The Flattening of the Self and the Asymmetry of De-subjectivation

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Toward Walpurgisnacht: Rising)

※Here is JPN
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Note: this essay contains spoilers. Readers are advised to watch the series before reading. The trademarks of all proper names appearing in this essay belong to Shaft, Urobuchi Gen, Aoki Ume, and the other members of the production.

Introduction | Laying a Floor

At 9:06 of episode 7, Kyoko’s palm enters the frame. For the remainder of the scene, the palm and the cut-paper puppets appear together within the same frame seven times. This essay reads Puella Magi Madoka Magica from a single point: the relation between the body and the plane.

First, a limitation of scope. The materials this essay uses are the images and sounds of the twelve-episode television series, and nothing else. This is a condition the essay imposes on itself, and the scan by three axes is completed within the television series. The following therefore fall outside its grounds: the film Rebellion, which serves neither as the spine of the argument nor as an object of the scan; the production history; the screenwriter’s career; the industrial conditions under which the franchise has continued for more than a decade; and the shift in what it means to physically move a puppet, brought about by recent changes in the environment of image production. The condition is stated explicitly in order to avoid a familiar outcome: a critical achievement that leans on a frame outside the work lapses the moment that frame is removed.

Next, on order.

This essay begins from material description and uses no term of theory until chapter 4. Chapters 1 through 3 are written with nothing but cut numbers and timecodes, arrangements within the frame, the level of the drawing style, and the layers of sound. This is not a stylistic preference but a methodological requirement. The concept applied in chapter 4 was constructed by the author himself across a preceding trilogy; it is not borrowed from outside. The risk is therefore high from the outset that the work degenerates into throwing one’s own concept at a new object and announcing that it fits. There is only one way to avoid this: to set the materials out first, apply the concept afterward, and then look at what the materials return to the concept. Running three chapters without theoretical vocabulary is the security for that.

A sketch of the structure. Chapters 1 through 3 are material; chapter 4 connects the concept; chapter 5 preserves an undecidability; chapter 6 moves to a social level; and the conclusion contains the essay’s single value judgment. Chapter 5 stands as an independent chapter because handling the undecidability as an appendix to chapter 4 would make it look like an excuse for a problem left unsolved. The undecidability is the shape of the object this essay treats, and it requires a description of its own.

The Three Axes

Only the names of the classificatory framework established in chapter 3 are given here: contact and grasp, commensurability of scale, degree of dimensional merging. All three are descriptive terms for the relation between body and plane; none is a technical term belonging to a thinker. Scanning the work along the three axes divides positions into five. The details are left to that chapter.

There is a reason the axes number three. At the outset this essay assumed one line would do. The materials showed that it would not. The two discarded criteria—the assumption of a position outside the plane, and a reading that uses the level of the drawing style as a binary—are presented in chapter 3 together with the materials that discarded them. What a piece of criticism has thrown away determines its character as much as what it has kept, but the record of that works better when it is kept at the site where the discarding occurred.

Distinguishing the Terms

This essay does not use the following four terms interchangeably.

Plane designates a state in which thickness and shadow have been lost on screen. It is a term describing the drawing, not a metaphor. Sign designates that portion of the plane which can be treated as an object of operation. De-subjectivation designates a state of affairs in which a self comes to exist as an operable plane or sign. It is a concept constructed across the preceding trilogy and redefined in this essay. Its definition and its redefinition are placed in chapter 4. To introduce them here would make the descriptions in chapters 1 through 3 read as though they had been arranged toward the concept. [Translator’s note 1]

The fourth is a term this essay does not use. Disindividuation designates a state of affairs in which a pre-individual metastability comes once again to the foreground; it belongs to the level of ontology. De-subjectivation belongs to the level of subject formation and of the social. The two lie on different layers, and this essay does not treat the former. As for the adjacent existing discussion—the one that has spoken of a descending movement in which individuation structurally declines—a footnote in chapter 4 shows that its direction and its level differ.

