And while Homura did legitimately love Madoka, her constant resets and loops were because of what she wanted for Madoka. At least, it eventually got there.
My problem with this line of reasoning is that for Homura, her actions have always been dictated by what Madoka directly requests from her. She tries to save Madoka because Madoka didn't want to die. She starts controlling Madoka and not allowing Madoka to make decisions for herself because Madoka requests that Homura stop her self-proclaimed stupidity from allowing Kyubey to trick her. She upholds and protects Madoka's new world, willing to face a fate worse than death because that's what Madoka wanted. Even her betrayal - in her mind - is what Madoka wanted, because according to Madoka's own words during her amnesiac state, she'd never want to leave her friends and family behind because it would make her incredibly sad.
After all, Homura gains nothing from the betrayal. She had the opportunity to ascend to the afterlife and spend the rest of eternity with Madoka. But she rejected it, because the amnesiac Madoka said she would never want to leave her ordinary and happy life, spurring Homura to believe that Madoka's sacrifice was merely out of necessity rather than her true desire. So she rejects the Law of Cycles, taking on the mantle of Madoka's enemy, and constructs a fake world where for as long as the barrier holds, Madoka can live peacefully and normally, cut off from all the things that might link her back to the world of magical girls and incubators.
Misguided and obsessed, perhaps. But selfish is hardly what I'd call it. The true dichotomy between the two is not selflessness and selfishness, but the difference between one who'd try to love and save everyone in the world even if it would make the people they love sad, and one who'd sacrifice everyone - including themselves - in the world because they love one person.
Every wish made in the show, with the exception of Madokas final wish, was a selfish one. That was the point that Kyubey kept trying to hammer in, and why he was so shocked when Madoka broke his "rules".
I also strongly disagree with this. First of all, Kyubey doesn't and wouldn't care for applying such a moralistic rule or having such a thing broken. What shocked Kyubey is that Madoka's wish is itself a paradox that requires the entire universe to be restructured
Remember that in the series, wishes and curses counterbalance each other. A great wish must be balanced out by a correspondingly great curse. Madoka's wish was born out of the combined weight of the negative karma built up through the hundreds of loops Homura's gone through trying to save her. That amount of negative karma should be enough to create the greatest witch that would destroy the planet, and it does in most of the loops. But Madoka's wish defies that - the negative karma accumulated by Homura is miraculously converted into positive karma by Madoka. It's more or less deus ex machina, though I don't mean that in a bad way, since it's intentionally supposed to be a reality-defying miracle, hence Kyubey's shock. "Are you trying to become a god?" he asks, because attempting to rewrite the rules of the universe is more or less what that entails, with Madoka destroying her own witch the moment it's born, something that shouldn't even be physically possible.
This makes much more sense than him being shocked that Madoka wasn't selfish, given the cold and rational nature of his species. He wouldn't care if a wish was self-serving or not, even differentiating between a selfish and selfless wish would be petty nonsense to his race. I believe there is a narrative about selfish and selfless wishes, but it's strictly limited to Kyouko and Sayaka's story. After all, I think it'd be excessively harsh to frame the phrase "I don't want to die" from the addled mind of a little girl bleeding out to death under a car as selfish, it's probable she wasn't even sure what was happening because it was a little alien cat thing that was asking her what she wanted. Meanwhile, Kyouko and Sayaka's wishes were explicitly laid out to have ulterior motives to them; Sayaka wanted Kyousuke to heal so he'd love her, Kyouko wanted her father to be respected so they'd stop being poor and have food. Nevermind the fact that Madoka's original wish was just to save the life of a stray cat, it'd be difficult to tack a narrative of selfishness onto that.
last edited at Jul 25, 2018 6:07PM