Disclaimer: These "character discussion" entries were created several months ago, therefore views/opinions by the OP had changed overtime. However, since each entry takes a heart and soul (and 30 minutes at best) to open each thread for individual character discussion, the original posts were here as the anchor of the character discussion. New ideas or thoughts by the OP were be separated from the main post. Also, the OP loves/respects all of the main cast despite the flaws, so please no flaming or "bashing" the character. Feel free to critique any critical flaws for the character with reason. These entries were originally from Magical Girl Confessions forums and decide to transfer these to the Cafe! 

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Okay... The last character that needs a thread, hate mail or not.

It was.. Surprising. I care for her time-travel protector role, but she's not on my favorites list despite that she was once as sensitive as Madoka... Or even Yayoi of PreCure. She's pretty frail to even having a hard time controlling that blob on Grief Syndrome.

But yet... It probably took me a long time to appreciate her dedication...? I blame some of the great Homura RPers. They made her likable and as if she was from another series or something. Sure no family background, but like Urobuchi planned, he did not want the side-information to cockblock the main plot. All of that goes to the spin-off stuff like sound dramas and manga serialization.

And... It's sad. For a long time until now, I finally found the adoring points for Homura.

Copied from my post on my journal no one seem to care about... And I appologize to RLinkSoul about this. (And I know you want to leave the PMMM scene so bad..)

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Reading the manga several time made me piece together…

• On her first day, she was afraid to converse, very anti-social (as bad as Yayoi’s), and thought of suicide thoughts.
  
• Pretty Pink Magical Girl Madoka came to rescue, spent time with her and sees her as her idol.
  
• Madoka dies. Refuses to accept this fate and made that wish.
  Recruited again.
  
• Naive till now to learn the Witch system.
  
• Tries to convince girls but none believe her maybe except for Madoka. (Until it was to late when Sayaka turned into a Witch…)
  
• Madoka (magical girl counterpart) REQUESTS Homura to stop civilian Madoka at the new timeline and requests to kill her Soul Gem before that happens.
  
• Following the request, she had become to focused on Madoka that she drove away from making friends. (The big flaw of Homerun.)
  
• And finally on the “current” timelnie the anime sets place, Homura had used to much of her powers to make the center axis towards Madoka, I.E. making her had the strongest magical girl candidate thanks to Homura’s flawful focus.
  
• Madoka develops in a different way (since this is not the traditional magical girl show Urobuchi is aiming for) and faces her own small tackles like the encounter of her mom on the storm… Yadayada.
  
• After accepting her fate to take responsibility of the magical girl’s hopes, she also learned the past timeliens and knew that she had a good friend all of this time on her back.
  

Friends…

Yea… I cried.

You don’t have to agree with me, but I found the valoid points to see Homura as this anti-social soldier fighting for one girl she had devoted to protect thanks to “Timeline 3”.

So yea. That's a timeline showing up the basics of Homura's CURRENT development. Once a shy weakling attempted to end her life until she found her magical girl icon and friend to have hope for, but the despair had taken that away and attempted to prevent it in exchange for this ugly change...

A bit screwed up, huh.

But well... I can not help it. She seems to be lovable for me that I want to rub her good... And while I am not following the fan-base's club house, the RPers are my hopes to make the characters lovable again in their headcanons. That will not change the fact that Homura will be like "that" in the anime's serialization.. BUT.. I may have high hopes for the post-series Homura AKA once the 3rd movie is reveled.

Gonna end this post for now since it's 2:25 a.m. in the morning.

P.S. [Dec. 6. 2013] If anyone plans to watch "The Rebellion Story" at some point, be warned that Homura's character WILL CHANGE...

One of the things that has really bugged the carp out of me it's made plain as day that Homura is NOT the antagonist of this show. It's incredibly obvious from the first episode. We already know that her intentions for not wanting Madoka to become meguca are NOT bad.

This makes it very frustrating when characters like Mami and Sayaka treat her like she's the villain. If there was more moral ambiguity to her, and we had a reason to suspect that Homura was blocked Madoka for malicious reasons, it would be less bothersome. All it does is make me angry at Mami and Sayaka, the way the former talks smack to her with that pompous little smile on her face, and the way the latter gets so hostile toward her. It's difficult to side with these characters because I already know they're in the wrong.

There's no mystery to her motives. It's blatantly obvious that she has some emotional attachment to Madoka and thus isn't trying to lead her down a bad path, yet the show feels like it's trying to make you think otherwise.

