The Necessity of Rebellion

Akemi Homura and the Tragic Necessity of 'Rebellion'

(original by u/RomanImp)


	I argue in this essay that the events of PMMM: Rebellion were necessary in the final development of Homura's tragic character, in a masterful transition from the role of Faust to that of a Miltonian Satan, development which was lacking at the end of season 1. In his essay Über Laokoon written in 1797, Goethe claimed that there were three necessary emotions to tragedy, which were embodied in the Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoon and his sons being devoured by snakes, namely: fear, pity and terror. Of course, a piece of work containing these tragic elements need not be dubbed a tragedy; horror, for instance, can contain tragic elements and still be considered as a whole a work of horror and vice versa, PMMM being an excellent example of a tragedy with strong elements of horror which supports the tragedy itself, yet is not itself a work of horror. Yet all of these elements – those of tragedy, horror, and the monstrous body – have an essential place in the conclusion of Homura's tragic character development.

	We will pick up firstly at the conclusion of Faust: Part 1 and PMMM: season 1. In tragedy, Goethe said there must be sacrifice, just as in comedy there must be marriage, as an example of Aristotelian katharsis. Indeed, Madoka's ascendancy in the last episode very neatly reflects Gretchen's in the Cathedral to the chorus of Dies Irae. She is at once the greatest witch encompassing the world – Sie ist gerichtet! – and a deified being – Ist gerettet! – who is able to create the world anew through her sacrifice. Which brings us back directly to Goethe's definition of katharsis and tragedy desiring human sacrifice in its final slump. Madoka's sacrifice brings about the necessary reconciliation of the series just as Gretchen's did to Faust. But, as Nicholas Boyle notes in his article, “Goethe's Theory of Tragedy”, after the death of Gretchen, “...the tragedy of Faust the character who aroused pity, fear, and terror for himself had in 1797 still to be expounded and explored” (Boyle, 1080).

	This is where Faust: Part 1 ends, and Goethe spends an entire second part of the play to fully flesh out Faust's tragic character – a work known for its complexity and multitude of Classical allusions. Just as Faust had no time at the end of Part 1, Homura had no time at the end of season 1 to properly finish her development as the fully realised tragic anti-hero. Enter Rebellion, stage left.

	Tackling Faust: Part 2 is a daunting task by any standards; it's widely considered one of the more difficult texts ever produced in the Western world, indeed in the whole world. Trying to translate it into the context of the PMMM universe would have been near impossible, unless treated episodically, and even then it would have been a jumbled mess fading into the vast void of allusions and philosophy. Some elements of Faust: Part 2, which I will detail later, can be said to shine through, but overall Part 2 is morphed and another influence is introduced in order to round off Homura's tragic character development, that being Milton's Paradise Lost.

	This was by no means a random decision, either. Let us briefly turn to idea of polarity in both PMMM and Faust. “From the standpoint of polarity Goethe's Faust is a gigantic panorama of life's contrapuntal dualism expressed in terms of good and evil, longing and resignation, soaring idealism and withering satire, divine dissatisfaction and earthly happiness, tragic sublimity and comic vulgarity, macrocosmic boundlessness and microcosmic individualisation, the most primitive, subjective emotionalism and naivete opposed to the most rarified consciousness and brilliant intellectuality” (Cardinal, 446). The first season of PMMM adroitly captured many of these elements of polarity as seen in Faust in such a way as to encompass satirical elements of the Magical Girl genre and confound all expectations of said genre in the transformation from light-hearted, slice-of-life comedy to horror-inducing tragedy. All steps were taken to rope in an unsuspecting audience with the familiar known of the genre and viciously subvert as many tropes as the writers could manage. In the space of just a few episodes Mami was dead, Sayaka was on the verge of becoming a Witch, and Kyubey was the most hated character in the show, likened more to Mephistopheles in his dog form of Faust: Part 1 than the cats from Sailor Moon.

