atamascolily

[atamascolily]

There's a famous story about the ancient Indian mathematician Sessa, who is said to have invented the game that would eventually be known as chess. As a reward for his services, his patron the King ordered he could have anything he wanted, and Sessa wished for a chessboard covered with rice, with one grain on the first square, two grains on the second square, four grains on the third square, eight grains on the fourth square, and doubling the number of grains each time until all sixty-four squares were covered.

The king, thinking this would be an easy task, agreed, only to discover he had promised more than he bargained for. You see, the total number of rice grains needed to fill the board was (2^64)−1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice. That's over 18 quintillion grains of rice, or 1.4 trillion metric tons, more than is produced annually in the world today, let alone in a single kingdom.

This story, which has a lot of variations and is popularly known as "the wheat and the chessboard problem" in mathematics, is about the power of exponential growth and how human beings are really, really bad at estimating its effects. I bring it up as an example here because I think that it vividly illustrates what Homura has inadvertently done to Madoka with her loops and why it has such a drastic effect.

Or to put it a different way, because of the way karmic destiny and causality work in this series (see the "Karmic Destiny, Magical Potential, and the Objectified Soul: What Happens When a Girl Contracts?" section of this essay by Imagak for one explanation), the impacts of Homura's loops are not linear, they are fundamentally exponential in nature, and thus are magnified far beyond what their actual number suggests.

So we're not talking about 14 here, we're actually talking about something like 2^14, or more than 16,000 times the impact of an "ordinary" human life. And given what kinds of miracles an "ordinary" human life is capable of, I think 14 loops would be more than sufficient to get the results we see at the end of the series. Even the original chessboard problem only went up to 2^64, and that was enough to overwhelm an entire planet--can you imagine what anything close to 2^100 would do???

[This is true regardless of how you choose to calculate the exact "weight" of karmic destiny; I'm just sticking with the base numbers for simplicity's sake. Likewise, you can debate exactly how the mechanics of karmic destiny work--maybe it doesn't follow this exact model--but the point remains that regardless of how you measure their effects, the timelines become more and more compounded over time because each one depends on a growing chain of causality involving all the previous timelines, which adds up considerably after only a few iterations, just like the chessboard problem.]

As for your other points, I'll note that Madoka Magica as a franchise has not been entirely consistent with its spinoffs and as a result, many of the examples you mention are either not considered canon to the main series, or cover some or all of the same timelines shown in the anime and Scene 0, so there's at least some amount of overlap (i.e., a storyline from one of the drama CDs about Amy the cat appears in Scene 0, for example). In general, however, Madoka Magica seems to content to continually re-visit the same material (lol) rather than invent new ones, at least in the sense of making them officially canonical, much to my disappointment.

Although it's playable in the Magia Record game (which is set in alternate universe that Madokami chose not to interfere with and thus remains isolated from the main series), Scene 0 itself does not reference any previous Magia Record characters or storylines and appears to be its own separate independent thing; its entire premise is that this is the "full" story that wasn't shown in the anime and everything I've seen of it has been fully canon-consistent thus far. Furthermore, Moemura is only present for the initial loops in Scene 0, transitioning rather quickly to the Coolmura we see later in the anime.

(I don't blame anyone for not following Scene 0, by the way--it is extremely long, and in my personal opinion, somewhat tedious and bloated, but there are English translations of the entire thing up on YouTube if anyone wants to check it out for themselves.)

As far as I know, the original Reddit post was removed because OP forgot to include spoiler tags, not because of its contents, but I agree that PMMM fans can be very aggressive in response to ideas they don't agree with. This is going to be very funny when Walpurgis no Kaiten comes out and blows everything up--if they do what I think they're going to do with that movie, it's going to make the backlash to Rebellion look like small potatoes, and a lot of people are going to be mad but for contradictory reasons. I think the long delay between installments had more to do with studio politics and behind the scenes drama than fan reaction, but there's no way to know for certain at this point.

