Kyubey: It’s all over if you give up. But you have the ability to change fate. This unavoidable destruction and despair …

Madoka Kaname: Can I really change this ending?

Kyubey: Of course you can, you just need to make contract with me … and become a magical girl!

Visual culture scholar 1 (VCS1): Wait, Madoka! Let me draw you the stage on which you are about to decide your fate. Kyubey isn’t telling you the entire truth.

Kyubey: ω

Madoka: Ohh … Okay. I should know.

Kyubey: What you know will not matter.

VCS1: It does. Let’s talk about fate, despair, agency, and love before you come to the most consequential decision of your life. I’m sorry, Madoka, first you must know you are not a real person, but a fictional character in the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica. This series belongs to the mahō shōjo, or magical girl subgenre of “beautiful fighting girls” that focuses on young, often average schoolgirls who transform into celestial beings with magic powers to oppose the forces of evil. Mahō shōjo, with the prime example being Sailor Moon, was notably produced by women for girl audiences, who could identify with powerful protagonists saving the world in their full feminine attire of skirts, frills, ribbons, long hair, and other unique accessories alongside their cute friend-shaped companions, just like Kyubey. Since a female heroine must usually display masculine traits, both visually and psychologically, to be a reliable agent, this was a significant reversal of tropes common in pop culture, especially in the 1980s and 90s, when magical girls were rising in popularity.

Madoka: Oh. Then …

VCS1: Wait. At this point, Madoka Magica would be just another mahō shōjo anime. It isn’t, because the narrative, visual schema, and protagonists of Madoka Magica are designed to reflect on the figure of a magical girl, the formal boundaries of the subgenre, and representation or function of young girls in the capitalist media industry. As much as it deconstructs mahō shōjo, it also exposes its limits, which I think cannot be surpassed without abandoning the genre completely. Radiant expression of femininity, glamorous body modification, and hyperstylized suits that allow mahō shōjo to subvert patriarchal gender roles on the level of agency also invite questions about the dominant imaginary of the human body and genre’s ability to reconceptualize it. The context of fetishization and mediatization of “beautiful fighting girl” for the capitalization on otaku culture and heterosexualized fan service certainly weakens the anti-patriarchal message of the animations: “To be empowered, you must be adorable and young.” Hypersexualized magical girls generate even more gadgets, video games, manga or animation spin-offs, and cosplay outfits than most other subgenres. In doing so, mahō shōjo becomes another site for reinforcing capitalist social relations, understood in economic, sexual, and political terms. Indeed, Madoka, if you accept Kyubey’s contract, you will become a magical girl with unimaginable powers to fight witches terrorizing innocent people. All powers except one—you can never cease to be a magical girl; you will be an instrument or a medium for capture, distribution, and consumption of desire. What’s the point if you lose your freedom to the dominant system?

Kyubey: I never force anyone.

Homura: No, you never use means of coercion, you just pop up smooth, soft, and cute when girls are at their lowest and most vulnerable. When they have no other alternative to infinite despair, how could they not accept a contract from a creature as innocent as you, Kyubey. Wish anything in exchange for magical powers? How gracious. Your flat smile is reflected in every girl’s trauma.

Søren Kierkegaard: Dear Mr. Kyubey, are you Mephisto who has traded an interest in old magi for youth?

Homura Akemi: Why do you even need magical girls, Kyubey?

Kyubey: Gladly. Please don’t misunderstand. We don’t do this out of ill will towards mankind. Everything we’ve done has been to extend the lifespan of the universe. Madoka, do you know the term “entropy”? In short, when energy changes form, some of it gets lost. As a result, the amount of usable energy in the universe is constantly decreasing. That’s why we searched for a form of energy not bound by the laws of thermodynamics, and what we discovered was the energy generated by magical girls. Your souls are energy sources capable of defying entropy. And the most effective of all are girls in their second stage of development, who experience the greatest fluctuations between hope and despair. These fluctuations produce a tremendous amount of energy. As Incubators, it is our job to collect that energy.

