It gets worse!
Fun Fact: Most orphanages in Japan also function as private Catholic schools, segregated by gender.
Moreover, a lot of people who come out of the Japanese orphanage system end up being behind in their education, many of them not getting a high school education at all, and are alienated and passed over for lasting careers. They tend not to self-actualize very well, because like hell there's funding and personal investment for, say, becoming a ballerina.
...Yea, the orphanage thing is only recently getting looked at in Japan as of a few years ago. Most orphanages are privately owned and there's waaaay less orphans compared to the Western world. "I went to a Catholic School" in Japan means either "My parents are hyper-involved and I'm RICH, BITCH" or "I'm an orphan, please politely change the subject."
So yea Homura was likely a mass orphanage kid that was transferred to Mitakihara due to her severe health problems. Her struggling with her studies in timeline 1 also implies her education might have been subpar. Like, in a Real World AU Homura would have little chance of getting into a good high school and few tools to prepare for the workforce because no one has personal investment in her, likely resigning her to a life of temporary entry-level jobs like a NEET, with no skills or ability to indulge in things like expensive or time-consuming hobbies.
Sooooo yeaaa when Homura was super suicidal and shit? YEAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Just a reminder that to a Japanese audience there is 100% no doubt that Homura is an orphan and Madoka was probably the first person to ever claim to be happy to have met her.
Because most orphans in Japan don't have dead parents. They were given up.
A lot of kids in these orphanages are also abused, physically or mentally, and while there's little evidence of physical abuse canonically, given Homura's constant self-hatred for her unnaturalness, her willingness to put herself down, her abysmally low self-esteem throughout the series, and her homosexuality, there can be no doubt that she was tormented in some way and punished constantly by the nuns in her orphanage for whatever 'behaviors' they saw fit to punish. Homura exhibits a lot of symptoms of an emotional abuse victim, and with her health problems and medical intervention in Mitakihara, plus her now permanent residence there, implies that she might have been removed from said orphanage by social services, as 14 is old enough to become emancipated from your current legal guardians and live independently.
Homura is most likely living on social security, so her modest living decisions are probably necessity. She probably isn't living off a nice inheritance like Mami.
It took one day at Mitakihara, a very nice and friendly school, to break her will to live. She failed at class lessons and doesn't accept that it's just due to hospital absence; she doesn't know this material at ALL because her curriculum wasn't up to national standards. She failed at PE not just because she was sickly, but because she doesn't have the tools to overcome it. Her social interaction went from pleasant to light jeering and pity, but she's apparently been emotionally abused enough to take all of this in the worst possible light.
She was already thinking of killing herself before the Witch came upon her.
She wasn't kissed. This has been brewing for a long time.
This is why Homura fell in love with Madoka so immediately, so perfectly, so beyond any of our ability to empathize with or truly understand. Madoka might truly have been the only person who ever showed Homura any love. Madoka might have sincerely been the only person who assigned Homura value. Homura lived a life of being a burden. Worse than a waste of space; a drain on society and the taxpayer, a problem for her caretakers and her fellow orphans, an embarrassment at school.
But Madoka said she was cool. Madoka talked to her once, then talked to her
again after 'new student courtesy' wore off.
Madoka...this perfect girl, who had all the virtues she herself lacked, who was loved by friends and family, and had every possible future open to her, who had every blessing of the modern dream and who deserved all good things life had to offer...
...Said that meeting her was the happiest thing in her life.
Homura and Madoka are truly opposites, in personality, backround, disposition, and futures. If Homura is Dante, Madoka is her Beatrice. She worships Madoka and what she represents and what she gave to her, and so protecting Madoka became her holy quest; the one thing that justifies her waste of an existence. If she can't do this one thing, she'll continue to be a hopeless, helpless degenerate waste of everyone's time and resources. An unwanted, unloved, useless child who will never amount to anything.
But she can be Madoka's shield.
So that's what she became.
