Nomad Land

Absolutely incredible Art Nouveau-inspired piece from the amazingly talented @aptericia, illustrating Mami Tomoe and Castrovalva from Moebius, my Puella Magi Madoka Magica x Bleach crossover fic! Words cannot express how happy I am to see my girls in TECHNICOLOR (well, one of them, anyway--Castrovalva doesn't really "do" color), not to mention all of the wonderful details like the sunflowers, stellated dodacahedrons, and, of course, the cat's cradle ribbons and the lemniscates... it's everything I had envisioned and so much more.

(Oh, and if you look at this and go, "Huh, that's interesting, I wonder what that's all about," you can also check out the fic on AO3.)

Once I started paying closer attention to the red lighting, I realized it was everywhere - in this shot, the sky on the scaffolding side (mirror Homura) is significantly redder than the yellow-orange on the original Homura's untouched side.

This same pattern appears in this shot, where the clouds transition from red to orange-yellow at roughly the halfway point. All of which composes one half of the "sky", with the other half being tranquil blue with white clouds.

So here we have two "halves" representing the Law of Cycles and the Devil (the latter of which also has two "halves"), and the original Homura becomes less and less "red" as her counterpart's influence grows. (As she steals Homura's "role", the double also steals the colors.) In this shot, the original Homura is standing on the Law of Cycles's "side", but she's upside down and about to fall from the heavens into red-and-gold "hell".

Every time I think I've caught all the symbolism, I keep finding more and it takes my breath away.

I may be surprised, but I am unlikely to be the most surprised.

I may be disappointed, but I am unlikely to be the most disappointed.

If I don't like the movie in 2026, I probably wouldn't have liked a hypothetical 2016 version any better.

This shot is so funny. Homura's all like "Hey, guys, what's up? Just crashing your magical girl team meeting for no reason, hahahaha." Also, Kyubey is there. She rewrote the whole universe and yet somehow we're back where we started with the two of them hanging out on top of a building at night.

Homura and Kyubey are on opposite sides of the beam, but Homura is in ascension (for now). Also, I really love the lighting and how it transitions from red to blue-black (and of course Kyubey is solidly illuminated by the red, while Homura is on the blue-black side so mostly it doesn't touch her).

Red seems to be "Devil" coded in this movie; it's the dominant color scheme during both the "girl without soul gem" sequence where we're seeing Devil Homura's powers at work, making everything look "hellish" or "firey" (recall Homura's name means "flame"). It is also the color associated with Homura's mirror image - cf. the evil air conditioner shots and the red and white spiraled barber poles that keep popping up, red eyes on the doppelganger, the cherry tomato aspic, etc, etc. Kyubey gets it in this shot because we already know he's evil, lol.

This scene occurs fairly early on, as the trailer makes it seem like they're discussing the "girls who aren't magical girls fighting wraiths" rumors when Homura "We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This" Akemi shows up. The sky behind them is pretty solidly blue-black, suggesting that while Homura is "playing" at being an antagonist here, she's really on their side.

I thought the green lights in the background were an optical effect because Shaft loves doing those, but they are actively moving, so perhaps they are supposed to be planes? Lots of little planes, which then get replaced by one big plane later on (just like a certain big witch is made of lots of little witches)? Who can say.

Anyway, these three are Not Happy with Homura's appearance. I like how Mami and Sayaka are on alert and Kyouko is just hanging out... but she summons her spear in another shot, so it's clear they're all feeling threatened by her.

Real question: do you think Mami et al. knew that their weird classmate was a magical girl until this moment, because if they did, that scene of everyone walking home becomes even funnier. (It would explain the dirty look Sayaka sends her as she's leaving the classroom, though.)

The lighting is split here, with one side red and one side black, just like it is later in the trailer. Same idea, opposite energy. I love cinematic parallels.

The lighting is different (all red), but the poses and locations are similar enough (and you can see background specks marking the future path of the green lights in the close-ups of the trio) that this clip from the first trailer in 2023 is probably an earlier version of the same scene, just from a different perspective.

But because everything in this movie comes in pairs, the trio has what appears to be a different meeting later on - or at least Kyouko is waiting for somebody up there on that tiny little platform. I had wondered where the neon-blue cake came from, but it's probably leftovers from the bear-themed restaurant/amusement park they visit.

The lights are a mix of red and blue, but it feels like more red than blue at this point, as the Homura doppelganger's influence grows, and they're intermingled with each other rather than staying neatly on their own side. I suspect Kyouko is feeling conflicted here about which "side" she's really on and she doesn't have much room to maneuver.

I didn't comment on this before, but I love how Homura's left side (the wing that gets shot off) is black while her right side is illuminated with red. It really drives home the duality.

One subtle outfit change I didn't notice earlier: the new design for Devil Homura's collar is almost, but not quite, split in half - the two parts are still linked, but just barely.

It's really hard to see anything in movie screenshots, but if you compare it to the settei or even the Magia Record version, you'll notice the collar isn't nearly so split. In the WnK version, it looks like it is barely holding together, which once again ties into the idea of two Homuras.

