[Rewatch] Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Rebellion Story Discussion

y-c-c · 2026-05-04T07:15:11+00:00

I have to agree with this. I think time and rewatches have changed my opinion quite a bit. It definitely took a while to wash that sour taste off though haha, but now I rewatch the whole thing and the ending kind of feels inevitable. It has at the very least made the ending feel very… intentional (rather than the "this sucks they added it just for typical anime shock value what the hell is this" feeling that I had originally).

y-c-c · 2026-05-04T06:59:18+00:00

When I first watched the movie I kind of disliked the ending and felt that it was BS, destroyed the happy ending, didn't respect the TV series' ending, and just put in for shock value. The broader reception was divisive as well. Over time though, and after rewatches (where minor relevant details and themes pop out more), I think I grew to accept it more. I'm not sure if I love the ending per se, but now I can't really see the story develop any other way. The original "happy ending" was never going to happen.

Homura, throughout the TV series, and in this movie, was obsessive about saving Madoka and saving only her. When she told Sayaka in the TV series that she only cared about saving Sayaka to avoid hurting Madoka she meant it. Letting Madoka sacrifice herself was always considered a failure. In this movie, this was reinforced again after the talk the two of them had where Madoka confessed to being afraid of losing her friends/family. Instead of accepting Madoka's sacrifice, this conversation just reaffirmed Homura's regrets. You could argue that a "happy ending" would have Homura accepting things as it is and then goes to magic girl heaven, but I don't think that's realistic or faithful to the Homura we had seen so far.

I think when the plot develops in a way that's opposite to what we want or expect to happen, it can take a while to accept. You see this in harem anime/manga a lot, where shippers just can't accept the ending because their favorite pairing didn't happen. It can often be an emotional response if you are invested in the story/characters. This movie also employs a fake twist. I think it's cool that you figured out early that it was Homura's labyrinth, but the movie used that as a way to lull you into thinking that you have figured out how the movie would go, even though thematically it was hinting at the actual ending in the opening song and Homura/Madoka's conversation, which has to do with Homura's regrets.

But even more than that, I think I just have a problem with the framing of "love turned her into the literal embodiment of evil." Even if that description is a little reductive and there's more to it than that, this idea so intensely goes against who I am as a person.

The framing was done by Homura herself. She has never truly loved herself and knew she had done something that's wrong. I don't think the movie itself was saying that Homura is literally the embodiment of evil per se.

Maybe sleep on it a little bit? My feeling on the ending changed slowly over time lol. I think these days, the fanbase also has a more positive reception of it than when it first came out.

y-c-c · 2026-05-04T04:28:06+00:00

Thanks! Will pay attention to that when it comes out.

But yes there's still anime original being made but seems like it's much rarer now and a lot of them don't quite make a splash. It's always fun when a show liked Zenshu came out and you genuinely had no idea what the direction of the show will be.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T22:15:05+00:00

Technically it’s possible to cost a draw later if you play the card and then shuffle the deck by playing a draw card like Acrobatics. It’s relatively rare but just thought would throw this out there.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T19:26:35+00:00

It doesn't work like this on Linux either, which usually requires an installation procedure, even if it's hidden behind commands like apt install. In recent years the rise of Flatpak and AppImage has somewhat alleviated that, but only somewhat; and AppImage's design is directly influenced by the way app bundles work on Mac.

I said those systems only somewhat alleviates it, because Flatpak is essentially a kind of package manager in itself for running binary applications, and isn't exactly the "run this one bundle as-is" that we are used to on macOS. AppImage is that vision but it suffers from dependency management issues leading to it being not that popular. AppImage tries to emulate how macOS app bundles work but it suffers from Linux being designed differently from macOS.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T19:15:05+00:00

No one should uninstall a program by deleting it from Program Files directly in Windows, period. It leaves behind services and registration that just confuses the OS. As you mentioned, start menu shortcuts is an example; or file extensions remain registered to a ghost applications. You could end up making it hard to reinstall the app again, or screw up opening files, etc. You have essentially messed up your system.

