The Adherent(s) of the Repeated Meme(s) Pt. 2 – The Memories

~:maze of memories:~
~:maze of the mind:~

TW: Discussions of racism, fascism, misogyny, colonization, chattel slavery, and… I’m a white lady talking about this stuff in the context of discussing an anime? This is going to be dicey and weird.

This is an essay about some of the themes and symbolism of Madoka Magica: Rebellion, an anime film released in Japan in 2013 that was a sequel to an anime broadcast in Japan from January to April in 2011 as my tiny white United States-an tranny brain perceives them and is a part of a three part essay series.

• Part 1: The Manual (huge trigger warning for suicide)
• Part 2: The Memories (♀♦You Are Here♦♀)
• Part 3: THE MATRIX (new as of 10Jan2023)

Please watch the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica (though I prefer the film adaptations Beginnings and Eternal for numerous reasons) and the sequel film Madoka Magica Rebellion through official means. It is well worth your time in my opinion. Further, none of what I write should be construed as reductionism (“This is definitely what the authors intended!” and/or “These are my only and final thoughts on the matter!”), but rather explorations on ideas I see in the subtext throughout Madoka Magica Beginnings, Eternal, and Rebellion. Thank you.

Prelude: A Response to Responses

I got some interesting feedback on The Adherent(s) of the Repeated Meme(s) Pt. 1 – The Manual. I got my first comment ever directly on a post. Someone, probably a spam-bot, whined that I suggested a book by Davids Graeber and Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything. To which I reply: fuck all the way off. I do what I want.

Moving right along, the friend I initially talked with the ideas of Pt. 1 about told me that they thought I was “reading too much into things.” They said it took them awhile to get into the right mindset to read it, and after that it still took them a long while to put together their thoughts regarding it. They were actually surprised at how much I had to say regarding the topic. As were others (though, I did start with some personal editorializing and did include other real life stuff, but that was kind of the point: I kinda feel like I stumbled onto a piece of real life source material for the anime).

Other commentary I received was that inclusion of the impacts of imperialism (and more specifically US foreign policy, where I am from and currently live) and the history of colonization should maybe not have been included. However, I’d feel more than a little remiss to not include discussions of that stuff on a discussion about an anime like Puella Magi Madoka Magica given the history of anime/manga itself within the larger context of the history of Japan (check out the 2001 adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis, as well as the history of how THAT came to be). The entire reason I talked about oppression dynamics was the Incubators. I left it all in the subtext on my last two pieces about PMMM, but I’m going to dive in head first on this piece.

Something unrelated to responses I recieved but all the while interesting that I missed with no relation to The Manual or a reference to The Sea of Trees (/sarcasm), here’s Homura Akemi entering a dead forest shaped like her soul gem for no apparent reason in Eternal before the film starts in on her timelines right after the death of the “tree sisters” Sayaka Miki and Kyoko Sakura in the paper maze suicide incident…

Final note: someone said that I talked about the United States Republican party specifically. I made no mention of them at all.

Part 2: The Memories

Introduction
What Friendly Hell Is This?

And I heard, as it were, the noise of a window:

A familiar smile saying: “Come and see.”

And I saw. And beheld a white beast.

There’s some hands goin’ round takin’ names
And they decide who gets sleep, and who gets dreams
E’ry body won’t be treated all the same
There’ll be a giant plushy flyin’ ’round
When the hands come around

The above isn’t exactly how the intro goes down, but I couldn’t resist the call back to an earlier post I wrote considering how the teacher, Saotome-san, starts talking about the book of Revelation, and that just because we’ve reached the end of the Mayan calendar doesn’t mean we’re all safe because she can’t get a date and…

…there’s a new transfer student? It’s Homura Akemi? And she’s a magical girl? Just like the rest of Madoka, Sayaka, Kyoko, and Mami who we’ve all seen so far already? Who all seem to be happily working and living together and fighting alongside one another in peace and harmony with Kyubey as nothing more than a cheerful mascot who says nothing but the letter “Q” repeatedly…?

NO. GOOD. THING. CAN. COME. FROM. THIS… probably…?

