Break the World's Shell! Panel Notes

Here, have some notes from my panel on the apocalypse genre in anime. And yes, this did partially come out of research I was doing for Near-Apocalypse of '09.

Also, this was COMPLETELY unplanned... but this is my 666th published post on this blog. Cute.

What is the Apocalypse genre?

• Apocalypse comes from Greek word meaning "pulling back of a veil, revelation, especially divine." But because the most famous apocalypse is the Book of Revelation, in English the older and more common meaning of the word is "great catastrophe, end of the world."
• In religious studies and study of ancient literature, "apocalypse literature" refers to this kind of divine revelation or vision. However, in modern works the term refers to the end-of-the-world narratives that evolved from those stories, so we'll be using a different definition.
• For purposes of this panel, a story in which a catastrophe, which might be natural, human, alien, or divine in origin, destroys the prevailing social structure on a setting-wide scale. Said setting could be as small as a single school or multiple universes; what matters is that the entire world of the story is endangered.
• Distinct from POST-apocalypse in that, in post-apocalyptic works, the social structure has already been destroyed or is destroyed at the beginning, and we focus on remnants struggling to survive or build civilization anew. Example: Fist of the North Star.
• Also distinct from Disaster genre, which contains a similar cataclysm but shows how the prevailing order SURVIVES. Example: Paranoia Agent, in which the apocalyptic events at the series climax resolve without significantly altering the social order--the same structures and lifestyles go on.
• Of course a story can have elements of more than one. Gurren Lagann, for example, is post-apocalyptic for its first half, a disaster in the next quarter (the endangered social structure in question is the new human/Beastman cooperative civilization), and an apocalypse in the final quarter (the endangered social structure is anti-Spiral hegemony).

Origins of the Genre

• Oldest known catastrophe tale: Utnapishtim. (Epic of Gilgamesh, ~2100-1200 BCE). The gods decided humanity was too noisy and should be destroyed with a flood. Utnapishtim was warned, built an ark, preserved all life.
• Atlantis (Plato's Critias, 360 BCE, an incomplete dialogue about two contrasted ancient cities, Atlantis and Athens. Athens is organized according to the design Plato laid out in his Republic, Atlantis a more traditional Hellenistic city-state. Both were originally righteous, but Atlantis became corrupt and conquered much of Europe and North Africa but was defeated by an alliance led by Athens. Later the gods punished Atlantis for its corruption by sinking it into the sea with an earthquake. Notable for Good vs. Evil and moral dimension, fact that it's part of a political, utopian argument.)
• Book of Daniel (the Bible, ~165 BCE). At time of writing, Jews were oppressed under rule of the Seleucids, a Hellenistic power centered in Syria. Tells the story of Daniel, a cultural hero who lived centuries prior when Jews were oppressed by Babylon. He makes many prophecies about a coming great battle when God will destroy wickedness and cleanse the Earth. Appeal for an oppressed people obvious, especially given the infamous image of a "statue with feet of clay," said in the text to represent a succession of empires that have risen and fallen. Soon after, Persians conquer Babylon and free the Jews. The intent is clear: Just as Babylon fell, so too will the Seleucids. The current order will be destroyed, violently, and a better one will rise. Dozens of books with a similar concept--a divine revelation, usually involving massive destruction, that describes the fall of some past or future order and replacement with a better world, mostly by Jews at first but then also popular among early Christians. Peak outputs coincide with Seleucid rule (~200-100 BCE) and aftermath of failed Jewish rebellion against Rome in 70 CE. Which brings us to...
• Revelation (the Bible, ~90 CE). At time of writing, Christians are a multitude of distinct sects with very different beliefs. Two of the major conflicts are whether you have to be Jewish in order to be Christian, and whether and how much to participate in the Roman state religion. While there was not, despite legend, significant oppression of Christians in general in this time period, those who refused to participate in Roman civic society and state religion were punished, because it was legally mandatory. Based on the text, John appears likely to have been a Jewish Christian who opposed engaging in Roman society. As in Daniel, "Babylon" appears as a stand in for the hegemonic state of the writer's time--the Seleucids for Daniel, the Romans for John. In the end, the wrath of God will destroy the oppressive state that the heroic faithful resisted, and a "new heaven and new Earth" will rise.

Apocalypse as Revolution

• What we see evolving is the notion of an apocalyptic catastrophe as a political event, the overthrow of a corrupt and hated system.
• By end of first century, this is cemented in Western culture as an expression of anger and hope, predicting (usually heavily shrouded in metaphor and code) the destruction of the present, corrupt, oppressive world so that a new and better world can be built.

Nineteenth/Twentieth Century

• War of the Worlds (HG Wells, 1897): Martians invade the Earth, piloting giant mecha across Britain as they smash the largest, most powerful empire in human history with ease. However, the Martians have underdeveloped immune systems compared to us, and all get sick and die. While this may appear to be a simple Catastrophe in that civilization as Wells knew it appears to be restored in the end, the power structure of Britain is destroyed by the end of part one, and until they get sick the Martians rule Britain and hunt humans with impunity. Note also Wells' statement in chapter 1 that what the Martians do to Britain is no different than what the imperialist European powers did to the peoples they conquered, specifically noting the genocide of the peoples of Tasmania. He was also a socialist, staunch opponent of racism, and opponent of both eugenics and Social Darwinism, popular ideas in his time--if he were on Tumblr today he'd get angry anonymous asks calling him a social justice warrior every day. So what we have here is in many ways still an apocalypse, still the angry, "see how you like it" destruction of an oppressive state in a great catastrophe.
• Demian (Hermann Hesse, : Story of Emil, a boy torn between social demands to be "good" and his own "bad" desires, drawn to charismatic older boy Demian (if there's not yaoi of this, there should be), who teaches him that it's impossible for an individual to be their own best selves because of all the rules and constraints society lays down--people shouldn't do whatever they feel like, but they should be free to be the best version of themselves. The only way for this to be possible is for some great cataclysm to upend society and shatter all the old ways and rules--and so comes World War I.
• Demian is important because it ties a civilization-wide apocalypse with personal revolution, with the choice to upend the power structures in one's own life and build a better self. Also in being a case where the apocalypse is welcomed and worked toward and regarded thoroughly as a good thing, a rebirth rather than a death.
• What does this have to do with anime? Egg speech, Utena. The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.