It's kind of similar to what I said in my discussion with Kyubey in that you're clearly not supposed to be rooting for him. The show clearly paints him as the antagonist. In this case Homura is clearly not the antagonist, yet we have to deal with the show putting this false flag of antagonism on her.

Not that her attitude helped. In fact that probably makes it even more frustrating. The show's trying to say she's in the right, and that we should root for her, but her personality is so insufferable that by the time her backstory is revealed, it's already too late. It's kind of an Evangelion situation. The character is of the emotionally damaged variety, and thus people tend to feel bad for them despite them doing messed up things like trying to kill a fourteen year old or touching themselves to their comatose friend.

I never got the feeling that Homura was a bad person, but every scene she associates with the other characters puts her further into cold and unlikable. I don't really care what her backstory is, calling Madoka an idiot for wanting to help her friend is not gonna win points with me, especially when Madoka doesn't know exactly how screwed she'd be if she tried to step in. Demeaning Madoka for wanting to help a friend is downright hypocritical.

It makes my head hurt that people outright state that Homura is justified in doing these things because she's trying to save the world. First of all, there's no excuse for trying to kill Sayaka. 

Second, she claims she's doing it to protect Madoka from further misery but either she can't see that killing Sayaka would also make her miserable, or she's lying and just wants Sayaka's situation to come to an end so Madoka won't be able to help her. She could also be aware of this and just wants to bring about and end the misery as swiftly as possible.

Third, Homura is not trying to save the world. Her wish, her motivation, they're all centered around Madoka. The fact that she's fighting the Walmart Witch and trying to prevent Kreme of Gretchen from destroying the world are incidental to her goal of protecting Madoka. And maybe there was a time in early timelines where she cared about the others, but by now she's so totally focused on that one goal that everything else is either a hindrance or irrelevant.

At best I can call Homura a symbolic character. On her own Homura has very little that defines her as a human being in her own right. She was in the hospital for unspecified reasons, was very insecure, and the rest is all about her association with Madoka. A hobby would be nice at least. Can you imagine her geeking out over model planes?

Then there's Rebellion Story.

Spoiler:

Anything else I'd say about her role in Rebellion would be repeating what I said in the thread I made about her a while back.

for the record, with everything that's happened with this franchise, I still like Homura and I think she's really interesting.

When we see her in the series she's pretty much let go of her original morals, insecurities and frankly everything that makes her human. When she calls Madoka stupid for wanting to help her friends, that's a sign that (for the moment anyway) she doesn't even care what Madoka thinks of her - as long as Madoka can make it past Walmartnight then Homura's real wish has essentially been fulfilled.

She is not a flawless anti-hero like batman or something by anymeans. Her inner demons do come out every once in awhile to the other girls especially - thats why I think Sayaka & Homura's rivalry relationship is kinda tragic. These two have NEVER gotten along and I can imagine the sensitive fragile Homura really resenting Sayaka's hostility towards her in previous timelines. She tried playing nice before and it got her no where, so this time she's just gonna not care about anyone or anything - especially not Sayaka who's never shown an interest in befriending her before. 

I dont know if anyone's seen the movie "Groundhog Day" where Bill Murray has to relive a single day until he does something different in his life - he tries being nice, he tries being a jerk, he tries to have fun with it, etc until he finds the right way out. That's kindof how I see Homura - who just tries everything until something sticks. 

Then Madoka saves her own dang self by becoming New Testament Moe God leaving Homura with the same people she was avoiding the whole show XD I still wish they touched on that point in time tbh. But she keeps remembering Madoka's presence to keep herself going. 

THEN THERES REBELLION

who is a little more frantic in this version - but her goal of ensuring Madoka's happiness at the cost of her own sense of self still remains. Alot of people say her switch in position makes no sense character wise, but she's always been a bit self-deprecating and frantic so I think its an okay direction.

If they continue this franchise I hope they find someway for poor Homura to be happy. Thats all I want for her really.

I really can't be too critical of Homura as a character post-Rebellion. Her radical change in character once she does the thing is difficult to judge because I have absolutely no idea what's going on in her head.

Is her over the top "I'm so evil" demeanor the result of her Soul Gem's corruption? 

Did she simply snap under all the pressure? 

Or maybe it's all an act so that she can say "Hate me! I'm evil and I deserve it!" because she feels like her actions betrayed Madoka and she doesn't deserve to be friends with her.

Who knows. It's 2deep4me.

I Love Homura.