Suspended in Dreams on the Mitakihara Loop Line – A Nietzschean Reading of ''Madoka Magica: Rebellion Story''

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Title:	Suspended in Dreams on the Mitakihara Loop Line – A Nietzschean Reading of Madoka Magica: Rebellion Story
Creator:	Imagak
Date(s):	July 18, 2018
Medium:	Blog post
Fandom:	Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Topic:	Soul gem mechanics, Incubator psychology, Rebellion, Homura Akemi character analysis
External Links:	Essay link
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Suspended in Dreams on the Mitakihara Loop Line – A Nietzschean Reading of Madoka Magica: Rebellion Story is a meta essay by Imagak analyzing the events of the Puella Magi Madoka Magica TV series and the third film, as well as the worldbuilding that underlies them.

The first time I saw Rebellion was in a movie theater in December of 2013. I had a pretty intense emotional reaction to the end of the film: I left the theater feeling incredibly angry, and to shake the feeling out I jogged insanely to a bus I knew I could have caught by walking. Though I wasn’t angry at the movie, as I later learned many were. This article is mostly an attempt to figure out why exactly and in what sense I was angry.

I’ll offer my interpretation of both the themes and literal events of Rebellion. A close qualitative tie between interpretation of Homura’s actions and the value of Rebellion is a trend I’m not really going to stray from. However, a tight interweaving of world-building minutiae, art direction, and broad thematic goals was a well-discussed hallmark of the Madoka Magica television series, and I think this strength was carried through to, and even intensified in, Rebellion. Explaining the thematic significance of Homura’s actions requires properly contextualizing them, and so this article is wider in scope than an analysis of Homura’s actions, the end of Rebellion, or even Rebellion as a standalone film. This article is an analysis of Madoka as a single property, including the TV series and Rebellion, aimed towards explicating the meaning of Homura’s actions at the current end of the franchise.

Some Topics Discussed

• "Karmic Destiny, Magical Potential, and the Objectified Soul: What Happens When a Girl Contracts?"
• Exploration of time travel as depicted in the TV series
• "What rules govern Soul Gems and Grief Seeds?"
• "A Field Guide to Incubators" - lying, empathy, morality, telepathy, and their relationship to humanity
• "The Health of Kyouko Sakura, The Sickness of Sayaka Miki, and the Weaponization of Despair"
• Parallels between Kyubey and Kyouko
• Rebellion through a Nietzschean lens, with Kyubey's views analogous to Nietzsche's concept of the "master" that Homura is rebelling against

Excerpts

Madoka (TV) was notable for its dramatically compelling exposition of the mechanics of its central conceit. A steady drip of new information about the nature of the show’s magical girl system takes up a large portion of the show’s plot, and the resulting progressive recontextualization of magic is generally what people refer to when they refer (rightly or wrongly) to Madoka as a “deconstruction” of the magical girl genre. The slow transformation of what it means to be a magical girl is written to mostly dramatic ends in the TV series: we learn about magic at the same pace and with the same increasing horror as Madoka Kaname, the show’s central POV character. As a consequence of this narrative structure, by the time the viewer has a complete picture of the show’s magical girl system it’s already on the verge of fundamental change as the story enters its climax. New mechanics are regularly introduced up to the end of the last episode and the viewer scarcely gets a chance to take in the entirety of the system before its radical transformation.

Let me make it immediately clear where I stand on this: Kyuubey is not only an unambiguous liar, but a creature that uses its mastery of lying as one of its main hunting tools. The nature of its mission forces it to be: Kyuubey’s goal is the collection of the energy contained in Grief Seeds, and no Grief Seeds would exist without there first existing girls who have been convinced to condemn themselves to witchification. That process of “convincing” obviously requires more than a full explanation of the “sweet deal” that is being a magical girl and waiting for girls to take the bait – it requires intentionally creating false beliefs about what being a magical girl involves. And so Kyuubey does exactly that to both the audience and Madoka in the first two episodes of the series before the infamous shoe-drop in episode 3 begins to slowly unravel its pretense.

The relationship between incubators and magical girls is in this sense identical to a predator-prey relationship: the injured members of a prey species group are the most suitable targets for predation.

Accusations of creating false beliefs, lying, tricking, or whatever shade of deception an incubator might be charged with fall on uncomprehending head-ribbons because they cannot conceive of a creature having perspectival interiority because they have no notion of a “perspective” in the first place. To an incubator, lying to a magical girl is basically no different from rolling a ball around, or herding worms through a maze, except that magical girls require more complicated and subtle maneuvers to direct.

One of Kyouko’s earliest thematic functions in the TV series is thus to give voice to Kyuubey’s view of the universe as organized into a hierarchy of species enforced by relationships of socially-acceptable violence, and to shine a spotlight on the fact that the extent to which one flourishes under the magical girl system is the extent to which one shares and lives by this view. In Nietzschean terms, a “good magical girl” is a slave who understands herself as a master because she is given an underclass (here, non-magical humans and witches) onto which she can outwardly express her will to power. As I discussed in the previous section, the self-concept of the master is composed solely of a consciousness of this outward expression of will to power and an appreciation of its products. The notion that a master’s will to power is caused by something would not be comprehensible to them because they identify the expression of their will to power with the objective world. This inviolable sense of autonomy is displayed clearly in Kyouko, who possesses remarkably little resentment of Kyuubey, expresses few feelings of diminution or subjugation, and who repeatedly affirms a view of the life of a magical girl, in line with Kyuubey’s early descriptions, as being one of noble and dangerous freedom with a duty she chooses to embrace as a matter of pragmatic self-interest.

Homura’s “rebellion” was thus not a revolt merely against Madoka, Kyuubey, or the magical girl system. It was a rebellion against an idea of necessity as an impersonal force that acts upon individuals, determining the course of their lives, defining what they are, and providing them with a supra-human value system woven into “nature” to which they must submit or perish. Supra-human necessity was represented throughout Madoka by Madoka’s many sacrifices and attempts to obviate it, Kyuubey’s scientific indifference, and the magical girl system’s reduction of the human soul to an object. With the help of Madoka’s example Homura transcends all three in the end, and none of them can any longer violate the autonomy she has created for herself. She is the universe and she is her own creator. There is no longer a “Homura” to exploit; there is only a phenomenon to experience.

Reactions

Not only is this to my knowledge, albeit limited, by far the best written interpretation of Madoka that exists, it’s the only one that actually engages with the work in a fruitful manner. Bravo!

I absolutely loved this reading. Thank you so much for taking the time to put all this analysis on paper. Words cannot describe the joy I felt in seeing dissection of many confusing scenes and meaningful character and story analysis throughout the series.