Akira (1988)

• All about power, particularly anxious power.
• Begin with demonstrations of how broken this society is, and its problems are ours: every available surface covered with ads, police brutality against protestors, terrorist bombings, biker gang warfare
• Everyone is trying to express their power over someone because they are afraid of having power wielded over them. The colonel is afraid of losing his job. Tetsuo is afraid of being dependent on Kaneda's protection. The Clowns try to rape Kaori because they're afraid of Kaneda's gang. Terrorists bomb because they're afraid of the power the state wields, cops shoot protestors because they're afraid of the state being destabilized.
• People WANT apocalypse, the leader of Kei's organization wants to tear civilization down to be free, the Akira cultists want to destroy civilization because they feel betrayed by modernity and progress, the Colonel wants to destroy the corrupt hedonistic city because he misses the hopefulness and camaraderie of rebuilding.

NGE (1995-6)

• Definitely an example of the apocalypse as personal revolution.
• Destruction of the world ultimately serves as a backdrop, happening offstage in the final two episodes while we focus on how this enables Shinji to overcome the fears that rule his life and step toward becoming his own best self.
• Specifically, it is about learning to recognize the neo-Stoic or cognitive-behavioral concept that our attitudes and thoughts determine our emotional responses, and by choosing to change his habitual thinking patterns, he can see the best in the world rather than the worst.
• Congratulations! Like Demian, the apocalypse is ultimately a metaphor for the cataclysmic transformation of a single soul. Shinji's entire world is eucatastrophically transformed because the way he looks at it is fundamentally changed.

RGU (1997)

• Interesting because the apocalypse is talked about constantly, but is it actually shown?
• Yes. The final duel is depicted as a crisis that grips the entire school--which is the entire universe of Utena--to the point that for the first time in the series, the entire student council gathers at once. And it does destroy the prevailing power structure of the school--Anthy is the means by which Akio dominates Ohtori, and her departure destroys his ability to do that.
• It is a personal transformation for many characters, primarily Anthy and Utena--Utena learns to be less judgmental, more empathetic, and to replace her toxic savior complex with helping; Anthy learns to trust, that she is lovable, and that she can walk away from dependency on her abuser and still survive.
• There is an element of social revolution too, however, as much of the power structure they seek to overthrow echoes the patriarchal and heterosexist structures of our own society, and there are subtle implications in the final scenes that Utena has radically reshaped life in Ohtori.
• Also about rebelling against narrative structures that constrain our lives, in this case the Princess/Witch or Madonna/Whore complex that says a girl must either be a weak, ineffectual, passive figure who exists solely to nurture and support males, or a corrupt and corrupting figure that manipulates and destroys men. Anthy is both and Utena is neither, and together they ultimately transcend this divide and demonstrate that they are people, at which point they graduate out of the story, leaving it in ruins behind them.

Saikano (2002)

• Teens Shuji and Chise start dating and experience the trials and tribulations of first love, complicated by the fact that a massive world war is in the process of wiping out humanity just offscreen and Chise, partway through the first episode, is converted by the military, without her consent or knowledge, into an unstoppable living weapons system.
• Shuji and Chise are both depicted as rape victims. Chise is traumatized by the government violation of her body and as a result is plagued by intense guilt even though she has little to no control over what she does in her "weapon state," disassociates to the point of frequent blackouts and occasional manifestations of the "weapon" side of her as an alternate personality, and revulsion at her own body. Shuji was sexually abused in middle school by his track coach, and is emotionally withdrawn, easily upset by anything "weird" or out of the ordinary, heavily implied to have sexual disfunction or at least a strong fear of sex, and disassociates more subtly, becoming easily distracted whenever the situation becomes emotionally intense. Both suffer from serious self-esteem issues, a pronounced tendency to self-blame, and a belief that they inevitably hurt anyone close to them. All of these traits in both characters are common symptoms in survivors of sexual abuse.
• Throughout, the war serves as a metaphor for their relationship issues stemming from their sexual abuse. The military constantly taking Chise away so that she can serve in their war, for example, play the role of an abusive or controlling father who refuses to let his daughter see her bofriend in a more traditional teen romance. Their guilt and anxiety frequently take external form in the war; for example, when Shuji's abuser returns and manipulates him into cheating, the war intensifies and Chise is called away to the front. When Chise cheats with Tetsu, an earthquake strikes their town.
• The apocalypse ensues when Chise and Shuji finally break through their anxieties and issues to make love. The entire world is destroyed, but the two of them are able to live on together in happiness. A clear case, in other words, of the apocalypse serving as the destruction of an oppressive reality; as in NGE, it is a purely psychological reality comprised of anxiety and trauma, and destroyed in order to build a new reality within which happiness and love are possible.

Madoka Magica (2011)

• Begins with the apocalyptic destruction of the city by Walpurgisnacht, ends with destruction of the universe and replacement with a new, slightly less awful one
• Very much a social revolution rather than personal growth--Madoka does grow as a person, but ultimately sacrifices herself to reform the world.
• The social structure she upsets is another version of Princess/Witch--in this case, the realization that being the perfect little princess is impossible, and no matter what a woman does, she will eventually become the Witch.
• Madoka destroys the concept of the Witch, but by becoming pure essence of Magical Girl herself, making this a flawed and incomplete revolution--hence Rebellion, but that hasn't had wide release yet.

WORKS DISCUSSED

• Epic of Gilgamesh, Unknown
• Critias, Plato
• Daniel, Unknown
• Revelation, John (probably not that John, or that one either)
• War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
• Demian, Hermann Hesse
• Akira (1988 film)
• Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-6)
• Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997)
• Saikano (2002)
• Madoka Magica (2011)

FURTHER READING

• John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature
• L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity
• Glenn Yeffeth, ed, War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives on the H.G. Wells Classic
• Martin Kitchen, Europe Between the Wars
• Susan Napier, "Akira: Revenge of the Abjected" in Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle
• Gillian Butler, Melanie Fennel, and Ann Hackmann, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety Disorders
• Kate Millet, Sexual Politics
• Jed A. Blue, The Very Soil: An Unauthorized Critical Study of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (coming 2015)

Some facts about my upcoming Apocalypse panel

Finished my Apocalypse panel last night, and I am inordinately pleased with it. So either I'll flub it horribly or no one will show up.

But until the inevitable catastrophe (heh) kicks in, here's some facts about it:

• Running length: ~48 minutes on my test run, which is ideal for a 1-hour slot.
• Number of video clips: 2 (low for me, but I have a LOT of talking to do)
• Number of slides: 16, included title slide and bibliography
• Genres of pre-anime works discussed: heroic epic, philosophical dialogue, sacred legend, sacred prophecy, alien invasion, bildungsroman
• Genres of anime discussed: cyberpunk, super robot psychodrama, surrealist fairy tale, teen romance, magical girl
• Uses of the word qlippothic: 0, alas
• Bibliography entries that, at first glance, make no sense: 1

Also I just bought a refurbished video camera, assuming it arrives in time and works I will be able to record my panels.

