The Power of Feelings — Madoka ep. 09

We’ve long known that feelings in anime are the most important and powerful force in the universe. If you only feel it enough, you can make it so.

Well now, we may have the the end-all and be-all of that in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. We get the “final” explanation (and I use that term advisedly, given Kyubey’s tendency to lie by omission.) Kyubey’s goal is quite noble — just ask him, and he’ll tell you. Feelings can save the universe!

Warning: MAJOR SERIES SPOILER. You see, Kyubey explains through some bad science mumbo-jumbo that the universe is losing entropy. Nobody’s stealing it; it’s just a design flaw. Eventually, this will cause Bad Things, so the race of beings that Kyubey belongs to searched the universe for an alternate energy source to boost the entropy back to stable levels. Lo and behold, they found that human emotional energy could supply that source through some hand-waved magical conversion ability, and of all the humans, the very best at it were females “in their second growth phase.” So the “Kyubeyans” set up a system whereby they would inject energy to change reality (grant a wish to a young girl), then harvest the emotional energies of the puella magi as they fought and fought and fought and eventually fell into PTSD, PMS, OCD, and a whole alphabet soup of despair. Then there’d be the big spike of emotional energy when they went over to the dark side and became witches. Finally, there would be another burst when the witch died.

And since all this was to prevent the destruction of the universe, and hey, there’s another ten humans born every four seconds to replace the puella magi, it’s not like this can be a bad thing, can it? In fact, it’s downright cool to be able to sacrifice oneself for the universe, isn’t it?

Darn humans, they just don’t get it.

I started to type a note about this the other day and had no time, but we are seeing the difference between a master and a pretender. Yamamato pitched a fit and said he was going to shake up the industry; he has produced a very pretty Miyazaki knock-off / road trip story so far. Shinbou has quietly assembled an all-star staff and turned out probably the best anime in years. Since Mami’s death
in ep.04, this show has been on rails (to borrow imagery from this episode). It may be a railroad to hell, but it knows where it’s going, and it’s going to carry the viewer through every last whistle-stop on the way there.

Definitely worth the ride; if it weren’t for this show, I’d probably be foolish enough to think thatFractale was living up to it’s hype.