As with my last piece, I’ve (arbitrarily) picked three things that got stuck in my craw and unpacked them. Those things are (with cool, riddlesome titles instead of just stating plain what I’m talking about because I’m hip and edgy):

1. Memories are Troublesome Things, Aren’t They?
2. Incubators & the Status Quo
3. MADOKA SAID “NO,” HOMURA! WHAT THE FUCK???

Part 2A: Memories are Troublesome Things, Aren’t They?

The way memories work for me is like a branching labyrinth. I remember one thing, and then several other things jump from there. I’ll pick one branch (or I won’t, sometimes I don’t have a choice), and then several other memories spring forth from that memory. It makes writing from memory very difficult for me. Now I use a system of pins to keep track of what comes up as I write and what I want to write about. I’ve tried drawing a web in a notebook before, but that gets overwhelming very quickly. Now my process more follows a mindset of PUT IT ALL ON PAGE and cut wheat from chaff. This works well for a digital medium, but for physical paper, drafting would be INCREDIBLY difficult for me. Nigh impossible.

When I have someone trying to mess with my memories, I can feel myself almost trying to escape from my body. When I know specific events happened in a specific way, or specific things were said, I have a hard time telling someone to their face sometimes how I’m really feeling. In part because its a multitude of things I’m feeling at any given moment. Whenever I do try to explain myself, I am told I am being “combative” or “aggressive”. The person specifically trying to manipulate me, or my memories or the memories of others, is never seen as such, though. They generally have power and privilege over me in some (or multiple) regard(s). It doesn’t stop me knowing in my body that I can no longer trust the person doing it, and I’ll usually never tell them outright anymore unless they gather the courage to ask me directly… or my brain just can’t take the cognitive dissonance of feeling manipulated anymore.

There’s another interesting thing about memories that sometimes happens where I’ll feel like I’m in two places and times simultaneously, like a split in reality is occurring. However, that has only happened a few times, and there’s only one time that I’d be willing to open up about. I wrote about that experience in “The Catfish Aside” in Part 3C.

This movie starts off really bright and happy in stark contrast to all the awful of Beginnings and Eternal. However, those who are paying attention would notice immediately that the Nightmares the Quintet face off against seem to span the whole city, and also are not the Wraiths that Homura Akemi, Kyoku Sakura, and Mami Tomoe were fighting at the end of Eternal after Sayaka Miki was led away by the Law of the Cycle. Another oddity is…

…there’s a witch. Charlotte. The Sweets Witch. Right there. Even though witches aren’t supposed to exist. Also, Madoka Kaname exists. Even though she’s not supposed to exist. Also, Homura Akemi is supposed to be using a bow in the new universe, not her shield and time magic. So there’s a lot at play here that isn’t it’s supposed to be, and yet is. And that all gets unpacked and unraveled.

Remember the flying hand? There was a yellow ribbon tied on the left middle finger that ties a cover onto the whole finger. A ribbon tied on a finger is associated with memory, usually the index finger. Given that it’s a yellow ribbon, tied on the same finger where a soul gem ring would be, it could have something to do with Mami Tomoe. However, the hand is blue, and this is a series all about deconstruction and trope inversion, so the writers kinda gave a big clue right at the start of the film. Which is really neat.

In the OG anime/Beginnings and Eternal, Madoka Kaname was very much the audience relate character. Now, it’s Homura. As she works to unravel the mystery of this strange – at least, strange for the standard set by Eternal – new world, there’s a lot of wacky stuff that happens. A heartwarming conversation with Madoka after a month working together as magical girls. Throwbacks to Sayaka’s “emotional baggage” with “Captain Oblivious” the teenage violin prodigy and Hitomi-chan. So many bridges of all different sorts on a bus ride to nowhere with Kyoko. There are definitely no subtle references to any other media being made here, and I’m definitely not going to talk about this in Pt. 3.

There’s lots of beautiful moon shots at different points of WHICH ARE ALSO OF ABSOLUTELY NO CINEMATIC SIGNIFICANCE. Mami and Homura come to blows as was teased in Beginnings with lots of bang bang pew pew shooty shoot action that is just _{*chef’s kiss*} ^*muah* Fantastique! Brilliance! Perfection! Finally, Homura eventually ends up at a decision point that is quite Hegelian in nature and definitely probably not a reference to any other media ever. It is interesting to note that after Homura releases time when she sees Octavia, instead of four paths, there are three. There’s probably some discussion of symbolism and use of imagery that could be had about how when we make choices our potential options become limited as a result…?

