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Let’s start off with your biggest objection. In response to me asserting that Shadows and Witches are both based on repression of an internal part of their host, you strongly disagreed, saying : “With Shadows, it always inward... about the subject. Like with Kanji, all his shadow represents is him dealing with his softer sides of himself and his image of both himself as well as what that means for his sexuality. Or Rise, for whom is all about her image of herself and the mask she has as an idol. Etc. After all in the series... \
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Let’s start off with your biggest objection. In response to me asserting that Shadows and Witches are both based on repression of an internal part of their host, you strongly disagreed, saying : “With Shadows, it always inward... about the subject. Like with Kanji, all his shadow represents is him dealing with his softer sides of himself and his image of both himself as well as what that means for his sexuality. Or Rise, for whom is all about her image of herself and the mask she has as an idol. Etc. After all in the series... \\\"I am thou, thou art I\\\" is paramount.
With Witch\\\'s... is never about the subject and always about the things around them. Things that the subject has no hope in controlling without acting against it. Mami manages this, by being a bit of a host to those that enter her life... whether they stay with her or not is something she can\\\'t control. Sayaka personal logjam about her feeling keeps her for saying what she need to around Kyosuke. And Kyouko has no real clue about her desires until she is near her deathbed.”
Well yes…and at the same time no. It is true that Shadows are oftentimes internalized problems. Yosuke’s a good example: he was horrified at his internal thoughts of using Saki Konishi’s death as an excuse to enter the TV. That was purely and simply his own reaction to his own personal, private thoughts. But, as in the case Kanji questioning his sexuality and Rise questioning who the ‘real Rise’ is, it’s sometimes EXTERNAL pressures that either create issues or agitate them further. Shadows are after all really just neglected, twisted, angry Personas: just one of the hundreds of thousands of masks worn by people in response to external stimuli. At the same time, Witches do indeed represent the idea that the wish didn’t give the magical girl what they really wanted. I’m not about to disagree with you on that. But what’s standing in the way of what they really want isn’t always the things around them as opposed to the magical girl herself like you asserted. Sometimes, as I’ll describe below, the magical girl is her own worst enemy *coughSayakacough*.
You used Kanji and Rise as examples. Kanji likely saw no problem whatsoever with sewing and home economics until he hit, say, middle or high school…ish. That’s when the bullying REALLY kicked in. “You like to sew? What a queer! Painting is so not you! But you’re a guy! You don’t act like a guy! Why aren’t you ‘manly’?” And so on and so forth.
Rise? Classic case of identity crisis: the stress got to her, and between the hundreds of different ‘fake celebrities’ she had to be, the touring, the screaming fans, she lost herself. She had no idea what parts of her were her ‘original self’ before she rose to stardom and which parts of her were manufactured for her by her managers and fans. She fled, hoping to sort herself out in the quiet of Inaba.
Yes, both of these are problems that lurk within their own minds, but no, the problems are not purely and simply there. Kanji’s decision to abandon his “sensitive guy who likes to sew” personality stemmed from an outside stimuli: the rejection and the pushback he got from the people around him. Coupled with the rather vague talk his father had given him before he died about “manliness”, Kanji panicked and threw that part of himself away, repulsed at the idea that he may not be a “real man”. That neglected, repressed part of him festered and turned into a Shadow.
Sayaka is, surprisingly enough, quite similar to Kanji in the regards that she threw away a part of herself willingly, because she didn’t think it fit who she needed to be. Upon learning that she was, putting it bluntly, a lich, she considered herself unworthy of Kyosuke. She decided that “her only worth left was killing witches”, and forswore everything else. She was going to wear her soul gem completely down and commit suicide, while taking as many witches as she possibly could down with her in one final blaze of glory. Kyosuke was beyond her reach: this was all that she had left, so she might as well suck it up.
Unfortunately, in both cases, their subconscious disagreed. VEHEMENTLY.
Kanji believed that he had to throw away his hobbies to be the tough manly-man he believed his dad wanted him to be, and Sayaka believed she had to throw away her desire for Kyosuke to fill her perceived new role as a mindless, soulless weapon against the witches. That course of action never, EVER works. No matter how vehemently he tried to deny it (at first, at least), Kanji couldn’t help it: he loves stupid cute shit. Sayaka pined desperately for Kyosuke until the very end, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself that he’d never love her as she was and deny herself those feelings.
It’s impossible to keep a part of yourself denied like that forever. They’ll start acting out on their own, particularly if you’re physically or mentally exhausted. Too much stress does nasty things to you, right? Sooner or later, a day WILL come along where they snap: you’re just too drained to keep your darker impulses under control. With the despair born from the fact she had basically sold her soul for nothing and turned herself into a lich, Sayaka certainly fit the ‘mental’ category. The self-destructive witch hunting frenzy she went on sapped her physical strength on top of that. All of this despair, all of this exhaustion, all the anger and hate…Sayaka just couldn’t take it anymore: her conscious mind was unable to hold back the tide any longer, and it was utterly overwhelmed by her shadow. From there, the shadow went on a rampage, trying desperately to fulfill its own needs after being denied for so long. Kanji’s built itself a paradise where it was free to just ‘be itself’, while Sayaka’s created the concert she had longed to hear, while donning a visage that fit the role of “knight” Sayaka had always wanted to be before disowning it in despair.