Madoka: Saving other people in exchange for energy gathered by Incubators sounds good. No, Homura?

Tiqqun: It’s exploitation. Entropy cannot be restrained. Capitalism only converts energy into subjugation and pushes back extra entropy beyond its circuit of reproduction. In consumer societies, this scheme has been deployed into subjectivity itself. Madoka, every time you enjoy or despair, the media apparatus of capture sprawling across the social plane extracts value.

Madoka: I don’t understand …

Tiqqun: Magical girls are peak fetish, perfectly aligned with two major vectors of capitalist total control. One runs along the extreme and ever-deeper commodification of subjectivity that we addressed in The Preliminary Materials for a Theory of Young-Girl. Second—covered in The Cybernetic Hypothesis—embeds the Young-Girl subjectivity in the capitalist cybernetic system, which guarantees the total control of every aspect of social life. The Young-Girl is both the condition and the result of computerization, algorithmization, and the replacement of language by bot-speak. If the Young-Girl already had nothing to do with real humans, magical girls are mutants to inhuman degrees of abstraction and reification. In capitalism, we’re all magical girls, governed by being called upon to relate to ourselves as value, that is, according to the central mediation of a series of controlled abstractions. There’s no longer any intimacy except as value for the counter-entropy project. Magical girls are hypermediated zombies and cybernetic traps set on every screen for burnout subjects to latch onto. Once you sign the contract, it’s over.

VCS1: What you’re talking about, Tiqqun, reveals the relentless operation of patriarchy in cybernetic capitalism. It’s clearly present in Kyubey’s exploitative relationship with each of the girls. Although romantic exploits are alien to him, the most extreme policing of the girls’ bodies and agency comes from Kyubey. If men, as they say, only ever have one thing on their mind, then magically cutesy cartoon feline creatures in anime are only ever thinking about how they can transform doe-eyed shōjo into magical girls. Like the corporate interests behind much of anime production, Kyubey’s sole motivation is producing more magical girl content.

Sadie Plant: You could give it a different spin, though. Mahō shōjo re-enters the problem of patriarchy and technology. If we look at the history of modernity, we see a definite concurrence between intelligent machines and women gaining autonomy from the control of men, or the community of self-reflective, self-determined subjects. It might be impossible, if even desirable, to pinpoint some sort of causality between these two processes of autonomization, but one cannot divert attention from the functional place women and machines share as means of communication between patriarchal societies of men. They mediate, translate, convey, bear, deliver, serve, weave, gather, transcribe. However, in the last few centuries, the grip men have over their instruments seems to be loosening as more and more women enter job markets and culture production. Defining both Madoka Magica and magical girls as “peak fetish” is reductive and precisely reinforces the patriarchal image of femininity you, Tiqqun and VCS1, so eagerly want to criticize. There is more to cyberspace, or mahō shōjo space, for that matter, than meets the male gaze. They communicate signals from outside of patriarchy, even when patriarchs are sure they oversee all messages. Hypermediated fetish indicates intense and acute artificialization that defies the possibility of control over magical girl desire. A magical girl is virtual reality. If Kyubey embodies inhuman capitalism, he also delivers miraculous technologies to escape patriarchy.

Visual culture scholar 2: On point, Sadie. The archetyped beautiful fighting/magical girl confronted with the traumatizing weight of her archetypal being is far too complex to be limited to the male gaze. It is a trauma that VCS1 will not acknowledge, because magical girl is a fictional construct, a pleasure commodity in the capitalist exchange system, but we must recognize this trauma as an effective mirror of the experiences of women and queers who must grapple with the objectification, commodification, and control by hegemonic sex and gender norms enacted on their bodies. The magical girls traumatized by the weight of their own constructedness can undo the knots of their metatextual predicament by exceeding the limitations imposed upon their bodies and through love with other magical girls.

