“…to experience is to invent…” – DB 119

The first time I saw Rebellion was in a movie theater in December of 2013. I had a pretty intense emotional reaction to the end of the film: I left the theater feeling incredibly angry, and to shake the feeling out I jogged insanely to a bus I knew I could have caught by walking. Though I wasn’t angry at the movie, as I later learned many were. This article is mostly an attempt to figure out why exactly and in what sense I was angry.

A popular sentiment, expressed even in discussions of their intent by Shinbou and Urobuchi, was that the ending of the film was emotionally ambiguous. Homura’s final actions were meant to be holistically confusing, with their motivations, methods, consequences, moral status, apparent dissonance with her arc through the rest of the film, and even what they actually were left mostly unexplained. While Madoka’s apotheosis in the TV series was conveniently and accurately explained by an onlooking Kyuubey, here the chorus was left as ignorant as the audience, with little explanation provided beyond Homura’s now-memetic citation of “love” and some cryptic taunting of Kyuubey and Sayaka. The final question of whether the end of Rebellion was “good or bad” for its characters was left intentionally unanswered, despite the film’s POV character going from an eager comrade fighting alongside her closest friend to that same friend’s self-proclaimed theological antithesis.



This ambiguity is well-reflected in audience reception (mission accomplished!), where the starkest divisions formed around interpretation of Homura’s final actions. Whether they were good or bad and for whom they were good or bad for, whether they were justified or adequately explained, whether they were in character or constituted a poorly-justified eleventh hour heel-turn, and what they even amounted to are all common differences in interpretation that tend to determine differences in enjoyment of the film as a whole. Interpretation of Homura’s actions thus tends to constitute interpretation of the worth of the entire film, in evaluations of the extent to which they meaningfully contribute to the thematic perspective of the TV series or to which they betray that perspective and render Rebellion a pointlessly pretty and embarrassingly indulgent complication of the neatly tied narrative bow that was the end of Madoka (TV).

In this post I’ll offer my interpretation of both the themes and literal events of Rebellion. A close qualitative tie between interpretation of Homura’s actions and the value of Rebellion is a trend I’m not really going to stray from. However, a tight interweaving of world-building minutiae, art direction, and broad thematic goals was a well-discussed hallmark of the Madoka Magica television series, and I think this strength was carried through to, and even intensified in, Rebellion. Explaining the thematic significance of Homura’s actions requires properly contextualizing them, and so this article is wider in scope than an analysis of Homura’s actions, the end of Rebellion, or even Rebellion as a standalone film. This article is an analysis of Madoka as a single property, including the TV series and Rebellion, aimed towards explicating the meaning of Homura’s actions at the current end of the franchise.



Rebellion is a pretty dense movie, and coming up with anything coherent to say about my reaction to it has (obviously) taken awhile. Ultimately, to best articulate my understanding of the film’s thematic and narrative nuances, I found it necessary to frame both in the philosophical ideas of a person it quotes throughout: Friedrich Nietzsche.

Cool mustache idiot.

Some disclaimers before we begin. First, I am not a Nietzsche scholar and I don’t know German. I have read a lot of Nietzsche in translation but there are innumerable people better versed in his writing than I am, perhaps among the readers of this article. If you are particularly familiar with his ideas then feel free to call me on clumsy or blatantly incorrect interpretation. If you’re not, don’t take my use of his ideas as constituting a canonical or even presumably correct interpretation of them. I will be picking out only a half dozen or so that I think are most directly relevant to (and that are occasionally directly referenced by) Rebellion and Madoka (TV). Additionally, I do think there’s a lot of basically false analyses in Nietzsche’s writing, especially with regards to the historical ubiquity and centrality of the psychological phenomena he exposits, and in my reading he blatantly contradicts himself on multiple points throughout his corpus: do not take my use of his ideas and analyses as an endorsement of either as correct or reflective of my opinions. I am going to be using my own specific reading of a number of elements of Nietzsche’s philosophical vocabulary mostly as a way to explain my interpretation of Rebellion’s thematic goals while not tying myself to any kind of coherent reading of an overall “Nietzschean philosophy”.



Secondly, I should point out that while I’ll be looking at the imagery in Rebellion through a Nietzschean lens, there is a more clearly intentional meaning and inspiration behind most of that same imagery. The design of Homulilly and the interior of Homura’s Soul Gem, and the way these design choices intersect with certain plot beats, are pretty unambiguously inspired by E.T.A Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The use of a piece of Romantic German literature as a foundation for its aesthetic and plot is something Rebellion shares with its predecessor, though I think the relationship between Rebellion and Nutcracker is actually much tighter than the one between Madoka (TV) and Goethe’s Faust (the roles of “mouse king” and “nutcracker” are more or less diegetically labelled in Rebellion, for example). I will thus be placing Rebellion’s imagery into a Nietzschean framework it was likely not intentionally placed in by its creators, but in which I think it serendipitously thrives at conveying the film’s broadest thematic goals. The thematic congruence of Rebellion with Nietzsche and Nutcracker is not entirely surprising, given Nietzsche’s active engagement with German Romanticism and his personal association with some of its key figures – there is a meta-textual joke in quoting Nietzsche throughout the sequel to your Faust allegory, and a number of interesting overlaps in the imagery used by Nietzsche and Rebellion. Were I more familiar with Nutcracker and Faust I might attempt to link my reading of the film more directly to Inu Curry, Shinbou, and Urobuchi’s intentions, but sadly I’m not.

Lastly, while Wraith Arc provides a canonical explanation of many things in Rebellion, I will be ignoring that explanation. I will not be using Wraith Arc not because I think it’s extra-canonical, or because I think it lessens Rebellion, or because I think my interpretation is better, but because it is a pretty elaborate explanation that I did not have access to when I first watched Rebellion and explaining my feelings upon that first viewing is the purpose of this article. Less tactfully, I have enough on my hands without adding pocket dimensions, more Homuras, and soul-eating avatars of Buddhism to the mix.

A not-so-unintentional consequence of this reading is a framing of the end of Rebellion as not only in-character for Homura and thematically coherent with the TV series, but as a necessary finale in a story that Rebellion highlights as thematically incomplete. I argue that Rebellion frames the completed entirety of Madoka Magica as a story about a struggle for personal autonomy and existential liberation that reached a liminal but necessary state at the end of Madoka (TV). The target of the titular rebellion is herein located not in Madoka or Kyuubey but in the reduction of the self to an object to be measured, manipulated, evaluated, and ultimately determined from without. Homura emerges as a (mostly) unambiguous hero, and Rebellion as a mechanically and thematically necessary end to her arc. So if you’re in a hyper-specific mood for some long-winded Nietzsche-flavoured Homura apologia, read on.

Rune, production material, and interview translations are taken from https://wiki.puella-magi.net/Main_Page

A: The Antichrist, TL R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books 2003

BGE: Beyond Good and Evil, TL R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books 2003

DB: Daybreak, TL R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press 2014

EH: Ecce Homo, TL Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books 1989

GS: The Gay Science, TL Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books 1974

GM: On The Genealogy of Morals, TL Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books 1989

TL: On Truth and Untruth, TL. Taylor Carman, Harper Collins 2010



TSZ: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, TL R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books 2003

TW: Twilight of the Idols, TL R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books 1990

WTP: The Will to Power, TL Taylor Carman, Harper Collins 2010

Part 1: The Jargon of the Wish-granting Business

Before I talk about Nietzsche, the TV series, or Rebellion, I need to clarify some nuances of Madoka’s magical girl system. This is necessary because some of the finer details of the magical concepts in Madoka are necessary for understanding both the literal events of Rebellion and for producing the Niezschean reading of them that I hope to provide.

Madoka (TV) was notable for its dramatically compelling exposition of the mechanics of its central conceit. A steady drip of new information about the nature of the show’s magical girl system takes up a large portion of the show’s plot, and the resulting progressive recontextualization of magic is generally what people refer to when they refer (rightly or wrongly) to Madoka as a “deconstruction” of the magical girl genre. The slow transformation of what it means to be a magical girl is written to mostly dramatic ends in the TV series: we learn about magic at the same pace and with the same increasing horror as Madoka Kaname, the show’s central POV character. As a consequence of this narrative structure, by the time the viewer has a complete picture of the show’s magical girl system it’s already on the verge of fundamental change as the story enters its climax. New mechanics are regularly introduced up to the end of the last episode and the viewer scarcely gets a chance to take in the entirety of the system before its radical transformation.

I thus found it useful while thinking about how to talk about Rebellion to collate these mechanics out of the context of the show’s dramatic structure. What follows is a glossary of some of the specific conceptual foundations of magic in Madoka that I think are most important to understanding the plot, and what I take to be the thematic import, of Rebellion.



Karmic Destiny, Magical Potential, and the Objectified Soul: What Happens When a Girl Contracts?

Contract terms, episode 2

Contract terms, episode 6



The answer to this question is actually not wholly clarified until the penultimate episode of the series, despite many dramatic revelations about the nature of contracts throughout. Here I’ll attempt to explain contracts in the reverse order of the series’ explanation, starting from their most obscure and foundational elements.