Upcoming Convention Appearance: Anime USA

I'll be giving several panels at Anime USA (October 3-5 in Washington, DC):

• Analyzing Anime 101: Probably my most popular panel, definitely the one I've given most. Basically a compressed overview of basic analytic techniques with examples from anime.
• Postmodern Anime: Brief discussion of postmodern techniques and concepts, then a bunch of anime examples.
• BESM: Introduction to the anime tabletop RPG--where to find it, basics of play, recommendations of approaches, and then having the audience collectively build a character.
• Break the World's Shell: Anime Apocalypses as Social and Personal Revolution: Title basically says it all. Briefly tracing the apocalyptic genre from its origins in the ancient Near East (Utnapishtim, Atlantis, Revelation), through Hesse and 50's science fiction, and then plunging into specific anime for the majority of the panel (including Akira, Saikano, PMMM, Evangelion of course, Utena, and others). Central thesis is apocalypse as metaphor for massive change on a cultural or personal scale (or both).

Don't know times/days yet, but all those panels have been confirmed. BESM and the apocalypse panel are both entirely new, Postmodern Anime I've done once before and Analyzing Anime 101 I've done probably a dozen times.

Why I love Anime Boston

A short list of just a few of the reasons that Anime Boston is my favorite anime convention:

• Great panels: Charles Dunbar and Kat Paige's Kill la Kill panel convinced me to give the show a second chance by arguing that it's readable as a criticism of State Shinto and the resurgence of nationalism in contemporary Japan. Kat's panel on tricksters and Charles' panel on Studio Ghibli were also great. I finally got to see the Geek Family's panel about happy and silly shows, and it was as good as I hoped and full of things I'd never heard of. Other highlights included the latest versions of the perennial Craziest Mecha Moments and Bad Anime, Bad (I can now say that I have seen all of the train wreck that is Garzey's Wing), and a couple of panels by people I don't know, one on music in anime and the other on visual storytelling in Miyazaki films, both of which were fascinating new perspectives given my usual focus on the verbal.
• Great panel audiences: Anime Boston continues to have the best and most interesting audiences of any convention I go to. The questions I got during both Postmodern Anime and Analyzing Anime were solid, interesting, and occasionally challenging, and Latin Latin Madoka More Latin resulted in two separate multi-hour conversations with attendees, the first about epiphenomenology, qualia, and theory of consciousness, and the second about Buddhism. The latter has already significantly altered my perception of what's going on in the last three episodes of the series and Rebellion.
• Ego boosts: I was asked for an interview, invited to speak at another convention (which will take some negotiating, since it can only happen if they pay at least hotel cost), and, best of all, asked if I taught a class anywhere.

So yeah, hung out with friends, recharged, and generally had an excellent time that has rejuvenated my seriously flagging convention mojo.

Latin Latin Madoka More Latin 3: The Search for More Mami

The Kickstarter has ONE DAY left, and we're only $170 from making the first stretch goal!

This entry is adapted from my portions of the Latin Latin Madoka More Latin panel I will be giving at Anime Boston this weekend. As a result, it is a bit disjointed compared to an essay. It is also shorter than the previous LLMML entries because of a change of collaborator and therefore collaboration strategies. In the first two panels, Viga and I made the panel by sitting down and brainstorming the entire panel, then I wrote it all up. This time around, Kit and I divvied up panel topics and went off to write our own, so all I have for you is the topics I'm covering.

Regular readers may find some of this familiar from The Very Soil and the Rebellion review.

Spoiler Warning: Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the Rebellion movie.

The first three episodes of Madoka Magica can be understood as a struggle of sorts between the fairly standard magical girl series it originally pretends to be, and the dark meditation on hope and despair that it actually is, the kind of show that would have Magia as an ending theme. Mami is at the center of that struggle; just as the first act of a witch, before we ever see one, is to tear apart the anime art style and replace it with something creepy and strange, Mami’s first act, before we ever see her, is to create a safe space around Madoka and Sayaka where the witch cannot harm them. Her approach to fighting witches is flashy and visually appealing, and includes a signature finishing move with a called attack, all stalwarts of the genre for at least two decades.

She is also an instance of the Yamato Nadeshiko, the traditional Japanese ideal of the feminine—loyal, an excellent hostess, wise, mature, and humble, but with a core of steel. Like the traditional magical girl, she exemplifies these feminine virtues in a way that empowers her, but she’s not *too* empowered—she is continually subject to the male gaze, especially during combat sequences, with the camera focusing on her breasts, hips, and upper legs much more than for any other chaslideracter. Nonetheless, she is feminine, nurturing, and a leader and warrior, the classic combination for a magical girl.

Thus, it falls to her to fight to keep the “Magia” version of the series at bay, and it is only when she’s killed that it is able to take over. And again, her return at the end of the series to give Madoka her costume designs signals that the series is reintroducing some of the core magical girl themes it had deliberately abandoned, most notably hope.

By contrast, Homura is in many ways the harbinger of the Magia version of the series. Her function is to disrupt the status quo—her appearance in Madoka’s dream and school is the first strange thing to happen to her in the main series timeline, and though she fights to protect Madoka from the eerier elements of the series, she inevitably is a source of eeriness herself and ultimately makes things worse for Madoka.

She does not behave or look like a normal magical girl. She has elements of the “dark magical girl” that sometimes appears as the heroine’s rival—such as Pixy Misa in Magical Project S or Princess Kraehe in Princess Tutu—but notably she is not empowered by the villains, nor is she Madoka’s rival. In those first three episodes, she is positioned much more as Mami’s rival, with them nearly coming to blows multiple times.

Additionally, for most of the series she is the character least subject to male gaze, with none of the breast-and-hips focus Mami gets, and her costume lacks the bare midriffs, tube tops, and boob windows of Sayaka and Kyouko. Really, other than her transformation sequence in episode 11, the camera consistently treats her as a character to be watched rather than an object to be ogled, very unusual for a post-Cutey Honey magical girl.

She is actually very much like a witch throughout the series, in that her arrival always means something strange, serious, and probably mysterious is happening. She deforms the narrative by her presence, with even Kyubey noting that she is “wrong,” an outlier.

