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View Poll Results: Madoka Magica - Episodes 11 & 12 Ratings | |||
Perfect 10 | 276 | 67.65% | |
9 out of 10 : Excellent | 70 | 17.16% | |
8 out of 10 : Very Good | 40 | 9.80% | |
7 out of 10 : Good | 14 | 3.43% | |
6 out of 10 : Average | 6 | 1.47% | |
5 out of 10 : Below Average | 0 | 0% | |
4 out of 10 : Poor | 1 | 0.25% | |
3 out of 10 : Bad | 0 | 0% | |
2 out of 10 : Very Bad | 1 | 0.25% | |
1 out of 10 : Painful | 0 | 0% | |
Voters: 408. You may not vote on this poll |
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2011-08-28, 16:50 | Link #1221 | |
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To make a successful wish, then, all a girl has to do is know on an absolute level what will make them happy. They have to identify if they have one thing, above absolutely everything else, which is the most universally and unconditionally important to them. If such a thing exists, then a happy wish is possible. |
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2011-08-28, 17:05 | Link #1222 | |
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The key thing here is to understand that the very nature of a magical girl is an irrationality, since magic is the creation of something (energy) out of nothing. So the wish, which is what defines every magical girl, it's an imbalance in and of itself. But the universe can't have that, so it will struggle to bring balance to the equation again, which will end up fucking the magical girl over some way or another. It's the way Gen created his world, so it can't be helped. If you want to be truly happy you have to get it the hard way, paying for it with your own effort as a human. If you resort to magic, to a wish, the universe will make you pay for it, and it won't be pretty. EDIT Or you could be like Madoka, who managed to accept the good (preventing the magical girls to go witch) with the bad (the disappearance of her own mortal existence). It's like when someone is dying: you can die resentful and in denial, or you can accept it and die with smile on your face. Like any wish, Madoka's has its drawbacks, but the difference between her and the other girls is that she could accept the good and the bad with a smile in her face. That alone makes all the difference.
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Last edited by Kazu-kun; 2011-08-28 at 17:35. |
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2011-08-28, 17:55 | Link #1223 | |
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2011-08-28, 18:01 | Link #1224 | |
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2011-08-28, 21:36 | Link #1225 | |
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I would say it's not so much that wishes have objective negative consequences as a cosmic fuck you insomuch as it is a naturally emergent consequence that humans can never be absolutely satisfied, especially in a system where magic inevitably leads to death or monsterhood. For example, how did the universe fuck over Homura as a result of her wish? Yea, she kept failing to save Madoka, but that was because of Madoka's own personality and her tendency to think of others before herself, making her decision to contract with Kyubey pretty much a mathematical certainty. Homura's wish doesn't do anything to change this in any way. Yea, there's the thing with Madoka being more powerful in each timeline, but that kind of worked in their favor, ultimately, and even if it DIDN'T, it wouldn't end up in "balance" because the ultimate conclusion would be Madoka consuming the planet.
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2011-08-29, 03:48 | Link #1226 | |
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Last edited by Kazu-kun; 2011-08-29 at 03:59. |
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2011-08-29, 05:11 | Link #1227 | |
The True Culprit
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2011-08-29, 05:28 | Link #1228 |
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But it's not the only one. Everything is connected. Like I said, Joan and Cleopatra didn't become witches, meaning their soul gems didn't get dark to that point, but their wishes still backfired on them. This is clear in Madoka's case too: with her wish she managed to prevent the magical girls to become witches, but as a result (drawbacks) she lost her mortal existence and the Maju appeared (since witches don't exist anymore because of Madoka's wish, the universe creates Maju to keep the balance). That's what QB means, he's not talking specifically about the darkness in the soul gem, he's talking about everything negative that happens to magical girls as a result of their wishes and being magical girls. That's why Joan and Cleopatra appear during his speech. It makes it clear that the wishes' drawbacks manifest themselves in a myriad of different ways, not only the darkening of the soul gem.
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Last edited by Kazu-kun; 2011-08-29 at 05:55. |
2011-08-29, 05:54 | Link #1229 | |
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Incidentally, consider this. In the old universe, not all Magical Girls became witches. If they died, then the produced a net gain in preventing grief and destroying witches. However, at the same time, not all witches were borne from Puella Magi: in fact, the witch system could independently self-propagate. In the balance, it probably exactly worked out. (It's not really that each individual Puella Magi's happiness/despair ended up in a balance of zero. It's more that the overall happiness/despair of humanity in general always remains in balance. Like Sayaka said just before her transformation: the truth is that whenever one person gains, another person actually loses out. The wish system, even in the new world, is a system of the passing around of misfortunes. However, it is not the case that it is impossible for it to make a single individual happy.) |
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2011-08-29, 06:04 | Link #1230 | |||
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Last edited by Kazu-kun; 2011-08-29 at 06:55. |
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2011-08-29, 14:36 | Link #1231 | |||||
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But Kyouko's despair is not a result of the universe distorting to balance her out. She made a wish that wasn't what she truly wished for (for her father to be happy or for their family to be able to eat, or something), and she made a wish that didn't take into an account that her father seems to have been emotionally unstable beforehand. And, well...there is pretty much no Christian who is comfortable with the idea of screwing with someone Free Will (and still a large number that don't tolerate magic). Quote:
Now, if Sayaka got over her angsting over her body, and asked Kamijou out, what would've happened? Say for an instant that Kamijou said yes! Hey, hell yea, her wish worked out fucking awesome. And what if he said no? Well, it's still not the wish's fault because his failure to think of Sayaka as a love interest never had anything to do with the wish in the first place. tl;dr you're taking a poetic metaphor way too literally.