A magical girl’s “magical potential” denotes the amount of magic power that will be created when she contracts. The size of this amount positively determines the size of the Soul Gem the contract will produce and the upper limit of the difficulty of the wish the girl can have granted in exchange for contracting, though Soul Gem size/available magic power is also influenced (in a never explained sense) by the kind of wish the girl makes. The size of a girl’s “magical potential” is itself positively determined by “the weight of the karmic destiny she bears”, making the “weight” of a girl’s karmic destiny the basic determinant of how powerful she is or would be. Kyuubey doesn’t explicate what “karmic destiny” is (let alone how one would go about “weighing” it), and the term comes up in only two scenes: in episode 11, when Kyuubey explains the growth of Madoka’s magical potential, and at the beginning of episode 12, when it talks about her wish and its implications. Unfortunately, the show’s notion of karmic destiny is essential to my interpretation of Rebellion. I’ll therefore need to look quite closely at the aforementioned scenes to try and figure out what exactly Kyuubey is saying when it talks about karmic destiny and its “weight” as the determinant of the amount of magical power available to a prospective magical girl.

In the first scene of episode 11 Kyuubey posits two individually necessary, jointly sufficient conditions that together comprise a theory meant to explain the growth in Madoka’s magical potential – though Kyuubey makes no great effort to delineate the two during its exposition. Presumably because it is using Homura’s reaction to the theory as a test of its truth, Kyuubey devotes more emphasis to the more emotionally impactful condition: the “convergence” of each timeline Homura visited “around Madoka Kaname” as a “side effect” of Homura’s time travel magic, a proposition which frames Homura as responsible for the perpetually increasing destruction caused by Kriemhild Gretchen in each timeline. The meaning of any single part of this idea is rather opaque, and no aspect of it is ever further elaborated on. Regarding the mechanics of Homura’s time travel Urobuchi confessed he “did not think it through very thoroughly”¹, and I myself know nothing about speculative time travel physics, so I’ll resist the powerful urge to speculate about the meaning of “timeline convergence”…to a degree. There is an interesting conclusion about the relationship between Homura’s time travel and Madoka’s magical potential that I think this part of Kyuubey’s explanation implies and that I want to explicate before moving on to the other condition in the theory.

By establishing timeline hopping as the basis of Homura’s time travel magic Kyuubey rules out some of the typical possibilities for how her magic might have otherwise worked. Rather than traveling backwards a month on the universal timeline or rearranging the universe’s matter into the positions it occupied a month prior, Homura jumped between distinct timelines and their corresponding universes. Or maybe rather than jumping between extant timelines, Homura created new timelines and universes with each jump: this is not an ambiguity I’m going to try and decisively resolve. Whether newly created or merely arrived in, the timelines Homura traveled between in some sense “converged” as a necessary condition for the growth of Madoka’s potential. Since Madoka’s potential likely increased with each of Homura’s nearly one hundred loops (as seen in the growth of Kriemhild Gretchen with each loop in episode 10), the “timeline convergence” must have occurred each time Homura traveled between timelines, rather than in arbitrary fits and starts or all at once when her magic use passed some physical threshold. If every instance of time travel caused an instance of convergence, then each time Homura jumped from one timeline to another the timeline she left must have “converged” with the one she arrived in, and her journey thereby transitively linked every timeline it crossed together.

(extremely “Puella in somnio” voice): Linked…for example…like a chain….

Homura’s time travel magic is thus powerful in a way that it wouldn’t be if it worked by merely turning back time. By crossing between timelines she apparently manipulated the physical relationships between entire universes and, to some obscure degree, removed their distinctions as plural entities. There are actually a couple of ways in which the distinctions between the different timelines Homura visited collapsed that don’t require speculative quantum physics to point out – only a bit of investigation into the meaning of causal statements and “timelines”.

A temporal relationship between a cause and its effect is generally taken to be intrinsic to both concepts: first comes the cause, then comes its effect. In this interpretation the truth of a causal statement like “X caused Y” depends not only on X and Y having actually occurred, but on X having occurred prior to Y; a truth claim about a causal statement is here also a claim that its cause occurred prior to its effect. If “timeline” in Madoka is meant to refer to the chronologically ordered set of all events in a universe, then the time at which any given event occurred must be given as its position on a timeline, else it cannot have occurred in a universe and so cannot have occurred. If the time at which an event occurred is synonymous with its position on the timeline it occurred in, then temporal statements like “X occurred before Y”, as statements about the times that two events occurred relative to one another, are statements about the relative positions of X and Y on a timeline, here that X appears earlier on the timeline than Y. This means that relative temporal measurements of events in separate timelines are incoherent: it does not make sense to say that an event in timeline A occurred before or after an event in timeline B if “before” and “after” are descriptions of the positions of two events relative to one another on a timeline.

Since causal statements usually imply the temporal priority of their causes to their effects, causal statements that include a cause in one timeline and an effect in another inherit the incoherence described above. This raises a significant problem for Kyuubey’s theory, because that is exactly the kind of statement it makes when it posits Homura’s actions in other timelines as a necessary causal condition for the size of Madoka’s potential in the current timeline. Thankfully, the actions it cites as causally relevant are “traveling through time and thereby converging each timeline visited”, which, depending on how “timeline convergence” is interpreted, can solve this problem.

Homura’s time travel can be coherently considered a part of the causally relevant past of the current timeline if the “convergence” caused by her time travel resulted in the inclusion of each timeline she visited into the past of the timeline she arrived in. If Homura was constructing an entirely new timeline by linking each timeline she visited together then it makes sense to cite her actions in other timelines as causes of things in the current timeline because they did not occur only in those other timelines, but also on the timeline Homura constructed with her travel and which connects with the current one. Thus, on pain of the incoherence involved in causal statements that cross timelines and the necessity of such statements to Kyuubey’s explanation, this is the sense in which I’ll interpret the “timeline convergence” caused by Homura’s time travel.

DANGER: timeline under construction.

Given the incoherence of trans-timeline causal statements, any phenomena in the main timeline of the show that locate their cause in another timeline cannot be truthfully and coherently explained without the inclusion of their causes in the past of the current timeline (or a re-conceptualization of causality or timelines, alternatives I admit to conveniently ignoring), but all such phenomena are more or less coherently and truthfully explained by the end of the show. These phenomena thus provide the examples of the collapse in distinction between timelines that I referenced earlier. The most obvious of them is Madoka’s oversized magical potential, the inexplicability of which given information available only in the current timeline is a recurrent plot point throughout the show. The other is Homura herself, whose behaviour in each timeline she arrived in was caused by events in the timelines she came from.

Homura’s perspective is moreover a handy demonstration of the sense in which the “convergence of timelines” described by Kyuubey might be understood as the creation of an entirely new and basically singular timeline. While it’s true that Homura was traveling between timelines, it’s also true that she experienced her journey in linear temporal succession. Homura’s experience of her time travel can thus be coherently recounted as a set of events occurring in linear time, creating an example of a “transverse timeline” that connects and incorporates every timeline it visits into itself, like a train laying rails over the ties it travels across.

If Homura’s perspective is meant to be the thing that constitutes or creates this transverse timeline, and this timeline is meant to represent the “converged timelines” that bear the karmic destiny that constitutes Madoka’s karmic destiny, then there are two senses in which Homura’s perspective on Madoka constitutes Madoka’s magical potential. First where that perspective is understood as integral to the motivation that led Homura to converge the timelines that contain the bulk of the weight of Madoka’s karmic destiny, and second where that perspective, through Homura’s magic, comes to literally constitute the convergence of those timelines by constituting the timeline that crosses them.

Whether “transverse timeline construction” is the actual meaning and method of “timeline convergence” isn’t really what I’ve tried to get at here, or why I bothered droning on about something the creator of which described as “not the focus in this work”. What I’ve instead tried to demonstrate is the highly granular degree to which Homura’s perspective on Madoka’s value as a person can be said to have magically constituted Madoka’s magical potential. In fact, a similar conclusion can be reached even while discounting Homura’s transverse perception of timelines as the sense in which the timelines converged.

By merely citing Homura’s time travel as the process that converged the timelines that bear Madoka’s karmic destiny Kyuubey positions Homura as instrumental in the creation of Madoka’s oversized karmic destiny. By further emphasizing Homura’s desire to “save Madoka” as the impetus for this act of creation, Kyuubey’s explanation frames the timeline-converging “side-effect” of Homura’s magic as the mechanism by which Homura’s perspective on Madoka’s value was magically and accidentally reified as Madoka’s magical potential. As I’ll argue, the reification of value statements as power is the basic function of magic in Madoka; this is just one of the more convoluted (and for Homura, unintended) examples of it.

In a flexibly literal sense, Homura’s perspective on Madoka was reified as a multiverse-bridging timeline that came to constitute Madoka’s oversized magical potential. As a result, the disparity between Homura’s evaluation of Madoka and Madoka’s evaluation of herself was similarly reified as a mirrored disparity between Kyuubey’s evaluation of the magical potential Madoka should have and Madoka’s actual potential.

That’s it for the first condition in Kyuubey’s theory. Despite the relish with which it harangues her about it, Homura’s timeline hopping and convergence was not actually independently sufficient to increase Madoka’s magical potential. Kyuubey explains that the weight of Madoka’s karmic destiny is composed of the “threads of fate” of each Madoka in each timeline Homura visited. If it were merely Homura’s linking of timelines that caused this there would remain two significant problems unsolved by the theory: why the karmic destinies of other magical girls didn’t converge as Madoka’s did, and why Madoka’s karmic destiny increased to the incalculably heavy weight that it did, given that it would be the modest sum of the karmic destinies of a set of diminutive schoolgirls living the same nondescript lives in many different universes. Kyuubey offers a single, deceptively simple solution to both of these problems: Madoka bears causal responsibility for Homura’s time travel and the convergence of timelines it resulted in.

“I just don’t understand at all!” – me, watching episode 11.



