[Mentar]

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Edit: I'll take this reasoning farther: If Madoka can't make the choice to revive Mami and be a magical girl, then she's not qualified to be the great magical girl everyone here thinks she is.

I've been listening to the to and fro quietly for a while, and I agree that you've got the right to stick to your interpretation as a valid theory. But you're WAY overplaying your hand here.

The very thought that it would be the the task or even the duty of magical girls to go around reviving people is absurd. To offer an analogy: You meet someone who happens to be a heroin addict. You spend time together and become close friends. And then you find out that your friend is about to die - unless you become a heroin addict yourself.

So, what now? Will you do it? Do you have the obligation to ruin your own life for the sake of someone else? Even if you know that it will cause tremendous hardship and will eventually kill you, most likely?

There is no such obligation, like you make it sound.

Hell, Sayaka is more qualified to be a magical girl, then, taking up the mantle to protect other people, using her wish to help someone at the same time, with the full knowledge of what's at stake.

Full knowledge of what's at stake? At the moment of flared-up emotions when her loved one had a breakdown? Really? I feel that we haven't even started to glimpse at "what's at stake" - the rules of the contract. I expect that Sayaka's lack of knowledge will kill her right after she realizes how she _is_ going to regret what he did.

Sayaka > Madoka, if your reasoning holds true.

Sayaka is a well-meaning girl with a caring disposition. She's self-aware enough that her desire to see Kamijo healed is born out of a desire to BE WITH HIM, and so, her wish isn't at all that pure, since it's got a selfish core. Likewise, her admiration of Mami always had a bit of a "fan of a sports star" element to me. She thought that what Mami did was cool, and she'd enjoy being like that, too.

Madoka's ideals are much more pure, by comparison. Her wish to help people, to protect them from harm, is genuinely selfless in nature. She couldn't even come up with a wish for herself in ep3 - she merely wanted to be useful to people. In ep4 she even courageously did that without being a MG in the first place, when she interfered with the ritualized suicide. You do see the difference between Sayaka and Mami, right?

My theory is that the whole overarching theme of the show will be that Madoka's ideals are what really makes MGs powerful, and that the Sayaka type does exactly what Homura described with some scorn: In the end, they're not fighting for what's "good", they're fighting for themselves and their own wishes. I expect this to be why Sayaka is going to bite the bucket and Madoka is eventually going to make the difference.