Consider the fact Hitomi asked Sayaka directly, and I quote, “if she could face her true feelings”.
In the end, she couldn’t. And they destroyed her. They’ve always been there, boiling under the surface.
Relatively powerless, but there. But as Sayaka denied them in a fit of ‘sour grapes’ mentality, she simultaneously fed them the diet of repression they needed and exhausted herself to the point she could take it no more. Her conscious mind was at its breaking point.
And so Seyiku lost it.
The terrible irony is that in reality, there was no outside force stopping Sayaka from actually having what she really wanted. Hitomi actually went as far as to give her a head start! Her own self-hatred was all that kept her from claiming what she had dreamed of. Like I said earlier, in this case she was her own worst enemy.
Mami outwardly says she had been running away from reality in her bad ending: she had been trying to convince herself that as long as she was protecting Mikihara, she was happy, when that is explicitly not the case. It simply came down to her trying to be someone she was not, by denying that she was lonely and afraid. She tried to disown her loneliness in its entirety in her Bad End, and fabricate a perfect new self that didn’t need those thoughts. But again, she couldn’t get rid of them, they festered, and when the reality became undeniable, the strain allowed Candeloro to emerge.
Just look at some of her lines:
“It’s inexcusable for these things to happen. I’m a magical girl. My defeat was inexcusable. My weakness killed that boy. I wanted to run away from that fact, so I desperately sought strength. I thought I could repent that way.”
She convinced herself that her loneliness wasn’t a problem as long as she was perfect in every other way. She tried to bury her insecurities under a façade of coolness and absolute strength. When she nearly lost to the Silver Witch a second time, and her actions had done nothing to console the mother of the boy it had killed long ago, that façade became unmaintainable: she WASN’T all-powerful, and she had done nothing to soothe the real problem. Considering that she never encountered this earth-shattering revelation in the other timelines, or she had friends that covered the real issue, her shadow was sated, and she never hit the degree of mental exhaustion that she did in her Bad End that would let the thing overwhelm her.
The way I see it, it may not be the despair itself that gives birth to the witches, per-say. The things are always there. Considering what I know about Jungian psychology, the despair acts as that critical moment of vulnerability where the conscious mind of the Magical Girl is too exhausted to keep itself from being overwhelmed. Consider that another criteria that can bring forth a witch is magical exhaustion, which would cover the aspect of physical exhaustion that is known to let a shadow take over. Just look at Madoka: she wasn’t in despair when she defeated Walpurgis Night during a couple of the timelines, but she was utterly drained in terms of her physical abilities, and she became Gretchen regardless.
With Witch\\\'s... is never about the subject and always about the things around them. Things that the subject has no hope in controlling without acting against it. Mami manages this, by being a bit of a host to those that enter her life... whether they stay with her or not is something she can\\\'t control. Sayaka personal logjam about her feeling keeps her for saying what she need to around Kyosuke. And Kyouko has no real clue about her desires until she is near her deathbed.”
Well yes…and at the same time no. It is true that Shadows are oftentimes internalized problems. Yosuke’s a good example: he was horrified at his internal thoughts of using Saki Konishi’s death as an excuse to enter the TV. That was purely and simply his own reaction to his own personal, private thoughts. But, as in the case Kanji questioning his sexuality and Rise questioning who the ‘real Rise’ is, it’s sometimes EXTERNAL pressures that either create issues or agitate them further. Shadows are after all really just neglected, twisted, angry Personas: just one of the hundreds of thousands of masks worn by people in response to external stimuli. At the same time, Witches do indeed represent the idea that the wish didn’t give the magical girl what they really wanted. I’m not about to disagree with you on that. But what’s standing in the way of what they really want isn’t always the things around them as opposed to the magical girl herself like you asserted. Sometimes, as I’ll describe below, the magical girl is her own worst enemy *coughSayakacough*.
You used Kanji and Rise as examples. Kanji likely saw no problem whatsoever with sewing and home economics until he hit, say, middle or high school…ish. That’s when the bullying REALLY kicked in. “You like to sew? What a queer! Painting is so not you! But you’re a guy! You don’t act like a guy! Why aren’t you ‘manly’?” And so on and so forth.
Rise? Classic case of identity crisis: the stress got to her, and between the hundreds of different ‘fake celebrities’ she had to be, the touring, the screaming fans, she lost herself. She had no idea what parts of her were her ‘original self’ before she rose to stardom and which parts of her were manufactured for her by her managers and fans. She fled, hoping to sort herself out in the quiet of Inaba.
