Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy C
I'd like to point out that he doesn't do it for just kicks and giggles. It's usually to show how people who pursue one path in life, be it their ideals, dreams or joy, to the exclusion of everything else, wind up getting destroyed by their fanaticism.
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I think that's a fair assessment of how Gen is handling a few key characters in Fate/Zero.
However, I don't think that it applies much to Sayaka.
Sayaka didn't strike me as an unbalanced character, or truly fanatical. She certainly didn't strike as an abnormal person (actually, I feel that Sayaka is probably the most normal person in the entire main cast, with the possible exception of Mami).
In all seriousness, I think there's probably two reasons why Gen is leery of giving Sayaka an entirely happy end.
1) I think that Sayaka's descent was Gen's key illustration or "character study" or "object lesson" as to why the Puella Magi system of Madoka Magica is so vile. Basically, what happens to Sayaka more clearly justifies the wish that Madoka ends up making. Sayaka's sad ending feeds nicely into Madoka making the wish she did to ensure that nobody else would have to end up like her friend Sayaka did.
2) Gen, as we all know, is a "darker themed" writer. Basically, he takes a more skeptical view to happiness and happy endings than probably most of us do. My sense is that the overall Madoka Magica ending was probably pushing it for Gen even as it was (i.e. I recall Gen comparing what he wrote to the ending of one of the PreCure endings, and Gen saying "Is my heart really that dirty?"; I think what Gen meant by that is
actually "Is my heart so dirty that I now long for happy endings myself?"). Gen probably felt that to be true to his own view of the world, and to be true to his own creative vision, he had to have at least
some stark sadness in the Madoka Magica ending. Some major character had to come out of it drenched in melancholy. That character ended up being Sayaka...
Gen perhaps feels that if he lets Sayaka have a total happy end in an official Madoka Magica-related property, that he might be "selling out" his creative vision entirely, just to make some fans happy. I can respect that, even if I don't necessarily like it.