Arabesque asked me to share my thoughts on this thread, and I felt that I should oblige.
But let me just say that I'm not as well-versed on Gen as many are. I'm probably a rare case of somebody who went into watching
Madoka Magica without knowing the man at all, really.
Still, I've read up some on Gen, I watched some
Phantom: Requiem of the Phantom, and I've watched every
Fate/Zero episode up to Episode 15 (comp issues have halted me briefly here, but I should catch up soon).
Madoka Magica was my favorite anime show of 2011, and is also one of my five favorite anime shows of all-time.
Fate/Zero may well be my favorite anime show of 2012.
So I guess you could say I'm a Gen fan. For more evidence of that, here's
a blog I wrote on Gen a few months ago.
The irony, for me, is that I typically don't go for really dark shows, and yet I tend to love Gen's forays into the anime world.
I think the reason is that, like pretty much all good writers, Gen has core ideas or philosophies that inform and inspire his writing. This gives his writing a certain purposefulness and narrative momentum that makes for a very engaging and enthralling experience, in my opinion.
It also probably helps that Gen's ideas contrast considerably with how things usually play out in other popular modern anime shows. In fact, there's something of an iconoclastic quality to Gen vis a vis the modern anime world, I think it's fair to say.
A lot of modern anime has a definite wish-fulfillment element to it (just look at all the anime with male leads that have one or many beautiful girls practically fall into their laps
), and Gen's works are much more about confronting
nightmares symbolic of real life issues rather than enjoying wishful dreams. As ironic as this might be given what is a prominent plot device in Madoka Magica, I find it nonetheless to be true.
Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with wish-fulfillment entertainment, but in a medium with a lot of that, Gen's works really stand out from the crowd, imo.
I'm not sure to what degree I agree (or disagree) with Gen's ideas, but one thing's for sure, they're interesting. I find them particularly interesting in Madoka Magica because you have several philosophical struggles play out in that, and when it's all said and done, I'm not sure if either position was favored to the exclusion of all others.
I think that to a certain extent, Gen's views can be summed up as such: You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to make the world a better place (either for the many, or for one specific person that's very important to you) then you have to
truly sacrifice for it. If you make such a choice without being fully mentally prepared to make such a sacrifice, then you're likely to endure great loss if not personal destruction.
On the flip side, you can choose to live only for yourself, but that means you have to be careful about the attachments that you make with others and the world around you.
So it's an interesting dualistic approach going on here, and I see a lot of it in the main cast of Madoka Magica, imo. I see how each of those cast members have to make hard choices with inescapable consequences, and even in a world infused with magic there's no way to "have it all", so to speak.
Gen's quote on love that Arabesque provided is interesting to me. The way love is portrayed in his works is often a slightly scary, pretty obsessed, and somewhat counterproductive thing. You can tell that Gen himself is apprehensive about romantic love. It's probably good that Gen is able to portray love this way, because not all love stories end well, and sometimes it can be good to be reminded of that.