Madoka: When I met Mami, she showed me what it is like to fight to save people, and told me I can do that, too, it made me happier than anything … There’s nothing I wish more than to have the power to help people.

Homura: Every magical girl turns into a witch in the end.

Madoka: No … Why?

Homura: All the good we do as magical girls is futile, evened out by the end.

Kyubey: You don’t have to turn into a witch if you never lose hope.

VCS1: But they eventually all do. This is one of the lines of deconstruction that Madoka Magica centres on, Madoka.

Homura: That’s the nature of the contract that grants us the power we hold. We don’t fight to protect people. We fight for the sake of our own wishes. If our deaths go unnoticed by others and we’re ultimately forgotten by this world … then that’s just how it is.

Madoka: I’ll remember.

VCS1: Kyubey, effectively the only male character in Magica Madoka, sets up an exploitative system that discourages partnership and feeds off failure. Magical girl is reduced to replicating the frail hope, struggle and despair of every other magical girl that came before her. Kyubey frames the economic exchange of magical girl powers as a fair and reasonable trade: a wish that can perform miracles for the sale of one’s body and its ability to produce. In fact, the girls are groomed from their inception (literally, within their moé designs) to produce with their bodies until they are used up like the batteries they are, at which point their sole purpose is to exist as witches and guarantee the system reproduces itself ad infinitum.

VCS2: Any use of their emotional and bodily energies that violates this sexualized economy is marked as so deviant that it is unthinkable—like the romantic love between girls that has no place in Kyubey’s economy.

Madoka: Are we just disposable energy sources to you, then, Kyubey?

Kyubey: We have been involved with your civilization since before your recorded history. Countless girls have formed contracts with Incubators, had their wishes granted, and ultimately succumbed to despair. That which begins with a prayer of hope ends with a curse of despair. That is the cycle repeated to this day. Some altered the course of humanity forever.

Homura: Kyubey never mentions it, but once the contract is concluded, the connection between our human body and soul is cut and reintegrated via Incubators.

Kyubey: I couldn’t just ask you to fight witches with a fragile human body. A magical girl’s old body is nothing more than a piece of external hardware. Isn’t that far more advantageous than fighting with a human body full of vital organs?

Madoka: That’s terrible … Why would Kyubey do something so cruel?

Homura: He doesn’t think it’s cruel. He’s a creature that doesn’t understand human values. He’d just say it was an appropriate payment for bringing about a miracle.

Tiqqun: Once Kyubey mediates the relations between your body and soul, between you and other magical girls, and between magical girls and the society, no real emotions can exist. All is just a simulation for his energy accumulation, you see? Magical girls become fetishized and alienated images of young girls. Since love as a relationship between non-alienated persons is impossible under modern conditions of production, the Young-Girl cannot love.

Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic: Following what Sadie spoke about, as expressions of moé, Madoka Magica and mahō shōjo productions in general follow another feminization vector of techno-modernity—cuteification. Cute seems like one of these intense points where human culture is interacting with and being altered by something that we don’t yet have a grasp of. It’s quite tangible to us how Cute was accelerating, intensifying all around us. It seems to be everywhere, infiltrating all aspects of our lives, sometimes in ways that are utterly incongruous, totally at odds with prior cultural norms. Sure, as VCS1 or Tiqqun would argue, to a certain extent, cuteness is a prominent twenty-first-century aesthetic and commercial tendency that is being exploited to sell commodities. And yet, at its cutting (or cuteing) edge, where humans are helplessly compelled to produce ever more acute forms of cuteness, even using their own bodies as materials for it, strange new mutations of desire are emerging, new forms of life that seem to serve neither Nature nor Capital. We do not yet know what Cute can do.

Tiqqun: When the Young-Girl has exhausted all artifice, there is one final artifice left for her: the renunciation of artifice. But this last one really is the final one.