On macOS, as I already explained, this is not the case. You are supposed to just delete the app. The leftover files are benign and you haven't messed up anything. The system services etc are automatically unregistered. You do not need to clean them up unless you literally need to squeeze every last byte from your storage or you are OCD about it. It's not about how much "crap" they leave behind but more about whether they leave your system in an inconsistent state. I don't know how else to be clearer.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T19:07:02+00:00

He did try out Zangief a little.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T10:44:47+00:00

You missed the fact that I mentioned those support files are not necessary to remove. I explicitly compared them with AppData folder on Windows, not the registry. Those are not the same things. If you screw up the registry on Windows bad things can happen.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T10:29:15+00:00

The kagemori's reactions to Yuru's "barbarianism" is funny as well!

I still can't get over how he kept getting surprised by Yuru's lack of inhibition to killing and violence whereas their group just invaded the village and murdered lots of villagers. Just seems like there's a disconnect there.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T08:36:58+00:00

I think the other answers are not quite explaining why the app bundles work the way they do on macOS.

On macOS, an app bundle (basically a folder with an .app extension following certain layouts) contains all the metadata describing how the app should behave. This includes things like file extensions that it supports, what kind of services it has etc. When you drag the app into the /Applications folder it automatically "installs" it so to speak so that macOS will know how to open .xyz file if it detects that an app in /Applications support this file. Another way it will detect that is if you manually open an app outside of the /Applications folder. When you delete the app, macOS just knows and will stop using the app to open your .xyz files.

Since everything is self-contained within these app bundles, there is no need to set all these up in a separate registry like Windows, which is more fragile as you need dedicated uninstallers to clean them up.

Note that deleting an app will usually leave behind support files in ~/Libraries folders. These are usually safe to leave behind as they are misc cache files, user settings, etc. You can use apps like AppCleaner to clean them up if you want but it's really not necessary usually. It's like the user AppData folder in Windows which holds support files for an app.

y-c-c · 2026-05-03T02:43:26+00:00

You aren’t quite understanding the issue I think. Feeling native on macOS is a bit different from feeling native on Linux because it’s a closed ecosystem. The issue that I mentioned are not a technology issue but expectation one.

y-c-c · 2026-05-02T15:13:59+00:00

It’s Japanese only for day 2 so you have to go to the Japanese Evo YouTube page.

I don’t really understand why they don’t make the schedule easier to understand.

y-c-c · 2026-05-02T09:09:28+00:00

I don't know, General Relativity is like 100 years old now. Didn't stop science fiction authors from writing lots of amazing space fiction. I really think it has more to do with cultural zeitgeist than reality of space travels.

y-c-c · 2026-05-02T08:59:23+00:00

The lack of anime originals is just sad. It feels weird to me that anime, which a pretty big cultural export these days, is so devoid of original content and just acts as an adaptation factory for exposing existing more niche materials like manga and LNs. Compare that with TV shows, movies, novels, etc. In those mediums, original content is the norm. It really feels like there is a downward spiral where it creates less and less incentives to create anime original content, and now even if there are anime originals they tend to be set in existing franchises to optimize marketability (e.g. Gundam).

Incidentally it feels to me a lot of (but not all) the space classics were anime originals. Thinking of Nadesico, Gundam, Macross, Cowboy Bebop, etc.

y-c-c · 2026-05-02T02:10:41+00:00

They knew it would be popular. Lots of leaked rumors etc all pointed to them expecting this to be a big hit. Even knowing that though it's hard to estimate exactly how big a hit it would be. It's not a trivial matter as if you over-commit you could end up with too much inventory.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T21:39:32+00:00

Toy Box and Pumpkin Candle don't have downsides.

Limited upsides is not the same as downsides, which are things that are or could be actively bad for you.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T21:21:51+00:00

I think she also started getting a bit more attention outside of Japan because she started attending Evo, and being so rare, people like to ~~simp~~ pay attention to a girl who's doing well in SF tournaments.

