#the sheer isolation that homura must have felt for so long is really killing me.

[burnorgetburned]

recent image reminded me again of something I noticed from Rebellion: how isolated Homura is.

This is her own fantasy world. It’s what she, in her deepest heart and dying moment, wants the most. Here she can make herself into the version that she wants to be: she can be Madoka’s best friend! The senior magical girl! The wise mentor figure that everyone finally listens to!

Homura can’t imagine herself being that, though.

Instead, she makes herself the transfer student - again. An outsider. The girls are already an experienced, established team by the time she even “arrives” in Mitakihara. They kindly invite this new magical girl into it. And she’s not the centerpiece of the team. She’s an extra power, useful to the other girls, but easily excluded if they feel like it.

That’s not the only time she secludes herself from them too. In the opening I can recall her doing this three times: once in that scene where it starts with Madoka and then adds the other girls, and they run around each other in dresses. She’s there standing at the end, waiting for all of them. The screen cuts away before any of them reach her in a way it doesn’t for the other girls, even though they do start to try and greet her. And then again while they’re all dancing and she’s kneeling on the ground.

Finally, there’s that long shot starting with the water and the drowned buildings, presumably from Walpurgisnacht. Mami and Sayaka are in a boat, and they smile at the “camera”. The camera rushes through them, and Kyoko turns around and smiles at the camera too. And, of course, it ends at Madoka, who reaches her hand towards the camera with a kind expression on her face.

We immediately cut to Madoka and Homura standing in an empty space, and it becomes apparent that Homura is the “camera”, not pausing to look at her friends smiling at her, but stopping to try and take Madoka’s hand. Only for Madoka to turn into dust. Because the person who is most kind to her, who again and again chooses to trust and care about her as we see in the series no matter how she acts - she’s not there anymore. She’s as good as dead. The other girls are kind, but they don’t reach out to her the same way Madoka does.

This is of course not their fault, because god knows their lives get harsh, but it doesn’t change the fact that Homura is just. Too traumatized and socially maladjusted to reach out first. Madoka gets through to her so easily because Madoka tries to see the best in her, so she gets past Homura’s awkward hairflips of anxiety that look really freaking arrogant to people who can’t read her and don’t have the motivation to try. She gets past Homura trying to use intimidation and Homura going quiet because she doesn’t know what to say, which, again, makes her look inscrutable and. just bad.

In the end of Rebellion, we see her going full throttle on the exclude herself part again. This time, consciously and intentionally. We see Mami walking to school, and Homura shattering a teacup. We see Kyoko try to share an apple with her Clara Dolls, and the apple dropping into the water, wasted. What do Mami and Kyoko use to befriend people in the series? Tea parties and sharing food. Homura has surely befriended/been befriended by those two plenty of times, since we see her achieve it with Kyoko and know immediately that she should eat the pocky given to her. So this is her, consciously, rejecting their friendship.

What hurts even more is the part with Kyoko. Why does Kyoko drop the apple? She sees the Clara Dolls waving at her, asking for one. Parts of Homura’s subconscious, asking for resources. She smiles and gives one over. Even before this, Kyoko was feeding some of Homura’s bird Familiars. When she drops the apple, though, we cut to a clear shot of Homura shaking her head while the apple floats.

The apple drops - into the water. The Clara Dolls are gone. Kyoko looks shocked. She couldn’t even keep feeding Homura’s birds. All of them fly away.

Homura’s subconscious asks for help. Homura sees help and shakes her head, rejecting it. Homura doesn’t let herself ask for help even when she desperately wants it (wanting it so desperately that her Familiars act it out even when she consciously tries to stop them). She’s already learned that asking for help doesn’t result in receiving help. After all, what has trying gotten her in other timelines? Disbelief. Anger. Confusion and hurt. Sometimes she gains allies (like in Kyoko), but most of the time even allies become unreliable. So she’s learned that she doesn’t know how to properly ask for help, and if she gets it, people will turn on her.

