Name: Paul Anderson Contact Info: Gmail: kohaku.river626@gmail.com AIM: aWondrousWorld Plurk: miyazaki895 Other Characters Played: N/A Preferred Apartment: None
Character Name: Kyouko Sakura Canon: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Canon Point: End of episode 7 Background/History:Here!
Personality: Kyouko Sakura, paradoxically, embodies the worst and best of magical girls. The traditional magical girl is heroic and selfless, and indeed several of the characters in Puella Magi Madoka Magica partially or fully embody this troupe. Kyouko, however, is self-serving. She uses her powers for her own good, and doesn't care if her actions or inactions get other people hurt in the process. She will do anything she must to survive. But while in another context this would position her as a villain or anti-hero, under Kyubey's rules she is successful. Kyouko is ruthless: she actively challenges magical girls so that the strongest one continues to fight. She attacks only witches (not the less-powerful familiars), so that she gets healing grief seeds which allow her to continue fighting. Upon Kyouko's arrival to the series, she represents a near-perfect cog in a system which Our Heroes (Sayaka and Madoka) have only just begun to understand is far less heroic or altruistic than they thought. The other girls, particularly Sayaka, dislike her selfishness and crudeness almost immediately.
But Kyouko's personality is also more complicated than they originally realized.
Kyouko grew up in a religious household, with a preacher father. She looked up to him, and while she may have been a little bratty, she believed in the ideas of good and evil. The fact that nobody else would listen to her father, to the point where her family struggled to have enough to eat, angered her. When the opportunity came for her to make a wish, she asked Kyubey for people to give her father a chance: because she wanted to help someone she loved, and because she believed in him. She began her magical girl career as an agent of good, a vigilante to fight evil in its physical form, just as her father fought the evil in people's souls. And she trained under and became friends with Mami Tomoe, another magical girl who similarly believed they were forces of good fighting against evil.
The rules of magical girls have a close relationship with the laws of thermodynamics. Kyubey's species devised the system in order to counter the second law: the universe's entropic energy loss and eventual decay. Less obvious is the implementation of the first law: the amount of hope and despair in the world balance each other out. This principle hit Kyouko particularly hard. Her father discovered her role in bringing crowds to see him, and condemned her as a witch. Then he killed her entire family, himself included, leaving only Kyouko alive. Her wish for the good of another brought more despair than had existed in the first place. Kyouko withdrew into herself, vowed to use her powers for herself alone, broke off her friendship with Mami, and continued to defend her home town. The veil of selfishness she drew over herself was an assumed one, a coping mechanism, a mode of survival in what she now perceived as a harsh world. The girl who fought for others became the girl who fought only for herself.
Kyouko, then, is a jaded individual by the time she meets Sayaka and Madoka. She's also a girl extremely invested in her own interests. She won't do something if it won't benefit her. She doesn't fight Homura because she knows she wouldn't win, but she does stop Sayaka from destroying a familiar before it grows to a grief-seed-dropping witch, so that she can pick up the reward later. Kyouko hates what she perceives as a mistake in her wish to Kyubey. Her attempts to move past it don't erase her sense of self-loathing, though; she expresses this by being extremely rude to others, and through her temper; when provoked with regards to the death of Mami, her old friend and mentor, she snaps. And she retains a certain amount of trauma from her family's time of starvation -- she finds comfort in having something in her mouth, which is why she's always eating. Also, she hates when anybody wastes food.
Upon discovering that her soul has been extracted from her body, she takes it in stride, considering it to be just another punishment for her previous actions. She has enough sympathy for Sayaka, who takes the news rather more poorly, to try to convince her to live as she does, particularly given Sayaka's choice to wish for the good of someone else. But Sayaka surprises her. Even knowing what Kyouko does, that all good deeds are punished eventually, Sayaka still chooses to fight single-mindedly for other people. This surprises Kyouko, making her consider that perhaps her vow had been at least somewhat misguided. And that's where she finds herself in Haven: still jaded and traumatized by her own background, but a little confused by Sayaka's choices, and reconsidering her path of complete selfishness.
