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Fic Commentary - Pt 2/? for a question of time
It's been 13 years and an epic fic since I watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica, so it's time to revisit the series. Specifically how the years since and writing this fic has shifted my view of the series.
At that particular point in my life, I had grown tired enough of most media that I needed spoilers for the entire series before I would even start. I couldn't take the emotional toil of having a comfort series turn out not to be so comforting at all. I thought I would be pretty safe with PMMM. It was only 12 episodes and I already knew the major plot twists (including episode 3).
I also had a gateway character in Akemi Homura, and she made it to the end of the series, so I would be fine. Since I don't talk about it often enough - gateway characters for me are my entry point into any media. I need to have stakes in a particular character before I dive in. Homura was everything that spoilers promised and more.
Homura had depth. She started the series seeming stoic but ended the series with the audience having a new perspective about how much hurt she had gone through. She enriched rewatches of the series.
But the same is just as true of any of the main five magical girls. Even Mami, who only had a living part in 3 episodes, had an impact that outlasted her presence. So much so that I was really excited at the three magical girls that Episode 12 left off on. Could Homura adapt to a world without Madoka? Would Kyouko come back to the fold, and why? Would we ever learn more about the glimpses of sentimentality that we learned just enough about so Mami could die from it?
Instead of season 2, we got Rebellion.
Narratively, I like the concept that if Madoka is a symbol of hope, Homura is a symbol of grief. I also agree that having been raised Catholic would pre-dispose Homura to certain ways of thinking. But there was something about Homura declaring herself the devil at the end of Rebellion that felt final (in terms of character development) and sequel bait-y (in terms of dragging out the conflict). So I'm not surprised that at the end of Rebellion, the creators had stopped adding to the main story - perhaps they had written themselves into a corner.
Given the questions that I was pondering for Homura/Kyouko/Mami earlier, I also don't think of Magia Record as a sequel. While it's playing in the same universe, it is more interested in new characters and the what if of things going differently. I'm not interested in retconning the original series. I want to see what comes after.
Since "canon" wasn't serving, I decided to turn to my own fic to get my wants met. Given the launch point of Homura, Kyouko and Mami fighting Wraiths, as well as the accepted fan theory that the original series went down in 2011, I thought that it would be nice to set the fic in 2012. That was the year that this idea came to me after all, and would let me age the characters up by a year.
With 2012 as a reference point, I looked at the Homestuck timeline. It didn't feel like the PMMM characters would fight Wraiths on Earth C, and I wasn't interested in that setting either. So I had to get the Homstuck characters to an Earth that made it to 2012. Which, technically the Earth that the Alpha kids lived on did, since Jane turned 16 at the start of their arc, and she was born in 1996.
But then we come to the problem of Dirk Strider. And of Bro Strider. Check that out in Part 3 below.
Part 1 || Part 3
At that particular point in my life, I had grown tired enough of most media that I needed spoilers for the entire series before I would even start. I couldn't take the emotional toil of having a comfort series turn out not to be so comforting at all. I thought I would be pretty safe with PMMM. It was only 12 episodes and I already knew the major plot twists (including episode 3).
I also had a gateway character in Akemi Homura, and she made it to the end of the series, so I would be fine. Since I don't talk about it often enough - gateway characters for me are my entry point into any media. I need to have stakes in a particular character before I dive in. Homura was everything that spoilers promised and more.
Homura had depth. She started the series seeming stoic but ended the series with the audience having a new perspective about how much hurt she had gone through. She enriched rewatches of the series.
But the same is just as true of any of the main five magical girls. Even Mami, who only had a living part in 3 episodes, had an impact that outlasted her presence. So much so that I was really excited at the three magical girls that Episode 12 left off on. Could Homura adapt to a world without Madoka? Would Kyouko come back to the fold, and why? Would we ever learn more about the glimpses of sentimentality that we learned just enough about so Mami could die from it?
Instead of season 2, we got Rebellion.
Narratively, I like the concept that if Madoka is a symbol of hope, Homura is a symbol of grief. I also agree that having been raised Catholic would pre-dispose Homura to certain ways of thinking. But there was something about Homura declaring herself the devil at the end of Rebellion that felt final (in terms of character development) and sequel bait-y (in terms of dragging out the conflict). So I'm not surprised that at the end of Rebellion, the creators had stopped adding to the main story - perhaps they had written themselves into a corner.
Given the questions that I was pondering for Homura/Kyouko/Mami earlier, I also don't think of Magia Record as a sequel. While it's playing in the same universe, it is more interested in new characters and the what if of things going differently. I'm not interested in retconning the original series. I want to see what comes after.
Since "canon" wasn't serving, I decided to turn to my own fic to get my wants met. Given the launch point of Homura, Kyouko and Mami fighting Wraiths, as well as the accepted fan theory that the original series went down in 2011, I thought that it would be nice to set the fic in 2012. That was the year that this idea came to me after all, and would let me age the characters up by a year.
With 2012 as a reference point, I looked at the Homestuck timeline. It didn't feel like the PMMM characters would fight Wraiths on Earth C, and I wasn't interested in that setting either. So I had to get the Homstuck characters to an Earth that made it to 2012. Which, technically the Earth that the Alpha kids lived on did, since Jane turned 16 at the start of their arc, and she was born in 1996.
But then we come to the problem of Dirk Strider. And of Bro Strider. Check that out in Part 3 below.
Part 1 || Part 3