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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Even if so, it was still a perfectly legitimate offering of an olive branch. Sometimes the extension of an olive branch is also a test. Testing someone is not "pushing them away". If Homura had accepted the grief seed, there is little doubt that Mami would have went further in trying to make amends with Homura.
Mami gave Homura an opportunity for the two to make amends, and Homura refused it. In fairness, Homura had understandable reasons for refusing it, given the events of Timeline 3. But Mami also had understandable reasons for thinking poorly of Homura after her interactions with Homura in the final timeline.
Because Homura had previously tried to kill Kyubey, and may well attempt to do so again while Mami is preoccupied with fighting a witch. Mami considers Kyubey her friend, so she wants to protect the critter.
No, she wasn't being reckless. She simply wanted to protect Kyubey from someone who had clearly tried to kill him only a couple days ago.
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Killing Kyubey is a separate issue from wanting to hog all the Grief Seeds to herself. Even if Mami distrusts Homura being around Kyubey, that does not logically lead to believing Homura is after Charlotte or any other Witch's Grief Seeds for herself.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Not exactly. Homura basically told Mami that she wanted this witch. Yes, Homura's motivations were almost certainly to protect Mami, but it's not hard to see why Mami wouldn't see it that way. Homura's dialogue in this scene fits the template of "girl who just wants a Grief Seed" a lot easier than it does "girl who wants to protect Mami".
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Homura explicitly stated "this witch isn't like the others!".
Even if Mami believed Homura had Kyouko's mentality and was lying about guaranteeing Sayaka's safety, Mami should have still found that statement a large contradiction to the "template" she had of her.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
No, it's a fair point for all of their confrontations.
As long as Kyouko and Sayaka are in the same territory, and as long as Sayaka is going to hunt familiars, Sayaka is a threat to Kyouko's Grief Seed supply.
Sayaka's threat doesn't end just because of one fight that ended with Sayaka still alive and able to carry out Puella Magi activities.
As for Sayaka... how would you respond if somebody you recently had a brutal fight with insinuated that they wanted to turn your romantic love into a limbless person?  Come on, Kyouko's threatening words to Sayaka were crystal clear. Sayaka had perfectly good reason to respond to it the way she did
Wrong. Sayaka could reasonably believe she needs to protect Kyousuke from Kyouko given what Kyouko said. |
Your premise is flawed. Before all of that, why did Kyouko return to Mami's territory in the first place? If Kyouko wants to maximize her Grief Seed yield, all she has to do is stay in her own territory without competing with other magical girls. She didn't keep her stake in Sayaka's city, so she has no grounds for taking it back.
Maximizing utility does not justify confrontation in this case because fighting other magical girls means wasting power and increasing their need for Grief Seeds.
Then even if confrontation is justified, Kyouko's actions still contradict her goal. Recall that Kyouko did not directly attack Sayaka, but made sure to provoke her into retaliating. One time is enough to confirm a friend or foe. There was no need for Kyouko to talk about Kyousuke the second time she confronted Sayaka. If removing the hindrance was Kyouko's true motive, then she could have made the first move and attacked Sayaka without a word, but she didn't.
Kyouko was quite clearly picking on Sayaka because of her own experience. She always has.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
No, it isn't. Sayaka's powers were instrumental in healing Mami. That's more important than what you just wrote.
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To Sayaka, Mami would have never taken as much damage as she did if she wasn't covering for Sayaka's mishap. There was only one time where Sayaka's healing powers were needed that badly - the time Mami covered for Sayaka's mistake.
[QUOTE=Triple_R;4904266]
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Yes, she was. At least going by the subs I had.
Madoka: Sayaka, you shouldn't be fighting like that. You're lying when it says it doesn't hurt. It hurt just watching you. You can't say it's Ok to hurt yourself just because you can't feel it.
Sayaka: If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been able to win. I don't have any natural talent for this sort of thing.
Madoka: Even if you fight like that and win, it's not going to help you out in the end.
Madoka is very clearly telling Sayaka how to do her job. And, frankly, Madoka's dialogue has a whiny tone here. It's understandable that Madoka is concerned for her friend, of course, but it's also not hard to see how her tone/dialogue could be very irritating to the person on the receiving end of it.
Sayaka had just been encouraged to use this exact fighting style by Kyubey, and now Madoka, a girl who refused to become Puella Magi, is telling Sayaka to go against what Kyubey told her. Regardless of who's right, it's not hard at all to see why Sayaka became pissed off with Madoka. I don't fault her for that, and I don't think anybody should.
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Kyubey encouraged her to decrease her sensitivity to pain, which is fair advice for any fight. Taking no effort to evade attacks is purely Sayaka's choice, and it's fairly obvious that it's a choice made without common sense. Anyone would be disturbed by the sight, and it was fairly obvious SHAFT intented to make Sayaka look as disturbing (and as disturbed) as possible during that scene.
I fault her for lashing out like that as much as I would fault someone like Father Sakura calling his own daughter a Witch and binge drinking over it. What they did may be well within human emotional capacity, but not everything within human capacity is acceptable.
Whether you sympathize with her or not, it doesn't change that Sayaka was being stubborn. She hates herself and only felt worse after seeing her friend upset over what she did instead of happy.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Besides, Sayaka has a regeneration ability. That alone throws Madoka's advice into question simply as a practical matter.
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Using more magic means the Soul Gem becomes more corrupted, which is an even bigger issue for Sayaka who actively refused to purify hers. There is practically no reason for Sayaka to fight the way she did against Elsa Maria. She was intentionally tanking hits, all because she believed it didn't matter since she wasn't human.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
It is a shared responsibility. Mami and Sayaka both care about protecting Mitakihara Town from witches and familiars. Neither of them are doing it primarily for the Grief Seeds, or to have their wish fully realized (like Homura).