Even her power over time is consistent with this role, when we consider what time really is:
The three laws of thermodynamics are among the most solid and fundamental findings in modern physics, more certain even than the law of gravity. They are: 1. You can’t win. Energy can be changed from one form or another, but never created from nothing. 2. You can’t break even. Entropy always increases in a closed system; in other words, over time, the energy in a closed system converts into more chaotic, less useful forms until it becomes heat, which requires more energy to use than you get by using it. 3. You can’t quit playing the game. Entropy drops to zero in a perfect crystal at absolute zero... but to cool a system to absolute zero requires infinite energy.

Entropy, in other words, is a measure of the disorder in a system, and it always increases; all things decay. Interestingly, not only is this an inevitable process, it is the actual scientific definition of time; “the future” is *defined* as the direction in which entropy increases.

Now, most of the time this isn’t that big a deal. Life on Earth, for example, is able to keep running because it’s not a closed system; we have a giant energy source that hangs over our heads all day every day, just pouring free energy down onto us. As long as you can get energy from outside the system, you can keep entropy at bay.

But the universe has no outside; it *is* a closed system, which means that every second of every day entropy is increasing. Eventually, if nothing else destroys the universe first, we will reach the state known as heat-death: all energy in the universe will be heat, all forms of organization will be impossible, everything will decay into a slowly expanding cloud of slowly cooling gas, and nothing else will ever happen again, forever.

However! If you could break the first law of thermodynamics, and create energy from nothing, that would be the same as bringing energy in from outside the universe. Even if all the energy native to the universe has succumbed to entropy, you can use that outside energy to maintain structures and keep the universe running—and if you had a steady supply of that energy, you could keep doing it. Of course, it’s impossible to violate conservation of energy—unless, of course, you’re using magic.

Entropy is not the only form decay takes in the series, however. Emotional decay is also a quite prominent theme, particular the descent into despair and depression. Most obvious is the breakdown of magical girls into witches, as we see in Sayaka’s arc. What’s interesting here is that their magic is explicitly stated to come from wishes, i.e., hope, and as they consume it they descend into despair, which descent Kyubey uses to combat entropy. In other words, the entropic decay of the universe is being explicitly connected to depression and despair, and the magic needed to overcome it is likewise emotional. There’s a real resonance here with comments by Urobuchi in the Fate/Zero author’s notes, where he discusses the inevitable decay of the universe and connects this with a decay in his ability to write happy stories. He concludes that only a “pure soul” could reverse entropy and save him from this mounting despair that is beginning to threaten his ability to write at all.

This brings us, believe it or not, to a third kind of decay present in the series, spiritual decay. In Buddhism, the first of the Four Noble Truths which form the philosophical core of the religion is the inevitability of dukkha, or suffering. One of the three types of dukkha is the inevitable decay caused by the passage of time, because all material things are transient and eventual break down and are lost—entropy, in other words. Unfortunately, the weight of karma traps us in the material world, and we are thus unable to escape dukkha unless we can do something about karma.

Now stop me if you’re heard this one: A young girl achieves a state of transcendence, allowing her to escape the confines of the material world and free herself from suffering, but in an act of supreme self-sacrifice, she instead takes pity on the suffering of countless others, taking their suffering and karmic burdens onto herself so that they can transcend the material in her place. That is, in essence, the story of the Chinese boddhisatva Guan-yin, known in Japan as Kannon, and the clear inspiration for Madokami. She rescues and redeems her friends and her world—but remember what I said about the relationship between entropy and depression and Urobuchi’s previous writing. The TV series does, more or less, end happily, or at least with a better world. The implication is that even the author, unable to write happy stories because of the entropic decay of his own emotional universe—because remember, the world in which these characters live is the inside of his head—has been saved.

[elided bits Kit is covering regarding the movies, precisely what is meant by "Rebellion" in this context, and the power of story]

So, during the climactic battle in Rebellion, Nagisa and Sayaka reveal why they volunteered to leave the perfect bliss of Madoka’s nirvana-like Magical Girl afterlife for this difficult mission. Sayaka of course did it because she regretted leaving Kyouko behind, and Nagisa, in an apparent continuation of a running gag throughout the movie, did it so she could eat cheese. But that’s in itself interesting—if she loves cheese so much, how come her afterlife doesn’t provide her with any?
The answer, of course, lies in what cheese is—decayed milk. There can be no cheese in a spiritual plane devoid of dukkha, because without decay cheese cannot be created. There are good things, in other words, things that some of the magical girls love, not found in Madokannon’s world because they are the creations of decay.

In medieval European alchemy, one of the most important concepts was the process called putrefaction. In practical terms, this is just a form of fermentation, but spiritually it was related to the idea that life emerges out of rot. A piece of rotting fruit is disgusting and revolts the human senses, but it is also a riotous explosion of life, molds and maggots that nourish other living things, up and up the food chain until eventually all the natural beauty, all of life, depends on rot for sustenance. The alchemists regarded this as a profound spiritual truth, and that same spiritual truth, whether derived from alchemy or not, is key to the reason BOTH magical girls returned. Without putrefaction there is no cheese for Nagisa. Without the decay of Sayaka’s mental state and Kyouko’s resulting attempt to reach out to her, there is no friendship between the two of them. Everythign they shared, is a product of decay.

In other words, the cheese gag is actually far more than a gag; it is evidence that Madoka’s system is imperfect, that some of the magical girls she saves are unhappy in a world without decay. Death and decay are part of life, a part that Madoka is trying to deny. Only time and the inevitable sequels will tell if Homura’s system is any better.

We started the panel by discussing the opposing significance of Mami and Homura. That representation still holds in Rebellion; Mami is once again in the position of defending the status quo, the happier, safer world within the barrier with its traditional magical girl team and cute mascot characters and always-survivable monsters. And once again Homura is questioning and challenging that world, introducing new and uncomfortable elements from the alien genre of conspiracy thrillers, such as the notion that one of them is a traitor, that their memories are false, that what they’re perceiving isn’t real. Their fight, which was teased throughout the first three episodes of the series, becomes inevitable here, and Mami emerges as the clear victor. As of course she must be, because Homura is not bringing everything she has to bear; that part of her which is already a witch is trying to maintain this happy world, because she herself created it, so Homura is fighting herself as much as Mami.

At the end of the movie, of course, Homura declares herself to be a demon, earning nicknames like Akuma Homura and Homucifer. And of course, there are references to Paradise Lost hidden throughout the movie, just as references to Faust were hidden throughout the series. Put another way, just as the series is in many ways a Buddhist Faust, Rebellion is a Buddhist retelling of Paradise Lost. But does that mean Homura is Satan?