	Yet at the end of season 1 the PMMM universe lacked any of the polarisation that had previously forged such suspense. There were generic “demons” that Magical Girls must fight, but no internal threat of Witches granting that initial mixed response of horror, pity, fear and terror within the audience, elements which must be kept for the integrity of the truly tragic nature of the series. Whence the next internal revulsion, the impetus for polarity and tragedy? Where else but from PMMM's very own unfinished Faust: Akemi Homura? Indeed, how fitting for a new world with a new god to have its very own antipodean Devil. In this way the shift from Faust to Paradise Lost was not only logical but absolutely necessary for the series and for the singular character of Homura.

	Unable to fully turn to the tragedy of Faust: Part 2 for its massive complexities – complete with an ambiguous redemption arc – the creators nonetheless managed to follow the skeleton of Part 2 via Paradise Lost. The structure of Faust: Part 1 displayed a clear descent, but Faust: Part 2, as Alfred Hoelzel correctly points out in “The Conclusion of Goethe's Faust: Ambivalence and Ambiguity” – “...Part 2 shows a promising climb which relapses at a crucial moment, however, into a disastrous fall into a moral abyss” (Hoelzel, 4). The shift from Faust to Paradise Lost then, is not as dramatic a change as first thought; it's just a small step to the left into Homura's final moral descent.

	The characters of Lucifer and Homura were well aligned in both disposition and appearance. At the end of season 1 we even get a glimpse of Homura descending from a great height with angel-white wings, only for those wings to be seen black and corrupted in a teasing snippet later. The bestial Lucifer of Dante I am less inclined to believe holds great correlation; Milton's Satan and Dante's Satan have far different propensities. In “Dante's Satan and Milton's Byronic Hero” Anne Paolucci contrasts the two depictions of Dante's and Milton's Satan: “Dante's Satan remains virtually immobile, throughout; Milton's is always moving, continually changing his form, scouting the heavens and the Garden of Eden, as well as Hell, assuming whatever shape best suits his purpose. Dante's Satan is grotesque; Milton's darkly sublime. Dante's Satan is repulsive; Milton's is admirable in his determination and his depth of feeling, in his sense of loyalty to those who depend on him and look to him for guidance and reassurance. Dante's Satan does not speak; Milton's Satan is often eloquent. Dante's Satan has no redeeming feature; Milton's has the humanitarian impulses of a great leader. Dante's Satan arouses disgust; Milton's at moments arouses something close to sympathy” (Paolucci, 143). Milton's Satan is a Byronic hero, self-absorbed and arrogant, yet beautiful and dangerous, heightened by a deep-rooted sympathy. This is the parallel that Homura distinctly follows in the events of Rebellion.

	Milton's Satan at one point exclaims, “Me Miserable! Which way shall I flie / Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? / Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; / And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatning to devour me opens wide, / To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n” (Book IV, 69-78), lines which reflect Homura's own predilection towards the Hell of her own making, doomed to torture herself with the memory of her Faustian wish for a moment in time, too desperate and wracked with love to ever let go of her cherished memories of God, yet too terrified to ask forgiveness and risk losing everything; better Hell with some semblance of Heaven than no Heaven at all.  Paolucci further stresses this piteous strain to be found in Milton's Satan, this pity which – according to Goethe – is a necessary element of our tragedy: “But perhaps the most impressive and moving quality of Milton's Satan is his appreciation of all that is good and beautiful. He is painfully sensitive to light and love; his despair is awakened sharply at the sight of Heaven and Eden. He cannot help remembering the goodness of God...he yearns to ask forgiveness but dreads the shame he would suffer among those he seduced to his purpose and for whom he has assumed full responsibility” (Paolucci, 144-145). Homura's character remains relatable for all the reasons that Milton's Satan does in that she truly yearns for redemption, she possesses a laudable drive to succeed, yet she will not, cannot ever repent. She would become a Witch for Madoka, she would kill Madoka all over again – as many times as it took – in order to save her; she is possessed of all the humanitarian impulses of her dark Miltonian counterpart for all the wrong reasons.

