The Uncontrolled Girl and the Calculated Demon
On sexist cinematic tropes and Puella Magica: The Rebellion Story
While watching X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), I had to sit through many — very many — scenes of Jean Grey unable to control her budding psychic powers, culminating in her issuing a banshee scream that disintegrates the film’s villain, Blue Prosthesis Man. The film makes sure to remind us that in time Jean will turn into Dark Phoenix, which I think is some kind of evil supermutant. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen this before so many, many times.
What do Scarlet Witch, Ciri, and Jean Grey have in common apart from being white? They’re all young women born with incredible powers and, to a one, they are unable to control it. Ciri fares better than most, but like her superhero compatriots, she is just not very good at keeping this under the lid. Captain America: Civil War spends so much of its runtime on how Scarlet Witch caused unintended destruction (to faceless brown people, mainly) because her control of her power is poor, and so much of Apocalypse is devoted to Jean being scared of her powers, and accidentally melting her bedroom once — so much so that she looks lost, sad, and confused for the entire film (less the character and more the actor, but one would think some of it was in the directing). These young women, in moments of anger or grief, unleash their power and inevitably cause friendly fire. They are frightened of what they have, call it a curse rather than a gift, and want nothing more than to be divested of it. They are frightened of their own emotions, because if they run a little too strong, someone they love might get hurt.
It’s pretty strange how, in X-Men: Apocalypse, Jean Grey’s terror of her own power is done with a straight face while the other dangerous supermutant Magneto has no issue controlling his powers even when we see him explicitly channel his grief and rage into leveling every city on Earth to rubble. Almost as if Jean Grey’s and Ciri’s stories (or River Tam’s, or Matou Sakura’s, or…) are about how feminine emotions are volatile and scary, but male ones — so often caused by women being fridged — are perfectly fine.
Rebellious Stories
There is a great deal to criticize in the Puella Magica franchise, especially its (as of this writing, final) installment, Rebellion Story (2013). I’ve written before on how the transformation from magical girl to witch is caused by very reasonable, understandable anger when society fails a girl, and on how as a whole the alien incubator is a good stand-in for patriarchal control. It’s this trope — girl emotions are scary and turn them evil — played fairly straight, until it isn’t. I argue that, in Rebellion Story, Homura’s transformation from stoic child soldier to demon-god does not come from explosive emotion but from desperate calculation.
Throughout the series, she embodies calculation, her first appearance that of the mysterious, aloof, dark stranger. This is expressed even in her magic, the ability to pause-and-play time, and execute precise destruction. She alone seems to know everything, the secrets behind the making of magical girls, the real story of the alien incubators. We do discover, yes, that she earned her knowledge from brutal experience and that at the core, she’s motivated by love (that, as far as we can tell, is unrequited). Homura’s love is not platonic — it is time and again portrayed, with increasing explicitness, as romantic and sexual. It’s easy to think of her demonic apotheosis as merely a homophobic play of the ‘psycho lesbian’ trope: the girl who wants another girl so badly she becomes a demon in order to possess the object of her desire.
That’s not what it feels like, though, to me. I may be reading against the grain, even counter-factual, but the argument that Puella Magica Magi Madoka is inherently misogynistic (‘because it presents girls’ emotions as unstable and dangerous’) has never convinced me entirely. If anything, this is a show that respects the decisions and emotions of its female characters.
The status quo in Rebellion Story is sequential to a universe rewrite at the hands of Madoka-as-god, but during her ascension Madoka forgot an important detail: that the cause of the curses and destruction in her world remains, and Homura perhaps compounds that error by letting the incubators know the real story — not anticipating that Madoka rewrote the world but didn’t rewrite the incubators’ nature, their drive and greed for energy with which to stave off entropy. When it all comes out, Homura is stuck in an impossible position. She has already been tainted by grief, en route to becoming a witch, and so with the information available to her she chooses the path that would least harm Madoka: she chooses to be executed within her pocket world, so that the incubators can never touch Madoka-as-god, observe this ‘phenomenon’ that they can then reverse-engineer and control. When that fails to work — when her friends refuse to let her die a witch — Homura does what seems like the only option.
Once she’s seized power, becoming Madoka’s equal, she sets out to correct their shared mistakes: rewriting the incubators, putting them under her control, resetting the world (once more). It’s arguable that she does try to give her former friends a life they missed out on, just being young women, being together, just like the illusory life they enjoyed for a while in her maze (Mami: ‘I’ve never been this happy’). It’s unhealthy. This is a sickness, and the cracks are already showing. The power Homura acquires is a lonely and bitter thing, and if she has worked to isolate Madoka, she herself is as isolated. We are shown a strange, halved world warped by the absence of Madoka-as-god; we are told in no uncertain terms that the Madoka Homura gets (and memory-wipes) is not the whole thing and that inevitably, the divine Madoka will reemerge.
It sets up room for more installments, which I hear may be a thing in the near future, but I also appreciate that at the time Homura genuinely has no other choice. She wanted to die to protect Madoka (whom she’d never meet again if she perishes as a witch), and that was thwarted. Once she accepts Madoka’s salvation she could live with Madoka again, the same way Sayaka and Nagisa are seen existing as distinct individuals within the ‘law of cycle’, but she would also expose Madoka to the incubators’ control.
The control Madoka sacrificed herself to break.
Unlike Jean Grey, Homura consciously and intentionally becomes what she is. It is not because she can’t control her powers or her emotions. It is a very exactly done action, tragic and damaging, but it’s something she chooses. In that Homura has much more in common with tragic male figures like Magneto than she ever does with Jean Grey, Scarlet Witch, or Ciri. And unlike them, she is not rescued by men. If there is redemption for Akemi Homura — insofar as she needs redeeming — it will come from female agency, from her friends who, we hope, can find it in them to understand and perhaps forgive her one more time.
