she's wearing animal ears, and I don't want to know.
UPDATE: And now having completed the first episode, it's obvious that this is the five-bladed razor of tsundere shows.
I don't ordinarily like seeing guys hitting girls, but in this case I'll make an exception. This guy has to man-up and show at least one of the violent women in his life that he has a spine.
So far there are three different women shown being violent towards him at various times, and from the Wikipedia article there will be at least two more. sheesh...
UPDATE: Man, they're really layering on the tropes. We got an Instant Fan Club, we got combat maids and combat butlers, we got nosebleeds...
I wonder if we're going to get an "insanely powerful student council".
UPDATE: End of the second episode, and I have to admit that this is growing on me. It's given me several laughs.
What I didn't realize is that it's not comedy, it's farce, and that's a different sensibility. And in the proud tradition of farce, they're beginning with a premise that's a little weird, and showing how it logically builds to a completely outrageous conclusion. In that sense it reminds me of the plotting in Project A-ko, which was also farce.
Also, Jirou (the poor bastard in the middle of this) is turning out to be pretty admirable and is doing his best to cope with the insanity.
However, the bad news is that for a fan service show I'm getting surprisingly few frame grabs, at least so far. I know there's going to be a beach episode, so that'll be prime fodder. In the mean time, there was this:
That's the only image I harvested from the second episode.
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No insanely powerful student council, but we do get a serious war between two "Subaru-sama" fanclubs.
This show is insane enough for me that the insanity itself becomes enjoyable.
Posted by: Jordi Vermeulen at September 25, 2011 12:29 PM (AJZdn)
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I just finished it. Yeah, farce is a good way to describe it; nobody will remember it a year from now, but eh, this season was kind of slow. The violence bit gets toned down a little, mostly because Konoe's not really tsundere (and frankly, it's water off a duck's back, Jirou being almost immune to it.)
The beach episode features an onsen and also yukata, there's a pool episode, and at least three outbreaks of maids, so there's probably some top-rotation fodder for ya.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 25, 2011 12:53 PM (GJQTS)
The difficulty has been that so many of the best images of the girls have Jirou in them, too, which disqualifies them. I'm through 4 episodes now, and one of those was a swimming pool episode, and I've only got about 6 pictures so far that I can use.
Actually, there were a bunch of images which didn't feature him. But they had some sort of hard-sub crawling caption, so they were out.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 25, 2011 01:18 PM (+rSRq)
I beg to differ: Konoe is tsundere. It's just that she switched to dere dere mode really early.
It helps that I think I understand Suzutsuki now.
She isn't a psychotic sadistic maniac. Everything she's doing makes sense. She loves Subaru as a friend, and doesn't like the way Subaru thinks of herself. She wants Subaru to accept that she's a girl, and to be happy with it. She wants Subaru to come to terms with her mother's death, and to shed a huge load of guilt she's carrying. She wants Subaru to make up with her father, and for him to come to terms with the fact that he didn't have a son. Suzutsuki sees Jirou as the key to making all those breakthroughs, with the added benefit that he may be able to lose his gynophobia. In some ways she reminds me of Seto in TMGXP. She does seem to be enjoying herself, but she isn't doing any of it out of pure sadism.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 25, 2011 01:23 PM (+rSRq)
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My question is, how do meganekomimis keep their glasses on? Their ears are in the wrong place.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 26, 2011 06:06 AM (PiXy!)
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All the ones I've ever seen had human ears in addition to the cat ears.
Posted by: ubu at September 26, 2011 06:41 AM (i7ZAU)
I wonder when the first complete fansub based on the BD rip will appear? (I wouldn't be surprised if there's already one.)
I never watched the whole original series. I made it through about the first three eps, and then quit. When it was over, I watched the last two eps. I've kind of been holding off waiting for the BD rip, and some time I'm going to sit down and mainline it. Or try to; as emotionally disturbing as it is, I might not be able to take that much of it in only one or two sittings. (So, for instance, I haven't seen "The Mami Event".)
UPDATE: Probably it'll be Doki that I get. As I write this they've done five of the BDs, and I'm going to start downloading them now.
