Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica Episode 7 Discussion

Psychodrake said:


Arguable. She is technically trying her best not to get involved, otherwise she would be involved by now. See where I'm coming from?

Psychodrake said:
I try my best not to buy more anime DVD's, still eye them up when I'm out though.

cleo said:
Yes, I see. Yet I think it's due to Homura she isn't a magical girl yet. Without Homura's invention, she'd be a MG in ep 5.

cleo said:
Sidenote: I'm getting hyped up for tomorrow's ep.
The more I think about it, the less I can see Sayaka going on a killing spree.
Numbing the pain is perfectly understandable in her condition.
But killing people goes completely against her moral standards, and would be too much ooc. Hurting someone unintentionally seems more likely.
Another option: Kyouko comes to her rescue. She's been through the same ordeal, so it's likely she went nuts for a while too. Yet she didn't turn into a witch.

cleo said:
Isn't that contradicted by her breaking down in Madoka's arms?

Kuro-Tenshi said:
Awesomeness~ ><
Is the reason why Sayaka doesn't want to be with/confess to the guy she likes because she doesn't have a soul? and she feels that her body is empty? I'm confused over that part.

And Sayaka's going crazy! Has hatred filled her?

What was Kiyuubei going about on how it slows you down in the beginning of the episode.... @_@

Psychodrake said:
This show is hardcore. I can't believe I'm actually watching a magical girl show, I'm usually more for brutality being a Warhammer 40k fanboy, but this is insanely cool.

Madoka isn't a Puella Magi yet. Surprised, guess there will be more than one season unless it just goes insane in the last few episodes. Is the manga considerably longer than this?

Omniknight said:
Reme

Remember this image!
Definite foreshadowing!

burntlettuce said:
Madoka is really, really annoying.

nerdyguy said:
Before that, my knowledge about religion is quite limited.

So, IMO, it seems like a holy place to me, where the witch, Elsamaria is praying to a religious-like symbol, in which it seems like Monstrance to some of the viewers. (taken from /a/ in 4chan and puella magi wiki). Do anyone have an innate understand of what the red like "sun" in the fight scene represents?

http://wiki.puella-magi.net/images/b/b3/PMMM_Ep7_Monstrance.png

There is also a representation of the tree, too btw. Going off tangent, it reminds me of the Sephiroth tree of life in Shin Seiki Evagelion.

Nothing else that I could comment in concrete here.

Going on to the next point,the concept of equivalent exchange, like what Kyouko have mentioned, is based on the concept of zero sum philosophy, in which states that when you create a miracle, in some other aspects, due to the chain effect, a despair is being formed.

As a side point, I think i could think of the reason why wishing a lot of wishes upon a wish is flawed. If you wish a lot of wishes, where does the equivalent exchange of having these wishes come from. It will come from more wishes as a self propagating effect. Ad infinium to absurdity.

Going back. We could understand Kyouko's position from episode 6 onwards, that wishing for another person to be well could lead to some other bad tragedy as well (looks myopic to me) and the reason why she become such a "hedonistic" person.

That, going back to the concept of intention, like what Mami-san have warned Miki. To wish for a miracle for another person because she loves him or because she wants him to feel indebted to her. It is not the action or the end results, but the intention that matters. Extending the point, this is what her father believes too. It is faith that he considers important, not the "illusion" of magic. Having his beliefs destroyed, he lost his reason to live and went along a self destructive path.

There are a lot of conflict of paradigms in this episode, from what I have observed. (But in a pragmatic world, people are too myopic to believe in the fact that the immediate end results are the one that matters, not their intentions or in the grand scheme of things)

To end off, I would like to take the concept that is relevant in the Madoka anime, borrowed from the philosophy of china's history (even through I have forgotten the exact Chinese poem for this):

"History is a cycle."

In specific reply to cleo,

"But can we hold something inhuman to human standards?"

We could extrapolate:

Can we accept what other cultures that we find "barbaric", and vice versa. (I am suggesting metaphorically that Kyuubey is a set of culture, while Miki is another set of culture)

...

And yes, ignorance is bliss. (Through I could argue that this will make life meaningless, I prefer a my life to be one of mad-dom.)

nerdyguy said:
Hi folks, I have read through all of your relevant points and would like to point out certain stuff .

Virtue and moral is relative. The way that we define good and bad is through our limited perceptive of what society and the environment defines us. In that aspect, Madoka, Sayaka and even Mami-san (as most of you would like to call her) (and Kyuubey too), could be immoral to a group of outsiders. (For example, they are bad because they are disrupting what a natural cycle of nature such as witch regeneration and stuff like that.)