In the end, she finally has the power to address the root cause of their distrust. The Incubator, who primed other people to dislike her (something something “maybe she doesn’t want Madoka to contract because she’d be too powerful as a magical girl and she wants this territory :3”) and their resource shortage of the limited Grief Seeds, which made people fight by its own nature and eventually introduced the truth of Witches. But when others try to help her, she can’t accept it because she’s so primed to be afraid of it.

It’s part of the tragedy of Homura Akemi. She didn’t have the tools. She didn’t have the background to make connections without Madoka first reaching out to her in the 1st timeline. She didn’t have the social skills for convincing the other girls of hard truths of magical girl life. She could never make a support system strong enough to stop Mami from killing people in her despair (and I’d argue that even great social skills wouldn’t solve their resource shortage, so the best she could ever do is stop Mami from killing people. We see in other materials that Mami would often kill herself). She relied on Madoka for help with forging connections with other people, and when she got that help, she’d get so attached to everyone that it hurt her badly whenever they died. Whenever they learned the truth and it broke their hearts (she says explicitly that it hurt when Mami learned too much). It also must have hurt whenever she had to reset and then the other girls stopped caring about her.

The really awful part about the magical girl system is that grief - mundane, everyday emotional pain - starts to darken their Soul Gems. So when Homura makes friends and loses them, either to death or the loops, it darkens the Gem. Whenever she may try to learn social skills and inevitably fumbles, and the other girls interpret this as intentional, it also darkens the Gem. When she makes them her enemy. When she tries to drive Madoka away. When she’s isolated by the truth of everything. When Madoka Wishes to help other people - especially her. I would say that she can’t treat any loop as a practice ground because she’s too invested in Madoka, meaning that treating any one loop as disposable means treating that Madoka as disposable too, something that she obviously can’t accept. So she invests her all into every loop and loses, and it damages her even further.

On top of that, there’s a malicious immortal unending alien chucking everyone into deadly situations. There’s other magical girls who occasionally butt in (Oriko…). There’s timeline variance. There’s Walpurgisnacht. It becomes an unending tide of resource management except the resources are souls, friends, and her own emotional wellbeing. The failure state is a fate worse than death. The holding pattern is the endless loops, which does chip damage to her Soul Gem and already abysmal social skills by way of trauma anyway. She learns to keep this at bay by distancing herself. But in doing so, she does long-term damage and makes the other girls distrust her even more.

I honestly think there was no way in hell she was ever going to survive. Either she lost in the loops or she would lose afterwards. There was so, so much stacked against her. She learned all the reasonable ways to survive her loops which are absolutely the wrong things for her long-term health, but how could she think of the long term when the danger is right now? She learns to never rely on people (who by the way are fucking primed to oppose her… another post on that later) and all the wrong lessons for continuing on after the loops. When her crutches for surviving are knocked from under her, she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t freaking ask for a therapist, she’s a magical girl! She can’t rely on Kyoko and Mami when she has no evidence of what she went through! She seemed actually suicidal by the time of Rebellion, and I don’t think that it was her Witch talking. Or the needles puncturing her Soul Gem(?!?! Which more people should talk about? Holy shit).

This is why I genuinely think that both the anime ending and Rebellion’s ending are necessary for Homura’s story. A lot of people seem to think that Rebellion makes the anime ending useless, but I don’t think that at all. First, Witches are gone. This is a big one. Witches are genuinely the most isolating thing in the Incubator’s system, because the girls who know have to step on eggshells around girls who don’t know. Homura keeps this “Witches are gone” thing and only switches the Grief-collection system to using Incubators, which remove two of the many obstacles preventing the Quintet from wanting to help Homura. I doubt that Homura has the omnipresence to respond to every magical girl ever as they turn into a Witch because she is said to use her Familiars for gathering information, and her Familiars can’t be literally everywhere. That’s what Madoka’s Law of Cycles is for, and it’s something that Homura keeps. We also see that it’s possible for people (Madoka and Sayaka) to fully remember all of the timelines, and those shared experiences lead to understanding. Sympathy. Most importantly, less isolation.

If everyone regains all of their memories, could they see what Homura suffered through? Could they convince her that they can help? The resource shortage is gone. Witches are mostly gone. The Rebellion’s system is a system that allows all of them to grow. They stop being so utterly isolated. They can stop hurting each other. They can help.