Heyyyyyy. Sayaka's got a baseball bat. Did Homuhomu drop us into the canon timeline
That was the previous timeline, but this one should be similar enough. It's just that canon is being derailed even earlier. Last time Mami showed up around episode 3 and Ashtaroth replaced Charlotte, but now it's episode 2 and Ashtaroth is replacing Gertrud. So yeah, chances are Mami was going to look for witches soonish anyway and will enchant the bat for Sayaka any minute now.
I think that's the general assumption, yeah. Ashy couldn't go back any further and still be Ashy. Possibly because of the Witch-ness in general, possibly because of some additional factor related to whatever made her forget details about her pre-Witch life, and possibly because the author thought it would be more interesting this way. Or some combination thereof.
Honestly, I assumed the time travel just runs on narrative logic, so it never seemed too strange to me that both Homura and Ashtaroth returned to the beginning of the story subjectively instead of a single specific moment.
-[x] Distract Mami by giving her her body back.
No can do! A corpse is not a character.
Maybe I'm wrong but don't a lot of magical girl characters feature aliens (Sailor Moon, Nanoha). Kyubey. Considering Sayaka's supposed to be a magical girl fan, she shouldn't have been surprised that the talking non human creature wasn't of this planet.
To be fair, Kyubey usually isn't very upfront about where he comes from or why he does anything. He needs to collect grief seeds and have magical girls fight witches, ostensibly to keep despair from getting out of hand, but he never claims to be motivated by altruism and nobody really questions it at first. And he is not very picky about who becomes a magical girl; he has no special reason for offering contracts to anyone in particular, beyond "you have the potential".
Whereas other cute mascots may simply reveal "I come from W planet for X reasons, which is why I need someone to carry Y responsibility, and that person must be someone like you because Z!" as soon as it's exposition time.
Seriously though, imagine how surreal it would be to see your own Witch as a Magical Girl. Your innermost traumas, fears, dreams, and obsessions smeared onto the canvass of a world and personified into this ... thing. What are you even supposed to do at that point?
Accept yourself as "
I'll Face Myself" plays in the background?
... What? It could work! Magic and shit, ya'know!
It would be entertaining to see Mami face herself for once. Since they are so evenly matched in ribbons, dakka, and attitude, obviously the one with the stronger spirit will triumph.
Assuming Mami even believes the part about how magical girls turn into witches rather than dismissing it as an insane lie. In canon, it took Sayaka witching out in front of her, Madoka, Kyoko and Homura for her to start taking it seriously
Well yeah, but Tira's clingy companion should still seem kinda sus to Mami, what with the identical powers and familiar familiars...
Oh? I don't think that's necessarily true, especially if you manage to successfully escape. There's still a chance it might not happen!
(Yet.)
Homura showing up here means she realized
something must have fucked up her perfect schedule (again). Right now she actually expects Madoka to be with Mami (and not contract), and she probably expects Mami to go witch hunting soonish (and not die). So far, so good, all keikaku. They just found a barrier a little earlier than expected, and only from
there will everything go wrong. So of course, by the time Homura realizes it may be too late to step in and fix everything.
Ironically, it's possible Kyubey may be the one to step in and tell Homura the situation is fucked, if only after realizing that Homura is somehow involved and deciding that even contracting Madoka or Sayaka is somehow not viable right now. On the other hand, if he stays to offer a contract, that means Ashtaroth can make first contact with Kyubey, which should be interesting because Kyubey has no idea just how well Ashtaroth remembers him.
Man, the scope of this collect em' all quest just keeps expanding. Can't it slow down a little? We lost our only Homura, and we haven't even pulled one of the ultra rare MG Madokas yet!
Hopefully finding the hidden Rewind event to find the permanently missables and the version exclusives will make up for not getting Homura. Become a raid boss, catch lots of Puellamon!
I mean, we don't know that's assumption they would make. Mami has better judgment than that, don't you think? (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)
Clones? What clones? Mami doesn't see any bodies. She only hears friendly voices, beckoning to her over the phone, dissuading her from leaving the cafe and promising to be with her shortly. That witch must be IMPERSONATING THEM from the safety of its barrier, the
fiend.
Okay, honestly, you're right. I have no clue. Mami's disposition was decidedly unhelpful last time, but the circumstances are now different. I'm just taking it for granted that
something will go wrong soon, but I don't know how wrong or who will be responsible (besides Homura and Ashtaroth, in the broader sense that they are responsible for literally all of this). But again, the first response to witches is to go for the kill and ask questions later, so already this is a terrible start as usual.