Believe it or not, although I've written a lot about it just now, I'm actually agnostic on this particular subject. Mostly I just want to know why there are 14 Clara Dolls in Rebellion, and there being only 14 timelines is one of the most solid explanations I've come across thus far, with an actual mechanism to explain it, as opposed to "Inu Curry felt like it"--which may indeed be true, but feels unsatisfying in a movie where every other aesthetic choice is strongly grounded in the characters, themes and mechanics of the universe. You don't design that many individual characters without some kind of reason, and I desperately want to know what that is in this case.

That said, I honestly think the exact number of loops is one detail best left to the imagination (there's a reason why it was never mentioned in the anime, because it ultimately doesn't change the outcome there). Personally, I would have preferred it if Gen Urobuchi had left the number entirely up to fan interpretation instead of firing off an estimate that so many people take as definitive despite never appearing in the original source material! But the recent story developments in Scene 0 has made me wonder if SHAFT is moving towards a direct answer after all, and I'm keeping an eye out in case this ever appears again.

I saw an incredibly interesting theory on Reddit that has unfortunately been deleted by the mods, so I wanted to discuss it here because I've never seen it anywhere else. OP began by pointing out that there are 13 timelines in Scene 0 in Magia Record, and the ending implies that the main anime timeline is Homura's 14th loop overall.

This contradicts Urobuchi's oft-repeated statement from a con panel in 2013 that that the number of loops was "approaching 100", which a lot of fans take to be canon, but was never clearly defined in the original series. (For what it's worth, Urobuchi has also gone on the record saying he didn't think too much about the mechanics behind Homura's time travel, so I suspect this is one more example.)

If there are truly 14 timelines, then it would go along way towards explaining why there are 14 Clara Dolls: each one would thus be a metaphorical--and quite possibly literal--representation of one of Homura's time loops. You could also make a case for a possible 15th timeline after Madoka's wish resets the world to account for the "missing" 15th Clara Doll; I personally believe that "Ai" is the Homura we follow for most of Rebellion, so that isn't strictly necessary, but you do you.

As a bonus, it would also retroactively explain why there are 14 "strings of fate" binding Madoka and Homura in episode 11 - this might have originally been metaphorical, because the animators didn't want to draw so many strings (though I suppose they could have), but it would now be literal as well.

I know a lot of people are emotionally invested in the idea of 100+ loops, but this idea makes a lot of sense. Up until now, the exact number of loops has not been a major plot point (and only 5 are explicitly shown in the anime), but it will be interesting to see if this comes up in any capacity in Walpurgis no Kaiten.

#puella magi madoka magica #pmmm analysis

[atamascolily]

Uh Oh, The One Other Guy Having The Same Problem As You Got Zero Replies To His Post On Reddit That He Made 5 Years Ago

#relatable #the accuracy tho #at least with reddit + forums you can actually FIND the non-answer #instead of a blank void

[atamascolily]

edgeless blade vs iphone

#thunderbolt fantasy #wuxia fantasy puppet epic #Fan art reblog #everything about this is perfect #pretty sure that lin changed the background on shang's phone to a photo of himself #lang playing angry birds is so funny because he's basically an angry bird himself

[atamascolily]

Star Wars Novel Covers Illustrations by Drew Struzan

#star wars #star wars legends #art #no one is out there doing it like Drew Struzan #okay maybe Tsuyoshi Nagano #FORMATIVE

[atamascolily]

Made a chart for sorting fantheories

#fandom life #yes good

[atamascolily]

Nobody understands the bond between a girl and the mediocre book she read when she was 13 years old.

