Jace911 "Reviews" Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Uh...prove she did that in the middle of the WN Fight and not beforehand in preparation.

Or that she can fly and not just hyper-jump and glide around.
 
What does that have to do with stockpiling weapons?
Also, that ended with her exhausting her arsenal and Madoka contracting in the end anyway.

My point was that if she spent an entire cycle doing nothing but killing witches, she may have spent another entire cycle doing nothing but stockpiling. We don't know.

Here's something some of you aren't getting, I think. Homura, by Word of God, has been doing this for over eight years. She was fourteen years old when she started. She should be graduating college now. She's been doing this for twice as long as World War I lasted. Shell shock doesn't begin to cover it. Post traumatic stress disorder doesn't even come close. She has watched everyone she loves die dozens of times at this point. We know she had to kill Madoka herself at least once. She's probably killed them all several times. By DSM-V standards she is almost certainly completely insane. By our fucked up standards she's almost certainly completely insane.

Just let that sink in.
 
Uh...prove she did that in the middle of the WN Fight and not beforehand in preparation.

Or that she can fly and not just hyper-jump and glide around.
...

You want me to prove that she did not somehow manage to predict where WN would land (note that this depends on the precise angle and nature of what she hits, what she hits it with, and the air currents at the time, which means that it is chaotic and will vary unpredictably from timeline to timeline), and then cover a stadium (AKA a much-in-demand public space with its own guards and security system) before Walpurgisnacht arrived?

Even if she knew which stadium to mine, she'd have had to do it within an hour or two of her arrival or it'd be noticed and there'd be bomb squads all over it - if she gives them as little as two hours of warning they can probably clear them away before the "hurricane" hits.

And this is predicated on predicting something that's impossible to predict.

I'm good, thanks.

(As far as flying versus hyper-jumping or whatever - she can change direction in midair, she visibly goes "up", she resists WNs blasts, we see her fly along the highway. She can fly.)
 
Uh...prove she did that in the middle of the WN Fight and not beforehand in preparation.

Or that she can fly and not just hyper-jump and glide around.
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Uh, not sure about the WN fight, which I've always chalked up to insane prep, which she probably did under timestop, but for flight, see the video.

Starting from 1:04, she slows herself down when the building gets tossed at her (1:09), timestops out of the way and moves to a different location, still in the air, (1:13), can use her magic to propel herself through the air in bursts (1:15) and can use her magic to resist the force of WN's fire attack (1:17).
 
*shrug*

I realize that a lot of Quest authors like to nerf her timestop... but in the original canon?

She has unlimited timestop.

Or at least, functionally so, because she thought nothing of spending, what was it, three hours or more mining that stadium? In the middle of a WN fight.

She can quite literally stop time and then go anywhere in Japan to get those weapons. Heck, she can fly, and there's nothing stopping her from going to a different city and gathering Grief Seeds - which means she can probably literally fly to China and start raiding there.

There's plenty of sources for those weapons.
You and your no limits.

She has a limit. It's her goddamn soul gem, just like every other fucking meguca.

(Also she completely loses the timestop ability past that month. Which means she loses timestop after a certain point of the WN fight. No point in saving up. It's easy to go nuts at that point.)
 
Rebellion also reveals a few limitations to her timestops.
It takes her a split second to activate, and if you're prepared you can either hit the shield and prevent the stop, or you can stay in contact with her to stay stopped with her. Also, I'm pretty sure that the [Double Spoiler] fight shows her flying, I'll try to find some footage.
 
Or she just used an assload of grief seeds she had stockpiled to get the time needed to set those mines/mortars/rockets/etc.
First, if you look at the actual mechanics of Homura's shield, it operates in such a way that it's more likely that she has a range in which she can stop time, not a limit on how long she can stop it for. The "mechanics" of the shield, insofar as they are not simply decorative (and come on, it's onscreen in PMMM), are such that the hourglass turns sideways and thus "stops" when she stops time. It's unlikely that keeping time stopped costs additional power.

Second, if you assume it does... that falls into the same trap as the weaponry itself. Where'd she get those grief seeds? Order of magnitude approximation: we see Witch numbers in the single digits across one month. Even assuming that for every one Witch we see defeated onscreen Homura defeats at least three, that still means that Homura can't get more than 15 Grief Seeds a loop. We don't know how efficient Homura is other than a WoG statement that she's the most efficient of all the puella, but assuming it takes three hours to mine the stadium, that's still twelve minutes a charge assuming she used them all at once. Which she is not likely to do - those 15 Grief Seeds are her budget for the entire loop, and I'm being generous even giving her that much. A more reasonable lower bound on her timestop is twenty to thirty minutes. Assuming there is a bound at all, which, again, I'm not convinced.
 