In the series, even though Madoka was the main character, it was a supporting character, Homura, who took the actual role of Faust, Similarly, in the movie, even though Homura is the main character, someone else is Satan. Homura’s rebellion, after all, is NOT against God, but rather against herself; the real rebel against Godoka is Kyubey, who like Satan in Paradise Lost believes that he is more qualified to run things, doesn’t understand anyone else’s motivations, gets his butt kicked in a war that tears apart Heaven, and is trapped forever in a Hell that exists inside him. In other words, just as he was Mephistopheles in the series’ version of Faust, he’s Satan in the series’ version of Paradise Lost.

But the real question is, is Homura good or evil? And the answer is, yes. Homura is a spectacularly morally ambiguous character. She reunites Madoka with her loved ones, returns Sayaka and Nagisa to worlds where they can get what they want, is working to end the magical girl system once and for all, is acting out of love, and holding the Incubators in check. These are all good things! Of course, she also destroyed one universe and is prepared to sacrifice another if she has to, has very clearly taken on the role of the Buddhist demon Mara, whose job is to use illusions and material things to distract people from their true potential to transcend this world—watch again that scene in the school hallway with Madoka. She deliberately taunts the other girls, forcing Kyoko to waste food, breaking a teacup behind Mami in an echo of the Charlotte fight, and erasing Sayaka’s memories, she’s motivated entirely by her own selfish desires, and she controls all the familiars and probably also witches. Her moral status is incredibly complicated—and so, like the movie itself, we end on an ambiguous note.

Observations from MAGFest 12

I went to MAGFest (the Music and Gaming Festival) 12 in National Harbor, MD over the weekend. Here are some observations:

• Every MAGFest I discover something new at the concerts. Last year was the metal awesomeness of Rare Candy; this year it was the classical awesomeness of Triforce Quartet.
• I did not enjoy Machinae Supremacy as much as everyone said I would. This may be due to equipment issues--the audio equipment was clearly not able to handle volume that high, and kept clipping and distorting the sound, making it next to impossible to hear the music.
• No game gathers a crowd of people wanting to join in as quickly as Cards Against Humanity. However, this effect only occurs if you're actually playing; sitting around with an open box waiting for people to join in takes quite a while.
• Sunday is basically pointless. There are no concerts and the board game library closes ridiculously early (I was there between 11:30 and noon and it was already closed), so the result is a Music and Gaming Festival with no music and no gaming.
• I got more Street Pass tags on my 3DS in one weekend at MAGFest than in the rest of the time I've owned it.

Race, Redemption, and Revelation

The rather pompous title of this post refers to a panel I gave on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood a couple of years back. I no longer completely agree with what I say here--in particular, the section on race at the beginning is <I>appallingly</I> naïve, simplistic, and, dare I say it, demonstrative of massive unexamined privilege, but still I think it's a reasonably interesting panel.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

Part Six:

Cue fanboy squealing...

If you follow me on Twitter, or are one of the two people who both read this blog and know me on Facebook, you've already heard this, but: Mysticon, a convention in Roanoke, VA, called me yesterday. They just lost their former Guest of Honor, Marina Sertis, so they decided to replace her with another Star Trek: The Next Generation actor, John deLancey, who you probably already know played Q on that show and Discord on Friendship Is Magic.

Since he's the guest of honor, they want him to have the first panel of the con, and since there's already going to be a LOT of Star Trek over the weekend, they decided to make it a brony panel instead.

And who's established himself as their main person for brony-related stuff over the last two years?

So that's how I ended up as moderator of a John deLancie brony panel. February 21-23, Roanoke, VA.

*incoherent squees*

Reading Too Much Into Adventure Time! with Finn and Jake, Part One

Once again, lacking anything else to post for a Wednesday Whatever I go to the well of hastily adapted panel notes. This time, have my panel on Adventure Time! from Connecticon 2013. As always, this is built around discrete chunks tied to slides, so please forgive the lack of flow. This is the first half of the panel; I will hold the second half, dealing with character relationships and postmodern elements, for another Wednesday.

Adventure Time! as nonsense literature: Literary nonsense is a genre with roots in two sources: First, traditional nursery rhymes, which employed made-up rhymes, little games (such as paddycake and ring-around-the-rosie) and lots of animal and food themes to entertain children. Second, in the middle ages scholars, intellectuals, and poets employed intellectual absurdities and paradoxes for humor in political satire, parodies, and comedies. Edward Lear popularized combining the two with his limericks, stories, and songs (most famously “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which combines animal themes and made-up words like “runcible spoon” familiar from nursery rhymes with a parody of courtly love). Lewis Carroll then codified the genre with the Alice books, the Sylvie and Bruno books, and poems like "The Hunting of the Snark."

Nonsense literature is generally rigorously logical, but with skewed premises—characters have very simple, straightforward emotions, and their behavior is instead logically driven from a weird basis. For example, Bubblegum Princess is uninterested in romance, and instead all her actions follow as a logical consequence of the absurd premise of being a ruler who is also a mad scientist who is also living candy. Nonsense literature tends to play with things that have a lot of arbitrary rules in real life, such as games, food (which is always surrounded by complex etiquette and rules about what you can eat at different times of day or what foods go together (ice cream and asparagus for breakfast, for example, is arbitrarily not acceptable even though either food on its own is acceptable at other times of day)), and laws, stripped of their normal context and emotional content. That’s all over the place in Adventure Time—early elements have things like the bizarre trials for breaking a Royal Promise, people made of candy, hot dogs, berries, and so on, and lots of references to video games and D&D. There are also entire episodes devoted to games being taken bizarrely seriously, such as the game of Let’s Pretend during the knife storm or the complex holographic Magic-the-Gathering-type game Finn and Jake play that Jake takes far too seriously.

The Nostalgia Factor: There’s a moderately well-known video about this from the PBS Idea Channel on YouTube. As it points out, a lot of the cartoons popular among adults evoke a sense of nostalgia—a fuzzy notion that childhood is nicer and simpler and happier, a wish to return to it. MLP, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and Gumball are all examples. Adventure Time evokes this nostalgia in a lot of ways: the heroic adventures, post-apocalyptic setting, and sword-wielding blend of fantasy and science fiction were common in products of the 1980s and early 1990s such as Thundercats, He-Man, and Krull. Nonsense literature is often usually children’s literature, so that element evokes memories of childhood, too. And the music frequently employs chiptunes, which are based on the sounds of video game consoles of the 1980s and 1990s. Many individual episodes work for this—for example, in Season One’s “Dungeon” they split up to explore a dungeon, and encounter challenges which would be perfect for the other one, parodying shows like Superfriends where the characters would always face challenges perfectly suited for their particular skills (for example, there was always a water-based problem for Aquaman). However, this video misses the mark by suggesting that its appeal is because the characters are nostalgic themselves, with things like the wreckage of human civilization everywhere and the hints at past relationships and “better days” between Marcelline and other characters like Ice King and Bubblegum Princess. That’s unlikely as a source of the show's popularity because it was already hugely popular long before those elements became clear in late first/early second season. The bigger factor is that unlike most shows nostalgic for childhood, it doesn’t shy away from showing how much being a kid can suck. Finn frequently is ordered to do things without knowing why, has information hidden from him by adults, gets confused over relationships and life questions and his identity—his life is not all happiness and silliness! It is thus far more accurate to childhood than most such shows, and thereby evokes nostalgia all the more strongly.