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2011-08-29, 16:42 | Link #1232 | ||||
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But that is the way Gen writes. He doesn't properly explain a lots of his shit so he can get away with a lot of things. For instance Madoka's wish was to erase all the witches "before" they are born, but the last witch she takes care of, you know, actually appears... Gen's writing isn't as logical or clear-cut as you make it out to be. Of course you can make up explanations for a lot of this unexplained stuff if you think hard enough. But that's you deluding yourself from the fact that Gen made things unclear and ambiguous on purpose so he would have more room to develop his ideas.
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2011-08-29, 18:21 | Link #1233 | |||||||
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2011-08-30, 14:42 | Link #1234 | ||||||
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Anyway, I'm getting tired of this. If we can't find a point in common then let's just agree to disagree and be done with it.
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Last edited by Kazu-kun; 2011-08-30 at 16:43. |
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2011-08-30, 17:32 | Link #1235 |
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Personally, I think, the show uses the entropy concept to account for wishes backfiring: there are way more possible states of the universe than there are states that conform to your wish. Thus you'll be expending emotional energy on frustration - turbulent rather than directed energy motion within a soul gem. If you manage to deal with your frustration and re-direct the energy towards your wish, your soul gem's life will be expanded. If not, it'll blow up and release all the energy - part of it turns into witch-space, part of it is lost to entropy (has to be, because that's how the world works), and part of it is probably harvested by Kyubey.
Remember that a magical girl's soul is now a physical object, and thus subjugated to entropy. Basically, a frustrated soul gem is a "hot" soul gem. A grief seed is a cool soul gem. Thus frustration flows from the soul gem to the grief seed - because frustration ends in despair. The grief seed gets a bit warmer, the soul gem a bit cooler. Also, physical souls can interact with non-physical souls - as witches call out to normal humans. How this works is a mystery. But, yeah, I don't think the universe has any drive to re-balance things, apart from entropy, which is the totally random distribution of particles, which is the ultimate antagonism to a wish. |
2011-08-30, 19:36 | Link #1237 | |
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Universe == Chaos/decay/entropy --> despair? This in contrast to Happiness --> Wish == Order + Universe == (karmic) Order --> Grief Entropy is indeed the ultimate balancer, so again I must say I agree with the former model. The concept of "opposites" has a sense of "opposing forces" but it can also be approached from the perspective of "negation/reduction to zero". In terms of the natural universe, Entropy is already the greatest force of "balance" or "returning to Zero". If we take the Karmic model, focusing on "happiness" vs. "grief", and consider the supposition that making an unnatural imposition of Order in the universe (towards Happiness)will be met by an equal imposition of Order in the opposite direction (i.e. Grief), the implication is that Madoka Magica's universe is actually fundamentally ruled by Order. I.e., the 'balancing' which goes on, is between the specific ('orderly') states of grief and happiness. By comparison, in the Entropic model, if we consider grief as "the absence of happiness" (or more illustratively: "despair" as "the absence of hope"), then the natural entropic decay of the universe towards nothingness already encompasses all aspects of the 'rebalancing' of any unnatural "order". In fact, the collapse of happiness gained by "illogical impositions of Order" (i.e. the fundamental nature of wishes) is then simply a natural extension as it already the highest and most unstable states of order on which entropy works fastest. Gen's assertion, I think, of the nature of the universe, is not one where Opposites (in terms of opposing forces) are naturally restrained to a balance of equals. Rather, he focuses on entropy, which is the continuing unstoppable decay of all things. Despair is not the opposite of hope, but rather the absence of all hope, as in the case of inevitable human death, or the death of the universe. In this way, in Gen's worldview, "hope" and "despair" are not actually equal: despair actually wins, and is the inevitable reality, because despair is the "negation" of hope equivalent to "balance", nothingness, Entropy, zero. That is why I think Gen's point is not "all happiness will be met by grief", but rather "all happiness will eventually fade" and "great happiness will fade even faster". The point is not to think of happiness and grief as opposite absolutes but rather as two progressive points in a line which ultimately ends at "non-existence". That "non-existence" is, to Gen, the real endpoint/inevitability. |
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2011-08-30, 21:44 | Link #1238 |
The True Culprit
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Gotta agree with Sol here. Also, as a nitpick, "A universe that balances with entropy" and "a universe as an element that balances in every respect" are synonymous term. Entropy works on absolutely everything and is an inescapable, fundamental force of the mathematical universe.
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episode discussion, final episode thread, madoka magica |
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