Yes, both of these are problems that lurk within their own minds, but no, the problems are not purely and simply there. Kanji’s decision to abandon his “sensitive guy who likes to sew” personality stemmed from an outside stimuli: the rejection and the pushback he got from the people around him. Coupled with the rather vague talk his father had given him before he died about “manliness”, Kanji panicked and threw that part of himself away, repulsed at the idea that he may not be a “real man”. That neglected, repressed part of him festered and turned into a Shadow.
Sayaka is, surprisingly enough, quite similar to Kanji in the regards that she threw away a part of herself willingly, because she didn’t think it fit who she needed to be. Upon learning that she was, putting it bluntly, a lich, she considered herself unworthy of Kyosuke. She decided that “her only worth left was killing witches”, and forswore everything else. She was going to wear her soul gem completely down and commit suicide, while taking as many witches as she possibly could down with her in one final blaze of glory. Kyosuke was beyond her reach: this was all that she had left, so she might as well suck it up.
Unfortunately, in both cases, their subconscious disagreed. VEHEMENTLY.
Kanji believed that he had to throw away his hobbies to be the tough manly-man he believed his dad wanted him to be, and Sayaka believed she had to throw away her desire for Kyosuke to fill her perceived new role as a mindless, soulless weapon against the witches. That course of action never, EVER works. No matter how vehemently he tried to deny it (at first, at least), Kanji couldn’t help it: he loves stupid cute shit. Sayaka pined desperately for Kyosuke until the very end, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself that he’d never love her as she was and deny herself those feelings.
It’s impossible to keep a part of yourself denied like that forever. They’ll start acting out on their own, particularly if you’re physically or mentally exhausted. Too much stress does nasty things to you, right? Sooner or later, a day WILL come along where they snap: you’re just too drained to keep your darker impulses under control. With the despair born from the fact she had basically sold her soul for nothing and turned herself into a lich, Sayaka certainly fit the ‘mental’ category. The self-destructive witch hunting frenzy she went on sapped her physical strength on top of that. All of this despair, all of this exhaustion, all the anger and hate…Sayaka just couldn’t take it anymore: her conscious mind was unable to hold back the tide any longer, and it was utterly overwhelmed by her shadow. From there, the shadow went on a rampage, trying desperately to fulfill its own needs after being denied for so long. Kanji’s built itself a paradise where it was free to just ‘be itself’, while Sayaka’s created the concert she had longed to hear, while donning a visage that fit the role of “knight” Sayaka had always wanted to be before disowning it in despair.
Consider the fact Hitomi asked Sayaka directly, and I quote, “if she could face her true feelings”.
In the end, she couldn’t. And they destroyed her. They’ve always been there, boiling under the surface.
Relatively powerless, but there. But as Sayaka denied them in a fit of ‘sour grapes’ mentality, she simultaneously fed them the diet of repression they needed and exhausted herself to the point she could take it no more. Her conscious mind was at its breaking point.
And so Seyiku lost it.
The terrible irony is that in reality, there was no outside force stopping Sayaka from actually having what she really wanted. Hitomi actually went as far as to give her a head start! Her own self-hatred was all that kept her from claiming what she had dreamed of. Like I said earlier, in this case she was her own worst enemy.
Mami outwardly says she had been running away from reality in her bad ending: she had been trying to convince herself that as long as she was protecting Mikihara, she was happy, when that is explicitly not the case. It simply came down to her trying to be someone she was not, by denying that she was lonely and afraid. She tried to disown her loneliness in its entirety in her Bad End, and fabricate a perfect new self that didn’t need those thoughts. But again, she couldn’t get rid of them, they festered, and when the reality became undeniable, the strain allowed Candeloro to emerge.
Just look at some of her lines:
“It’s inexcusable for these things to happen. I’m a magical girl. My defeat was inexcusable. My weakness killed that boy. I wanted to run away from that fact, so I desperately sought strength. I thought I could repent that way.”
She convinced herself that her loneliness wasn’t a problem as long as she was perfect in every other way. She tried to bury her insecurities under a façade of coolness and absolute strength. When she nearly lost to the Silver Witch a second time, and her actions had done nothing to console the mother of the boy it had killed long ago, that façade became unmaintainable: she WASN’T all-powerful, and she had done nothing to soothe the real problem. Considering that she never encountered this earth-shattering revelation in the other timelines, or she had friends that covered the real issue, her shadow was sated, and she never hit the degree of mental exhaustion that she did in her Bad End that would let the thing overwhelm her.
The way I see it, it may not be the despair itself that gives birth to the witches, per-say. The things are always there. Considering what I know about Jungian psychology, the despair acts as that critical moment of vulnerability where the conscious mind of the Magical Girl is too exhausted to keep itself from being overwhelmed. Consider that another criteria that can bring forth a witch is magical exhaustion, which would cover the aspect of physical exhaustion that is known to let a shadow take over. Just look at Madoka: she wasn’t in despair when she defeated Walpurgis Night during a couple of the timelines, but she was utterly drained in terms of her physical abilities, and she became Gretchen regardless.