Meme depot into cult show: As long-time readers of this blog know, I have argued before that there are basically two kinds of shows popular among geeks right now. Meme depots are shows that have a lot of absurd gags that are easily repeatable out of context, so we can easily spread them as memes on Facebook and Tumblr. Most of these are cartoons—Family Guy was probably the original cartoon to actively do this, but it’s been done better by shows like Regular Show. A cult show, on the other hand, has a plan (or pretends to have a plan) and much of the fun comes from the audience learning about the world and gathering clues to try to figure out the plan. This is old hat in anime and limited-run British series like The Prisoner, but in American television didn’t catch on until shows like X-Files and Babylon 5 in the 1990s, before it took off massively with Lost. As mentioned, it’s always been everywhere in anime, but entered Western animation in the 2000s with shows like Justice League and Avatar the Last Airbender. What’s interesting about Adventure Time is that it started as a meme depot—it was all about silly gags and gif-able memes—but has been steadily becoming more of a cult show, slowly revealing that there is a backstory worth caring about with things like Marceline and Ice King’s relationship, dropping recurring hints at future developments with things like the snail that became the snail-lich, and so on.

Worldbuilding: This brings us to worldbuilding. The Simon and Marcy episodes are a good source for this. We know there was a Great Mushroom War, referring to the mushroom cloud from nukes, and that the current planet has a huge chunk taken out of it. We don’t know what caused the Mushroom War, but it’s not that relevant to the present of the show--whatever cultures' differences created the conflict are long gone. The “Finn the Human/Jake the Dog” two-parter shows us an alternate history that implies that these weapons weren’t all straightforward nukes, since the one bomb is implied to have necromantic elements that probably created the Lich in the normal continuity.

How did humans get a necromantic bomb? The fact that both Marceline and the Ice King’s crown predate the Mushroom War means that magic has always been around in this world, although maybe it wasn’t as out in the open prior to the war. Things like Hell, vampires, and magical artifacts existed, so why not necromantic nukes? “Simon and Marcy” even gives hints to the origins of the candy people: The zombie-like mutated humans in the abandoned city resemble the candy people faintly, and the friendly blob creature is pretty obviously Princess Bubblegum or an ancestor. The episode as a whole is actually something of a reference to the novel “I Am Legend,” with Simon as the main character and Marcy as the dog. As in that book, the apparent monsters are actually humanity’s successors that will be founding a new civilization in the future, and the apparent hero is going to be their legendary monster.

Anime USA in Summary

Utena pulled out Gary Oak's soul sword, and it turned out to be the Dragonslayer from Berserk. As a result, the duel with Tatewaki Kuno for possession of the Rose Bride (humanized Rarity) was very short.

Anime USA BESM Campaign!

This weekend (Friday through Sunday) I'll be at Anime USA in Washington, D.C.! Rather than my usual panels, at this particular convention I will be in the Traditional Games room, running a BESM campaign. It is a single 4-hour session, and I will be running it several times over the weekend. Stop by if you're interested or want to say hi!

Campaign Synopsis:

Someone or something is messing with history in 1850 Karuisawa-shuku, Japan, and it's up to the Interdimensional Action Squad to put a stop to it! Choose your squad member (Utena Tenjou (Revolutionary Girl Utena), Gary Oak (Pokemon), Kanata Shimonome (AKB0048), Zelgadis Greywords (The Slayers), Michael Carpenter (The Dresden Files), Toph Bei Fong (Avatar: The Last Airbender), or Doctor Whooves (Doctor Who/My Little Pony)) and help save history... before there's no history left to save!

As with last year's campaign, I've set it up so that the plot of the campaign and identity of the villains changes depending on which characters the players pick. (So, for example, there are certain events that occur if both Utena and Gary are in the campaign, while other events only occur if Zelgadis is in the campaign but Michael is not, etc.) That way it stays fresh for me even though I'm running the same campaign a dozen times in one weekend.

Latin Latin Madoka More Latin 2: Thermodynamic Boogaloo

This post is adapted from the script for Latin Latin Madoka More Latin 2: Thermodynamic Boogaloo, a panel Viga and I presented at Anime Boston 2013. As an adapted panel, it has a rather different structure than my usual essays; also note that some portions are repurposed chunks of the original Latin Latin Madoka More Latin, although most of the content is new.

As promised in the title, we start with that most exciting of topics, thermodynamics. Woo. You may have heard economics referred to as “the dismal science.” Well, bullshit. The real dismal science is thermodynamics, as witness the three basic laws of thermodynamics:

1. Energy is conserved. You can never create or destroy energy, only change it from one form to another. You can’t win.
2. Entropy increases in a closed system. In other words, energy in a closed system becomes more disorganized and less usable (which is to say, it becomes waste heat) until ultimately everything breaks down in what’s called “heat death.” You can’t break even.
3. Entropy drops to zero in a perfect crystal at absolute zero. But the closer you get to absolute zero, the more energy it takes to get closer, and it would take infinite energy to actually reach it. You can’t quit playing the game.

Note that the second law applies to a closed system. If you have an open system—one where energy can come in from outside—entropy doesn’t have to increase. For example, life on Earth doesn’t need to worry much about entropy, because we’ve got a big ol’ giant fusion reactor hanging over our heads, pouring energy onto us.

The problem is that the universe is a closed system, and there’s no “outside” to get energy from—that’s kind of what “universe” means. The universe itself WILL eventually run down into heat death, reaching a state of perfect disorder, a vast cloud of undifferentiated, gradually expanding and cooling gas. Of course, if you could create energy from nothing, that would be basically the same as importing it from outside the universe, but that requires breaking the first law.

Oh, and just to be extra fun—these are the most experimentally confirmed and reconfirmed findings in science. Not even gravity has as much empirical support as these three laws—they are as close to absolutely certain facts as any science can be. And extra, extra fun—Emmy Noether did some very impressive math and proved more than a century ago that “energy isn’t conserved” is a synonym for “the laws of physics change over time.” That’s not a whole lot better—avoiding heat death might not be worth it if it means gravity just randomly turns off some days!