First, if you look at the actual mechanics of Homura's shield, it operates in such a way that it's more likely that she has a range in which she can stop time, not a limit on how long she can stop it for. The "mechanics" of the shield, insofar as they are not simply decorative (and come on, it's onscreen in PMMM), are such that the hourglass turns sideways and thus "stops" when she stops time. It's unlikely that keeping time stopped costs additional power.

Second, if you assume it does... that falls into the same trap as the weaponry itself. Where'd she get those grief seeds? Order of magnitude approximation: we see Witch numbers in the single digits across one month. Even assuming that for every one Witch we see defeated onscreen Homura defeats at least three, that still means that Homura can't get more than 15 Grief Seeds a loop. We don't know how efficient Homura is other than a WoG statement that she's the most efficient of all the puella, but assuming it takes three hours to mine the stadium, that's still twelve minutes a charge assuming she used them all at once. Which she is not likely to do - those 15 Grief Seeds are her budget for the entire loop, and I'm being generous even giving her that much. A more reasonable lower bound on her timestop is twenty to thirty minutes. Assuming there is a bound at all, which, again, I'm not convinced.

Assuming Homura limits her hunts to Mitakihara. She probably hunts in a wider area than any of the other MG's, and thus, gets more grief seeds, and, being the most efficient, probably only needs a few seeds per loop depending on how much she uses her powers. Thus, she probably has seeds left over each loop.
 
My point was that if she spent an entire cycle doing nothing but killing witches, she may have spent another entire cycle doing nothing but stockpiling. We don't know.

Here's something some of you aren't getting, I think. Homura, by Word of God, has been doing this for over eight years. She was fourteen years old when she started. She should be graduating college now. She's been doing this for twice as long as World War I lasted. Shell shock doesn't begin to cover it. Post traumatic stress disorder doesn't even come close. She has watched everyone she loves die dozens of times at this point. We know she had to kill Madoka herself at least once. She's probably killed them all several times. By DSM-V standards she is almost certainly completely insane. By our fucked up standards she's almost certainly completely insane.

Just let that sink in.
I don't think insane is the right word, she still acts rational to a fair degree, her plans are too well thought out to be the work's of a mad person. That said she's probably under extreme mental stress the likes of none of us could imagine, Shell Shock and all that nasty stuff. The fact that she was able to carry on after Loop 3 is amazing, to say nothing of the years that came afterwards. A normal adult would not be able to handle half of it, let alone a fourteen year old girl, and she still is a teenager for the most part, just because she's experienced eight years of this does not make her an adult mentally.

That's not to say she's 100% sane , she may still care some for Miami and the others she will do anything it takes to keep Madoka alive, the rest of the world can burn if that's what needs to happen.
 
...

You want me to prove that she did not somehow manage to predict where WN would land (note that this depends on the precise angle and nature of what she hits, what she hits it with, and the air currents at the time, which means that it is chaotic and will vary unpredictably from timeline to timeline), and then cover a stadium (AKA a much-in-demand public space with its own guards and security system) before Walpurgisnacht arrived?

Even if she knew which stadium to mine, she'd have had to do it within an hour or two of her arrival or it'd be noticed and there'd be bomb squads all over it - if she gives them as little as two hours of warning they can probably clear them away before the "hurricane" hits.

And this is predicated on predicting something that's impossible to predict.

I'm good, thanks.

(As far as flying versus hyper-jumping or whatever - she can change direction in midair, she visibly goes "up", she resists WNs blasts, we see her fly along the highway. She can fly.)

Okay except the entire populace evacuated to safe zones at 6 in the morning and Walpurgis, according to the PSP game, shows up at 9 in the morning. And given how long she's been doing this, knowing how and when to knock Walpurgis around to specific tactical spots of massive explosives isn't that far fetched.

Also, since she only 'flies' in scenes where several stories of skyscrapers are suspended in the air, it's possible she's riding some huge ass wind currents because it's a fucking supercell hurricane according to all Muggle metrics.

First, if you look at the actual mechanics of Homura's shield, it operates in such a way that it's more likely that she has a range in which she can stop time, not a limit on how long she can stop it for. The "mechanics" of the shield, insofar as they are not simply decorative (and come on, it's onscreen in PMMM), are such that the hourglass turns sideways and thus "stops" when she stops time. It's unlikely that keeping time stopped costs additional power.

Okay, no. Her time stop doesn't just freeze a local area, that's fucking ludicrous. Kyubey would notice and figure out what her power is the first time she ever used it if that's the case since his species kind of monitors that whole damn planet. Different parts of a city becoming temporally unphased by even a few seconds or minutes would be noticeable even to humans. Why are all these clocks off in a consistent manner based on geographical location? Why do people keep losing minutes of their day? Why don't people look at the sky, get time froze, then notice the clouds skipped several beats somehow?

Homura's power only makes sense if the only thing her magic is effecting is herself and what she touches, allowing her to remain in the space inbetween moments for as long as he tries to hold it, which probably takes magical energy because FUCKING EVERYTHING THEY DO TAKES UP MAGICAL ENERGY, INCLUDING FUCKING BREATHING AND MOVING AROUND.