What soul? I don't recall him ever claiming to have one of those.
It's implied that living things necessarily have souls, considering that magical girls spontaneously and completely die without one. And like any living thing, Kyubey suffers, albeit less than anyone else. Do you suppose he has a really thin, colorless soul? He's not very useful as an ectoentropic energy generator, by his own admission.
Would it be called a Doppel if it's a full on Witch grafting themselves to a copy of themselves?
A doppel, though useful and interesting in its own ways, is basically just a deliberately botched transformation. Grafting an actual witch to a magical girl would be more permanent and dubiously beneficial to both, I think.
And now you've got me thinking... A doppel is often conjoined to its host. Should Mami and Candeloro team up, how closely would they bind together? Would they merge at the soulular level, like a doppel? A true fusion of same yet different beings would be fascinating, because PMMM has had only the smallest taste of this trope. Only Isabeau managed it, and even then for all intents and purposes she was regarded more as a witch with remarkable magical girl (and other) qualities instead of a perfect 50/50 frankensteined hybrid. Kazumi, the next example worth a mention, qualifies even less because she was just a witch glamoured into a magical girl, not a real magical girl at all until she wished the witchiness away. And Ashtaroth's weird case is parasitic, relying on
other people being magical girls and separately doing magical girl things in her shadow.
Oh, that's interesting. Scent and taste experiences are notoriously subjective, depending on both physiological and psychological factors. If Ashtaroth's flavor experience is identical despite being delivered through two different sets of gustatory (and olfactory) receptors, but Sayaka and Tira have different experiences, then that suggests… something. Maybe they coincidentally have similar distributions of receptors but are different on the psychological end. Maybe Ashtaroth's sense-hijacking is more conceptual than a direct sharing of sensation, and she's experiencing what the apple would taste like to her. Maybe witch apples don't yield a taste sensation via ordinary taste receptors, but by some stranger mechanism. Maybe transformed puella magi bodies all have identical gustatory and olfactory senses.
Speaking of which, there's a lot of questions about Ashtaroth's senses in general. For example, her sight appears to be standard human trichromatic vision, despite not having eyes with the specific photoreceptors involved. She saw and heard Sayaka's dream, suggesting that she shares subjective sensory impressions—but she sometimes seems to be able to focus her attention on a different part of their visual field than her subsumees and now there's the taste thing. Her sight has a distinct center, with a large blind spot there, suggesting that she senses light incident on some sizable surrounding surface—so how easy is it to occlude her vision? If you hold up a finger, you can still see things behind it, because what it blocks from the left eye is still visible from the right—does Ashtaroth's vision do the same? She has tactile sensation with a specific level of sensitivity, with no physiological basis.
Even in her own barrier, Ashtaroth fails to grasp the nuances of every witch and magical girl she experiences firsthand; a failure of a cosmopolitan. The best she can hope for is to wander about, sampling their senses and culture. She is... the tourist witch!
This is around the same time that Tira met Ashtaroth in the previous timeline, maybe a bit earlier. She was actively hunting, and shouldn't be in danger of witching just yet.
Well yes, but actually no. Tira literally said she wasn't as strong as Mami, and had trouble keeping up with the magical girl lifestyle. But it's not just how strong or experienced Tira is, nor how many witches she can hunt, but also how quickly she burns through her limited resources.
Remember, while talking to Kyubey, Tira was already starting to grief spiral, enough that she feared the danger of losing control over her emotions. She seemed to be highly dependent on the short term relief grief seeds gave her, and she had dangerously few grief seeds, having used up the last of them earlier. I'm sure the big idea there is that she was almost at the end of her rope, running on fumes, and the social witch mystery was her only big distraction from despair at the time, and she can't have been
significantly better off just a day or two earlier. And all of this is consistent with her later remark that embarking the subsumption train is actually an improvement, choo choo.
Ashtaroth doesn't really think of herself as such, and she does
try not to be, but she might just be a
tad self-centered. I wonder why that might be...?
It's hard to think of yourself as self-centered when you have zero experience not being self-centered.
Personally, I would send both of them down to distract Mami and then motor on out of there.
...Seeing Tira and Sayaka #2 approach and then suddenly collapse dead would be an effective distraction, yes.