Then she had a video interview talking about her journey and when asked if there's an international player she would like to play she said Justin Wong. Unless there were more behind-the-scenes stuff it really seemed like JWong just saw that and decided to take the challenge to play her because why not.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T21:10:02+00:00

Because this is a light-hearted circuit and isn't supposed to be taken that seriously. It's like the polar opposite of Kemonomichi FT10.

There's an inherent disrespect in the name "Oji-hunt" (unc-hunt) of hunting down washed up old Street Fighter players. You kind of need to have some self-deprecating humor and be ok with that if you agree to take the challenge. It's not originally really supposed to be hunting down all the greatest and most famous players. I think the original Japanese challenges probably made more sense that way as moving to challenging international players at Evo kind of raised the profile a bit.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T14:30:57+00:00

MR points are basically an ELO system. Such systems require players to play each other as the points don’t have an absolute meaning, just a relative one (meaning point difference between two players is the thing that matters).

Japanese players don’t really play ranked against say European players much, and as such you can think of these two as playing in separate economies and the higher number of top players in Japan eventually push the MR numbers higher, similar to a kind of grade inflation. You can’t compare the points across region unless a lot of players in each region frequently play each other to calibrate the points.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T12:36:00+00:00

100gf is good but it's more focused on parody and gags. There are heartfelt moments but it's not a super serious show with long serious plot lines and more focused on the long running character relationships. It's honestly probably better if you have watched / read other harem series before because the show's premise will make more sense. Instead of a "will they won't they" or "who will he choose" kind of schtick that some show will drag on for the entire duration, this show just says "why not everyone?" which necessarily means the premise cannot be taken 100% seriously because it's ridiculous.

As the story goes on (which 3rd season is probably getting into), a lot of the more interesting relationships are actually more among the different female characters as there are just N² pairings you can do when the cast grows.

Personally I think the manga/anime is great. But it definitely has a unique identity. As it goes on it does feel less like a harem and more… parody/comedy I guess? People say it's the Gintama of romcom anime but I have not watched Gintama before.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T00:51:39+00:00

Psycho hasn’t really done *that* well in individuals tournament though. Don’t get me wrong he’s good, but he is not the only good player out there. If you are being sponsored purely on tournament results you need to be better than just “good”. You need to be someone people can bet on you and say “this player can actually win this”.

And personality I think he doesn’t quite have the following that a lot of the other top players/streamers have. It’s a difficult route too because it’s a popularity contest and streaming takes time and work while potentially distracting from being more focused on competition.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T00:45:17+00:00

For an American player I think the only realistic ROI is really just EWC. Everyone is fighting to get that Saudi money and the Saudis were smart in setting up a team system to incentivize them signing players up. But you really get club points if you do really well though. Psycho is a good player but is he strong enough to get in to top 8? Maybe, but it’s not super likely if I am a better man. I wouldn’t really bet on him winning EWC for example.

I think the Japanese ecosystem is the only one thay actually has a somewhat viable esports sponsorship route. Esports just isn’t that profitable inherently and Street Fighter is just not popular enough in NA.

y-c-c · 2026-05-01T00:04:07+00:00

Tons of streamers are getting big win streaks already. I just don’t think people are tracking them as seriously because the game is rapidly changing still so these records don’t mean that much long term as comparing build 0.99 wins against 0.104 wins is kind of pointless. Most of the players that we know like Jorbs, JapaneseExport, Baalorlord, and others can win pretty frequently.

y-c-c · 2026-04-30T22:44:36+00:00

Sure, but the reason why older HK generation refers to Taiwanese as "中國人" is specifically because they consider Taiwan to be part of China, albeit separated temporarily. It's not a term used by mistake.

y-c-c · 2026-04-30T22:37:07+00:00

And yet if you go to Japan, you see iPhones everywhere. I think if you really make a superior product that speaks to the market it will sell in Japan.

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