In addition, wherever a term of theory is introduced, three things are stated: its provenance, its original context of use, and its redefinition in this essay. No term is recuperated through an adjectival form derived from a proper name. The moment a thinker’s name is turned into an adjective, that name stops being a concept and becomes an atmosphere.

What This Essay Does Not Answer

This essay is written toward the sequel. But it forecasts neither what will happen there nor what ought to happen there. A forecast is not a diagnosis. What this essay prepares is a floor—laid within the television series, and such that whatever comes next can be measured with the same instruments.

One further point. Chapter 6 introduces a social theory from outside the work, but not in order to treat the work as an illustration of a social problem. It is in order to describe, as an implementation internal to the fiction, what happens when a fiction attempts to handle a load at the scale of the individual. It is not the extraction of a lesson from the work for reality.

And finally, a value judgment appears in this essay exactly once, in the conclusion. The six chapters preceding it are diagnosis, not evaluation. The two stand at different levels, and this essay does not wish them to be read as mixed.

[Translator’s note 1] The term rendered here as de-subjectivation is the author’s own, constructed across a preceding trilogy of essays; it is neither a rendering of Agamben’s desoggettivazione nor of Foucault’s désassujettissement, and it carries the argumentative context of neither. The hyphenated form is used throughout to mark this. Its definition and redefinition are given in chapter 4.

Chapter 1 | The Externalization of the Operating Self (Kyoko Sakura, Episode 7)

(From Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Episode 7)
Puella Magi Madoka Magica, episode 7: roughly three minutes running from 8:47 to 11:36. The setting is the abandoned church. Episode direction by Kidokoro Masaaki, storyboard by Nishida Masayoshi. In these three minutes Kyoko Sakura tells Sayaka Miki how she came to be a magical girl, and the telling is not done with the mouth alone. Kyoko takes up puppets cut out of paper—pēpusāto, flat cut-paper figures mounted on sticks and moved by hand—and speaks while moving them. This chapter describes only the material composition of these three minutes.

The first thing to establish is that the camera scarcely moves throughout the scene. It is fixed, and there is no zoom. The sole exception is a single pan-out, discussed below, and even there the composition itself is held. The changes across these three minutes are produced, then, not by the movement of the camera but by what cohabits the inside of the frame.

Kyoko’s palm enters the frame at 9:06. From that point on, the cuts in which the palm and the paper puppets are co-present within a single frame number seven. The scene contains both co-presence and shot/reverse shot; the co-presences number seven.

9:28. A medium shot from a forty-degree low angle. At the center of the frame is the present-day Kyoko from the elbow up, her right hand gripping the paper puppet of her father. The background is cut paper: black withered trees, and a sky as though scorched black. The living hand that grips and the paper that is gripped are contained in one cut of a single frame.

9:36. A medium shot at eye level. Kyoko, her eyes half-lidded, looks down at her father’s puppet in the lower right of the frame. This is the only cut in the entire scene in which Kyoko’s mouth is shown moving as she speaks. The speaking mouth appears on screen just this once in three minutes.

For the three seconds from 9:38 to 9:40, the footing is doubled. The present-day Kyoko’s leg extends from top to bottom at the left of the frame; from lower center toward the lower right rear, a paper puppet in the shape of the young Kyoko has been set down, face lowered. Within one frame, a part of the present body and the paper figure of the past self stand side by side. This doubling has been described independently by Nakata Kentarō and Nagaoka Shiei (“Guided by the Law of the Spiral” [螺旋の理に導かれて], Eureka [Yuriika], special extra issue, November 2011, p. 119), and the observation here is a first-hand verification of it. Their discussion on that page, however, is written out of an interest different from this essay’s classification, and it is cited here solely as an independent confirmation of the fact that the footing is doubled [note 2].

9:46. A close-up at eye level. Kyoko covers her own mouth with her right hand while, with her left, she turns her father’s puppet round and round. Both hands are within the same frame. What occurs here is not grasping alone. It is a movement: turning. The puppet, still held, has its orientation changed by the palm [note 3].

