[Triple_R]

Response to Shadow5YA is in Spoiler Space below.

Spoiler for Manga and anime spoilers:

Originally Posted by Shadow5YA

Mami offered her a Grief Seed and attached the loaded statement, "Or are you the type that hates sharing with others?"

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.

The following episode, Homura tried warning Mami about Charlotte.

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".

The foolish part in this case isn't that Mami distrusted Homura (since Homura did little to help her image by keeping to herself all the time) but the fact that Mami felt the need to disable Homura entirely. Why go so far?

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.

Mami was being reckless for the sake of her reliable senpai image and paid dearly for it.

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.

That's a fair point... only for their first confrontation.

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.

There was no Grief Seed to gain or people to protect in this case.

Wrong. Sayaka could reasonably believe she needs to protect Kyousuke from Kyouko given what Kyouko said.

A witch possessed Hitomi. Sayaka hesitated to the point of not participating in the fight at all. As the Witch attacked, Mami covered for Sayaka, sustaining severe injuries. Combined with Kyouko's taunting, it should be easy to see why Sayaka felt she was a liability to Mami.

No, it isn't. Sayaka's powers were instrumental in healing Mami. That's more important than what you just wrote.

Madoka wasn't even lecturing Sayaka about her ideals or how to fight.

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.

It's like a supermodel falling out of stardom because she developed anorexia, and her normal friends and family tell her to eat. Taking "it's your fault!" or "you don't know what I've been through!" is not an acceptable answer.

Bad analogy. Being a Puella Magi is nothing at all like being a supermodel.

Besides, Sayaka has a regeneration ability. That alone throws Madoka's advice into question simply as a practical matter.

It's not a shared responsibility and it never was a shared responsibility.

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.

While Mami and Sayaka's ideal's are similar, they are not the same. Mami wants companionship while Sayaka wants "justice".

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.

Mami's desire for companionship is a separate matter.

However, Sayaka's notion of justice is so idealized and fragile that she can't even live up to her own standards. That's why she calls herself a fool in the anime, and why leaving Hitomi to die in this manga eats at her from the inside out.

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.

Explaining and understanding human actions does not necessarily make those reasons "rational".

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.

I think feeling guilty and nearly responsible for an innocent person's death is a fair reason. I don't think it justifies exacerbating it with even more negativity, but it's natural for some people to feel that way.

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.

Kyouko had unrequited love. She made her wish for the father she loved so dearly, and in response, not only did he hate her, he tried killing everyone in the family over it. Are you really disregarding this just because it's familial love and not adolescent love?

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.

Homura also had to deal with the "no longer human" issue. You should understand why it's harder to sympathize with Sayaka when other characters dealt with similar issues more constructively.

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.

So what you should understand is that not everybody is going to connect to characters the exact same way that you do.


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.