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In the book The Very Soil: An Unauthorized Critical Study of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Jed A. Blue addresses that the main characters of the series suffers from different types of depressive disorders, and called out on Homura's lack of affect. Writing for The Girl at the End of Time: Temporality, (P)remediation, and Narrative Freedom in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Forrest Greenwood argues that Homura "assumes that she is playing a conventional real time game with a save/load function, recursive at the microlevel but teleological at the macrolevel, when in truth she herself navigating the temporal architecture of a branching narrative" and notes that each of Homura's narrative threads "ends in tragedy." Greenwood described her as a "doe-eyed jihadi bent on liberating Madoka from Kyubey's contract." Greenwood also states that while each of the series' character's design has themes that conveys their character, and that Homura is "reserved" and "slightly unsteady", these traits of the characters actually "endure nightmarish tragedies and betrayals in their canonical narrative arcs." In Japanese Aesthetics and Anime: The Influence of Tradition, Dani Cavallaro writes that Homura's initial unusual persona is "one of the most unusual twist to the norm proposed" by the series; and although she initially appears to be "Madoka's adversary or even a witch", the reason behind her effort "is not enmity but rather a selfless desire to protect [Madoka] from a destiny which [Homura] knows to be tantamount not to a supreme bonus but rather to a poisoned chalice."