Explaining why causal responsibility for Homura’s time travel should be relevant to the size of the current Madoka’s karmic destiny requires an investigation into what “karmic destiny” is supposed to be in the first place, but Kyuubey does not offer much in the way of explicit clarification. I’ll have to look at each of the few things it does say about it in episode 11 to assemble a working definition of the concept.

The first bit of context Kyuubey gives for the meaning of karmic destiny is that, given her station in life, Madoka’s should not be so heavy. If Madoka were “a queen or messiah” her large karmic destiny would apparently be more understandable, but being “given an ordinary life”, her vast well of potential is unexpected. Obviously then the weight of one’s karmic destiny is in some sense commensurate with…the rarity of one’s life circumstances? The impact one has on the course of history? How generally “important” one is? It’s not clear from this comment alone what the relationship between karmic destiny and one’s station in life is supposed to be. Kyuubey follows this up by remarking on the surprising number of destinies for which Madoka is a “focal point”. What the positive correlation between the number of destinies for which one is a focal point, the weight of one’s karmic destiny, and one’s station in life is supposed to tell us about karmic destiny remains unclear because it remains unclear what it means to be a “focal point” for a “destiny”.

Kyuubey then explains that, as a consequence of the timeline convergence, all of the “threads of fate” of all of the Madokas in all of the timelines Homura visited converged “upon” the current Madoka. This raises the question of why this convergence happened only to Madoka and not to other girls. Kyuubey’s emphasis on the “one purpose” of Homura’s time travel alludes to the answer. Apparently, since Homura was inspired by Madoka to begin her time traveling, Madoka is transitively responsible for the timeline convergence. Madoka’s causal responsibility for the timeline convergence is itself the cause of the convergence of the threads of fate of all the different Madokas. Since no other magical girl bears responsibility for Homura’s time travel (excluding Homura herself, who has already contracted and whose potential can therefore not be increased), only Madoka received the karmic weight borne by the threads of fate of her trans-temporal selves.

Kyuubey then claims that the convergence of the threads of fate of all the different Madokas would explain the size of her karmic destiny. But if the karmic destiny of a single Madoka produces enough magic to yield an average, palm-sized soul gem, then why should the multiplication of that quantity by 99 produce the planet-sized soul gem her last wish yields? Well, because according to Kyuubey, Madoka’s karmic destiny contains “all of the karmic destinies from all of the different timelines” Homura “affected”. This, presumably, is the sense in which Madoka is a “focal point” for many different destinies. Like the convergence of the threads of fate of each Madoka, the convergence of all of these karmic destinies into Madoka’s is caused by Madoka’s causal responsibility for the timeline convergence.

From these parts of Kyuubey’s explanation of Madoka’s potential we can derive a couple of basic facts about karmic destiny. First, the weight of an individual’s karmic destiny increases by the assimilation of other karmic destinies into it, meaning that “weight of karmic destiny” is a measurement of the “quantity” of karmic destiny from other individuals that have attached to one’s own. Madoka’s potential is as large as it is because it is constituted by the karmic destinies of many other individuals, including those of her own selves from other timelines. Second, the process of assimilating a quantity of someone else’s karmic destiny into one’s own is effected by causal responsibility for some event, e.g., responsibility for the convergence of many timelines resulting in the assimilation of all of the karmic destinies in those timelines into one’s own.

From Kyuubey’s comment about queens and messiahs being more suitable bearers of a destiny as heavy as Madoka’s, and from the scalar symmetry of “timeline convergence” and “every karmic destiny in each timeline Homura affected”, I think it’s safe to assume that these two aspects are connected in that it is specifically causal responsibility for an event that affects another individual that causes the assimilation of some portion of that individual’s karmic destiny into one’s own. Thus, responsibility for an event that affects the life of another individual emerges as the fundamental mechanism by which one’s karmic destiny grows heavier, and the set of events that affect the lives of others for which one is causally responsible emerges as the basic constitution of “the weight of one’s karmic destiny”, the fundamental meaning of the concept within the show, and the ultimate determinant of a girl’s magical potential. The definition of “weight of karmic destiny” I’ll be using for the rest of this article is thus “the set of causal statements that include an action by the owner of the destiny as cause and an event in the life of another individual as effect”.

Given this definition the determination of whether an event increases the weight of one’s karmic destiny is, prima facie, non-arbitrary: it is determined by whether one is causally responsible for the event and whether the event affects/partially composes the life of another individual. I will also assume that the “amount” of karmic destiny the event confers upon the responsible actor is proportionate to the “size” of the effect it has on the donor individual’s life. Buying someone a bagel, or stealing a bagel from someone, might grow your karmic destiny by a…bagel-sized amount, whereas interfering with the entirety of the timeline in which they exist might yield a bit more.

Now I can attempt, with more transparency than Kyuubey, to guess at what happened to Madoka’s karmic destiny, how it happened, and what exactly the “weight” of her karmic destiny refers to. If the timeline convergence caused by Homura’s magic is meant to work anything like how I described it above, then bearing responsibility for that convergence entails bearing responsibility for the collapse of the distinctions between the timelines as discrete entities. One form this collapse might have taken is the creation of a new “compound” timeline that includes every timeline it crosses. Bearing responsibility for the creation of a timeline presumably entails bearing responsibility for every event in that timeline, which naturally includes responsibility for every event that affects every individual in that timeline. Since “weight of karmic destiny” is the set of events affecting the lives of others for which one is causally responsible, this resulted in the attachment of “all of the karmic destinies from all of the different timelines” to Madoka’s.

If this is indecipherable word salad no more helpful than Kyuubey’s “explanation”, fear not. I have tapped another of my countless skills, graphic design, to produce for you a helpful and beautiful diagram illustrating how Madoka’s magical potential might have grown with each loop. It’s my gift to you, a survivor of this molecular examination of twenty seconds of dialogue.

If Madoka’s karmic destiny included causal responsibility for entire timelines and their constitutive events, and if the weight of one’s karmic destiny is commensurate with the number of effects one has on the lives of others, it’s easy to see why Kyuubey said this.

This definition leaves an unresolved ambiguity in whether “weight of karmic destiny” denotes only the set of causal chains already established between a prospective magical girl and the lives of the people around her (viz. whether it refers only to effects already caused by the magical girl), or whether it refers to both past and future cause-and-effect statements that include the girl as cause and the modification of the life of someone else as an effect. I take the latter resolution to be the case on the basis of one of Kyuubey’s comments.

In episode 12 Kyuubey says that Madoka’s wish “violates the laws of karmic destiny”. This is a pretty obscure comment but it does preclude the possibility that “weight of karmic destiny” denotes only the sum of the effects on other people’s lives that a girl has already caused. Assuming Kyuubey is referring here to the fact that magical girls were predetermined by “the laws of karmic destiny” to become witches, and as a result of Madoka’s wish no longer are, then the transformation of a magical girl into a witch is likely meant to be considered part of her karmic destiny. Madoka’s interference in events that have yet to occur being construed by Kyuubey as a violation of “the laws of karmic destiny” thereby makes it clear that “weight of karmic destiny” is a measurement of an object (“karmic destiny”) that spans both past events and the future events that those past events would normally (i.e., absent the interference of a newborn law of nature gijinka) determine.

Now that the more complicated notion of “weight of karmic destiny” is on relatively solid ground I should probably get to the simpler concepts of “karmic destiny” and “thread of fate”. These terms are used interchangeably by Kyuubey to denote the predetermined course of an individual’s life, but “karmic destiny” is used in some ways that “thread of fate” isn’t. When the course of an individual’s life is cited as a deterministic law (something like “the previously established causal relations between an individual and the world determine a set of future causal relations between that individual and the world”, as in Kyuubey’s comment discussed in the above paragraph), or when the total effect of an individual’s life on other people is being referred to as a quantity (“You are the center of karmic destiny from many different timelines.”), “karmic destiny” is used. When referring simply to the preordained course of an individual’s life, “thread of fate” is used. A “thread of fate” acts as a visual metaphor for the force of karmic destiny by representing the course of a girl’s life laid out by that force from beginning to end. “Karmic destiny” is used by Kyuubey to explain the relationship between the preordained impact a girl has on the world and the size of her magical potential by representing the former as the “weight” of her karmic destiny. When used to denote an object (“Madoka’s karmic destiny”) “karmic destiny” is synonymous with “thread of fate”, except for the additional implication of “karmic destiny” that the predetermination is effected by the previously established causal relationships between herself and the world rather than by “bare fate”.

Madoka, bound by the heavy karmic weight borne by the threads of fate of her other selves.

Before I finish talking about karmic destiny I want to highlight some implications of these definitions that will be relevant in my discussion of their thematic import later.



The popular notion of karma as the determination of the material quality of one’s future life or lives by the moral quality of one’s past actions affords the individual a degree of control over their fate: act well and you’ll fare well, act poorly and you’ll fare poorly. Given the above definitions, it would be incorrect to say that, analogously, it is the actions or decisions made by a girl over the course of her life that determine the weight of her karmic destiny and the size of her magic potential. Instead, the weight of a girl’s karmic destiny is determined by the number of causal statements that include an action of hers as cause and an event in the life of another individual as effect. Perhaps the most obvious difference between the amount of control an individual has over the weight of their karmic destiny rather than over their “karma” generally is that the moral quality of one’s actions might be partially constituted by the intent behind those actions, whereas whether an event one is responsible for affects the life of another individual is not, in any sense, determined or constituted by the intent behind the event. A serial killer inspired by the sight of a prospective magical girl to go on a killing spree might contribute a heavy weight to the karmic destiny of that magical girl without her even consciously acting, let alone with her intending to inspire a killing spree.

