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Been catching up on the MCU in preparation for Endgame (yes, I’m very late, please don’t spoil me). Noticed a really obvious sex joke in The Avengers: Tony inserts a nuclear missile into a hole in the sky, missile blows up, the day is won.

I’m not sure whether this is just a funny sex joke or whether it actually means something. Regardless, here are some other potentially important facts:

Stark Tower, the new ~~phallic~~ monument to Tony’s ego, is also pointed directly at the hole. Tony flies up the length of the tower before continuing on to his climactic victory.
Before this happens, Jarvis is like “Hey, should we call your girlfriend?” and Tony is like “Oh yeah, good idea,” but she doesn’t pick up.
The Tesseract, which opens up the hole, is once called “she.”
Iron Man 3 comes next. In this movie, Tony experiences panic attacks related to his victory with the missile. He also befriends a child.

Possibly symbolic of some sort of sexual violence from Tony to Pepper? On account of the whole “Check in with your girlfriend first, but if she doesn’t say anything, just go for it” sequence? Maybe. Time will tell.

Madoka wants time to move forward.
Madoka wants to escape the womb.
Homura wants time to move backward.
...?

Given the parallels between Madoka and Homura—given the way their wishes become equal and opposite forces for hope and despair—I'm beginning to wonder whether Homura is driven by a fantasy of unbirth, that is, returning to the innocence and comfort of the womb.

Our primary insight into Homura's sexual desires is when she kneels at the feet of Ultimate Madoka, blushing, reaching up toward the statue's crotch, while her minions munch on pomegranates. I'm inclined to read this scene as Homura wanting to perform oral sex on Madoka, carrying undertones of worship/service. It's... possible, I guess? that Homura literally just wants to. Fucking. Climb up into Madoka's uterus.

Given the uterine connotations of witch's labyrinth's Homura's tendency to get stuck in them—first a labyrinth of time, then a labyrinth of space, then a labyrinth that encompasses the whole universe—could be read as a desire to escape back to the womb. Actually, given the apparent fact that Witch = Baby, the threat of Homura's impending witchhood seems like a fulfillment of an unbirth fantasy? Maybe? Which means her suicidality isn't about the release of death, but a return to the oblivion of the womb...her first encounter with a witch (suicidal thoughts, doubly yonic monster).

I'm not sure whether this jives with Homura's desire to switch places with Madoka—to be in control of their relationship. If we want to collapse all the power hierarchies in female relationships into Mother/Daughter dynamics (which we may not want to do, since Homura could just be Queering The Binary) then it looks like Homura wants to be the Mother while Madoka is the Daughter. But then, Madoka is both Mother and Daughter when she gets severed from herself...

Okay, that's enough for today. This is even weirder than I normally get. I just ordered a copy of The Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed, so hopefully I'll have some more coherent ideas soon.

I'm back on Tumblr, but I kind of only want to use it to write political and political-ish stuff. So I think I'm going to maintain this dreamwidth for Madoka posting (which I haven't been doing a lot of lately because I've been focused on political writing instead). Or maybe I can just make a sideblog on Tumblr for Madoka posting? I don't know. I'm very tired right now. I definitely want to keep up the Madoka posting because wow I feel like I'm seriously in danger of burning out if I don't figure out how to relax.

> loving Madoka Magica
> feeling sad about the fact that I don't know where to watch Rebellion
> feeling sad in general
> wishing I could watch Rebellion whenever I was feeling sad

Following up on Madoka's inversion of the Oedipal paradigm, it just occurred to me that Homura's forced separation from Madoka at the end of the series feels vaguely Oedipal? Madoka has taken up the ultimate mantle of Motherhood, from which Homura is traumatically severed and towards which Homura spends the rest of her life oriented.

...hopefully this will help me untangle some of the pregnancy and birth imagery in Rebellion.

I'm increasingly coming to believe that the magical girl cycle is a metaphor for pregnancy: the Soul Gem is the womb, Kyube provides the seed, magical girlhood is the gestation period, and birth is a traumatic event in which a piece of oneself (witch/baby) is violently severed from the physical body.

So when Madoka does...

