The Ethics of Sacrifice

Рет қаралды 245,644

Жыл бұрын

Are the systems of ethics we know and love spelling the end of humankind under our noses?
Madoka Magica is a Gen Urobuchi anime with a shoujo, magical girl surface, but a dark and twisted story underneath worthy of many a video essay or analysis. Following Madoka Kaname, Sayaka Miki, Mami Tomoe, Homura Akemi, and Kyoko Sakura, these magical girls appear to fight evil for the sake of good, but did their mysterious benefactor Kyubey, an Incubator, actually mislead them? While these girls make contrast for their powers (any wish in exchange for a lifetime of fighting witches) the terms aren’t exactly clear, one big reveal of the series. While Madoka, Sayaka, Kyoko, and Homura find despair in this truth, Kyubey walks a seemingly cold utilitarian line; this bad deal is actually helping prevent the death of the universe, and it’s in line with the result of human ethics they observe. This conflict leads to interesting ethical questions in the war of Utilitarianism and Deontology, or Bentham vs Kant, but much more so than ends vs means. It asks how do we communicate ethics, and what if we can’t? How do we judge the value of different lifeforms? Can might be right? And, woven into all of that is a discussion of our own world, and how abiding by our human-centric ethics may be the doom or our species. This anime video essay will explain and analyze these considerations and more, as we ask who is right, magical girls or Incubators?
The Ethics of Sacrifice / Domination / Something | An Anime Video Essay Explaining Madoka Magica
#madokamagica #pmmm #anime #videoessay #professorviral

Пікірлер: 914

@SgtWicket Жыл бұрын

Kyubey uses the idea of consent as a shield. But even humans are aware that consent between two completely imbalanced parties is no consent at all. It can be tantamount to coercion

@Marshallangelo Жыл бұрын

I love how we’re all still talking about Madoka.

@HotaruMitsuki101 Жыл бұрын

I just had a thought. Kyuubei stated that "without us, humans would still be living in caves". So wouldn't that mean that the current way humanity lives is, in a sense, still THEIR fault, as them intervening into our evolution caused us to evolve to think like THEM? Is humanity no better than Incubators because we were evolved to think like that through them?

@000Dragon50000 Жыл бұрын

Interestingly the way Kyubei phrases it, the gender of the magical girls themselves doesn't actually matter all that much, it's purely that they find it more efficient to manipulate teenage girls into despair and thus Witches, likely because of just how sharp the mood swings can be in estrogen-induced puberties. (They phrase it in the show as girls being more emotional but that's a crappy stereotype that hurts people of all genders so I'm giving the show the benefit of the doubt there.)

@aSUGAaddiction Жыл бұрын

It wasnt Mami dying, but Kyubei's revelation of how the wishes work that made this anime go from good to fantastic. This is essential anime viewing to me, up there with Evangelion, Akira, amongst others.

@KingOpenReview Жыл бұрын

I see the whole soul gem thing as nothing but advantageous like Kyubey, but I'd still be mad as Sayaka was for him omitting the detail. If I became a magical girl at like 10, forgetting my soul gem at home with no one around who understood how to help me is absolutely how I'd die.

@000Dragon50000 Жыл бұрын

Also they DO actually have some Incubators who develop emotions, they call it a rare condition, and even then those emotions are nowhere near on the same scale as the ones humans have.

@candescence Жыл бұрын

The omission is strategic, not just for the sake of obtaining agreement. It's because more negative emotions can be harvested when there is no chance for magical girls to discover the truth beforehand and make their choice knowingly and at peace with it. If they reconcile themselves with the necessity of suffering, then they are suffering a little bit less.

@angeldude101 Жыл бұрын

"Do you feel any guilt or remorse over the livestock you consume?" Yes. Yes I do. The only reason I'm not vegan is because I have such difficulty eating many vegetables that I fear I'd starve to death if I tried that. And I want to live, but not to feed to system. I want to live so I can learn, share what I learn, and watch the world in hopes that the it will eventually become like the one I can imagine. I honestly believe Kyubey when he says that he treats us better than we treat livestock, and in that it's hard for me to fault him. Even knowing everything I do, I'd still make the contract if for no other reason than to be able to persist with lower maintenance. (Boy do I hate maintenance; both for the things I have responsibility for and for my own body. There is little more infuriating to me than doing the same tasks knowing I'll have to do the exact same thing the next day or the next week.) Somewhat hilariously, one of the aspects of "the [world] I can imagine" is transhumanism and what could potentially be done to one's body. Little would I know in-universe that that would already be fulfilled simply by the contract itself. The truth of the Soul Gem is not just not a downside to me, but actively a selling point. (You can bet that I would do tests disconnecting my Soul Gem from my body to see if I could regain consciousness in that state.)

@Kagomai15 Жыл бұрын

I swear you're saying Monika sometimes

@williambarnes5023 Жыл бұрын

To be fair, none of the wishes in Madoka were monkey's paws.

@k-ondoomer Жыл бұрын

Kyubey Is easily my favorite antagonist in media. There's a bad guy, then there's the realization of cosmic insignificance in the face of something far beyond our understanding, something that has no regard for our morality not out of injustice or spite... but out of a need to survive on a bigger scale than we can fathom... it's no diffrent than us destroying an ant nest to build a house. Madoka magica hits lovecraftian horror better than most lovecraftian media I've read lmao

@JaMaAuWright Жыл бұрын

There's one thing to note about Kyubey's understanding of humanity. Kyubey has been shown on multiple occasions to have a level of understanding of humans. He knows what to say and when to say it to coax the girls into making wishes, and has a keen ability to show up when they're most likely to make a wish. Any further lack of understanding can only be considered Kyubey's responsibility at this point.

@Nizati

I love how teenage angst is considered so powerful, it can reverse entropy itself.

@dracocrusher Жыл бұрын

I do want to point out one really interesting line where Kyubey mentions that "Emotions were seen as a mental disorder", directly implying that at some point their race used to have emotions before they decided that emotional responses simply got in the way, leading them to surgically or genetically remove their own capacity for emotion to focus on pure logic.

@Pudding404

Even in an audience perspective, the incubators are an amazing antagonist.

@elysainempire4628 Жыл бұрын

Also in magia record shows Kyubey making sure each girl gets the most out of their wish, even asking clarifying questions to get the desired wish. And in one of nagisa's transformation we see the true form of Kyubey, an eldrich like creature that made of eyes and connected tissue appearing like a neural network. And soft confirms Kyubey to be a single consciousness

@stellastarfield1111 Жыл бұрын

I think it's interesting how the age of the girls wasn't mentioned here.

@xXJennismsXx Жыл бұрын

One thing that’s taken for a fact in this video that I think is a mistake is taking Kyubey at their word in regards to how the incubators supposedly help humanity.