lol, and I thought I posted a rant
tbh I'll admit I was probably too quick to judge re Sayaka and I wasn't really paying attention to her storyline, esp the conclusion. but what you said does sound convincing, haha, and I'll be rewatching it (while getting Stone to watch it) sometime soon so, hmm, my opinion will probably change. and I guess in a similar way I liked the tragedy of Homura's arc - that you have no choice but to keep fighting, because even if trying raises the cost of failure, even if you don't even know if there's a way out etc, it's better than the alternative. lol I guess I am weird and sadistic somehow and love seeing my characters put through hell and back :<
as for characterization maybe I'm just drawing too much on unimportant details, but I liked the contrast between the passive cry-cry Madoka in the present timeline and the glimpses we got of bold outgoing magical girl Madoka in the others - specifically how, instead of taking a shortcut by becoming a magical girl, she kinda had to grow up the hard way (that "this is my wish" speech ahhhhhh <3) by watching her friends suffer and stuff. I'm not terribly fond of Mami either really, but there's at least some depth to her character - pretending to be the stereotypical happy magical girl heroine while being all lonely and suffering, and all that culminating in her death due to Madoka's offer of friendship
lol I've heard that term thrown around so much, but I don't get what exactly it means to be a "deconstruction" tbh..? though for what it's worth, I think where the show most challenged stereotypes etc was that it showed that being a magical girl is basically suffering and despair. then again its underlying message imo is that despite all that, one should still hope, so at the end of the day I'd say it isn't an inversion of the magical girl genre
re the ending, it wasn't mindblowingly jaw-droppingly awesome or anything, but it was cute and sweetly sad, and so I liked it on a purely superficial feel-good level I guess :p I would've liked it to have resolved the controversial issues it brought up (Kyubey's "cattle" morality, in particular) but that's kinda peripheral to the main theme of the story, and I suppose stories like these don't always need to offer a resolution and solution to everything; just pointing out the question and getting readers/viewers to think on it is enough..?
plus I kinda fanwanked a sort of alternative ending idea in my head that if they were maintaining the aspect of the old system where puella magi die when they lose all hope and fall into despair, Homura would never be able to die because the thought of dying would mean she'd be reunited with Madoka, which would fill her with hope and happiness again
(i like being cruel to my characters OKAY)
also I was talking with a friend about it and what he dislikes about the ending is that it violates the central consistent principle of the show - that there's a balance to the universe, and with happiness must come sadness; with hope, despair etc. but Madoka somehow managed to rewrite the rules of the universe such that there was a huge net positive - the amount of suffering she erased could not possibly have been enough for a single individual to bear. was that anything like what you meant by cop-out? regardless, haha, I haven't managed to come up a good response to that. I find it v convincing actually (my opinions are too malleable, lol). all I can say, I guess, is that it goes back to their main message, that it's always right to hope - Madoka makes it possible for us to have hope and be idealistic without it coming back to bite us in the butt