Dark energy protrudes from a green Soul Gem into Madoka's glowing hands.

Dark energy protrudes from a green Soul Gem into Madoka's glowing hands.

...this, I can't help but wonder if it fits into the pattern somehow. (Abortion?)

One reading is that men are the root of all evil. Kyube is often coded as darkness intruding upon light, so the dark energy swirling around soul gems that eventually leads to a birth is—well, semen. Which means Madoka isn't just destroying each witch, but undoing each insemination. The fact that all that darkness seems to gather on her own soul gem, which she then ritualistically destroys, regaining her individual identity and ascending to godhood...well, I don't know what it means. But it's interesting.

Madoka's godhood is a form of motherhood, as she wraps all the suffering girls of the world into her motherly embrace. Yet to become a mother, Madoka must sever herself from Junko. Does she worry that she might be trapping girls into a dependency similar to the one that hampered her? Then again, she's not just perpetuating motherhood so much as redefining it.

(Eugh. I feel like I'm getting close, but nowhere near close enough.)

Madoka conceptualizes herself as trapped within the womb: she wants to grow up, to discover herself as a person, but she cannot do so while living under Junko's shadow. Thus, becoming God—the endgame of Madoka's character growth, the moment of her self-actualization—creates a universe in which Junko does not even remember Madoka. The two have been completely severed; the umbilical cord has been cut.

Other, subtler indications of this fantasy are peppered throughout the series. In Madoka's dream of the previous timeline, she exits a labyrinth (i.e., womb) and goes on to make a life-altering decision. And in the final episode, she abandons the red hair ribbon which Junko gifted her in episode 1.

For the first time, I'm actually reading about psychoanalysis—psychoanalytic film theory in particular, since that's the school of thought which influenced Malo's reading of Homestuck, in turn influencing my own reading of Madoka Magica—and this description of the Oedipal complex set off some bells in my head:

The male child is bonded to his mother through the breast, and imagines himself in a unity with her. This unity, however, soon breaks up when the child senses his difference from the mother ... The realization of his difference prompts the child to desire the lost unity but, as Freud insists, this desire sexualizes the mother ... The child also associates the power to castrate with the father because he sees that the mother "is not like him, she does not have a penis." Since the only person having access to her is the father, the child imagines that it was the father who castrated her possibly as a punishment. At this point, the child's desire for unification becomes problematic for him because if he chooses to identify with her and thus accomplish the lost unity, he becomes like her, he gets castrated, too ... To resolve this castration threat, the child identifies with the father ... Becoming like his father, the child moves towards social stability by adopting heterosexual orientation through redirecting his repressed desire for the mother toward other women in a socially acceptable manner.

It's easy to imagine Madoka's situation as the answer to the question "What if the child was female?" Hers is not a gender-swapped scenario in which the daughter identifies with and becomes attracted to the father, but rather:

the female child, bonded to her mother through the breast, imagines herself in a unity with the mother
the child does NOT notice a difference between herself and the mother, and so this unity is not broken
the child does not desire to reclaim the unity, since the unity was never lost
the child never develops a sexual attraction to her mother
she experiences no castration anxiety, no identification with the father, no repression of incestuous desires...

...all because the fantasy of unity is never interrupted. In fact, it becomes antagonistic: Madoka wants to sever herself from Junko, but she lacks the willpower to do so.

The Emperor’s Soul: 4/5 stars

This is a fantastic little story. Of all the magic systems Sanderson has created, Forgery might be my favorite. The concept of rewriting an object’s (or person’s) history into a plausible-but-untrue alternate reality is fascinating enough; the use of intricately carved magic stamps to accomplish this task is even cooler.

Beginnings are often the Sanderson’s weakest points, and while that’s true here, the effect isn’t as jarring as it would be in a novel. The stage is set quickly, and the tale that follows is a delightful, compelling glimpse into what makes humans tick.

Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell: 3/5 stars

If I were a Gothic horror fan, I’d probably have given this story a higher rating. That said, I liked it well enough. This is a bleak world where spirits of the dead roam free, their fury easy to invoke. Each character is compelling in her own right, and the central relationship—that between the protagonist and her dead grandmother—gives the story a powerful emotional backbone. Sadly, I never found myself too invested in the outcome of the central conflict—if they live, the grimdarkness feels unfulfilled, but if they die, what’s the point?—although I’d guess this is just a symptom of my disinterest toward horror.

Sixth of the Dusk: 4/5 stars

Taking place on a deadly tropical island, a battleground for the clash between tradition and progress, “Sixth of the Dusk” is almost perfect. It’s certainly one of the most well-paced stories from Arcanum Unbounded: the magic system is revealed slowly over the course of the narrative, without a single exposition dump.

Only the ending bothers me. Tension climbs slowly throughout the story, building to a crescendo—but the ending fails to play off the building suspense. It’s not bad, just unceremonious, a sharp and disappointing contrast from the dramatic climax I’d been expecting.

Still, a fantastic read.

(Content warnings: Discussion of adolescent sexuality, candid discussion of suicide.)

Before I start posting Madoka Magica meta here, I think it would probably be helpful to link back to my previous posts. That way, when I finally get back on my bullshit, I can at least pretend it’s coherent.

The background: I haven’t studied or even read anything about psychoanalysis—all I know comes from someone interpreting Homestuck through a Freudian lens—so, in truth, I don’t know whether I can call my reading “psychoanalytic.” My reasons for using the term are twofold. First, these characters’ motivations, as I understand them, lie foremost in the unconscious. (No one knows why Homura betrays Madoka—least of all Homura herself!) Second, my criteria for what constitutes a phallic, yonic, or uterine symbol are pretty lax. Beyond these two points, I really don’t have much of an interest in Freud. I’m also well aware that this isn’t real psychology.

At the beginning of this year, I rewatched The Rebellion Story with my partner—in Japanese, with no subtitles. I don’t speak Japanese, so instead of listening to dialogue I paid attention to the visual language of the film. This led me to notice a big ol’ sexual symbol that appears right before Homura kneels in worship at Madoka’s statue. So I watched the film again, and again, and again...

As I kept analyzing Rebellion, it quickly became one of my favorite movies. The dreamlike nature of the labyrinth-city leaves it so open to interpretation; no matter how much I dug into the film, I knew that my line of inquiry was only one among many. Plus, the twist ending had always felt unsatisfying to me, so attempting to construct a narrative where Homura’s actions made sense was fun.

Then the film was pulled from Netflix! So now I’ve turned my eye back onto the original series. It’s less of a psychosexual landmine than its sequel, and subsequently less fun to analyze, but I think this exercise might be useful in the long run. Rebellion left me with several unanswered questions. Now, as I dig into the original series, I’m beginning to find the faintest hints of answers; I feel as if I’m slowly approaching a Grand Unified Theory of Meguca.

But I’m not there yet.

Anatomy of a Nightmare: These are the only full-length essays on Madoka Magica I’ve yet produced, focused primarily on Homura’s arc in The Rebellion Story.

Rainbow Love: Homura’s romantic and sexual attraction to Madoka, as expressed through rainbows and other vagina symbols. (Yes.)
A Heart Divided: Homura wants to purge herself of weakness, but that desire is ultimately suicidal.
Puppets: As Homura meets with each magical girl in turn (Kyoko, Bebe, Mami, Sayaka, then Madoka), she is effectively peeling back the layers of her own psyche, grappling with the repressed knowledge of her own witchhood.
Corrections, Clarifications, Conclusion: Wrap-up post that summarizes Homura’s character arc and mentions some unanswered questions.

Other posts: These are less polished than the essays and often shorter as well, much more about getting my thoughts on a page than anything else—in other words, the type of content I’ll be posting here. (Note that not all my posts are listed below, only the ones I thought were most important. I have a tag that documents the entire journey.)

I want to use this website to organize my thoughts without feeling pressured to create full-length essays.

My current major project is a psychoanalytic reading of Madoka Magica, so this kind of content is mostly what I'll be posting here. At least for the time being. So if that's something you're interested in, welcome!

My other fandoms include Undertale, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Homestuck, the Stormlight Archive, and more recently She-Ra.