That’s what the Incubators are trying to change, and it turns out that the laws of physics can briefly change or be broken (which is mathematically identical to being able to make energy from nothing!) when magical girls do their thing, and especially when they become witches.

But there’s more to entropy in Madoka than the science…

The theme of decay is everywhere in this series. You can see it in the way Mitakihara City starts clean and beautiful, but ends up ruined by Walpurgisnacht. You can see it in Sayaka’s descent from happy kid—the most playful of Madoka’s trio of friends—and warrior of justice to depression, murder, despair, and ultimately becoming a witch.

It’s also in the way Homura’s every attempt to turn back the clock and fix things makes them worse. In the first timeline Mami and Madoka die fighting Walpurgisnacht, but Walpurgisnacht is defeated and no new witch created. In all other timelines Mami doesn’t live that long, not to mention Madoka becoming a progressively worse witch at the end of each timeline until the fifth.

But the biggest example is the way the characters’ wishes turn against them. They each get what they wanted—Kyubey always honestly fulfills the wish—but soon find that they regret it anyway. Once gained, the thing they desired quickly sours—Kyoko’s father commits murder-suicide, Sayaka saves the boy but loses him to another, Mami survives but finds herself isolated as a friendless orphan, and Homura eventually realizes her attempts to protect Madoka are just increasing her suffering. Everything they wish for rots away.

This theme of entropy or the inevitability of decay is an important factor of Buddhist thought, which is a huge influence on Madoka. Buddhism uses the existence of decay to argue that this world is corrupt and corrupting, an illusion that must be seen past, or else it will use your desires—your wishes—to lure you in, and then trap you when the things you wished for inevitably decay.

Kyubey also talks about karma a lot. Karma is a very complex concept, and different sects view it very differently. The Buddhist view can be very loosely summed up as cause and effect: action plants seeds which grow (maybe in this life, maybe in the next) into consequences. Good actions lead to good consequences and bad to bad, but either way, it has the effect of trapping you in the cycle of karma, because those consequences lead to further action which leads to more consequences. The magical girl happiness-despair cycle works the same way, dragging them steadily down to witch-hood. The weight of karma also binds people to a cycle of rebirth, forcing them live over an over again, facing the burdens of the karma from past lives. Episode 10, in other words.

Enlightenment, the understanding of the true nature of the world, is the only way to escape karma--and it is only on the last cycle that Madoka learns both of Homura's time travel (the cycle of rebirth) and precisely what the Incubators are doing (the nature of karma). And Walpurgisnacht strongly resembles a lotus blossom (a symbol of Enlightenment) while at the same time the gear motif reflects the ever-grinding wheel of karma. Note that Walpurgisnacht is both where Homura always resets time—binding herself and Madoka more tightly—and where Madoka ascends to goddesshood.

Because, of course, that ascension has a strong Buddhist element, too…

Madoka resembles a figure from Buddhist mythology, the bodhissatva Kwannon. Kwannon was a young girl who nearly attained nirvana, but stopped just before she reached it. She transcended space and time to reach out to others and help them to Enlightenment, before finally ascending to nirvana herself. This helps explain the Virgin Mary connection, as well--people who syncretize Buddhism and Christianity often identify Kwannon and Mary together, and when Christianity was illegal in Japan during the Edo period, underground Christians disguised statues of Mary as Kwannon, and eventually fused them into a single goddess, the cult of Maria-Kwannon.

Madoka resonates with Kanon quite strongly. Like Kanon, she is an incarnation of compassion and hope, sacrificing herself through all of time and space to help bring others to the same heaven she has attained. Kanon can see Nirvana, but holds herself back from that perfection—how much must that hurt? And she is at every point in time and space, sacrificing herself eternally to ensure everyone else can be with her. That’s pretty much what Madoka does in the final episode.

There’s also Marian elements to Madoka, which makes sense if Madoka, Kanon, and Mary are all versions of the same ideal goddess of compassion, hope, and salvation. For example, the rose is a symbol of Mary, and Madoka has a rose on her bow that blooms when she begins to ascend. The show is also a retelling of Faust (as we covered in detail last year), and Madoka fulfills the roles of both Gretchen (who ends up serving Mary in the afterlife) and Mary in that story.

Finally, the music Kyosuke plays when Madoka and Sayaka watch him in the final episode is Ave Maria, a musical setting of the Latin prayer known to English speakers as “Hail Mary,” requesting Mary to ask for the forgiveness of the person making the prayer.

Moving on to something completely different…

Madoka is a clear example of postmodernism in anime. Postmodernism, as a philosophical and artistic movement, is mostly interested in the ways in which we construct meaning. Postmodern art, generally speaking, is art that deliberately calls attention to the way in which it constructs its meaning; where most art tries to hide the technique and create an illusion of reality, postmodern art demands that you notice its artificiality. The main technique by which it does this is to strip signifiers out of their normal context and then treat them as if they’ll still work anyway. The simplest example is breaking the fourth wall, which pulls the work out of its normal context of existing entirely in an imaginary world, and smashes it against our own reality.

None of the characters in Madoka break the fourth wall to come out of the show, but the witches break it in the other direction—their barriers are in a different art style, and the characters notice and are freaked out by this. It’s the fourth wall breaking into the show instead of out—one of the elements of the show that we’re normally supposed to ignore according to that vile “suspension of disbelief” idea is actually a part of the story.

Another way in which the show calls attention to the way it and other works construct meaning is by bringing up, and then dismissing, common magical-girl generic elements. In essence, it does for magical girls what Neon Genesis Evangelion did for mecha; what fans tend to call a genre deconstruction, though an actual deconstruction is something very different. What Madoka and Eva do is take common elements of the genre and play them as straight as possible, while removing the narrative conveniences that make them work. Eva deconstructed the super robot genre by showing how psychologically devastating it would be to place the fate of the world on the shoulders of a child and force them to face monsters. Madoka does the same with magical girls, as well as showing the isolation their superhero-esque roles and secret identities create. Mami's death, for instance: she dies against a third-episode monster of the week, proving this is not the sort of magical girl series where the girls have plot armor, or where the big Final Attack always works.

At the same time, just as Eva ultimately returns at the end to the core shonen theme of a young man embracing hope and self-determination to cross the threshold into adulthood, Madoka embraces the core magical girl theme of a young woman evolving into a powerful, maternal goddess-figure able to protect the world. It takes the genre apart, but puts it back together again as something new, and in so doing sets a new benchmark, a new standard of what the genre could be.