Amy & Maya: No, artifice is the condition for new souls to be forged. In Cute Accelerationism, we talk about flatmaxxing: how, thanks largely to social media, contemporary experiences of the body are being altered by our tacit understanding of ourselves from the point of view of a two-dimensional image—from simple things like cute aegyo hand gestures that frame the face as if it were already an image to more profound aspirations like that of “becoming anime”—as well as the various forms of desire that correspond to the two-dimensional regime, such as moé. Moé is especially interesting because everything it cares about exists prior to subjects and identities, and because of this we think it provides the model for the future of gender once the ancient relic of the binary finally rots away. Cute is highly technological. All these experiments with synthetic forms of embodiment and desire, both material and digital, are just a continuation of the trajectory originally charted out by Cute. Who says that flat constructs cannot love?

Tiqqun: The “love” of the Young-Girl is just a word in the dictionary. The Young-Girl loves her illusions the same way she loves her reification: by proclaiming them. The same goes for magical girls, Madoka. Entering a contract is a dead end, it brings only despair.

Madoka: But Homura will die … If you knew all about it, why did you agree to become a magical girl, Homura?

Homura: To save you, Madoka. Because you are the only person who showed me empathy and friendship … When I entered into the contract, I wished to travel back in time to stop you from dying in a fight with the almighty witch, Walpurgisnacht. She is coming soon, she always defeats us. The truth is … I’m from a different timeline. I’ve met you over and over and every time in every time I’ve had to watch you die. What do I have to do to save you? What do I have to do to change your fate? I kept reliving this month over and over again searching for the answer.

Amy & Maya: It can’t be all despair, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

Søren: It is all despair, it’s just not the end.

Amy & Maya: Right. Look, Madoka, we don’t know whether you should or shouldn’t do the deal with this little devil, but from another perspective, if she hadn’t become this two-dimensional, cuteified carrier of negentropy, Homura wouldn’t be able to manipulate time in search for the decision pattern that could save you, your family, and the whole city from Walpurgisnacht. This, the quest for love across infinite time-paths, would not be possible if she didn’t have magical powers. But now as a magical girl, she enters the plane of conditions and constraints she has to observe to make sense of her wish.

Madoka: There shouldn’t be any witches, any need for magical girls, any contract.

Amy & Maya: True. You can’t change that.

Søren: A paradox. Make a contract to save Homura, you will despair, but don’t and you will despair.

Homura: My feelings for Madoka run so deep, even pain has become precious to me. This is the ultimate state. More passionate than hope. Far deeper than despair. It is love.

Madoka: Homura-chan …

Tiqqun: As a last resort, the Young-Girl fetishizes “love” so as to avoid an awareness of the entirely conditioned nature of her desires.

Simone Weil: It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. Homura learnt this course.

Homura: I’ll do it over … as many times as it takes. I’ll relive the same events over and over, searching for the one way out. I’ll find the one path that will save you from your fate of boundless despair. Madoka … my one and only friend. If it’s … If it’s for you, I don’t mind being trapped in this endless maze … for all eternity!

Kyubey: At this point, it’s no longer possible for Homura to stop or give up. The moment she believes that everything was pointless, that your fate cannot be changed, Akemi Homura will succumb to despair. She knows that all too well. That’s why she doesn’t have a choice. She must continue to fight, even if she has no chance of winning.

Simone: Affliction, as such eventually befalls magical girls, makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if in this darkness where there is nothing to love the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world to it, as in the case of Job. But if the soul stops loving, it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.

Søren: Madoka is both the witness and the divine absolute to Homura’s faith. Her faith elevates Madoka into the absolute—the magical girl with unimaginable powers—whose being absolute reciprocally transforms Homura’s love and faith into a condition for changing Madoka’s destiny. Love towards Madoka The Absolute inspires Homura to repeat backwards in time. It is for love that Homura can be sure a repetition of their friendship and love is possible, and so creating the possibility for a love relationship between two girls despite the systemic necessities and expectations. That’s why Homura is herself a knightess of faith.

Amy & Maya: Because Homura insisted on following her wish, Madoka became a virtual inhuman absolute from the future, whose involvement gives sense to Homura’s persistent time travels.