However, I think there’s a more basic and complete loss of individual control over the object when moving from “karma” to “weight of karmic destiny”, and this is the difference I am most interested in explicating. I will argue here that not only is a prospective magical girl’s intent not able to determine the weight of her karmic destiny, even the actions that result from that intent are incapable of influencing the weight of her karmic destiny – to any degree. This is because neither her actions nor her intentions are responsible for the establishment of any causal chains. The establishment of a causal chain is instead determined by the “action” and a set of jointly sufficient conditions, the contents of which the girl cannot even perceive until after the chain has been formed. The establishment of a causal chain via prudential action will be thereby framed as a fundamentally impossible accomplishment, entailing that no girl is able to affect the weight of her karmic destiny by endeavouring to behave in particularly impactful ways.

A “single unit” of karmic “weight”, understood as a descriptive causal statement that includes the girl as cause and an event in the life of another individual as effect, might be expressed as “X occurs in the life of W because Y does Z”, where Y is the karmic donee, W the karmic donor, Z an action committed by the donee, and X an effect that is caused by Z. Using Madoka’s karmic destiny as an example we can see that Y does not need to intend X, or even Z, for one such unit to form. While Kyuubey pins responsibility for all of Homura’s looping onto Madoka, there is no way Madoka could have intended for Homura to do what she did (“X”) because Madoka did not even know that Homura was going to become a magical girl, let alone that she’d thereby acquire the ability to time travel.

Explaining the irrelevance of Z to the intent of the donee magical girl is, admittedly, uniquely difficult in this case. Not only did Madoka intend to sacrifice herself, it is specifically her intent to do so that Homura cites as inspiration for contracting immediately afterwards. This resonates well thematically with the end of the show, where Madoka’s sacrifices are rewarded by a functionally infinite well of magical power. That power thereby serves as a metaphor for Madoka’s infinite worth as an individual, finally contradicting, for the audience and for her, the self-doubt she expresses throughout the show and completing her arc as a triumph of “good karma”.

However, Madoka’s intent to sacrifice herself resulted in an increase in the weight of her karmic destiny not because it was a noble action (though it surely was) or because she had unlimited value as a person (though she surely does) that, when sacrificed, necessitated compensation at a later date by “the laws of karmic destiny”. This would be a severe misuse of the show’s concept of karmic destiny. The weight of an individual’s karmic destiny is not determined by the moral quality of their intent or deeds but by the size of the set of consequences those deeds produce.

Instead, Madoka’s sacrifice increased her karmic destiny because it had a witness in Homura, who took it as inspiration to begin her labyrinthine temporal odyssey. Madoka’s sacrifice should thus be understood as jointly sufficient with Homura’s witnessing of it to establish a karmic link between Madoka and Homura’s actions. Madoka’s sacrifice (“Z”) and her intent to make it were alone neither sufficient nor necessary to produce an increase in her karmic destiny equivalent to the canonical increase. Had Madoka died reluctantly but nonetheless inspired Homura to begin her loops then the same increase in Madoka’s karmic destiny would have occurred, though stripped of the cosmic beauty and vindication represented by its canonical increase. On the other hand, if Homura had not been there to witness it Madoka’s sacrifice would have retained its intrinsic moral quality but no multiverse-bridging causal link would have been established, leaving Madoka’s nobility uncompensated.

What this situation highlights is a peculiar kind of fatalism underlying the notion of “karmic destiny” in Madoka: not only is the weight of an individual’s karmic destiny not determined by their intent to act a certain way, strictly speaking, it is not even determined by the way they act. The establishment of a causal chain is determined by what follows from an action, and “what follows” is not determined by the action or the intent behind it but by the environment in which the action occurs. You can let go of a pebble, but what happens to the pebble after depends on where you’re standing.

In most circumstances this distinction is trivial because actors are typically aware of the environment in which they act and of the consequences that will follow from their actions given that environment. From interacting with our environments we gain foreknowledge of the consequences that will arise from our actions given our environment: a child places their hand on a hot stove and learns that if they stick their hand on a hot stove their hand will be burned. This causal “foreknowledge” allows us to claim responsibility for the consequences of our actions and to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible causal reasoning. However, that foreknowledge does not determine those consequences, nor does it constitute a discovery of a necessary logical connection between a cause and an effect. Neither of those bars need to be cleared for causal reasoning to function in daily life, but when the question at hand is whether one can be sensibly described as capable of controlling what causal chains are established between themself and the world, there is a wide gulf between reasoning that is correct by serendipity and reasoning that is correct by necessity. Why, you might now be asking, are we unjustified in claiming a necessary logical connection between two events that seem so obviously connected, like the placement of a hand on a hot oven and that hand’s being burnt?

Our “foreknowledge of consequences” emerges after repeated observations of similar actions producing similar effects in similar environments, a principle that the philosopher David Hume referred to as “habit”. While we can learn about our environments and thereby learn to expect different consequences from the same actions committed in different environments, there is one thing we cannot learn from our environments: whether, in the future, they will react to a given event in the same way as they did in the past. This, unfortunately, is precisely the knowledge that would be required for an individual to be able to truthfully claim that they can determine in advance what consequences will necessarily follow from their actions given their discovery of a “necessary logical connection” between a cause and its effect.

“That you feel as though I’ll stop posting if you delete my account does not logically entail that I will.” – David “please, please, stop talking” Hume.



To prove that similar actions in similar environments necessarily yield similar results would be to prove what Hume called a “principle of the uniformity of nature”. If this were possible, and “nature” were therefore necessarily uniform, the causal anticipation given to us by habit would constitute knowledge of what kinds of events necessarily follow from what kinds of actions committed in what kinds of environments. Unfortunately, there is no clear way of proving a uniformity principle because the only obvious evidence for it is the historical uniformity of nature.

Attempting to prove the principle inductively by reference to the historical uniformity of nature fails since, without the truth of a uniformity principle established in advance, there is no reason the historical uniformity of nature should imply anything about the uniformity of nature in the future – this aspect of the dilemma is part of why the general problem is also known as Hume’s expression of “the problem of induction”. Attempting to deductively prove the principle is impossible, argues Hume, because the conclusions of deductive arguments cannot be coherently negated and it is not difficult to come up with an example of nature behaving in ways contrary to our causal expectations (i.e., non-uniformly). This reduces the only obvious proof of a uniformity principle to an example of question begging and belief in the principle to an article of faith in the fact that since it has held in the past it will hold in the future.

Attempting to circumvent the necessity of a uniformity principle to the justification of causal inference by reference to some empirical evidence of “causal necessity” is not possible because “causal necessity” is not an observable phenomenon. Every instance of a “necessary causal connection” between two events is, upon thoroughly indexing the observable parts of the causal chain, only a pair of spatiotemporally proximal events: “necessity” does not appear except as a feeling in the mind of the observer.



Without a uniformity principle or observable causal necessity the causal foreknowledge that we habitually form cannot be truthfully described as knowledge of what consequences necessarily follow from what actions and is more accurately described as knowledge of our own psychological habits. This is not as ridiculous a conclusion as it might sound: everyone has experienced a situation where they expected one outcome and experienced another (viz., an accident). If habituated causal expectation was knowledge of what effects necessarily follow what causes in what environments this kind of disconfirmation would never occur.

While our inferential habits do tend to succeed more often than they fail this cannot be admitted as evidence for a uniformity principle. And while we pragmatically blame failed causal inferences on imperfect knowledge of our environments, Hume’s analysis of causal reasoning demonstrates that no amount of environmental knowledge will ever be sufficient to provide a relationship of causal necessity between one event and another because the notion of causal necessity itself rests on an unjustifiable uniformity principle. We can therefore never be accurately described as capable of determining, through prudential action and keen observance of causal laws, what causal chains will form between us and the world, no matter how many “lucky guesses” we make. Nor, therefore, can a prospective magical girl ever be said to be capable of determining the weight of her karmic destiny or the size of her magical potential by choosing to act a certain way. While we hold each other and ourselves responsible for making erroneous causal inferences we should know better than to make, we do so on the (historically sound) basis that past successful causal inferences prove future causal inferences, a proposition Hume reveals as a fundamentally unjustifiable article of faith.

An important consequence of Hume’s reductions of causal inference from a process of deductive logic to a psychological habit, and of inductive logic to a formalized expression of a psychological habit, is that they highlight causal reasoning as a fundamentally normative process. What effects are expected to follow from what causes depends on what a given individual has been habituated to expect, not on any properties intrinsic to the cause, effect, or the environment in which they occur, and the observation of a “causal connection” relies on a wholly subjective projection of a “necessary connection” between two events. What constitutes a necessary causal relation depends on the psychological habits of the observer, and as such a third necessary condition emerges for the establishment of a causal chain: the act, the conditions in which the act occurs, and an observer, habituated to recognize the event as an instance of “causal connection” rather than as a pair of spatiotemporally proximal but causally unrelated phenomena. For Hume, causation itself is produced by the normative conditions of human psychology as much as it is by spatiotemporal relations between objects.



This reduction of causal reasoning to just another “irrational” behavior will be important later, I promise! But that’s everything I wanted to say about karmic destiny in this section. The moral of the story here is that since “weight of karmic destiny” determines magical potential and no girl is ever in a position to control the weight of her karmic destiny, no girl can be in a position to determine her magical potential. Where magic in Madoka is taken as a reification of a value statement, no girl is therefore in a position to determine her value under the magical girl system.