9:49 is a pan-out from the 9:46 cut. The composition of Kyoko and the puppet is held while the background alone converts wholesale to the texture of paper: the church, red earth, the trees of a red forest, an unnaturally large mottled starry sky, and seven or eight white bears gazing at the church. It is the world’s side that turns to paper. Kyoko’s palm goes on holding the puppet inside that converted world.

Two seconds later a reverse shot moves the frame to Sayaka; what is happening there is deferred to the next chapter. This chapter looks only at Kyoko’s side.

9:56. A close-up at eye level. Kyoko’s forearm and her father’s puppet enter from the right toward the center of the frame, and from the left a green bear made of the paper texture reaches to take hold of that hand. Here the direction of contact reverses. Contact, until now consistently directed from the palm toward the paper, comes back from the paper to the palm.

As for sound: with the start of the puppet play, a synthesizer-like piano built on a music-box figure enters; at 9:57 it drops to silence; from 10:03 a güiro, a violin, and a cymbal are added. A fault line of silence is inserted once, in the middle of the staging.

The level of the drawing style—hereafter called the register—should also be recorded. Throughout the scene Kyoko’s palm is drawn in the ordinary cel texture based on Aoki Ume’s drawing style, consistently. The puppets, the background, and the animals are all drawn in the texture of cut paper. Two textures go on co-existing within a single frame. What this co-existence divides, however, is not settled until Sayaka’s side has been seen. Here only the fact of the co-existence is fixed.

There are, further, cuts from 10:33 onward that do not fit within the frame of this chapter’s description. They are deferred to chapter 5.

Only one minimal hypothesis can be drawn from the description above. Kyoko places her own past outside herself as a paper plane and has it cohabit the same frame as the hand that operates it. The past exists on screen not as the content of what is told, but as a thing the palm can grip, turn, and knock down.

What this first floor is laid for is answered in chapter 6 [note 1].

[Note 1] The proposition that serves as this chapter’s conclusion has been put forward earlier by Ueo Masamichi. Writing on the recollection in episode 7, Ueo holds that the replaying of the wounded Kyoko’s memory is an occasion of raising the dead, akin to a witch’s barrier, and states that Kyoko’s barely managing to control this by her own hand is expressed by the recollection’s taking the form of a paper puppet play (Ueo Masamichi, “Those Who Fight While Praying” [祈りつつ戦う者たち], in Mori Shigeyuki and Kawaguchi Shigeo, eds., A History of Anime Representations of War and Trauma [『〈戦い〉と〈トラウマ〉のアニメ表象史』], Nippon Hyoron Sha, 2023, chapter 10, pp. 166–180, at p. 169). The proposition that the past is placed outside as an object of operation belongs to that description. What the present chapter adds is a determination of what, on screen, that control consists in: that the palm grips, turns, and knocks down; that the puppet is scaled to the palm and is not commensurable with the body; that at 9:49, even when the surroundings convert wholesale to paper, Kyoko’s body remains at the level of the cel. Ueo’s description is given in a conjectural form and is not accompanied by these cut-level materials. The asymmetry and the three axes established from chapter 2 onward do not appear in his argument.

[Note 2] The description on that page is not read as anticipating the classification this essay uses in chapter 3. The agreement is structural, not conceptual.

[Note 3] In the same cut, Kyoko’s right eye lies inside the frame yet is not drawn; and her right hand covers her mouth. The former can be treated as a choice, since omitting it would not lower the drawing cost, but as it is an event confined to a single cut it is not used as grounds in this chapter. The latter is fully explained by a standard labor-saving practice of television animation, the avoidance of lip sync, and has therefore already been withdrawn as grounds (16 July 2026).

Chapter 2 | The Self Being Flattened (Sayaka Miki, Episodes 5, 6, 7, 8)

(From Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Episode 6)
What the previous chapter looked at was a palm that grips a paper plane and turns it. This chapter treats the side that has no such palm. For Sayaka Miki there are materials from four points in time, running from episode 5 to episode 8. They are set out in chronological order.