Before I continue, I want to say that if there is one thing I’ve learned in all my years on this earth, there are very few people who are truly, genuinely curious about the world around them, that there are far fewer people that actually follow their curiosity through to its logical conclusions than I’d like to believe, and even fewer than that who actually try to do something about what they find…

…but Homura does all of the above. I think that’s why I relate to her story so much…

…to a point.

Part 2B: Incubators & the Status Quo

~:Kyubey & Colonization:~

Kyubey and the Incubators want to keep the universe as it is. They like things the way they are, and none of us (the viewers, or the magical girls they definitely “don’t” trick) understand why. However, for some reason, they are very interested in making sure that billions of years from now, the universe doesn’t cease to exist.

Side note: my (admittedly tiny) understanding of cosmology is that there is a possibility that universes come and go? Like one universe will collapse in on itself and another will begin over the span of something like thirty billion years from start to finish similar to the NIETZSCHEAN ETERNAL RECURRANCE???

Anyways, the way Kyubey and the Incubators talk, I am reminded of the way a certain group of beings talk. They claim that they NEVER rely on emotion to make decisions. They claim to always be rational and logical. They might ask for a reasonable debate. Remind everyone that they are “just asking questions.” It just so happens that their line of questioning and the way they talk most of the time seems to justify prison slave labor, imperialist wars, restrictions on bodily autonomy, busting labor unions, and justifying all manner of violence against everyone who is not them, and it seems like they are always unimpacted by the things they talk so calmly and “rationally” about. The things they just want to have a “rational” and “logical” debate about. Furthermore, they always talk about things in a way that support maintaining the way things currently are…

It is interesting to note, that when Kyubey first shows up in Beginnings, he shows up battered and bloodied at Homura’s hands, after calling telepathically for Madoka to save him. He never really tells an outright lie, but obscures the truth in such a way such that the truths he does speak benefit him. Later, at the end of Beginnings, when Madoka is going to make a wish to change Sayaka back into a human, one of Kyubey’s “countless spare” bodies is destroyed by Homura to prevent Madoka from making a contract. An action on Homura’s part that is ultimately described as “pointless” in so many words by Kyubey.

Over the course of Eternal, we find that the Incubators have shared a relationship with the humans that has spanned the course of human history. Of course, while Kyubey claims the Incubators have tried to deal fairly with the humans, acknowledging the humans’ sentience, gaining consent for every contract (albeit not FRIES model consent or anything similar), Madoka rejects this notion in their conversations because that knowledge won’t bring her dead friends back. Kyubey even tries to play the factory farming card, saying that Madoka’s horrified response to being shown images of factory farm animals being mistreated is illogical (I’d be lying if this show isn’t part of the reason for my current mostly pescatarianism and shift toward vegetarianism… my relationship with food is… fraught). Eventually, Kyubey tells Madoka that she will become the most powerful magical girl ever and then the wickedest of all witches, at which point the incubators will harvest an unimaginable amount of energy. And that if she ever feels like dying for the sake of the universe, she should dial 1-800-777-QBAY from a touch-tone phone. Finally, when she does make a wish, it partially undoes the system the Incubators had in place, and saves magical girls from a fate of despair by creating a multiverse free of witches thanks to all the hope placed in her by Homura Akemi.

When it comes to Kyubey, and the way he presents himself in relation to what he is actually doing contrasted against how we find out Homura is a magical girl with what she is doing to Kyubey and her role in all of this: did you catch it? When we first meet Kyubey, he is LITERALLY playing the victim. In reality, he is victimizing adolescent girls and has been for millennia while claiming it is for the good of humanity and the universe with unfalsifiable claims and appeals to logic and reason. Meanwhile, Homura is portrayed as a violent antagonizer when her goal is to protect others who might fall prey to Kyubey, though her focus is on Madoka Kaname in particular. Where else have we seen this before?