On to the more explicit aspects of contracts. Kyuubey refers to the containers of magic produced by contracts as Soul Gems, and describes the Gems as products of a technology that converts “the emotions of sentient lifeforms into raw energy”. Kyuubey also refers to the Soul Gem and its contents as the “soul” of the magical girl which, in a peculiar contortion of the concepts of body and soul, Kyuubey says is tantamount to the “real body” of the magical girl. By fundamentally altering the nature of her soul contracting fundamentally alters the destiny of the newly born magical girl, making the exchange of her destiny for her wish figurative where karmic destiny is understood as an energy source that is “burnt” to transform her soul into magical power and grant her wish, and literal where karmic destiny is understood as the course of the girl’s life, now irrevocably altered by the limitations and powers of her newly-corporeal soul.

From the relationship between karmic destiny and Soul Gem size there emerges a novel implication about the mechanics of contracts that is never outright stated in the series. If the weight of a girl’s karmic destiny determines the size of her Gem and we take Kyuubey at its word when it says that Soul Gems are the result of extracting the soul of a magical girl and transforming it into a physical object, then the size of a magical girl’s soul is determined by the weight of her karmic destiny. If the soul that Kyuubey extracts has its “size” determined prior to extraction (viz., if the relationship between Soul Gem size and weight of karmic destiny is not one that Kyuubey creates but merely makes physically apparent) then, according to Kyuubey, the size of a girl’s soul is determined by the size of the set of effects she has on the lives of other people. By episode 11 of the TV series, “size of a magical girl’s soul”, “weight of a magical girl’s karmic destiny”, and “size of a girl’s magical potential” are revealed as synonyms for the same measurement – quantity of magical power – of the same object – the Soul Gem/the girl’s soul.

The sacrifice of her karmic destiny and transformation of her soul into a Gem also nets the magical girl the granting of any wish she chooses, given she has a destiny heavy enough to produce enough magic to reify her wish as well as her Gem. The wish is granted by a surplus of magic not contained within the Soul Gem but which is produced by the same conversion of emotion to magic that produced the Gem. Is this surplus a piece of the magical girl’s soul disappearing? A business cost borne by Kyuubey? Another shady industry practice, anyway.

Many lines of dialogue in Madoka can be read as both abstract moral comments and descriptions of some empirical fact about magical girls. This line from Homura in episode 7 works as a description of the comparative feat-achieving abilities of miracles and humans but it also works as a statement of empirical fact about the magical girl system: the emotional energy that Kyuubey uses to grant wishes is a “surplus” not contained in the corporeal souls of the magical girls who make them but which Kyuubey is nonetheless generous enough to reify in exchange for a girl’s contracting.

The relationship between karmic destiny, the “soul”, magical power, and the magical girl system will figure centrally in my analysis of the Nietzschean themes in the TV show and Rebellion. There is, however, more to the general magic system to discuss first.

What rules govern magic in Madoka Magica?

When a girl contracts she receives a “Soul Gem” that contains magic. The amount of magic the Gem contains is proportional to the weight of her karmic destiny and is consequently finite. Until Rebellion magic displays two mutually exclusive qualities: it is either constituted by “hope” or by “curses”. These qualities directly correspond to the girl’s state of mind, with “hope” magic corresponding to “positive” emotions and “curse” magic corresponding to “negative” emotions. As a magical girl’s mood fluctuates, so too does the polarity of her magic. Herein, when speaking generally about magic as it functions within the system, I will refer to magic “born of hope” as “positive magic” and magic “born of curses” as “negative magic”.

There are four sources of change in the state of the contents of a girl’s Soul Gem. First, magical girls can use their magic to affect the external environment, in battle or otherwise. Second, magic is constantly autonomically used to “maintain” a magical girl’s human body. Third, negative magic inside the gem can be absorbed by grief seeds. Finally, a magical girl’s mood deteriorating or improving replaces positive or negative magic in the Gem with an equal amount of the magic’s polar opposite



One of the subtler revelations in the Madoka TV series is that the total sum of magic in a girl’s Gem never actually decreases. Early on in the show, primarily through Mami and Kyuubey, the use of magic to affect the world is framed as causing a “depletion” of a girl’s reservoir of magical energy that needs to be “replenished” by Grief Seeds. What is actually happening when a magical girl uses her Soul Gem to affect the world, and as her Gem maintains her human body, is a loss of a quantity of positive magic within the Gem proportional to the difficulty of the task accomplished and a simultaneous replacement of that lost positive magic with an equal amount of negative magic. Magical girls can thus use available positive magic to affect the world and to keep their human bodies running, but only if they have the positive magic needed to accomplish the task available in their Soul Gem. Conversely, the siphoning of negative magic from a Soul Gem by a Grief Seed causes the gem to (magically!) generate an equal amount of positive magic to replace its lost “curses”.

Using a grief seed, Sayaka “replenishes” the magic she “expended” during a fight.

What rules govern Soul Gems and Grief Seeds?

A Soul Gem is a container for a magical girl’s magic and is also her…soul. Soul Gems function as simultaneous magic generators and batteries that constantly maintain their original quantity of magic. The ability of the gems to generate energy ex nihilo is not trivial to the broader plot of the show. While Kyuubey emphasizes breaking the second law of thermodynamics (the constant increase of entropy, or, roughly, the inevitable, irreversible and constant conversion of all energy into non-usable forms) as the great achievement of the magical girl system, this achievement is enabled by the ability of Soul Gems to break the first law, which states (again roughly, as I don’t actually know anything about physics) that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

When a magical girl asks Kyuubey to grant her a wish she’s given a Soul Gem “in exchange” for the granting of that wish. When her Soul Gem is created the girl’s wish is described by Kyuubey as “surpassing entropy”, implying that the energy produced in the granting of the wish and creation of the Soul Gem is greater than the “energy” contained in the emotions that apparently compose the girl’s soul.

Kyuubey eventually explains that Grief Seeds are created when Soul Gems “flare out” in a reaction that produces more energy than is put into it, meaning that Grief Seeds contain more magic than the Soul Gems from which they are born. The transformation of a Soul Gem into a Grief Seed is in this sense analogous to the creation of a Soul Gem during a contract: it is a “reaction” that produces more energy than is put into it.

Kyuubey collects a Grief Seed after Sayaka uses it to siphon negative magic from her Gem.

Kyuubey’s goal for most the series is the collection of nearly-full Grief Seeds. The quantity of energy in such Seeds is the product of two entropy-surpassing moments: when the Soul Gem the Seed was born from is created, and when the Gem expands into the Seed. As Kyuubey says at the end of episode 12, this is a highly efficient system. Kyuubey would likely never be forced to collect Grief Seeds that are less than nearly full because magical girls have a strong incentive to fill them to the brim. While Kyuubey cites “the human soul” and “fluctuation between hope and despair” as the respective entropy-surpassing energy sources that these moments tap into, both sources are pointedly difficult to describe in empirical terms. The magical girl system in this way staves off entropy by taking a non-physical “energy source” and rendering it physical.

The relationship between a magical girl and her corresponding Gem is something this post is going to take as one of its central focuses so for now I just want to outline the most basic mechanical elements of that relationship. When a magical girl is more than 100 meters away from her Soul Gem her human body stops working. When a magical girl’s mood changes from “positive” to “negative” or vice versa there is a proportional change of magical energy quality within her Gem. The destruction of her Gem entails the death of her human body but the destruction of her human body does not entail destruction of her Gem. A girl can use her Gem to directly alter her human body, though as with all expenditures of positive magic, this proportionally increases the quantity of negative magic within her Gem. Finally, a girl’s Gem can be directly affected by Kyuubey, which produces a corresponding effect on the girl’s human body.

The mechanics of Grief Seeds, witches, and familiars, are another element of the series obscured by its primarily dramatic concerns. To be clear: a Grief Seed is a container of magic that breaks out of a Soul Gem when the entirety of the positive magic within the Gem has been replaced with negative magic. When the negative magic contained by a Grief Seed exceeds the volume of the Seed itself, the Seed cracks, and the overflowing magic manifests externally as a witch.

Sayaka’s breakdown in episode 8 produces enough negative magic to shatter two “shells” almost instantaneously. First her Soul Gem shatters when the magic within it produces a Grief Seed too powerful to be contained. The newly born Grief Seed explodes immediately afterward, before the shattered fragments of her Gem have even hit the floor – the Seed too is too small a vessel for her rapidly mounting despair.



A witch surrounds herself in a labyrinth made of magic. A witch’s labyrinth also contains her familiars. Familiars are “projections of the magical girl’s heart before she became a witch”. Since labyrinths are born from the contents of a magical girl’s Soul Gem they can be understood as external materializations of the former magical girl’s soul.



Oktavia’s “Holger” familiars manifest as an endlessly performing string ensemble. One in particular bears a striking resemblance to a boy she loved but could not be with.

Familiars will occasionally separate from their witches, consume a certain quantity of humans and their despair, and grow into witches themselves. The ability of a witch to assimilate the negative emotions of the people in her surroundings means that, unlike with the use of positive magic, the activity of negative magic paradoxically tends to increase its own total mass. In this way witches preserve the magic-generating property of the Soul Gems they emerged from after having quite literally shattered the limit on magic-generation imposed by the spatial confines of the Gem.