This is one of those times where I start to wonder "Am I reading too much into this?" but there's so much other stuff in her costume and in the trailers with the same theme that this particular detail feels like icing on the already ornate magical girl-themed cake.

I do not have the hubris to claim I know exactly how WnK will turn out, but I suspect "there are two Homuras, the original and an evil mirror image, who are fighting for control over Madoka and by extension the world - oh, and by the way, the other Homura is the human avatar of Walpurgisnacht and out to destroy the world" covers a good 60% of what this movie is about.

Throw in "the Walpurgisnacht we've seen before is a concept like the Law of Cycles and was created from its component parts [insert chicken-and-egg timey-wimey bootstrap paradox]", "the other Homura reflects the original's suppressed desires and her ideal endgame scenario is Homura's subconscious wish for a world where there's nothing left but her and Madoka as expressed in episode 10 (so there's no way Madoka can ever leave her because there's nothing left to save)" and "everything Homura has ever done to save Madoka has led to the exact circumstances she was trying to avoid" for angst, pathos, and irony, and that probably gets another ~30%.

As for the last 10%, with her entire project in ruins, original Homura will have to confront her failures. Will she make psychologically healthy choices (oof), die (double oof), take advantage of a loophole/deus ex machina only possible as a direct result of the increasingly improbable series of events that led to that precise moment, or any combination of the above? Stay tuned to find out!

The real question for me is whether the Final Twist That Remakes The World Into Something Different is "everything is seemingly awful and then BAM, better ending is possible" (aka reverse Rebellion) or something significantly darker, but either way it likely involves taking advantage of the similarities between the two Homuras to mislead the audience about what is really happening; whatever we thought we saw wasn't really what was actually happening.

EVERYTHING IS FATED… but hopefully that's not entirely a bad thing in the end (i.e., bad things were necessary in order to get good/better things).

My personal ideal ending is one where magical girls and witches can coexist in the world without dying (i.e., proto-Doppels/Automatic Purification System) and everyone except for Madoka and Homura can live an ordinary human life (but they're happy with this arrangement because they're together forever after transcending their humanity to make it possible) but I do not trust Urobuchi to necessarily share this opinion. Based on his other works, I'm bracing myself for stuff like "the world is better, but only as a result of Homura sacrificing herself (i.e., she finally gets what she wants but isn't able to enjoy it)", "wrong Homura wins, everything is awful" or even worse, "everything is superficially fine/the same as the beginning but the wrong Homura survived and only the audience/1 character knows/suspects the truth [insert gif of that guy from GTA saying 'Aw shit, here we go again']".

(or to put it a different way, I want the Gaim ending, not the Chao Feng, Lou Zhen Jie, or Demon King endings.)

Bonus: surreal and mostly non-verbal post-credits scene that explains everything and nothing (extra credit if it's a callback to "Prologue in Heaven"/blue lace curtains).

This is obviously leaving out a bunch of other stuff, like what's going on with pretty much every other character, to which all I can do is shrug - they may be in the movie, but that doesn't mean the movie is about them, you know?

No matter what happens, there will be insane levels of fandom discourse; I'm tired just thinking about it. Eventually, the shock wears off and people grudgingly accept whatever happens the same way they did for Rebellion (mostly).

This sounds great, but Urobuchi could never do something like that because his entire writing philosophy is predicated on the idea that to be human is to lack something - and therefore seek to attain it - and if they get it, they must immediately pivot to seeking something else in order to retain their humanity. In other words, to be human is to be perpetually unfulfilled; to be otherwise is to transcend humanity by becoming a god, a monster, or dead (i.e., fixed end states from which no further change is possible). For Urobuchi, it's the journey rather than the attainment that is the point of human life; the key to a long life for his characters is to work diligently at something that will never be complete, and their happiness is determined by how they accept and respond to this.

This is why the wraiths come into being at the end of the original Madoka Magica series - since witches no longer exist, but magical girls must still fight to retain their humanity, the wraiths are there to fill the gap. So any hypothetical world where magical girls and witches come to some kind of stable balance or symbiosis akin to MR doppels will also have wraiths, or something like them, in order to remain consistent with Urobuchi's philosophy. This is also why Homura's happy dreamworld in Rebellion has the girls fight Nightmares, instead of just hanging out, and why magical girls still have to fight in Homura's post-Rebellion world, even though there's no reason why they should have to.

(I know, I know, I harp on about this a lot, but the interview where Urobuchi lays all this out in his own words was the key to the pattern that underlies his work and irrevocably changed how I analyze and view it, because once you notice it, it's both consistent and everywhere.)

If I had to guess, these hypothetical proto-Doppels would be more akin to Sayaka and Oktavia and Nagisa and Charlotte - either manifesting as two separate but linked entities or combining as one - vs. the attached witch bodies under the command of the magical girl in MR (i.e., as partnership of equals rather than master-servant), but that may reflect my own particular interests more than anything else, TBD.