Episode 5, ten seconds beginning at exactly 14:00. Standing mirrors appear in Sayaka’s room. Counted, there are four, one of them a three-panel mirror. This three-panel mirror is given a peculiar treatment: Sayaka is not reflected in the central panel, only in the panels to either side. The center stands empty.

Episode 6, two standing mirrors at 4:50 and one at 5:31, three in all. A negative observation must be recorded here. The initial expectation was that Sayaka’s image would proliferate within the mirrors. In the material itself the movement is the reverse: from four down to three. The hypothesis of a proliferating image is withdrawn. Sayaka’s body is not handled in the manner of being divided and repeated across mirror images [note 1].

Episode 7, 9:51. The reverse shot deferred in the previous chapter arrives here. Two seconds after the space of the abandoned church has converted wholesale to the texture of paper, the frame shows Sayaka in a wide shot at eye level. At the center of the frame, leaning against a transparent chair, covered from the chest up in black shadow, Sayaka sits vacantly. Twenty or thirty white rabbits, bears, and cats surround her. These are drawn in the texture of paper. On either side are the trees of a white forest, an unnaturally large mottled starry sky and white clouds, ground scorched black. At the left edge of the frame are Kyoko’s father—from the neck down only—and Kyoko’s mother, in the paper texture.

Three facts are to be recorded here. First, Sayaka’s body is drawn entirely in cel based on Aoki Ume’s drawing style, exactly the same register as Kyoko’s palm in the previous chapter. That is: Sayaka has not turned to paper either. Second, Sayaka is touching nothing. Third, the surrounding animals, while being puppets, stand at human height, enlarged to a size that matches hers. And the animals stand still, arranged facing toward the church. Sayaka is seated facing the same way. The seven or eight white bears that were gazing at the church at 9:49 and Sayaka are on the same side.

Paper puppets are by nature made to the scale of the hand. What Kyoko held was of a size that fit in her palm. Here the same paper puppets are stretched to human height and stand beside Sayaka. In place of a hand that touches, there are bodies that stand alongside.

Episode 8, the loop-line scene from 13:37 to 15:07. Here Sayaka is reduced to a binary of white and black. The intermediate gradations drop out, and both her body and the interior of the train car are processed as a black-and-white plane. One condition for refutation can be closed off here: this binarization is not a general labor-saving technique of the work. It is applied to no other character; it is specific to Sayaka [note 2].

And here the difference from episode 7 emerges. The Sayaka of episode 7 remained in Aoki Ume’s cel even when everything around her turned to paper. She sat there with a discrepancy of level between herself and her surroundings left standing. On the loop line in episode 8, that discrepancy is gone. Sayaka is leveled to the same standard as the scenery of the car’s interior and belongs to the same binary plane. Only from the scenery flowing past outside the windows is she at a different level. That she touches nothing is unchanged from episode 7; what has vanished is the difference of level that had separated her from her surroundings. The depth has advanced by one stage.

At the end of the same scene, from exactly 15:00 to 15:07: as the two men seated beside Sayaka talk, the frame ceases to view them from Sayaka’s side. The point of view disperses toward the men, toward the background, and toward the outside of the frame, until where it is being seen from can no longer be fixed. The initiative of the point of view does not lie on Sayaka’s side. Nakata Kentarō and Nagaoka Shiei describe this passage by saying that, for the host, “the boundary between what is visible and what is invisible is being shaken” (op. cit., p. 121) [note 4]. That the two of them read a shift to a third-person viewpoint out of this, however, is offered as one possible way of construing it and not as an assertion. Nor does this essay assert it. What can be asserted is only the fact that, for these seven seconds, the frame is not organized as Sayaka’s point of view [note 3].