For most of Rebellion, Kyubey acts like a prototypical magical girl anime mascot. He only makes the sound “q” or “kyu” (think Pokémon), he steals human food, he is around Madoka more than anyone else… and then he breaks into a villainous monologue about how illogical it is to act on curiosity alone once Homura realizes that she is a witch and the false Mitakihara City is (what… you thought this was all happening in the REAL Mitakihara City??? OH NO THIS IS ALL HAPPENING) within Homura Akemi’s soul gem contained by the Incubators for the purpose of capturing Madoka Kaname (who the Incubators have been trying to ascertain exists as simply “The Law of the Cycle”) so they can push things back to the old order of a cycle of hope and despair: of magical girls becoming witches so the Incubators can collect emotional energy in vast quantities all at once…

At the end of Eternal, Homura told Kyubey about the world where magical girls became witches. Kyubey said that the witch concept had an appeal as a means of collecting energy. Whether Homura subjected herself to this experiment or she became trapped by the Incubators somehow is unclear to me (and I kinda don’t want to look it up because I appreciate the ambiguity for the time being, but I’ll come back to this). However, that she is was being used by the Incubators for the purpose of interfering with the Law of the Cycle and eventually controlling Madoka was unacceptable to her. When Kyubey tries to reason Homura out of becoming a witch, she remembers that she is older than the current universe, and informs him that her wish when she became a magical girl was to defend Madoka, and that holds true. Even now.

Eventually, the Quintet work together to defeat the Incubators by working together, right under their very noses by getting them to focus on Madoka, while Charlotte (going by Bebe) and Sayaka work with Mami, Kyoko, and Homura to unravel the mysteries of the false Mitakihara they’ve all found themselves in.

Something important to note is that the while Kyubey never technically lies, he makes one big claim that technically can’t be falsified: that humans would still be living in caves without the interference of the Incubators. I’m reminded of initiation ceremonies of the Proud Boys (founded in 2016, and bear in mind that this is a film with a release date of 2013, with the original anime airing in 2011) where their members have to declare an oath to refuse “to apologize for creating the modern world.” However, this sentiment for imperialists and colonizers has been around for a long while and is a time honored tool in storytelling (Gul Dukat thinking himself a hero in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comes to mind).

Setting that aside, I can say with certainty, that I haven’t invented a damn thing (though I’ve created some cool stuff, I think). However, I can point to the Wachowskis for completely revamping the way Hollywoo does movies (even after The Matrix, though no one wants to admit it). I can point to Martine Rothblatt, who invented satellite radio (not in the “Elon Musk invented the electric car” kind of way, but rather, she actually did her homework and knows her stuff and if there’s anyone who is a real life corollary to Tony Stark: it’s Martine Rothblatt). Further, unlike Elon Musk’s rabid fanboys, I can offer scathing critiques of her and her written work. I can point to Wendy Carlos for being the fairy godmother of electronic music. I can point to Lynn Conway for advancements in computer chip technology that are allowing me to type up this very blog post. If I were to extend my scope beyond “white trans woman” and go with just “white queer” to still fit within my identifiers, Alan Turing was pretty amazing with computers as well.

Then there’s the fact that black women have always been amazing inventors and innovators. There’s all the black women responsible for putting white men on the moon. There’s Gladys West who is the person most directly responsible GPS technology, which I’m sure absolutely zero Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, or Three-per weirdos EVER used to find their buddies for doing fasci- I mean- wholesome patriotic activities. Then there’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who literally invented rock music. If it weren’t for her, Proud Boys wouldn’t be able to “refuse to apologize for” bands like Burzum and Five Finger Death Punch. That’s just off the top of my head. When I did a quick search, there were lots of list-style articles about all the cool inventions by black women that lots of white folks take for granted. For example, Marie Van Brittan Brown is responsible for every security system in homes and banks today. Simply because cops were slow to respond in her neighborhood with high crime (I’ve definitely never written about crime here). Something that white people EVERYWHERE rely on now DUE TO OUR OWN RACISM was born from a black couple’s desire to protect their home that was at risk AS A RESULT OF RACISM. And yet, Proud Boys have the audacity to claim they built the modern world.