	Moreover the two – Homura and Milton's Satan – are alike in both action and body, the appearance being as memorable as the fall. Homura is not only morally opposed to Madoka, but aesthetically opposed. As Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish, “The soul is the prison of the body,” and the body in fact reflects the soul. This is the premise of Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows, “Skin houses the body and it is figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside. The vampire will puncture and mark the skin with his fangs, Mr. Hyde will covet white skin, Dorian Gray will desire his own canvas, Buffalo Bill will covet female skin, Leatherface will wear his victim's skin as a trophy and recycle his flesh as food. Slowly but surely the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster. The Gothic text, whether novel or film, plays out an elaborate skin show” (Halberstam, 13). Both Homura and Milton's Satan fulfill the requirements of this theory. I mentioned above some of the contrasting traits of Dante's Satan and Milton's Satan, but it is undeniable that both reflect an aesthetic that fits the monstrous body: one a stagnant, three-faced, grotesque perversion of the Holy Trinity, the other a dark, charismatic figure with all the qualities of a leader – proud and noble – yet with whatever monstrous body suits his present needs, be it snake, beast, angel or man; in such a way Goethe's Mephistopheles also falls under this category.

	Homura is hardly exempt from this category, and in fact her transformation into the Devil only reaffirms their connection aesthetically. We were never privilege to Homura's Witch form in season 1; it is not until Rebellion that we see Homulily, shackled and faceless. But this is not the form with which I am concerned in this essay. Rather I am just as intrigued by her form as the Devil – and not just for the titillation effect, mind you. As the Devil, her body reflects herself as a perversion of the painfully shy Homura of yesteryear, and as the exact aesthetic opposition of the godlike Madoka.

	“The monster's body, indeed, is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative. The monster functions as monster, in other words, when it is able to condense as many fear-producing traits as possible into one body. Monsters are meaning machines. They can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body. And even within these divisions of identity, the monster can still be broken down” (Halberstam 21-22). True monsters then, display their monstrosity through their very appearance. We saw this clearly in season 1; Magical Girls became physical embodiments of their monstrous grief, reflecting and consuming so many endless fear-producing traits with hauntingly atavistic imagery. The irony is not lost in retrospect when recalling that Kriemhild Gretchen, Gretchen who was the fulcrum of Faust's desires, was the name of Madoka's Witch form. The irony continues when considering that Madoka's Witch form in season 1 provided Homura with the impetus to become a Magical Girl in the first place, and that Madoka's ascension into heaven would serve as an extension of Homura's innermost fears and desires, which ultimately would drive Homura to her own transformation into the monstrous body.

	Finally Homura's consummation as both Faust and Satan has been reconciled at the end of Rebellion. The harmony invoked by the polarisation between Homura and Madoka, the final development of Homura's tragic character, and the upholding of the essential elements of tragedy via the now fulfilled elements of fear, terror and pity, the katharsis of human sacrifice – the death of Homura's old self and the subsequent rise of the Devil –  all tie together to the conclusion of Homura's tragic character development in a necessary climax.




	Works Cited

Boyle, Nicholas; “Goethe's Theory of Tragedy”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 105, No. 4, (2010).

Cardinal, Clive H.; “Polarity in Goethe's Faust”, PMLA, Vol. 54, No. 3, (1949).

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; “Faust: Part 1 and 2”

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; “Über Laokoon” (1797).

Halberstam, Judith; “Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters” (1995).

Hoelzel, Alfred; “The Conclusion of Goethe's Faust: Ambivalence and Ambiguity”, The German Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (1982).

Milton, John; “Paradise Lost”

Paolucci, Anne; “Dante's Satan and Milton's Byronic Hero”, Italica, Vol. 41, No. 2, (1964).