Madoka Magica rewatch 1-6
Apr. 3rd, 2011 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootWhile the last two eps are hanging, it seems like a good time to re-watch. After all, this is a series one needs to watch at /least/ twice to catch all the good stuff.
One thing I notice this time through is that there's a lot of short-term foreshadowing to go along with the long-term. One of the first things Mami says about witches is that it would be very bad if one showed up at a hospital because it would gain all the negative-energy power of that location even without putting in the effort to 'kiss' people. Lo and behold, the witch that kills her shows up at a hospital, and it is indeed way to powerful for her to handle. Similarly, Homura tells Madoka that doing anything for Sayaka would be like raising the dead, and two eps later we find out that the magical girls are indeed dead and encapsulated in their Soul Gems.
And then, of course, you have the reverse-parallel of Madoka and Homura's meeting in eps 1 and 10, which certainly helps explain the prevalence of mirrors in the setting. And the multiple shadows people seem to have so often. And oh my god, once you've seen 10 there are so many absolutely heartbreaking moments now that you know the things Homura isn't saying whenever she talks with them.
Not only that, though. There's a lot of staging and perspective that suggests lenses. The convex perspective when Mami and the girls are looking for witches the first time, the repeated shots through the glass table when Mami is giving them background info. I also note how often Kyubei turns up in the location from which the girls have just been "seen" by the viewer. The scene when Sayaka and Madoka are talking about being in a 'different world' following Mami's death has a particularly noticeable instance of this. Perspective and what one knows are emphasized pretty heavily.
There's definitely a lot of inter-text commentary between this show and Faust, too. It's not just one-way. Consider that Sayaka is repeatedly warned about the cost of being a magical girl and to be careful she isn't just wishing for Kyousuke to get better so that he will be grateful to her. We have the scene on the rooftop where he, being healed, plays violin again and Sayaka thinks that this is a moment of perfect happiness. Now, if this were simply a parallel to Faust, this would mean that Sayaka is saved--that she has acted from unselfish altruism and her soul is clean. MSMM, on the other hand, inverts that. Almost immediately after this, Sayaka encounters both a magical girl who refuses an altruistic philosophy and finds out that, on the scale of these things, both that girl and Madoka are a lot stronger than her and this seems to begin her downward spiral. That suggests that her motives, despite warnings, are either not pure or not stable, which we might have seen already given her presentation as someone who has a short fuse and doesn't re-think very often, and, indeed, she is not saved. One challenge after another breaks her grip on altruism, or any desire to save people, and when she loses that she becomes a witch. This strikes me as a commentary on the oversimplification, the flattening of fate and motivation that we see at the end of Faust, and on the potential of altruism to save anyone.
Ep 5 is definitely a turning point, too, away from what we might call the external tragedy of magical girls (the danger of being killed) to the start of the internal. This is where we see the rawness of the conflict for resources between them, contrasting Sayaka's "for love and justice" approach to Kyouko's food chain.
This is also the ep where Kyubei starts to come out in the open. His attempts to get Madoka, specifically, to contract get a lot more bald and clearly not in her interests. This is where he starts explicitly sowing distrust of Homura, and where he seems to reach the conclusion that Homura is a temporal anomaly.
In light of what we find out by 10, Madoka's discussion with her mother about doing a wrong thing to set things right, even if no one understands, also has some serious resonance with Homura, as well as Sayaka. In fact, this might be the one moment that makes me most hopeful for a good ending.
One thing I notice this time through is that there's a lot of short-term foreshadowing to go along with the long-term. One of the first things Mami says about witches is that it would be very bad if one showed up at a hospital because it would gain all the negative-energy power of that location even without putting in the effort to 'kiss' people. Lo and behold, the witch that kills her shows up at a hospital, and it is indeed way to powerful for her to handle. Similarly, Homura tells Madoka that doing anything for Sayaka would be like raising the dead, and two eps later we find out that the magical girls are indeed dead and encapsulated in their Soul Gems.
And then, of course, you have the reverse-parallel of Madoka and Homura's meeting in eps 1 and 10, which certainly helps explain the prevalence of mirrors in the setting. And the multiple shadows people seem to have so often. And oh my god, once you've seen 10 there are so many absolutely heartbreaking moments now that you know the things Homura isn't saying whenever she talks with them.
Not only that, though. There's a lot of staging and perspective that suggests lenses. The convex perspective when Mami and the girls are looking for witches the first time, the repeated shots through the glass table when Mami is giving them background info. I also note how often Kyubei turns up in the location from which the girls have just been "seen" by the viewer. The scene when Sayaka and Madoka are talking about being in a 'different world' following Mami's death has a particularly noticeable instance of this. Perspective and what one knows are emphasized pretty heavily.
There's definitely a lot of inter-text commentary between this show and Faust, too. It's not just one-way. Consider that Sayaka is repeatedly warned about the cost of being a magical girl and to be careful she isn't just wishing for Kyousuke to get better so that he will be grateful to her. We have the scene on the rooftop where he, being healed, plays violin again and Sayaka thinks that this is a moment of perfect happiness. Now, if this were simply a parallel to Faust, this would mean that Sayaka is saved--that she has acted from unselfish altruism and her soul is clean. MSMM, on the other hand, inverts that. Almost immediately after this, Sayaka encounters both a magical girl who refuses an altruistic philosophy and finds out that, on the scale of these things, both that girl and Madoka are a lot stronger than her and this seems to begin her downward spiral. That suggests that her motives, despite warnings, are either not pure or not stable, which we might have seen already given her presentation as someone who has a short fuse and doesn't re-think very often, and, indeed, she is not saved. One challenge after another breaks her grip on altruism, or any desire to save people, and when she loses that she becomes a witch. This strikes me as a commentary on the oversimplification, the flattening of fate and motivation that we see at the end of Faust, and on the potential of altruism to save anyone.
Ep 5 is definitely a turning point, too, away from what we might call the external tragedy of magical girls (the danger of being killed) to the start of the internal. This is where we see the rawness of the conflict for resources between them, contrasting Sayaka's "for love and justice" approach to Kyouko's food chain.
This is also the ep where Kyubei starts to come out in the open. His attempts to get Madoka, specifically, to contract get a lot more bald and clearly not in her interests. This is where he starts explicitly sowing distrust of Homura, and where he seems to reach the conclusion that Homura is a temporal anomaly.
In light of what we find out by 10, Madoka's discussion with her mother about doing a wrong thing to set things right, even if no one understands, also has some serious resonance with Homura, as well as Sayaka. In fact, this might be the one moment that makes me most hopeful for a good ending.
