[Sol Falling]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

I don't. I think it would be a good way of reaching out to an even wider audience, and making more use out of the excellent potential of the PMMM characters.

Why?

Considering the scale of the audience that Madoka Magica has reached already, I think the franchise would be weakened if the follow up to the first season were to be a slice of life. Madoka's mainstream credibility lies in how it managed to communicate the hope and empathy at the core of mahou shoujo stories in a context/narrative which is unquestionably adult in its consequences. A slice of life story would, while undoubtedly being pleasant and making good use of Madoka's characters, have none of that thematic consequence/urgency which managed to make this series relevant to general/non-anime enthusiast viewers.

Particularly regarding what I mentioned about there being no point in Gen being involved in a non-dramatic follow-up to Madoka: I think that, minus Gen, there would not be all that much to differentiate a slice of life Madoka from Hidamari Sketch. As such, even though I believe that Aoki Ume's worldview as generally expressed in her works was very much an element in the formulation of Madoka, I think gravitating too quickly in that direction would greatly dilute Madoka's own identity. That's why I think it would be important to first reinforce Madoka's identity as a collaboration/joining of SHAFT/Ume and Urobochi's writing style before the franchise could safely be allowed to fall back into SHAFT's comfort zone.

Originally Posted by Kazu-kun

The thing is Gen doesn't give a fuck about how people perceive Madoka's ending. The reason the ending came out the way it did was something very personal to his writing process. The preface to Fate/Zero clarely states why he needed to write a story like Madoka at the time.

Not quite. While Madoka is unquestionably Urobochi's, I think there was also an element of Gen being influenced by the fact that it was a collaboration and him responding to a perceived role for his involvement in the project. The creation of Madoka was probably a new and enlightening writing experience for Urobochi himself, but I don't think he would've produced such a story by himself if he had not been provided this sort of context (i.e. a collaboration, and a magical girl story) to inspire it.

Frankly, thematically speaking Gen's a one trick pony. His central theme is always the same: karma. Whether is Phantom, Madoka, or Saya no Uta, the core of it is always the same. His talent lays in his ability to write about the same thing in so many different ways. Considering that, I think you'll see more Madoka is he finds a new way to revisit the themes Madoka dealt with. Whether it'll be a sequel or spin-off or whatever is probably no concern for him at all.

A number of his interviews actually indicate that Fate/Zero and Madoka are the start/mark of a major shift in Urobochi's writing style. Fundamentally, Gen's issue was probably his inability to believe in naive/romantic notions of human happiness or the goodness of the world. Pre-Fate/Zero, Gen had been expressing this through endings where the protagonist's personal/subjective happiness was achieved through ignoring/abandoning the good of the world on a macro level. Post-Fate/Zero and Madoka, Gen seems to have reached a conclusion instead where the good of the world must be maintained by the suffering/sacrifice of the protagonist. But in this regard I still think Madoka is something of an unusual work for him, because the uplifting aspects of Madoka's conclusion probably come precisely from the fact that Madoka is not an "Urobochi protagonist". As such, I think we can actually expect a somewhat different Madoka sequel (if it actually happens) than what we got this time, if only because it will be a "new Urobochi" work that will completely feature the new type of "Urobochi protagonist".

I more or less agree that there'll be no reason for Gen to hold back in terms of making new iterations into sequels or into spinoffs, though. I think it would be a mistake to continue applying the label "grimdark" to Urobochi's work in the same way as it was used previously. Urobochi should be perfectly capable of coming up with some new idea which is congruent with Madoka's hopeful message and yet has its own, Urobochi-like identity. We'll just have to wait to see if it really happens.


lol, looking at what I've written above, it seems like what I'm saying is that continuations of Madoka should probably come in the form of an "Urobochi sequel" and an "Aoki sequel". But since Madoka marks a fairly significant departure from Urobochi's former/previous style, I think it'd be important for the "Urobochi sequel" to come first so that people can get a clearer picture of how the first Madoka fits into Gen's writing as a whole.