Kyouko Sakura // Puella Magi Madoka Magica // Reserved // 1/?
Contact Info: Gmail: kohaku.river626@gmail.com
AIM: aWondrousWorld
Plurk:
Other Characters Played: N/A
Preferred Apartment: None
Character Name: Kyouko Sakura
Canon: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Canon Point: End of episode 7
Background/History: Here!
Personality: Kyouko Sakura, paradoxically, embodies the worst and best of magical girls. The traditional magical girl is heroic and selfless, and indeed several of the characters in Puella Magi Madoka Magica partially or fully embody this troupe. Kyouko, however, is self-serving. She uses her powers for her own good, and doesn't care if her actions or inactions get other people hurt in the process. She will do anything she must to survive. But while in another context this would position her as a villain or anti-hero, under Kyubey's rules she is successful. Kyouko is ruthless: she actively challenges magical girls so that the strongest one continues to fight. She attacks only witches (not the less-powerful familiars), so that she gets healing grief seeds which allow her to continue fighting. Upon Kyouko's arrival to the series, she represents a near-perfect cog in a system which Our Heroes (Sayaka and Madoka) have only just begun to understand is far less heroic or altruistic than they thought. The other girls, particularly Sayaka, dislike her selfishness and crudeness almost immediately.
But Kyouko's personality is also more complicated than they originally realized.
Kyouko grew up in a religious household, with a preacher father. She looked up to him, and while she may have been a little bratty, she believed in the ideas of good and evil. The fact that nobody else would listen to her father, to the point where her family struggled to have enough to eat, angered her. When the opportunity came for her to make a wish, she asked Kyubey for people to give her father a chance: because she wanted to help someone she loved, and because she believed in him. She began her magical girl career as an agent of good, a vigilante to fight evil in its physical form, just as her father fought the evil in people's souls. And she trained under and became friends with Mami Tomoe, another magical girl who similarly believed they were forces of good fighting against evil.
The rules of magical girls have a close relationship with the laws of thermodynamics. Kyubey's species devised the system in order to counter the second law: the universe's entropic energy loss and eventual decay. Less obvious is the implementation of the first law: the amount of hope and despair in the world balance each other out. This principle hit Kyouko particularly hard. Her father discovered her role in bringing crowds to see him, and condemned her as a witch. Then he killed her entire family, himself included, leaving only Kyouko alive. Her wish for the good of another brought more despair than had existed in the first place. Kyouko withdrew into herself, vowed to use her powers for herself alone, broke off her friendship with Mami, and continued to defend her home town. The veil of selfishness she drew over herself was an assumed one, a coping mechanism, a mode of survival in what she now perceived as a harsh world. The girl who fought for others became the girl who fought only for herself.
Kyouko, then, is a jaded individual by the time she meets Sayaka and Madoka. She's also a girl extremely invested in her own interests. She won't do something if it won't benefit her. She doesn't fight Homura because she knows she wouldn't win, but she does stop Sayaka from destroying a familiar before it grows to a grief-seed-dropping witch, so that she can pick up the reward later. Kyouko hates what she perceives as a mistake in her wish to Kyubey. Her attempts to move past it don't erase her sense of self-loathing, though; she expresses this by being extremely rude to others, and through her temper; when provoked with regards to the death of Mami, her old friend and mentor, she snaps. And she retains a certain amount of trauma from her family's time of starvation -- she finds comfort in having something in her mouth, which is why she's always eating. Also, she hates when anybody wastes food.
Upon discovering that her soul has been extracted from her body, she takes it in stride, considering it to be just another punishment for her previous actions. She has enough sympathy for Sayaka, who takes the news rather more poorly, to try to convince her to live as she does, particularly given Sayaka's choice to wish for the good of someone else. But Sayaka surprises her. Even knowing what Kyouko does, that all good deeds are punished eventually, Sayaka still chooses to fight single-mindedly for other people. This surprises Kyouko, making her consider that perhaps her vow had been at least somewhat misguided. And that's where she finds herself in Haven: still jaded and traumatized by her own background, but a little confused by Sayaka's choices, and reconsidering her path of complete selfishness.