Homura Akemi Quotes

Filed everywhere as the show's thesis, and it is the opposite: it is the position the show exists to refute, spoken by the character who most needs it to be true. Homura says it right after Madoka has promised to remember her, and she says it because in the timeline she came from, Madoka's kindness to a hospitalized transfer student is the thing that put her on this walkway with a gun. From Homura's side of the loop the sentence is a report. From the series' side it is a warning about Sayaka, whose wish was kind and whose end was worse than Mami's, and the finale answers it anyway: the kindest wish ever made is the one that closes the trap. Quoted as wisdom, it is Homura's despair with the context sanded off.

Spoken by the girl whose entire wish was to protect one person, so the disclaimer is a lie about herself in the middle of a truth about the system. Episode ten shows where the flatness comes from. The first Homura watched Madoka die under Walpurgisnacht and wished the month back; a later one learned to fight with stolen firearms and explosives; by the time she is standing on this walkway she has watched Mami die in more ways than Madoka will ever know, and the affect has been worn off her like paint. What she tells Madoka about a body staying in the labyrinth is what she knows first-hand, because she has left Madoka's own body behind more than once. The "I guess" at the end is the only soft edge left in the sentence, and it belongs to a girl who used to say things like that all the time.

Set this against Okabe in Steins;Gate, who loops to save one girl and gets a whole cast of allies, a lab, and a rule about what a worldline will permit. Homura loops alone and learns the wrong lesson from each pass. Steins;Gate treats repetition as accumulating knowledge; Madoka treats it as accumulating weight, and episode eleven names the weight when Kyubey explains that every reset has been piling karmic potential onto the girl Homura is trying to protect. Okabe's persistence is the solution. Homura's is the mechanism of the problem, and the vow at the end of episode ten is delivered by someone who has just shot the friend she is vowing to save, at that friend's request. The two shows agree that going back is love. Only one of them thinks love is enough.

Delivered at Homura's home with Walpurgisnacht due, to a Madoka who has just called out the lie about not needing Kyoko's help. Homura has just told the truth about the loops, in this same scene, and it got her a frightened stare, so this is the version with no explanation attached: a wish, stated as a fact, offered as a reason. What it commits her to is the ending she cannot accept. Madoka does get saved, by Madoka, and the shape of that salvation deletes the person Homura wished to protect while leaving Homura as the one witness. A wish this specific cannot be satisfied by any outcome except the one it named, which is why Rebellion opens with a Homura who was handed the good ending and could not live in it.

The Japanese word is akuma, which carries a Christian flavor in Japanese that "demon" only half delivers in English: it is the word for the devil of scripture, the opposed party to a god, not a generic monster. The dub keeps the theological pairing by calling Madoka "sacred as a god", which is faithful, and then softens the noun. Homura is claiming a role, not a species. The line is also the film answering the question Kyubey asked a line earlier, and it is worth hearing how tentative the dub makes her: the hedged run-up to the noun is a person trying the word on. Either way the important choice was made in the writing, not the translation: Urobuchi gave the girl who kept every promise the vocabulary of the party that breaks them.

As the film's turn, this is the weakest writing in it, and the reason is the sentence before the last word. Rebellion has spent most of its length being precise: the isolation field, the one-way barrier, the trick of a labyrinth built inside a girl's own Soul Gem. Then, at the moment it has to justify Homura tearing a god in half, it reaches for a ranking of emotions announced like a product launch. The idea underneath is strong. The series has said all along that hope and despair are the poles Kyubey farms, and a third thing outside the axis is exactly the escape it needed. It did not need to be shouted.