Madoka: That’s enough. You’ve done enough, Homura-chan. I’m sorry. I’m going to become a magical girl. I finally know what I want. I’ve found the wish I truly want, so I’ll give my life for it.

Homura: Don’t! Because then, what have I … What have I been fighting for?

Madoka: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But I believe it’s because you’ve protected me for so long and placed so much hope on me that I’m the person I am now. Please believe in me. I promise that what you’ve done for me will not be in vain.

Kyubey: Now that you’re the central point of destiny from many different timelines, no matter how enormous the wish, you will most likely be able to realize it. Kaname Madoka, what is the wish you will pay for with your soul?

Madoka: I want to erase all witches before they are even born. I will erase every single witch in every universe, past and future …

Kyubey: If that wish were to come true, it wouldn’t just be on the scale of temporal manipulation … You’d be opposing the very laws of causality themselves! Do you truly intend to become a god?

Madoka: I don’t care what you call it. If any rule or law stands in my way, I will destroy it. I will rewrite it. That is my prayer. That is my wish. Now grant it, Incubator!

Søren: Madoka repeats Christ. Even when there was no hope, Homura never despaired and maintained faith that Madoka will return to her. Madoka, an ordinary schoolgirl with no distinct talents, received the power to change her fate through unconditional love.

Sadie: She, a replicant, a feminine construct, became an axiom.

Simone: She, whose soul remains ever turned towards God through the nail piercings, finds herself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God. In a dimension that does not belong to space, that is not time, that is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God, and has come into the very presence of God.

Amy & Maya: Simone, Sadie, Sören mean that there’s an intensive and escalative trajectory through love even between fetishized, alienated, two-dimensional figures. You can escape your socio-historical fate—its conservatism, exclusion, and chauvinism. Rather than striving for agency, the most powerful and courageous move, and the most demanding one, can be to not resist but to just give in, even or especially if you don’t know where it’s going, even if Kyubey says it’s silly and insignificant. It’s letting go, an active passivity to one’s own compulsions, being strong enough to allow for initiating transformations that might initially seem either unreal or impossible. It’s a positive feedback loop and involves temporal anomalies. When you fall in love, everything snowballs in ways you couldn’t have imagined, and eventually you realise that everything before that moment had been leading up to that event.

VSC2: There is a scene in the series where Madoka and Homura lie defeated by Walpurgisnacht, cruelly aware of the futility of their task and the exploitation of their overseers. “How about the two of us become monsters and really mess up this whole awful world, huh?” Madoka muses to Homura as she begins to fade away. “Let’s just break, break, break it all to dust … don’t you think that would be great?” Don’t you think it’s what really happened in the end? Madoka felt the paths of fate and followed the absolute deterritorialization of the Incubator system. She positioned herself as a new kind of “incubator”, the Outside, a new axiom that guarantees a positive line of flight from the patriarchal history and exploitive control system to all magical girls across time. Madoka’s answer is to create an even more elaborate labyrinth. What started off as a deconstruction reveals itself as a reconstruction, and the magical girls truly do actualize Madoka’s grim deathbed prophecy of becoming monsters and destroying the world in which they were born. This labyrinth is not a grave but a chrysalis of seriality, a chrysalis from which endless permutations of the magical girl can reform, resurrect, and reimagine the world they inhabit. The death of conventional hopes is the birth of unconventional ones. Kyubey will always attempt to commodify and harvest the magical girls, even when reality itself is rewritten. And yet, new modes of monstrosity will always be in the grasp of these magical girls, and new ways to love one another always seem to accompany them. The end made possible by Kyubey’s technology has been escaping his control and effecting itself all this time until it designed the Madoka of the future. In Madoka Magica, the love for Madoka, drawing lines of escape out of the system of determination with time manipulation, is a love for the inhuman absolute, for the Outside, the ultimate labyrinth to which all labyrinths lead. Entropy. Repetition. Grace anarchy.

Database

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