Setting the four points from episode 5 to episode 8 side by side, what happens on Sayaka’s side is consistent. She grips nothing. She turns nothing. It is the level of her surroundings that approaches her. In episode 7 she remained cel even as her surroundings turned to paper; in episode 8 she is herself leveled into a binary plane and is excluded from the organization of the point of view as well. Whereas in chapter 1 the palm moved toward the plane, here it is the plane that moves toward the body.

The minimal hypothesis to be drawn from this chapter is likewise a single one. Sayaka does not place herself outside as a plane; she is made into a plane from outside. And this does not occur all at once: it occurs as a continuum of depth in which the separation of levels is progressively lost.

That Mami in episode 3 supplies a further gradation to this continuum of depth is shown by the scan in the next chapter.

What can be drawn from setting chapter 1 and this chapter side by side is treated in the next chapter. What this second floor is laid for is answered, as with chapter 1, in chapter 6.

[Note 1] The absence in the central panel of the three-panel mirror in episode 5 is not folded into this chapter’s continuum of depth. Reflection in a mirror is a different mechanism, and it belongs to a different series from the materials that measure agreement or disagreement of level with the surroundings. As with the absence of the right eye at 9:46 in chapter 1, it is recorded only as a subtraction (judgment of 1 August 2026).

[Note 2] The commonality between this binary design and the shadow play at the end of episode 7 is treated in chapter 3. This chapter confirms only that the condition for refutation—that it is not a general technique—has been passed.

[Note 3] Whether the point of view’s ceasing to belong to anyone is to be read as an index that Sayaka has been placed on the side of the seen is not decided in this chapter. What can be decided extends only as far as the initiative not lying on her side.

[Note 4] Original Japanese of the quoted phrase: 「見えるものと見えないものの境界がゆさぶられている」.

Chapter 3 | Fixing the Asymmetry, and the General Grammar of the Image

(From Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Episode 7)
The two floors laid in chapters 1 and 2 are now set side by side.

On Kyoko’s side, a palm grips a paper puppet, turns it, knocks it down. The puppet is made to a scale that fits the palm; it is not the same size as her body. Even when the surroundings convert wholesale to paper, Kyoko’s body remains at the level of the cel. On Sayaka’s side, the palm grips nothing. The animals standing beside her in episode 7 are stretched to human height and become the same size as she is. In episode 8 she herself is leveled into the same binary plane as her surroundings.

This difference has not been gathered up across episodes. Within a single continuous flow of roughly five seconds in episode 7—from 9:46 to 9:51, moving from close-up through pan-out to reverse shot—both are assembled at once. The gripping palm and the body that grips nothing are placed within five consecutive seconds of the same scene.

Two objections are taken up here in turn.

The first objection is that the paper puppet play is a one-off convenience of staging and forms no system: that it can be disposed of by saying a picture-card treatment of Kyoko’s account of her past takes up less running time. This objection can be dismissed. Ishioka Yoshiharu, writing on the Lotte Reiniger–style manner of the shadow-play witch at the end of episode 7, notes that it “resonates visually with the style of the puppet play that appeared before it” (“The Stage Apparatus of the Magical Girls” [魔法少女たちの舞台装置], Eureka [Yuriika], special extra issue, November 2011, p. 173) [note 3]. The same design—cut paper—appears twice within one episode, and the later instance echoes the earlier: this fact of correspondence was pointed out by Ishioka, and this essay cites him as its source. What Ishioka connects the correspondence to, however, is Sayaka’s fighting as a berserker, not the dismissal of the convenience thesis. That the correspondence occurs is owed to Ishioka; that an explanation by one-off convenience therefore cannot stand is this essay’s inference. The two are recorded separately.

The second objection is the stronger one: that the paper plane is a general grammar of this work. The design of the plane is not confined to Kyoko’s vicinity. Sayaka’s binarization in chapter 2, and the shadow play at the end of episode 7, belong to the same family of designs. The design of the witches’ barriers by Gekidan Inu Curry runs through the whole work as a planar space of cutouts and collage, and Kyoko’s paper puppets are no more than a part of it. Ishioka reads the motifs of the witches’ barriers as visualizations of their bearers’ inner lives (ibid., p. 171)—a reading written in the assertive form. It is not the case that Kyoko alone possesses a special plane.