The question, of course, is why Madoka is playing with the form and genre like this. And the answer seems to be that it’s trying to reach beyond itself, to break the fourth wall in a novel way—not the wall between work and reader, but between work and author.

The truth is, I haven't always been this way. I have often written pieces that didn't have a perfect ending, but by the last chapter the protagonist would still possess a belief that "Although there will be many hardships to come, I still have to hold on."
But ever since I don't know when, I can no longer write works like this.
I have nothing but contempt for the thing men call happiness, and have had to push the characters I poured my heart out to create into the abyss of tragedy.
For all things in the world, if they are just left alone and paid no attention, are bound to advance in a negative direction.
No matter what we do, we can't stop the universe from getting colder, either , and on the same principle. This world is only maintained in existence by a series of logical, common-sense processes; it can never escape the bondage of its physical laws.
Therefore, in order to write a perfect ending for a story you must possess the power to break the chain of cause and effect, invert black and white, and act in complete contradiction to the rules of the universe. Only a heavenly and chaste soul, a soul that resounds with genuine praise for humanity, can save the story; to write a story with a happy ending is a double challenge, to the author's body as well as the mind.
At some point, Gen Urobuchi lost that power.

By having the non-diegetic space of art style invade the diegetic space of the characters’ awareness, a bridge is formed between inside the story and outside. By raising and dismissing generic elements, Urobuchi can stress-test them, and discover how strong they really are. In short, by redeeming her universe Madoka can prove to Urobuchi that he still has the power to write a happy ending; she has redeemed not only her universe but her creator.

In this sense, the series serves as a leap of faith for Urobuchi. The leap of faith is originally from theology, and originates with “Lessing’s Ditch,” which posited that there is no way to make a rational, evidence-based argument for Christianity, but it can be generalized to any moral belief system. Basically, Lessing’s Ditch argues that the is-ought problem—that there is no way to logically get from “here’s how things are” to “this is what you should do” unless you start having some kind of beliefs already—is insurmountable; you cannot ever know what action to take or what to believe in based on facts or evidence alone, but must have some kind of moral principles or values you take on faith. Kierkegaard then took this a step forward by introducing the “leap of faith”—though he originally called it the leap to faith--the idea that, upon reaching the ditch, one can consciously choose to leap across. That, in other words, one must make a decision to believe in something before one can make any other meaningful decisions.

This is exactly Urobuchi’s problem that he tackles in Madoka: he is aware of the nature of the physical universe, and it leaves him paralyzed, in despair, unable to write anything but misery. In Madoka, he creates something he can believe in, and now can take action—even though, ultimately he created his belief, leapt to faith.

Speaking of morality, we’re going to wrap up by discussing the characters as examples of different approaches to morality, starting with Kyoko. Kyoko is a hedonist; she lives for pleasure. Originally she pursues immediate gratification like food and games. At this stage she is completely selfish, willing to sacrifice people to familiars so they’ll grow into witches and provide her with Grief Seeds. However, her interactions with Sayaka slowly leads her to become less selfish, and to start to crave more enduring pleasures such as friendship. Ultimately, she dies betraying her own principles, acting entirely selflessly as she sacrifices herself not even to save someone, but just to ensure that Sayaka is not alone.

Mami is hard to place, but she may be a deontologist—that is, someone who follows a set of rules, principles, duties, and rights in determining right and wrong. In particular, she seems to be driven largely by a sense of duty. However, she has so little screen time it’s hard to be sure.

Sayaka is a study in virtue ethics—that is, instead of following a set of rules or principles, she tries to act consistently with certain virtues or follow the example of some ideal person. She basically has a picture in her head of what a hero is like, and she tries to imitate that image. However, because she is fixated on imitating something that isn’t her, she loses sight of her own needs, and falls into despair. She is unable to cope when her self-image doesn’t match reality, first when she learns she’s basically a zombie, and later when she appears to have murdered the two misogynistic jerks on the train.

Kyubey is a utilitarian; he believes that the right thing is what does the most good for the most people. This leads him to conclude that it’s okay to cause great suffering for a few people and to treat others as livestock instead of people, and this leads directly to his downfall: Because he didn’t care, it never even occurred to him (or his people) to try to find some other way of circumventing entropy, or even just to get the full informed consent of the magical girls! He doesn’t understand why humans value such things, but he clearly knows that they do, or else he wouldn’t know which information to keep secret until after the contract is done. But because things like respecting the values of others, obtaining consent, and being honest are not factors in a utilitarian decision, which only ever considers what creates the greatest benefits, he creates a situation in which Madoka rewrites reality and forces him into a less efficient path to saving the universe.

Madoka and Homura are two approaches to care ethics. For both of them, right and wrong are emotionally determined; we see both of them carefully considering their options, but that consideration is not purely rational; it’s a combination of reason and feeling, and compassion and empathy for others are key parts of their motivation. Both of them value other people as individuals; the main difference is that Homura practices an in-group care ethics, where she only cares about the people closest to her, while Madoka cares about and feels empathy for everyone she meets. This is key, because ultimately compassion, empathy, and hope become cosmic forces. Madoka, of all the characters, is the one who comes across as the most moral, because she wants to make people happy—not in the utilitarian sense of clinical, detached decision making, but in the sense of wanting to know the people she encounters and put an individually crafted smile on each of their faces.

Pony Thought of the Day: Cloudsdale Congress, Summarized

Cloudsdale Congress was, even though it was only in its first year, better organized than any Katsucon I've been to and most of the Otakons.

And then Closing Ceremonies degenerated into an impromptu dance party and singalong.

If there's one next year, I'm there. Period.

Pony Thought of the Day: Cloudsdale Congress!

I will be at Cloudsdale Congress in Alexandria, VA March 9-10.

I will be on four panels:

My Little Panel: A general analysis panel on MLP:FIM, including series-spanning themes, character archetypes, and a debate (topic to be determined, but probably Twilicorn Sparkopalypse-related).

Brony vs. Brony: MLP trivia gameshow. Six contestants, and any questions they can't answer go to the audience. Prizes and candy! I will be serving as laptop monkey/Vanna White-equivalent... you know, if Vanna White were a short, fat guy with a beard.

A Petite Panel about Ponies and Postmodernism: Basically this blog in panel form, but on a broad, series-wide level instead of going deep into individual episosdes.

A Brief History of Saturday Morning: A serious, historical study of the development of North American short-form animation, from the last days of theatrical shorts in the 1960s to the merchandise-driven wasteland of the 80s, through the golden age of the 90s, and culminating in the emergence of MLP:FIM. Totally not at all an excuse to spend an hour showing clips of our favorite cartoons, why would you think that?