As containers of purely negative magic Grief Seeds share the despair-absorbing ability of the witches they birth. The ability of Grief Seeds to appropriate negative magic from their surroundings is exploited by magical girls and Kyuubey to “replenish” Soul Gems and proportionally improve the state of their owners’ minds. Not to beat a dead horse here, but this process should not be baldly understood as “replenishment of magic”, but as either “expending of negative magic” or “replenishment of positive magic”. It is a law of Soul Gems that they replace any lost magic with an equal amount of that magic’s opposite quality, and “purification” by a Grief Seed is just one example of that law in action.

For magical girls, this claim by Sayaka is not mere pontification on a tragic philosophical point, but also a barely metaphorical description of the mechanics of their Soul Gems.



And that’s it for dry exposition of mechanical minutiae! If you’re still with me at this point, thanks for putting up with such a drawn out exposition of the show’s magic system. I intend to make it worth your time. Before I talk about Rebellion though I need to talk about the way Madoka (TV) sets up a Nietzschean framework that Rebellion highlights and exploits. To do that I’m going to look at the arcs of five of the show’s central characters, starting with the devil itself.

Part 2: Master, Slave, and Redeemer

A Field Guide to Incubators



“The noble…designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as ‘the powerful,’ ‘the masters,’ ‘the commanders’)…but they also do it by a typical character trait: and this is the case that concerns us here. They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’…” – GM 1, 5

The moral status of Kyuubey, like that of the magical girl system it peddles, morphs progressively throughout the entirety of Madoka. From mascot character to Mephistopheles, one of the greatest achievements of Kyuubey as a piece of character writing is the juxtaposition of the faultless consistency of its characterization with a constant shift in what the character means for the world it exists in. Consequently, as with the magical girl system, I’ve found it necessary to first try and describe what Kyuubey actually is by the end of Rebellion, in isolation from its kaleidoscopic framing throughout the franchise, before I try to offer my analysis of what Kyuubey represents thematically.

When Madoka was airing a common if half-serious debate I saw play out as each new episode aired focused on whether Kyuubey could be accurately characterized as a liar or if it was merely “allowing” girls to stumble towards their deaths by their own naive volition, as the character itself argues.

Let me make it immediately clear where I stand on this: Kyuubey is not only an unambiguous liar, but a creature that uses its mastery of lying as one of its main hunting tools. The nature of its mission forces it to be: Kyuubey’s goal is the collection of the energy contained in Grief Seeds, and no Grief Seeds would exist without there first existing girls who have been convinced to condemn themselves to witchification. That process of “convincing” obviously requires more than a full explanation of the “sweet deal” that is being a magical girl and waiting for girls to take the bait – it requires intentionally creating false beliefs about what being a magical girl involves. And so Kyuubey does exactly that to both the audience and Madoka in the first two episodes of the series before the infamous shoe-drop in episode 3 begins to slowly unravel its pretense.

Kyuubey’s largest outright lie is thus its claim that it always receives consent from girls who want to contract before creating their Soul Gems. The girls cannot consent to the terms of the contract if they aren’t even aware of what those terms are, and Kyuubey’s belief in the “laws of karmic destiny” makes it clear that it considers eventual transformation into a witch one of those terms. Of course, the more interesting thing about Kyuubey’s lies is its apparent inability to recognize them as such. I’ll offer an explanation of the nature of that incapacity shortly.

Outright lying or manipulation of the girls’ understanding of their situations are not the only weapons in Kyuubey’s arsenal. Kyuubey makes active decisions throughout the TV series, beyond the decision to offer a contract, that directly contribute to the deaths of multiple magical girls. Sayaka’s insecurities about the meaning of her contract are actively stoked by Kyuubey, and its emphasis on how much more powerful Madoka would have been results in a fissure between Sayaka and Madoka that marks a decisive point of no return for the former. Kyouko is baited into a suicide mission by Kyuubey’s refusal to openly deny the possibility of her success until after Kyouko is dead. And finally, as a result of the success of these plots, Homura is left without allies and Madoka is ultimately compelled to contract, though not for the reasons or with the results that Kyuubey might have preferred.

Even before a girl has been targeted as a prospect the relationship between incubators and humans is fundamentally antagonistic. Finding candidate magical girls requires finding people willing to trade the current course of their lives for the chance to change reality, which means finding individuals who are to some degree suffering from their realities: as Kyuubey says, “all hopes are wishes for something other than the current reality”. The relationship between incubators and magical girls is in this sense identical to a predator-prey relationship: the injured members of a prey species group are the most suitable targets for predation.

While the girls may have been unaware of the nature of their relationship with Kyuubey, Shinbou was not.

Besides its comfortable mendacity and resemblance to a predator species over humanity, Kyuubey also has some interesting physiological quirks. Like many things in Madoka, the specifics of how these traits work are never offered, likely for reasons similar to those cited for the opaque meaning of “timeline convergence” (read: who gives a shit). Nonetheless, as with that case, I think there are some interesting implications about Kyuubey that might be derived from what we see of its unique physiology.



The first incubator ability to be revealed actually has little direct relevance to the magical girl system: their capacity for telepathy.

(nodding)



“Telepathy” is probably underselling what exactly Kyuubey is capable of when it comes to other people’s minds and the thoughts they contain. Madoka’s first introduction to Kyuubey is through a voice echoing unprompted in her head – Kyuubey can remotely project its own voice into the heads of anyone within an unspecified range, without their permission or anticipation. In episode 2 Sayaka and Madoka (neither yet a magical girl) discover that they can communicate telepathically with one another as long as Kyuubey is around. By “thinking at” another person their thoughts are sent, by Kyuubey, into the mind of the person the thought is directed at. While they’re framed benignly in the scenes in which they’re revealed taking these revelations out of context does not cast them so neutrally.

Unless the intentionality behind the thought Kyuubey relays is itself a necessary condition for Kyuubey’s access to the thought (an improbable restriction to place on your own thought-reading technology), Kyuubey’s ability to relay the thoughts of non-magical humans combined with its ability to project its own thoughts into the heads of those humans implies that it has basically unrestricted access to the minds of any human beings in its range. The contents of a human mind are for Kyuubey basically no different than noise – a kind of information that can be perceived, relayed, recorded, and altered at will.

There is, however, one very important limit on the telepathic abilities of incubators. In episode 11 Kyuubey says that “their species” has eliminated emotion, having classified it as a mental illness and then cured it. This means that, despite Kyuubey’s ability to directly experience the thoughts in an individual’s mind, it is incapable of sensing any of the emotions that might be occurring simultaneously with those thoughts. Their inability to experience emotion thereby imposes a significant myopia on incubators as a species. While they may understand what a target prey species member is thinking, where the reasons for those thoughts are emotive (as they often are for humans), incubators are incapable of understanding why the target is thinking what it’s thinking. And where the emotion experienced with a thought is considered partially constitutive of the thought they are not capable of sensing the “entirety” of the thought. Incubators can understand emotion only as an energy source, and the transformation of a magical girl to a Soul Gem thus represents the imposition of Kyuubey’s concept of emotions onto magical girls.



In episode 8 Kyuubey is perforated by a shotgun-wielding Homura. The new holes in its body reveal no organs, only texture-less masses of Kool-Aid red. A “new Kyuubey” immediately appears, lamenting the destruction of one of its “spares” and thereby identifying itself with the “Kyuubey” that was just destroyed. The replacement shares all of the knowledge and history with the cast as the one that was destroyed. Presumably, it is the one that was just “killed”.

(Emiya Shirou voice) now hold on just a minute.

For the first time, during the end of Rebellion, we see many incubators operating simultaneously. During Homura’s transformation into Homulilly she is engaged with Kyuubey in a conversation that remains unbroken despite the latter’s repeated “deaths” at the former’s enraged hands. When the arrow that shatters Homura’s Gem reveals the outside world we see many incubators moving and thinking in perfect sync, all exclaiming with identical tone, pitch, and timing: “I just don’t understand at all!”.

These scenes raise a pair of semantic puzzles: what exactly is Kyuubey referring to when it says “we” or “I”? As far as I can tell there are two primary solutions to both questions.

One is to say that there is actually only a single incubator consciousness that can inhabit and operate many bodies simultaneously. This would explain why Kyuubey told Homura “That’s the second time you’ve killed me” in episode 9. The “second time you’ve killed me” line also reveals that, despite the possibility of the physical dislocation of its mind and body, Kyuubey does identify with the body it inhabits to some extent. The use of “we” in this interpretation could thus be construed as a reference to many bodies rather than many individual consciousnesses, and the incubator “species” might be a single mind controlling countless bodies simultaneously. There being only a single incubator consciousness would also explain how multiple incubator bodies are able to sequentially participate in a single unbroken conversation with Homura as she successively destroys them.

Alternatively, one might say that there are many individual incubator consciousnesses but that those minds are simply not produced by or recorded in the bodies we see. An incubator whose body is destroyed can seamlessly inhabit another one, explaining the uninterrupted conversation, the corpse-identification, and Kyuubey’s use of “we”. This interpretation also allows for the same simultaneous operation of multiple bodies by a single consciousness the first interpretation relies on.

