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No. 33392
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The idea here seems to be that Madoka is appreciated because of its intellectual insight, and that this is largely not justified. Neither claim is correct, but let's start with the first one. Madoka has the production and direction values, not to mention great moe characters. Add to that the emotional nature of its storytelling, and Madoka already deserves to be remembered. But going deep into what makes the characters so good is a lot of work, and many that only feel the moe but can't really think about it will take the easy way out to justify their love, which is saying the anime is "deep". It's a simple claim, and in casual conversation it's quite hard to falsify. But I want to stress this: if these people loved Madoka for intellectual reasons, as OP seems to believe, they'd talk about Camus or Nietzsche instead of Madoka.
Second, when it comes to whether or not Madoka's intellectual side is "substantive enough", OP is right to disqualify himself right off the bat. Tl;dr is that Madoka has some good commentary to add to the first story arc of Sailor Moon, but the conclusion of its thought isn't much to celebrate. It's the problem that is more interesting, and even then, it's core dates from the early nineties.
1) Mahou Shoujo was about self-sacrifice even before Sailor Moon, but SM managed to choose the exact right points to focus on. Those are: what constitutes a "pure heart", the isolation the heroines experience, and the absolute and absolutely silent manner of their sacrifice. It's a classic tragic story, except for the absence of corruption - the girls simply die. And here we see the first thing Madoka has to add: truly classical tragedies show how the protagonist is heroic but succumbs to evil and self-destructs.
2) The second move Madoka makes is a little bolder: it forgets how SM was retconned to have a happy ending, and asks what the implications would have been if the story of SM would have ended there. Should we take it to mean that in times of great danger, some misfits give their lives for people who ostracized them in the first place, and that's it? Is there no way to escape this fate? Ultimately, Madoka deems existence itself tragic - the only way out is to go outside "existence". Going even further, you could say t
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