Moving on to one of their kind of “unspoken” thought leaders, Jordan B. Lobsterson has written a LOT about how there is this supposed “order” within masculinity and “chaos” within femininity. What is interesting here is, there’s a part where Kyubey is trying to talk Homura down from becoming a witch, and instead wants her to call to Madoka to awaken Madoka’s full potential as The Law of the Cycle. When Homura tells Kyubey about how he doesn’t remember that the initial wish she made to become a magical girl was to protect Madoka, and that holds true even now, Kyubey argues that it would be the worst possible outcome for her to die in the shell of her soul gem, with only curses for company. That acting out of curiosity alone is illogical. That if there is no goal or reward in mind when performing experimentation… then what is the point?

Prior this film, though, and around the time of the anime broadcast: there was a budding online skeptic community in the US and the UK. That skeptic community, which came to be known by many names (the skeptosphere, YouTube Atheists, New Atheism, BUT YOU BETTER NOT CALL THEM ATHEISM PLUS lol). It included figures who… some of whom are now Christian? And fascist? I’m not going to name names, but the course of time was from about 2010 to 2020 this whole bunch of YouTube atheists started dunking on young earth creationists because… it’s so fucking easy to do… but the thing is, they had a tendency to take those creationists and what they had to say seriously and at face value. However, when they got bored with those creationists, they turned their gaze to feminism. Not even actual feminist theory which has been a thing for over a century and seen several permutations, but feminism as this kind of bogeyman (bogeywoman? bogeyperson?). Then the skeptosphere saw its own permutation into the YouTube RedPill community in tandem with r/redpill with all that violent incel bullshit and co-opting and misinterpreting of the first Matrix film which PROBABLY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH LANA WACHOWSKI COMING OUT AS TRANS IN 2012 AS A CHARACTER ASSASSINATION OF HER AND HER WORK AS SOMEONE WHO PUT CORNEL WEST ON THE SILVER SCREEN AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY IDEAS IN THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN A BIG WAY. It makes me wonder what was going on in Japan politically around the time of the anime and the film…

…but I digress.

However…

~:Hacking the Matrix:~

I used to be in the skeptosphere. That’s how I know it so well. Dunking on creationism was hella fun and kinda cathartic because I used to be a creationist in my teenage years. In my defense, my world was abysmally tiny (though I want to shame each and every one of my teachers who stood by and let me engage with that fuckery). I was never a Proud Boy, though. I got out of the skeptosphere WELL before all that shit went down. I’m hella proud, but no part of me is or ever was a boy. And my Pride is related to having to fight like hell to keep all the parts of me that matter close to me while almost every single man around me tried to destroy them. My womanhood. My attachment to and affinity with visual art, musical composition, the written word. Their pride is related to their ability to inflict harm.

I exist outside of their paradigms, but because I wanted to know what I was dealing with, I kept my ear to the ground on reactionary bullshit for so long that I lost a lot of myself to it. Not in the sense that “you become the thing you fight against.” More so that I just lost pieces of myself to the void of time and death. It really had nothing to do with the fascist groups I was keeping my eyes and ears on. I can’t get those pieces back, I’ve found. They’re gone.

Like the Incubators, there are tons of fascists. They think they know everything. They mistake “logic” and “rationality” for emotion, and deny that they rely on emotion. There are no Gulags for me to put them in even if I wanted to. There is no firing squad for me to order to shoot them behind a chemical shed. Even if there were, I’d give no such order. That’s not the kind of person I am. I used to be. I’ve learned and grown a lot since then, however. It’s hard to say what happened in specificity.