As far as I can tell there is no way to decisively preclude or affirm either of these theories (except by reference to Kazumi Magica, which is not the subject of this article). There are nonetheless some conclusions about the psychology of incubators that can be derived from the telepathic abilities of incubator bodies, the dislocation of their minds from their bodies, and the “curing” of their emotions, and all three traits are included in or congruent with both of the above explanations.

m’lady

The simplest way to answer the question “Why, despite being telepathic and prodigiously manipulative, is Kyuubey incapable of empathy and of understanding the concept of tricking someone?” is by reference to Kyuubey’s incapacity for emotion. One might argue that Kyuubey is actually extremely empathetic…with non-emotional individuals. One would argue that Kyuubey’s capacity for empathy is merely “stunted” insofar as the individual it is attempting to empathize with is emotional. Its inability to understand “tricking” could be similarly explained by reference to a moral valuation and corresponding emotional value inherent to the concept. One would argue that Kyuubey understands “behavioural manipulation” but not why behavioural manipulation is, in certain contexts, bad, and that the only difference between “behavioural manipulation” and “tricking” is that the latter concept includes a value judgment and emotive content that an incapacity for emotion would preclude one from comprehending.

However I think there’s a more fundamental reason why incubators would be incapable of understanding these concepts. Their telepathic powers and the dislocation of their minds from their bodies might produce fundamental differences in how incubators and humans understand the concept of an “individual”. Those differences might in turn produce broad and fundamental differences in the worldviews of each species, one of which is an incapacity for empathy in incubators that is more fundamental and complete than an inability to feel emotion.



The human concept of an individual includes both a body and a “subjective perspective” or “lived experience” corresponding to that body. The destruction of a human body entails the destruction of its perspective because the former provides the content that constitutes the latter. This causal relationship between body and perspective helps to both delineate and define individuals by enabling one to infer a difference in perspective from a difference in body – your body is different from mine and occupies a different space than mine and so you necessarily experience the world differently than I do, to a degree more or less commensurate with the degree of difference between our bodies, their histories, and their spatiotemporal locations.

From the idea that individual human bodies correspond to individual human perspectives the idea of “the Other” as a human body possessing a perspective that is necessarily different from one’s own arises. When we encounter other human bodies we recognize them as members of our “kind” but as categorically delineated from ourselves in body and experience. The imaginative closing of this difference, wherein one attempts to occupy the perspective of the Other by placing oneself “in the Other’s shoes”, is generally what is meant by “empathy”. When empathizing with an Other who is witnessing oneself, empathy further allows a human individual to see themselves as “the Other” in the imagined perspective of the Other.

Witnessing oneself empathetically as an animate object rather than experiencing oneself as a perspective in which objects appear pointedly demonstrates the causal relationship between one’s body and one’s perspective by making visible the simultaneous operation of both. When empathizing with an Other who is observing me I am made aware that from the perspective of the Other I am a mere physical body among others, as they are to me when I’m not empathizing, but I am also aware that I am creating their perspective recursively as an “object” within my own perspective. I am therefore aware of myself as a mere object in the perspective of the Other and of myself as the perspective in which the perspective of the Other appears, providing evidence for the idea that behind the behaviour of a human body (here, me) there lies a corresponding perspective.

The idea that my perspective is wholly constructed and determined by the spatiotemporal limitations and biases of my body and its history becomes irrefutable when I am able to observe myself as a materially-determined object-among-many in the perspective of the Other and where the possibility of the Other’s divergent perspective prevents the conflation of the idiosyncratic contributions of my body with properties of “the world itself”. It is not possible for me to return from empathizing with a perspective in which I appear as a mere object with a belief that my perspective represents the world as it “exists generally” still in tact. My appearance as an object in the perspective of the Other demonstrates both the absence of my perspective outside of my body (my perspective is thereby revealed as contingent on my body for existence) and the spatiotemporal and qualitative symmetry of my body and the contents of my perspective (the position and physical state of my body determines the contents of my perspective, as it has for the Other whose perspective I have created on the basis of their body). If my experience of reality is contingent on my bodily idiosyncrasies for its content and existence then it is clearly not an experience of reality as it exists independently of my subjectivity (“generally”). Empathizing with the Other and witnessing the causal relationship between my body and perspective thus allows me to both recognize the wholly subjective constitution of my perspective and to distinguish my concept of the world generally from my perspective.

Put another way, empathy allows me to create both “the world” and “my perspective on the world” as distinct concepts, with their differentia lying in the unique bodily determination of the latter and the independence of the former from the idiosyncratic contributions of my body (as whatever common material exists between my perspective and the perspective of the Other). Without a capacity for empathy the notion that my perspective is subjectively constituted is not visible to me: all that appears are “objects in the world”, and the notion that my body has anything to do with their constitution sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of an “object”.

While without empathy I may possess a nascent notion of my perspective as tied to my body in certain specific ways (I can know, for example, that the world is not visible when I close my eyes, or is experienced differently when I’m drunk or dizzy), this does not amount to a discovery of the constitution of the entirety of my normal experience by the idiosyncratic state of my physical body, and can thus only ever amount to a list of ways in which my perception of the world can vary. The holistic bodily determination of the contents of my perspective is not visible to me until I empathetically make an object of myself in the perspective of the Other and thereby witness the absence of my perspective, and the existence of a mutually exclusive perspective of the Other in which I am not a passively perceiving subject but a materially determined object, when I am removed from my body. Nonetheless, possessing a notion that my perspective is at the very least contained within my body, I can assume that it is the same for the Other, engage in empathy, observe the perspective of the Other and the absence of my perspective within it, and enter back into my own perspective with the knowledge that the contents of my perspective are wholly constituted by my body.

Because empathy requires only that there is an Other whose perspective I can imaginatively replicate, and because from the perspective of the Other I am the Other, I can empathetically recreate my own perspective within the perspective of Other by imagining them empathizing with me. From the imagined standpoint of the Other I can thus empathize “with myself” in an act coined “iterated empathy” by the early 20th century phenomenologist Edith Stein.

Iterated empathy creates a kind of “infinity mirror of empathy” in which two perspectives are established as the subjective products of two bodily subjects. The necessary qualitative and spatiotemporal symmetry of my body and its perspective is demonstrated by my empathy with the Other because the bodily constitution of my perspective is made visible by the difference in perspective I experience when I place myself “in the Other’s shoes”, recognize myself as a mere object, and then recreate my own perspective on the basis of my appearance as a body in the perspective of the Other. By reconstructing one’s own perspective on the basis of one’s appearance as an object, iterated empathy serves as a practical demonstration of the causal dependence of the contents of one’s perspective on the idiosyncrasies of one’s body.



In this sense the notion of the self as a single body producing and determining the contents of a single perspective is partially “intersubjectively constituted”. Empathy with the Other allows us to see ourselves simultaneously as mere bodies in the perspective of the Other and as the imaginative perspective that is producing the perspective of the Other in which we appear as mere bodies and thereby reveals the extent of the subjectivity of our perspectives. The postulation of a perspective behind the behaviour of the Other that underlies empathy is self-justifying: the notion that the Other has a perspective that might be empathetically imagined is supported by the causal relation between my body and my perspective that the act of empathizing makes visible.

The creation of the Other, a capacity for empathy, and the creation of the self as simultaneously a perspective and an object in the hypothetical perspective of the Other, are therefore all reliant on a single proposition that these things in turn help to further clarify: we are individuals whose individual bodies produce and shape individual perspectives. This is an idea that the physiology of incubators conspicuously precludes their accessing. Individual incubator perspectives are not produced or limited to individual incubator bodies, and thanks to their telepathic capabilities the “individual perspectives” of incubators are to some ambiguous degree not even contained in their individual bodies.

This, I believe, is the real reason why and sense in which incubators are incapable of empathy and of understanding the concept of “tricking”. They are incapable of conceiving of the Other because they are incapable of understanding their perspectives on the world as limited to and defined by their bodies, because in many ways, they aren’t. Since they lack the capacity to understand their perspective on the world as limited to and defined by their bodies they lack the ability to infer from any animate object (e.g., a magical girl) the existence of a subjective perspective produced by that object, are thus incapable of empathy, and are thus incapable of discovering the holistic subjective constitution of their perspective. Incubators simply do not have access to the notion of a “subjective perspective” as something different from “the world itself” into which they might empathetically project themselves.

Accusations of creating false beliefs, lying, tricking, or whatever shade of deception an incubator might be charged with fall on uncomprehending head-ribbons because they cannot conceive of a creature having perspectival interiority because they have no notion of a “perspective” in the first place. To an incubator, lying to a magical girl is basically no different from rolling a ball around, or herding worms through a maze, except that magical girls require more complicated and subtle maneuvers to direct.

“Men of a still natural nature, barbarians in every fearful sense of the word, men of prey still in possession of an unbroken strength of will and lust for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races…” – BGE 257

Even given the damage to the incubators’ perception of the interiority of magical girls implied by Kyuubey’s livestock analogy, there remains the question of why incubators seem incapable of understanding the concept of a “trick” in the sense of a “lie” in the sense of “saying something false” – that is, why Kyuubey seems to think it is telling the truth when it says it always receives consent before contracting. This too is answered by the incubators’ lack of access to the concept of a “subjective perspective”, though a bit more circuitously.

The inability of incubators to meaningfully delineate individuals on the basis of individual perspectives entails a litany of differences between humans and incubators in how each species might understand their epistemological relationship with the world. Without a concept of the Other incubators can possess no concept of their perspective on the world as a thing delineated from the world itself, since they are incapable of considering themselves as a discrete object-among-many in the perspective of the Other and of thereby perceiving the subjectivity intrinsic to their perception of reality. As a result of this incapacity, any aspects of their perspective that are produced by the idiosyncrasies of their bodies and histories will always appear to them as “objective” aspects of the world; as facts that are true independently of the incubators’ perception of them.



