Quote:
Originally Posted by Snork
So, to summarize.
- initially Madoka is what Junko describes her as - a good and kind girl. Her wish to be helpful is moderate, partly restrained by her lack of belief in her abilities (otherwise, she'd have been a triple scout already  ) and not too uncommon for a person who apparently was brought up with such an wish to keep in mind.
- her wish to be a hero directly derives from the seeming opportunity to become one with a flash spark. The wish to help people suddenly gets a definite prospect sketched out - and it's more than Madoka has EVER hoped to be able to do. You won't be able to explain her eagerness to fight witches unless you consider HOW she views the system at the time (and in timeline 1 she herself becomes a poster child for it together with Mami, in Homura's eyes).
- her self-denial and self-sacrificing, while they MAY be based on her personality and the first two points above, do NOT look like her innate traits to me. If anything, Madoka knows well what Junko voiced in ep 11: her life does not belong to her alone, and her family will be in great pain. That's partly why she turns down Kyuubey's offer in ep 4 after witnessing and painfully realizing the old "Anyone Can Die" trope. Up to this point, there is no self-denying Madoka. However, if this girl has a heart big enough to sympathize with other people and want to help them, what to expect when people dear to her start getting involved deeply? When Hitomi's endangered, she does her best to save her. When Sayaka contracts, she insists on tagging along because she can't leave her friend alone in situations she has seen to end tragically. And tagging along as a helpless spectator makes her consider contracting again, more and more. She's hit again with the episode 6 revelation, but then it's seeing Sayaka suffering that makes her as desperate as to put her own soul on the line - because Sayaka is not even some abstract "people to help", she's her dear friend whose life is being ruined rapidly... and Kyuubey keeps hinting Madoka could change it. As I see it, THIS is where the Madoka we've seen at the beginning of episode 12 comes from. Her self-denial and sacrifice does not lie in her character that needs backstory motivation - it's her character development that starts from ability to sympathize with others and a simple wish to be helpful (not necessarily to a Spiderman extent and not necessarily bordering on inferiority complex), then goes along the line of the events Madoka experiences. |
I disagree. I'm no going to repeat myself over and over. I already addressed some of this points before so go read those post if you're interested. That aside, the way you analyze the character is already a pretty big concern for me: if her motivations were properly handled (like Homura's, Yuma's, Koyko's, etc) you wouldn't even need to analyze the character to this extent, which is very telling, because you really shouldn't have to.