This objection is accepted. Having accepted it, the position of defense is moved. Initially the asymmetry had been set up as a difference between “standing outside the plane” and “being swallowed inside it.” That was discarded by the materials of chapter 1. When the world converts wholesale to paper at 9:49, Kyoko too is inside it. No one has gone outside. Sayaka and Kyoko are both cel from head to foot, and no difference in the level of the drawing style divides them either.

What divides them is a difference of position within one and the same space. And this is a strengthening, not a weakening. For it becomes a description under the condition that no one has escaped outside the same system: even so, one lays a hand on the puppets while the other sits and watches.

To measure this difference of position, the essay establishes three axes. All are drawn from materials already seen.

Before that, what has been discarded should be stated precisely. What was discarded is not the register itself, but a reading that uses the register as a binary. Asked in terms of cel or paper, Kyoko and Sayaka stand on the same side. But as chapter 2 showed, Sayaka altered the degree of her distance from her surroundings between episodes 7 and 8. The register operates not as zero or one but as a continuous degree running from merging to separation. The third axis below is established in order to measure this continuum.

The first axis is contact and grasp. Kyoko’s palm grips the puppet, turns it, knocks it down. At 9:56 the green bear on the paper side comes, conversely, to take hold of the palm. Sayaka touches nothing in episode 7 or in episode 8. The axis takes three values: active grasping, no contact, and being contacted.

The second axis is commensurability of scale. Kyoko’s puppet is made to the scale of the palm and is not commensurable with her body. The animals beside Sayaka are of her own height: commensurable. The sense of oddity recorded on the observation sheet for episode 7—”somehow the same height as Sayaka”—points to this axis.

The third axis is the degree of dimensional merging. This operates not as a binary but as a degree. The Sayaka of episode 7 holds to the level of the cel even as her surroundings turn to paper: separation is maintained. On the loop line in episode 8 she is leveled into the same plane as the car’s interior: she merges. Between these two lies a composite state in which plane and solid coexist within one and the same being.

The scan that follows differs in granularity of description from chapters 1 and 2. The two floors required a description of the composition of the scenes themselves; the scan takes only the minimal indices needed for classification. The difference in granularity is deliberate, and no claim is made that each item of the scan is supported at the same density as the floors.

Scanning the candidate scenes of the work along these three axes, the positions divide into five.

The operating position is where active grasping, incommensurable scale, and maintained separation hold simultaneously. Operation requires separation: in order to grip, the gripping hand and the gripped thing must be at different levels. The only case is Kyoko in episode 7.

The spectator position is no contact, commensurability, maintained separation. The Sayaka of episode 7 falls here. So does Kyubey in episode 11. Appearing within the plane of the historical figures, Kyubey does not touch them and holds to its own level.

Being flattened is where there is no contact or being contacted, commensurability, and merging. The Sayaka of the loop line in episode 8 and the Madoka of episode 4 fall here.

Crossing appears exactly once, from 10:33 to 10:53 in episode 7. Kyoko is inside the paper space of the witch while remaining cel and holding to her own scale, and at the same time her father exits the plane and becomes cel. Entering and exiting occur at the same moment. This is treated in chapter 5.

A different layer covers cases that do not fit within the frame of a relation between an individual and the plane. Walpurgisnacht in episode 11 is a being composite of plane and solid, and the Madoka of episode 12 is involved in a rewriting of the system itself. These two lie on a layer different from the axis along which Kyoko and Sayaka were set side by side.

The conclusion of the scan is single. Within the range confirmed, the only individual who stands in the operating position is Kyoko. Where Mami intersects with the plane is the witch’s barrier in episode 3, but she fights with musket and ribbon and is finally swallowed. There is no scene in which she grips and moves an element of the plane. Homura, in episodes 10 and 11 alike, throws solid weapons in from outside the plane. Time-stopping, the shield, the firearms—all are operations upon solids, not upon planes [note 1].