Without a notion of the subjective constitution of their perspective incubators could never experience “objectification”, both as the reduction of something cognitive to something non-cognitive and as conceiving of oneself as a thinking thing among other things, thinking and non-thinking. Without a concept of a subjective perspectival self that might be denied or emphasized there is no way for an incubator to be reduced to or identified by their individual perspective. In a similar vein incubators would be incapable of introspection, where introspection denotes investigation into the nature of the subjectivity of one’s perspective. Incubators possess no concept of a perspectival self that might be interrogated and analyzed, only concepts of the objects that appear within their perspective.

Curiously, given this reading, incubators would also lack a capacity for philosophical skepticism. Doubting the validity of things like causal inference and the existence of the external world (where “external world” denotes “that which exists independently of the contributions of the human/incubator perceptual apparatus”) would never occur to incubators because their inability to recognize their perspective as constituted by their embodiment (viz. as wholly subjective) precludes them from distinguishing between their perspective on the world and the world itself. One cannot doubt the existence of the external world if one doesn’t have access to the notion that the world might be other than one’s experience of it.



What Hume might refer to as an instance of “habituated causal inference” would always be understood by an incubator as an instance of “natural causation” occurring in the world, independently of their psychological processes. Access to the former interpretation requires one to be capable of acknowledging the subjective constitution of one’s perspective which incubators are never in a position to do. While incubators might possess a concept of the “external world”, it would be a far different concept than that which philosophical skepticism concerns itself with. To an incubator, the “external world” can never be a representation of the world as it exists absent the contributions of a perceiving subject because incubators cannot recognize any such contributions as a part of the world in the first place. To an incubator the “external world” is their experience, paradoxically extended ontological independence. The extension of “ontological independence” to habituated causal association frames it as “objective natural causation” by stripping it of its subjective origins and presenting it as a phenomenon that is true and extant independently of the perceiving subject.

Without the philosophical concepts of an external world and a perspective on that world, the possibility of a conflict between an incubator’s perspective and the “external world” can never arise. Where the concepts of truth and falsity describe respectively symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships between the meaning of a statement and the state of the external world incubators can thus not even possess the concepts of truth and falsity. This is the sense in which Kyuubey can be described as incapable of understanding the concept of lying in the abstract: without a distinction between subject as perspectival self and object as external world there is no possibility of concepts that describe relationships between the two like truth and falsity. Kyuubey only ever “speaks truthfully” because, lacking any notion of their own subjectivity, the possibility of inventing a fiction never occurs to incubators, nor does the possibility that what they see, think, and feel might be something different from the way things “actually are”. Kyuubey believes it is speaking truthfully when it says it always receives consent before signing contracts because to an incubator “consent”, along with every other concept, can only ever mean whatever the incubator thinks it means.



Without a concept of the Other or the perspectival self incubators can never experience a conflict between interpretations of the value, meaning, or nature of any object or phenomenon. The possibility of an interpretation other than their own requires the possibility of a perspective other than their own, which they are incapable of conceiving of. Without the concepts of perspective and external world, the possibility of a different “table of values” (Nietzsche’s term for the set of moral values an individual or society appends to phenomena) never arises because the possibility of distinguishing the way one values the world from the world itself never arises. Different “interpretations” of reality would thus always be understood by incubators as sets of more or less erroneous claims about reality, depending on how divergent the claims are from the incubators’ own understanding of reality.

Incidentally, each of the incubator traits I’ve outlined in this section – an inability to conceive of the interiority of the Other, an inability to conceive of oneself as an object in the perspective of the Other, an incapacity for empathy, an incapacity for introspection, an incapacity for philosophical skepticism, an inability to understand the concept of lying qua uttering falsehoods qua making claims that are not reflected by the external world, and an inability to conceive of alternative tables of values or to separate the way one values the world from the world itself – are traits shared by individuals Nietzsche describes as possessing a “Master” or “Noble” type morality.



Kyuubey, Musician of the Spheres

“The noble type feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges ‘what harms me is harmful in itself’…” – BGE 260

Along with the ubermensch, master and slave moralities are some of Nietzsche’s most infamous philosophical contributions. They are also often referenced out of the context of his larger philosophical project, in which they occur rather late. To properly explain what master morality is and how it relates to Kyuubey, I’ll need to first contextualize it by outlining the different senses in which Nietzsche discusses truth.



One of the difficulties in interpreting Nietzsche’s writing is his penchant for using a single term to indicate wildly different, sometimes diametrically opposed things, often without marking or explaining the shift in meaning or the contradiction. There are a number of different excuses one could offer for this: Nietzsche regularly implies his love of irony, and his “perspectivism” might be cited as a theory for which his inconsistent uses of a single concept are a praxis. Regardless of how justified one reads it as, his descriptions of truth as alternately attainable and impossible, and of “will to truth” as alternately life-affirming and life-denying, are some of the most egregious examples of this casual self-contradiction.



Nietzsche uses “truth” to refer to (at least) three distinct kinds of relationships between propositions and the world. The first sense of the term to develop in humans was truth as the “correct” usage of language. According to Nietzsche, language developed out of a need to prevent a Hobbesian “state of nature” in which individuals would be pit against one another in a mutually destructive struggle for resources. By establishing a shared set of sounds and norms prescribing the conditions under which those sounds ought to be used, communication became possible and the state of nature was avoided. Nietzsche thus frames language itself as a kind a of social contract wherein each party agrees to use the same sounds for the same reasons and to indicate the same things. Whether a given proposition is true in this sense is thus intersubjectively determined by the norms a group has established for the usage of the terms that constitute the proposition. Whether “I am typing” is true in this sense depends not on whether I’m actually typing but on the society in which I live and the rules for “correct usage” that that society prescribes. To someone who doesn’t speak English “I am typing” is neither true or false in this sense. I’ll herein be referring to this natal concept of truth as “linguistic truth”.

Linguistic truth is not a measurement of the epistemic validity of a proposition but of the social acceptability of its deployment in a given situation. This is its primary distinction from the second sense to develop in humans and the most familiar to us now: truth as correspondence between the meaning of a term and the state of affairs it describes, which I’ll be referring to as “epistemic truth”. A proposition is “epistemically true” when its meaning is identical to the state of affairs the proposition is being used to describe. Before the concept of epistemic truth can develop the normative rules for using a term must be naturalized as a “property” of the term itself: the concept of meaning, and of a “concept” as the unity of a term and its meaning, must be invented.

The invention of concepts and epistemic truth as a symmetry between a concept and a state of affairs gives birth to a unique skeptical problem. According to Nietzsche concepts develop by identifying many different sensible impressions with one another in order to group them under a single term. However, no two impressions are actually identical because their plurality presupposes, at the very least, a spatio-temporal differentiation between them. It is only by “arbitrarily ignoring” the differences between impressions and by arbitrarily privileging their similarities that they can be grouped together under a term to produce a single “kind” of object.

To use Nietzsche’s example, when I recognize a leaf as a “leaf” I am incorrectly identifying it with the many other impressions of “leaves” that I have associated with the term. While this “arbitrary association” is a fine method of concept creation, it presents a problem for epistemic truth, which demands precisely that the impressions that form the meaning of a proposition reflect the state of affairs it is being used to describe. Since no two impressions are identical and the criterion for epistemic truth is the identification of impressions with one another Nietzsche arrives at the conclusion that all propositions are, strictly speaking, epistemically false. Only by forgetting and subconsciously eliding the differences between the impressions that constitute a concept are we able to “arrive at the feeling of truth”; only by forgetting the differences between every cup I have seen in the past am I able to construct the concept of a cup and feel that I am telling the truth when I hold a cup and say “Behold! A cup!” (which is a thing I do whenever I see a cup).

In forgetting the dissimilarity of the impressions we identify with one another to form concepts we also forget how and why certain similarities are privileged and certain dissimilarities ignored. That is, we forget that language itself was invented to circumvent the state of nature, and that the content of any given concept is just a normative rule of usage imposed to solve a long irrelevant problem of communication, now naturalized as an objective “property” of a term rather than of the society in which the term is used.

Since language was developed as a tool for negotiation to circumvent warfare, the right to create the first concepts went to the individuals in the best position for bargaining: those with the most material power, who would suffer the least in the absence of language and who therefore had the least need to acknowledge the needs of the other party. As Nietzsche emphasizes, calling this process the signing of a “contract” is true only insofar as the submission of one individual to the demands of another at gunpoint can be described as an “agreement”.

The meaning of a concept – what impressional similarities are privileged and what dissimilarities are ignored to form the generalized “object” the term is used to denote – is thus ultimately determined by the most privileged individuals in a society, who are in a powerful enough socioeconomic position to be able to legislate appropriate behaviour and language use. It is precisely their forgetting the role of their subjective bodily needs (to secure resources, to prevent mutual self-destruction, to justify slavery) in acting as a selection principle during concept creation that facilitates concept creation in the first place by allowing the “regulating unconscious” to present impressions as naturally identical rather than contingently associated through privileged similarities and ignored differences. “Epistemic truth” is a failed philosophical project because it is a self-undermining criterion of truth, but it remains for Nietzsche a perfectly functional and healthy psychological process. “Forgetfulness” is, for this reason and in this sense, a typical trait of the Nietzschean master. Concept creation is forgetful work.



“(The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say “this is this and this,” they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it.)” – GM 26

The final sense in which Nietzsche discusses truth is as a correspondence between the meaning of a proposition and the external state of affairs it purports to denote, which I’ll be referring to as the “noumenal sense of truth”. “External” here means “the state of affairs that exists independently of the contributions of the human perceptual subject”. This external world contains “things in themselves” (what Kant referred to as the “nou