We have a pretty home. A bit untidy outside our sanctum, but there's nothing wrong with a little mess.
Not going to speculate on the meaning of the barrier's setup. I'm not good with that kind of thing.
[-] Wait. It's your barrier, so it's probably not something planning on attacking you. Unless of course it's a magical girl, but given how high you are in the sky right now, surely that's not possible… right?
…
You take a few moments to think about that, and end up silently laughing aloud at yourself. That is cosmically idealistic, to the point of being almost comical. If you're going to go that far, you might as well just set your sights on removing Kyubey's race from the picture entirely so you can take over handling the magic system yourself and revise it to be less atrocious, however the heck that would work.
...
...honestly, now that you think of it, why not try that? You recently found out you're living in a world where aliens, magic, and souls exist. Clearly, anything is possible, so there's no real reason to rule something out just because it seems ludicrously unlikely.
...other people fill things in with theories, and I pick and choose the one that makes most sense?
. . . . . .
Tart Magica involves like, battlefields I think, but it's about armies and such where there's tons of people clustered together, so not really what you're asking.
Depends on time-scales and the size of the army. I don't think we see cities of <100,000, so even a 20,000-man army would be a significantly lower-population setting. And one with a distinct lack of contract-age girls, which would have important effects on Witch populations. If there are Witches hanging around army camps (and not lured there by enemy magical girls), that says something. (Maybe just that they followed the army from the city, but that still says something about Witch migratory patterns.)
That could make a good story, yeah—the idea certainly deserves exploration, at least. Not sure how one would go about writing it though. Maybe you should take a stab at it?
I can't write. More specifically, I couldn't write any character that isn't basically me (and specifically the me of right now), couldn't set
any scene, couldn't do dialogue which sounds remotely natural, and might not even be able to make a plot hang together.
I could stick to my strengths and do
academic writing; write a textbook by a historian/anthropologist/ecologist of magical girls examining the variations in culture and practices across regions and times. But, me being me, this wouldn't be in the style of fictional textbooks, giving only plot-relevant information and whatever worldbuilding the author felt like sharing, this would be in
actual textbook style. I don't think too many people would want to read that. Never mind the difficulty of writing a textbook; that would be a significant undertaking even in my own field (if I had anything worth writing a textbook on), never mind one which I've never even taken a class in and would need to invent the material for. (Of course, to do the subject justice would require
several textbooks, focusing on different areas—one ecological, at least one anthropological, and at least one historical.)
There are various ways to make the endeavor easier; for instance, instead of a textbook, I could write a single paper, or a collection of research notes or lecture notes; these would decrease the volume of text required and ease the style constraints. Still difficult, but more reasonable. Would still probably be more work than I'm willing to do to make it meet my standards.
(Don't ask how any of this would be published in-universe. Presumably it's written by a powerful and experienced magical girl, probably old enough to have graduated college, who got interested in the subject and is writing it for herself and any magical girls she happens to meet.) (Interestingly enough, it
would make sense for such a thing to be published in the context which first got me interested, which was a discussion of demographics and sustainable populations in
To the Stars and
Mass Divergence. But that's post-Madokami, so I couldn't talk about Witch ecology, and the important discussions there are more about long-term population changes. I get to ask questions about the effects of clinical immortality and the geographically non-uniform 21st century decreases in death rates on 24th century magical girl demographics, and whether an alien civilization with different lifespans and generation times would have more or less difficulty sustaining its magical girls, and how population growth slowing to sub-exponential would affect age distributions. Interesting questions, but requiring a rather different sort of analysis.)
I'm not too fond of that either, to be honest. To some extent it makes sense in this universe, but it still feels wrong to "retcon" a real life historical event as having occurred because of magic. Which is funny, because I rather like to imagine that sort of thing really DOES happen in this reality, even though we'll probably never know if so.
I don't mind retconning real historical events to be (partially) caused by magic—indeed, unless the magic system has specific reason to make it impossible, it would unrealistic to
not have some well-known historical events be connected to magic. What I object to is when attributing something to magic takes away from it. If you attribute something like the black plague to magic, you take away from the horror of the reality of our biological existence and nature's endless creativity and unpredictability—if it were caused by witches, humanity would no longer be just a part of the environment which microbes were taking advantage of to reproduce, but active participants in the event.
Ahhhhhhhhh, I don't wanna think about Spanish! I did my time already! Four years of it! Leave me be!
This sentence is in Spanish when you're not looking.
Last, the outer barrier is made of an infinite number of twisting paths, which have a strong thematic connection to free will. "Choose one's own path" is an idiom for a reason.
On the other hand, all of those paths lead to the same place. Which… isn't really a counterargument, is it?