Suffice it to say, I’m better than the God of the Bible, and better than Jesus: there are no unforgivable sins. While I’m not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, I at least won’t condemn anyone to eternal torment for the crime of being human. If you’re a white person reading this: I get that you’re scared, and your world is changing, there are lots of different kinds of people you’re expected to be nice to that you probably weren’t expected to be nice to when you were a kid. I bet the prospect of it feels incredibly terrifying, though you probably won’t admit it. I mean, on the one hand, you’ve got black folks saying “I can’t breathe,” “hands up, don’t shoot,” “our lives matter,” trans folks with very specific healthcare and access needs, disabled folks with very specific healthcare and access needs, queer folks with very specific healthcare needs, people the state classes as women and girls with their reproductive rights (their very bodily autonomy) in jeopardy, and then there’s the overlaps and intersections and complexities and nuances… and on the other hand, you’ve got a group telling you you have nothing to apologize for where the “modern world” is concerned. HOWEVER, that group on the other hand is lying…

…because white men didn’t build the modern world. European Settler Colonizers stole and raped and pillaged and enslaved and then covered it all up with grand myths to bring what we know of as the modern world into existence. The world we all experience was brought into being by the blood, sweat, and tears of those that European Settler Colonizers enslaved, either through chattel slavery or indentured servitude, but it was mostly on the backs of those who would not be considered “white” by the standards of the 1691 Act for Suppressing Outlying Slaves, which was where the word “white” was first codified into law. Take note of how non-whites were described, and the punishments meted out for interracial relations between genders in that law, and it’s all downhill from there. Every law document in the US that was written since then was created to cover this up. See? White people didn’t even exist before 1691. So for “western chauvinists” to talk this big game about “building the modern world”… no. Just… no. Go read The 1619 Project for a more comprehensive view on US history at the very least.

So why is this part titled “Hacking the Matrix”? The Matrix as a body of work was about capitalism, post-structuralism, power dynamics, reality, control, love, memory, trauma, and… _{I guess also there was a transition allegory somewhere in there…}

Each and every one of us has our own way of conceptualizing the world based on the data that we have available to us. We all live in our own little world, in a sense. Thanks to social media, those worlds have become more and more fractured and disconnected despite the ostensible connectivity of social media. We all get fed different info at school growing up. That info gets filtered differently thanks to what we get taught at home or at church growing up. That info gets added up, multiplied, subtracted, or divided differently in college, if that happens. And then, social media takes all of that info that we give it, and creates an amalgamation of “stuff that can get sold to us” mostly for the purpose of getting us to become a product ourselves. And all we wanted from social media was to… what? Connect with friends or whatever? INSTEAD, we’ve handed a lot of these platforms the keys to our innermost worlds, and holy fuck do they have the power to destroy some people if they really wanted to… I mean… not me, because I have no shame and am TERRIBLE with secrecy anyways, but… for those whom secrecy matters? Yeah. Totes. One site breach would destroy some people.

One of the points of this subsection is to say that we need to learn to keep a dual ledger as we are able. Black folks call this “code switching,” and autistic folks call this “masking.” For both groups, it’s annoying and harmful to expect people to do (on the latter part, I know this from personal experience). It is used as a means of restricting who has access to spaces, and thus, whose voices are heard. This is one of the ways in which white nationalism and all the systems of harm it maintains and that help maintain it in cyclical fashion stay afloat.

THE OTHER POINT of this subsection is that we let them divide us as a working class because we simply don’t know how to talk to each other as humans anymore. We’ve taken what should be intensely personal matters (abortion or transition to pick two intensely personal examples) and made them matters of public debate that will make entire classes of people 2nd or 3rd class citizens (those classed as women/girls and trans people) for no real reason other than “these concepts make cis/het white Christian men feel uncomfortable, and therefore we need to legislate them out of existence.” They are using all the tools at their disposal to do it. AND WE LET THEM DO IT BECAUSE WE DON’T LISTEN TO THOSE MOST IMPACTED BY THE HARM OF THESE THINGS. Which seems like a good Segway into…

Part 3: MADOKA SAID “NO,” HOMURA! WHAT THE FUCK???

During the big Homulilly/Octavia fight scene that spans the city of Fake Mitakihara, and the magical girls trade quips with Kyubey about working right under his nose while they were focused on Madoka, everything seems to come to a stop once Madoka reaches Homulilly. Homura is ready to kill herself. She is ready to die in that place if it means keeping the Incubators from knowing any more about Madoka than they already do. Even if that death is repeated into infinity. When Madoka reaches her however, she says something interesting to Madoka calling out to her in the wake of the same window imagery from the opening of the film…

This…

This cut me.