#fandom life

[atamascolily]

Feelin like a hellhound tryna catch an angel

#thunderbolt fantasy #wuxia fantasy puppet epic #Fan art reblog #sha wu sheng #he looks so focused here! #also very fluffy

[atamascolily]

Do you miss all your old selves?

no they are inside of me i hug them everyday and say u did such a good job

#vein of gold

[atamascolily]

i love posting madoka magica art because without fail half of the interactions will be from blogs with homura pfps and urls like “homuralover2000”

#puella magi madoka magica #fandom life

[atamascolily]

Wise words from Shang Bu Huan.

#thunderbolt fantasy #wuxia fantasy puppet epic #shang bu huan #important life advice

[atamascolily]

I've talked before about how the Incubators are male-coded, but I was browsing the Puella Magi Wiki and discovered that the Madoka Magica Café event in 2011 dropped the subtext entirely with their signs for the bathrooms:

*squints at runes* Ah, yes, the two genders: "magical girl" and "Incubator".

#puella magi madoka magica #pmmm analysis

[atamascolily]

Candeloro

#puella magi madoka magica #Fan art reblog #mami tomoe #love her eyes and the use of negative space here! #also the blood in the background #perfect mixture of the cute and the ominous

[atamascolily]

Why are you booing me, I’m right.

#thunderbolt fantasy #wuxia fantasy puppet epic #Fan art reblog #lin xue ya #xiao kuang juan #cannot stress how much the first panel is entirely canon

[atamascolily]

Man, the latest round of AO3 spam comments makes me glad I turned off anonymous comments on my fics so I don't have to deal with that.

#fandom life #bless ao3

[atamascolily]

everyone's like wehhhhh why doesn't doctor house gets suuuueeed! like my man. literally every patient he sees is someone that's been trying to find a diagnosis for ages. i could live with a little medical malpractice if it were coming from someone ready to break into my home to look for allergens and not simply half heartedly listen to me before suggesting I lose weight and take ages of back and forth arguing to order a single test

#house md #Fan art reblog #so much this #canon in my heart #omg the crossed out 'lupus' in the background #it's never lupus

[atamascolily]

you cannot headcanon your way out of overt thematic structures on which the entire narrative is built

#fandom life #so true it hurts

[atamascolily]

Absolutely no one asked for this, but in case anyone might be curious as to how to pronounce the Thunderbolt Fantasy characters’ Chinese names (since they are never actually said in the voiced show), here is my “haven’t-regularly-spoken-Mandarin-in-20-years” attempt at the names.

The list in which I say the names is as follows:

Lin Xue Ya ( 凜雪鴉) Shang Bu Huan ( 殤不患) Dan Fei (丹翡) Shou Yun Xiao (狩雲霄) Xing Hai (捲殘雲) Juan Can Yun (刑亥) Sha Wu Sheng (殺無生) Dan Heng (丹衡) Mie Tian Hai (蔑天骸)

(Note: “Sh” is pronounced with either the “sh” or “s” sound, depending on whether you want to sound more mainland/northern Chinese (”sh”) or Taiwanese (”s”). For example, I’m of Taiwanese descent, so I pronounce “Sha Wu Sheng” as “Sah Wu Sung.”)

I personally prefer using their Chinese names in writing, because unlike their Japanese names, the Chinese names are actually consistent with the characters and…have some sort of evocative meaning? (ie: the Xue (雪) in Lin Xue Ya’s name is the character for “snow,” and he has a largely snow-colored color scheme? and the Tian (天) in Mie Tian Hai’s name is the character for “sky,” and he has those cloud patterns on his robes? idk).

Likewise, the Japanese names are completely context-dependent (ie: the Kanji of their names would only be pronounced the way they are when referring specifically to the Thunderbolt Fantasy characters–otherwise, they would be read as merely a very odd/nonsensical combination of Kanji characters). But I also still enjoy using the name “Mushou” and all that, too, so I don’t judge either preference.

Please note that I’m foremost American, so if any actual Taiwanese/Chinese/Japanese people disagree with any of my pronunciations or commentary, they are probably right.

#thunderbolt fantasy #wuxia fantasy puppet epic #aaaa this is so helpful thank you!