God.
 
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Okay except the entire populace evacuated to safe zones at 6 in the morning and Walpurgis, according to the PSP game, shows up at 9 in the morning. And given how long she's been doing this, knowing how and when to knock Walpurgis around to specific tactical spots of massive explosives isn't that far fetched.

Also, since she only 'flies' in scenes where several stories of skyscrapers are suspended in the air, it's possible she's riding some huge ass wind currents because it's a fucking supercell hurricane according to all Muggle metrics.
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Yes, it is. Learn some physics.

And Occam's Razor. If it was a real hurricane she couldn't control her own flight that well. Or do you think Walpurgisnacht has any interest in making it easy for Homura to maneuver?
 
I don't think insane is the right word, she still acts rational to a fair degree, her plans are too well thought out to be the work's of a mad person. That said she's probably under extreme mental stress the likes of none of us could imagine, Shell Shock and all that nasty stuff. The fact that she was able to carry on after Loop 3 is amazing, to say nothing of the years that came afterwards. A normal adult would not be able to handle half of it, let alone a fourteen year old girl, and she still is a teenager for the most part, just because she's experienced eight years of this does not make her an adult mentally.

That's not to say she's 100% sane , she may still care some for Miami and the others she will do anything it takes to keep Madoka alive, the rest of the world can burn if that's what needs to happen.
In Rebellion she says that it always hurt telling the truth in front of Mami, so she wasn't completly jaded.
 
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....

Yes, it is. Learn some physics.

And Occam's Razor. If it was a real hurricane she couldn't control her own flight that well. Or do you think Walpurgisnacht has any interest in making it easy for Homura to maneuver?

Literally the only scene she can actually fly as opposed to"jump good" is when there's lots of other buildings just floating in the air as well and gravity seems to have taken a vacation.
 
....

Yes, it is. Learn some physics.

And Occam's Razor. If it was a real hurricane she couldn't control her own flight that well. Or do you think Walpurgisnacht has any interest in making it easy for Homura to maneuver?

She shows wind control in the very first episode. Your move.

Also lol @ telling someone to learn physics when discussing how an invisible magical construct that blatantly disregards physics would interact with them when batted around with magically enhanced bludgeons and explosives with the intertia-fuckery of STOPPING TIME.

Like if you want to pull the physics card, whenever Homura stops time, moves things around, and then un-stops time, there should be massive explosions through FTL Kinetic bursts.
 
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In Rebellion she says that it always hurt telling the truth in front of Mami, so she wasn't completly Jaded
I think Rebellion goes to show also just how fragile her mental state is and what Homura breaking really looks like IE: The entire ending

Last Spoilers I'll do for this thread I promise.
 
This is it for me as well. I just re-watched some of rebellion, and Homura doesn't seem to fly. She needs Mami to move her around when falling during the fight leading up to the cake song. In the [super spoiler] fight, she seems to mostly jump or glide, but also seems to have some way of controlling her direction in a very limited way. She changes direction in mid-air, but it isn't graceful in a way that implies full flying abilities. Rather, she just jerks in a different direction when she needs to. Also, that fight may just be the best fight in the entire series.
In conclusion, she can change direction while in the air, but does not have true flight.
 
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My point was that if she spent an entire cycle doing nothing but killing witches,

She has to kill witches to survive either way, and it doesn't get in the way of her gathering weapons for that loop. Also, we know she was gathering weapons that particular loop.

she may have spent another entire cycle doing nothing but stockpiling. We don't know.

But we know how she thinks. She fights every loop as if it were the last one, as if this time, she will succeed. She psychologically cannot write off a loop without immediately jumping to the next one or breaking down completely. Stockpiling for the next loop would mean admitting she doesn't have a chance this loop, an admission that would send her jumping right away or destroy her.
If she gathered a stockpile during a loop, it's for use during this loop. It's done in the hope that it will be enough this time. She won't jump until she has thrown her entire arsenal at Walpurgis and seen that it isn't enough.
Then, in the next loop, she gathers that arsenal again and looks for even more weapons to use, this time.

You're thinking she thinks, "if I fail this time, I can try again."
That's incorrect, she thinks, "I must succeed this time, I don't want to do this again."
 
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Jimmy C is entirely correct.

Also, don't underestimate the weaponry she could steal given an entire month's time, especially since she's also robbing the Yakuza. She probably taps the JSDF once to get her HEAVY DUTY shit and then lasts off the Yakuza loot for her less important fights.
 
HERE

is the General Madoka Discussion thread.

Which means that this thread isn't it.

Hop to it!
 
I do love the idea of someone in the JSDF having to report to high command that, I'm very sorry sir and I take full responsibility, but uh, there appears to have been some theft, and some explosives are not accounted for.

What? This is terrible! How much has gone missing?

Um. There's really no good way of saying this...all of it, sir. All of it.
 
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