Extending the argument, Kyuubey thinks that what he is doing is the so called "right" way because he is preventing the "grief" of the world, the witches, from doing evil to the world, by contracting little girls in an equivalent exchange of their commitment to fighting witches (and the after mentioned effects) with a miracle that could not exist in the standard view of the physical world itself . Mami-san, too, by dedicating her life to fighting witches. But he is "evil" too because he "tricks" little girls into doing his work for him.

By extending the argument even further, we could see that the concept of virtue, good and evil is being even more flawed, and that is even before computing all of the paradigms of different people and their "noble" (that is even being disputed-what is really right and what is really wrong) perception of morality itself. This, could lead to a big big question of what really is ethics?

What I could conclude in a almost certain term then, is that the commonly used perception of a part of morality is only what today's "superior" (superior as in society's alpha humans), only want us to behave as, through the use of "fear" and "reward" so as to maintain the status quo of the community.



PS: Not so much Faust references eh? Just curious.

Yumekichi11 said:
That's my other option if I get Shafted about him. If that is so, then it would mean someone is behind his creation and that means someone is higher. This could be a Bokurano where we may never know the higher ups but we may have a vision of them to see what he or they look like. Anyone who has seen Bokurano would know exactly what I mean. In any case I want to meet this person and slap him out for killing off innocent girls like that. This game is shit and lives are playing around in a cycle that is infinite unless someone breaks it like in Bokurano through a means it will never end, looking at Homura. Even her I am not sure if putting a end to the leader in Walpurgisnacht can solve things since he may be just part of the higher ups but not the leader.

Also I think because of showing her that she tested it out to the max during her fight with the witch. Apart from Hitomi influencing her in that, a though passed through me as I see this for 2nd time, that of Sayaka testing out how slow her moves are when she is damaged a lot. Turns out she finds they are not slow at all and the pain does not feel at all anymore.

-Vid said:
It was about time that Sayaka lost her mind though. ;o I did find it pretty weird that her friend (with the crush on that nub guy) suddenly acted up like that, though. That didn't sound like something friends would say. Not at all. Maybe Kyubey is also involved with that? Or she's possessed again?:P

And tbh I was just waiting for Sayaka to die at the end of the fight. Well, who knows, maybe she will soon enough anyway.

Monad said:
I don't know am not certain that Hitomi really wants that boy like many of you.

It seemed to me like she saw Sayaka not having the will to express her emotion and thought of pretending that she will confess to make her friend find the guts to go near the boy she loves. So it may have actually been an attempt to help her but she doesn't know that Sayaka feels bad about what she has become.

Sayaka obviously has a problem handling the fact that her soul isn't in her body. Her last crazy outburst shows her attempt to get hurt trying to feel the pain and going crazy over the fact that her body feels so soulless.

I wonder the feeling of a kiss or touch is diminish like the feeling of pain, making her go crazy over the fact that she would never be able to feel the touch of the boy she loves in a prober way.

Can that body even get pregnant for example? Can she feel sex normally?

If the only difference really is the feeling of pain then I believe she really doesn't need to take it so horrible no matter how bad it seems.

Maybe because am also a person that cares more about logic over sentimentality I can see Kyuubei having a point there. Really who cares if your soul is inside of your body or not if you still have control of it. I would only be concern in my ability to still have my senses except pain at full. Other than that i wouldn't really care. Feeling less pain isn't so bad anyway.

Now am waiting for some inside on Homura. She seems to be the most interesting girl with all the knowledge she has and the fact that even Kyuubei seems to not know much about her.

DonKangolJones said:
Sayaka's reaction is normal, predictable and pitiful. She's only a freaking little girl. However, at this point Sayaka gets what she deserves. At this point, she's gotten as many warnings and as much information as anybody. At this point, I don't doubt that's she's going to serve as the example. She can say she wants to be a hero all she wants. She's just deluding herself.

I also see that maybe I've been overreacting to Kyubey. He doesn't seem evil. He's simply not human and doesn't understand humans. This misunderstanding apparently leads to him seeming evil due to his "all business" approach. Homura has been dead right all along. And the more naively these girls deal with the situation, the more frustrating it becomes to watch them.

Interesting choice of direction in the end as well, I would have liked for them to show all the violence that went along with the scene, but what they did was just as effective.

cleo said:

Japanese fans noticed that the font of the kanji "魔法" (mahou, magic) in the show's logo text is heavily stylized, and could be read instead as "廃怯" (hai-kyou, cowardice, hesitation).
The visually valid joke title, "廃怯少女　まどか☆マギカ" (Hai-Kyou Shoujo Madoka Magika), could be translated as "wavering girl Madoka Magica" <3

maarsaalis said:
especially pathethic otaku who just overhype it.