They have the same goals, and the same viewpoint on what a good Puella Magi is.
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Again, not quite. Mami is the one who primarily wants to work together towards what should be a common goal. Sayaka wanted to fight alongside Mami as a hero protecting the innocent, and she betrayed those ideals as she tried to leave Hitomi to her death. While their goals should coincide under normal circumstances, they are not kindred spirits with identical natures.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Sayaka doesn't want to punish witches and familiars. She just wants to make sure they don't hurt people. Mami is exactly the same.
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Mami wants everyone to
survive. She doesn't want anyone to be subjected to a premature death like her family (and she almost) was, and therefore she wants to work together with other magical girls to maximize not only their survival, but others' as well.
Sayaka respects this idolized image of Mami as a hero protecting the powerless, so she wants to become just like her.
Again, while their motives are similar, they're not entirely the same. Mami's ideals are slightly more grounded than Sayaka's due to their difference in experience.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
She called herself a fool in the anime because at that particular point, she had regretted some of her decisions. She had regretted allowing herself to self-destruct. She may have even regretted her wish. Her feeling this way at the time makes sense.
Her overreacting to a brief moment of weakness that had no lasting negative affects does not make much sense to me. It's taking one of her character traits, and flanderizing it. This manga went too far in this regard, in my view.
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In the anime, Sayaka also attacked two men on a train for bragging about taking advantage of some young girls. While the two men's fates were left ambiguous, I recall Urobuchi confirming in an interview that Sayaka did not kill them in contrast to the manga adaptation which did show her killing them.
Sayaka's moment of weakness had no lasting negative effects on others in the anime either, and yet she still spiraled into despair all the time. She betrayed her ideals, and as she told Kyouko before she finally transformed, protecting someone means hurting others in the process. Whether in the anime or this manga, Sayaka believed herself to be a hypocrite.
Even if you are precisely correct and Sayaka is regretting her wish, it still changes nothing. In that case, Sayaka would be consciously desiring for Kyousuke to be crippled again so that Hitomi doesn't meet with him as often as Sayaka does. It's a Catch 22 scenario where Sayaka can't imagine a route that would lead her to being happy with Kyousuke without harming Hitomi or anyone else.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Some decisions are entirely "rational". Others have more of an emotional component to it. But then there's decisions that don't make sense either rationally, or emotionally. And that's my impression of many of Sayaka's decisions in this manga.
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I disagree. I think Sayaka's decisions are well within the emotional capacity of an adolescent girl. That however is a problem within itself. The world they live in isn't kind enough to support a relatively normal girl with romantic ideals. That's why the ones to survive the longest in the series are the ones who are willing to change and abandon part of their old selves like Kyouko and Homura.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
I think it's understandable for Sayaka to feel a bit guilty. I don't think it makes any sense at all (either emotionally or rationally) for her to exacerbate it further by severing her partnership with Mami. The reasons for Sayaka to stay working with Mami are better both rationally and emotionally.
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It makes perfect sense to young teens to distance themselves from others because they feel that they don't belong or live up to their self-imposed standards. Considering Kyouko has been criticizing Sayaka all the time, it should be easy to see why Sayaka doesn't believe she is up to the task.
Whether it's for the best is not always the issue. The fact that they don't always make the best choice emotionally or rationally is what naturally leads to their Soul Gems getting corrupted or them getting killed.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Until now, I don't think I've ever heard or read "unrequited love" used to describe anything other than romantic love. I suspect there's a deep emotional truth for why this is the case.
Familial love is no less important than romantic love, but there may be differences in the way the two impact people. I would argue that familial love issues is more likely to numb/jade a person (as it did Kyouko), while unrequited romantic love is more likely to make a person act in an overly desperate and/or self-destructive manner. They both can have negative impacts, but they tend to be a bit different, I think.
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Because in most cases, it is standard for family members to care for one another. Even when the emotional ties are not as strong as they should be, often it is compensated with a strong sense of rational duty. The word "family" carries that much weight. That is why when familial love is absent, it is easy to point out why the situation is wrong.
There is no such responsibility between mere love interests. Kyousuke or any teen is not obligated to reciprocate someone's feelings if theirs are not the same. Unlike familial love, the ties behind young, romantic love are purely emotional. With less rational obligation to care, cases of unrequited romantic love are far more likely to occur than cases of unrequited familial love.
If familial love is absent, then it's just called neglect, or even abuse depending on the case.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Different people relate to different characters to different degrees. To a certain extent, this is because of our own life experiences.
I experienced unrequited love myself when I was a teenager, so I know what it's like. I know how self-destructive it can make a person. I know how it can lead you into taking actions that you'll later regret.
So for this reason, and others, I deeply relate to Sayaka. Hence I don't find it hard at all to sympathize with her.
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I've experienced both cases, though I don't find personal experiences to be relevant, so let's leave it at that.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
Largely because of the way I connect to Sayaka, I hate how she was wrote in this manga. I think this manga flanderized her, and made her carry the idiot ball to a degree that was painful to read. I think that Sayaka was much worse in this manga than she was in the source material.
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Care to explain which part was "much worse" than the source material? The last mistake Sayaka made was declining Kyousuke's invitiation to tell the truth for a reason she did not have to deal with in the anime After that, she distanced herself, and the next time she is mentioned, it is through Mami's perspective where Sayaka has already become a Witch.
Are you really telling me Sayaka is that much worse from what little she did do in a couple of chapters before it shifts focus back to Mami and Kyouko again? The way you talk about it, you make it sound like it drags on for several tens of chapters. It almost makes me forget that the manga is only 12 chapters