The whole of Homura’s story arc in Beginnings and Eternal was painful as hell to begin with. This monologue seems to suggest that Homura put herself under the Incubators’ control for the purpose of drawing Madoka out in the specific way that they did. However, once she came around from her own memory re-writes, she rejected the Incubators’ plans and girls protected girls.

Here is where things get even weirder. Homura Akemi awakens to see Ultimate Madoka coming to take her away as part of The Law of the Cycle because Homura Akemi’s soul gem is tainted and wish and witch and yadda yadda, but…

…Homura breaks off the part of the Law of the Cycle pertaining to Madoka Kaname before she made her wish. This opens up a lot of questions that are explored in the first two films surrounding the nature of consent. In one of Homura’s timelines, Madoka specifically asked to be prevented from being tricked by Kyubey. However, Homura doesn’t know that right before Madoka made her wish to become the Law of the Cycle, her mom asked to make sure she wasn’t being tricked by someone’s lies. Madoka’s wish to become the Law of the Cycle was intentional and motivated by selfless love. However, Homura was still trapped in a cycle of trauma and fear and loss where she couldn’t see the love she had in abundance surrounding her in the form of Kyoko and Mami right by her side. She said it herself:

What is troubling to me is that Homura describes her act of dissociating a Madoka that she knows (Madoka before she made her wish) from the Law of the Cycle as “love.” However, it is not any form of “love” that I can recognize. In All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks, she quotes psychiatrist M. Scott Peck as echoing psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in defining love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Hooks names the following as the components of love: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honesty. In Homura’s action of splitting a Madoka off from the Law of the Cycle, I see none of that. It is something that does not extend Homura’s self for Madoka’s growth at that point. It does not show care for Madoka’s wishes or well-being. It does not show affection for the wholeness and complexity of who Madoka is and who Madoka became thanks to the love and hope Homura already placed in her. It does not show recognition of Madoka’s growth. It does not show respect for Madoka’s wishes. It could be argued that, up to that point, Homura showed commitment to Madoka, but was her commitment to the complexity of the fullness of Madoka’s being or an idea of Madoka that Homura wanted to hold on to? Homura was not trusting Madoka’s wishes. Finally, there was not honest and open communication about what Homura’s needs or wants were.

Granted, this is an anime, so applying dialectical materialism is kinda… a bit weird… BUT MY POINT IS THIS: Homura’s action of splitting a piece of Madoka from the Law of the Cycle was an act of selfishness that was not rooted in actual love or even a form of it, and not something the Law of the Cycle or Madoka wanted or consented to. In All About Love, this gets talked about. Homura did not love Madoka. Homura invested time and energy in Madoka, and it did not get returned the way she wanted it. Homura engaged in cathexis. This also gets talked about by M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled, though I will admit I haven’t read it (it just gets mentioned a lot by bell hooks).

The most painful part about all of this in terms of the storytelling is that Madoka almost awakens to her true potential as The Law of the Cycle. And Homura gaslights her by saying “No, you are exactly who you are supposed to be and where and when you are supposed to be,” in so many words. Homura does say that she’d still wish for a world where Madoka could be happy, though. So there’s that at least…

Part 2: The Memories – In Review

Madoka Magica: Rebellion has been DIFFICULT to write about. Mostly due to my own uncertainties about almost everything in my life.

I think it asks a lot of interesting questions about memories. Who gets to control them and why? Individually AND collectively, and to what end?

I also think it has a lot to say about power dynamics and issues surrounding ideas about love, consent, and sacrifice and who deserves those things from us.

But… there’s a post-credits scene. Because Homura didn’t just break off a piece of the Law of the Cycle. She also forces the Incubators to help clean up the curses that have spread across the earth. We hear two bells toll (there are usually four). We see half of the moon. We see her alone in a chair. There’s Kyubey all frazzled. She ballet dances around him. Smiles. And remember the frame with the runes from her magical girl transformation sequence I showed in my Part 1 essay…?

Next up is Part 3! Which… I’ve dropped a lot of hints as to what it’s about, but I’m still not gonna show my hand because… REASONS. Now go out and PAINT THE SKY WITH RAINBOWS!!!