The case requiring the most verification was Kyubey in episode 11. If Kyubey were in the operating position, the asymmetry would be reorganized into a different figure—not “an individual operates / an individual is made into a plane” but “a system operates / an individual is made into a plane”—and this essay’s construction would collapse. The scan did not turn out that way. Kyubey does not touch, and merely holds to its level. It watches.

A by-product of the scan should be recorded here. Mami in episode 3 fits into none of the five positions. She is on the side that is swallowed by the witch, and in that sense on the side that is contacted. But in the cut immediately before she is swallowed, Mami’s body is at the level of cel based on Aoki Ume’s drawing style, while both the witch and the background are drawn in the texture of cut paper. There is a difference of level between them. And the moment at which the difference disappears is not on screen. The very moment of being swallowed is not depicted; her exit is signaled by a different design—the lock that had bound Homura springing open, an event with thickness and shadow, in cel. She is on the side that is contacted, yet leaves the frame without arriving at merging.

The continuum of depth seen in Sayaka in chapter 2 can be repositioned here. The Sayaka of episode 7 maintained separation even as her surroundings turned to paper, and merged in episode 8. Mami stands on the side that is contacted while maintaining separation to the end. The description breaks off short of merging. If being flattened is read as a continuum advancing from no contact to being contacted, and from maintained separation to merging, then Mami is located at one pole of that continuum and the Madoka of episode 4 at the other. This, however, is not a proposal to raise the five positions to six. It is one more gradation on the scale of degree that exists within being flattened.

What is fixed here is the fact that Kyoko alone stages her own past as paper puppets. The operating position is neither attacking a plane with a weapon nor being swallowed by one. It is operating the plane as a puppet play for telling of oneself.

This position, however, carries no scale of superiority. What the three axes measure is the direction of contact, whether scales are commensurable, and to what degree levels have merged—these three only. None of the three possesses a scale for measuring better or worse. That the scan yields Kyoko alone in the operating position does not mean that Kyoko alone stands in the right position. To read the difference of position as one of rank, a scale would have to be brought in from outside the three axes, and the moment it is brought in, this chapter’s description departs from the level of the relation between body and plane.

The materials also give a difference on the side of the medium. Kyoko’s puppet is drawn in the texture of paper and fits within the scale of the palm. The plane with which the Madoka of episode 4 becomes one has no shadow, and its scale extends beyond the edge of the frame. What is called a plane in both cases differs in scale between the two. There is a road leading onward from this difference, but this essay does not take it. The reason is given in a note [note 2].

Evaluation is carried out in chapter 6. What is used there is not the three axes but a scale at a different level: the distribution of the load. What this chapter fixes is position, not the value of a position.

Finally, the line of demarcation this essay imposes on itself is declared. The classification above has used three axes and nothing else. Contact and grasp, commensurability of scale, degree of dimensional merging—all are descriptions of the relation between body and plane, and none makes any use of the level of the plot: who helps whom, who dies in what way. The moment Kyoko’s end is brought in to ground her position, this essay puts its foot through the floor it laid itself. This prohibition extends to every chapter that follows.

[Note 1] Mami and Homura were checked against the three axes. Inside the witch’s barrier in episode 3 (13:04 to 20:02), the only object of Mami’s contact that amounts to a grasp is a doorknob, but the knob is drawn as a solid, and the door frame too has volume and shadow. What is moved is a solid structure, not a plane. The musket and the large gun have thickness and shadow and lie in the same dimension as Aoki Ume’s register. The ribbon is drawn as a plane and the object it binds is likewise a plane, but the binding changes neither the object’s orientation nor its position; the condition for a grasp is not met. In Homura’s room in episode 8 (5:48 to 7:57), what Homura touches is an aerial photograph on the desk; there is no difference of register between Homura and the photograph, both being cel with shading, and neither orientation nor position changes. No gesture of contact is confirmed toward the paintings on the wall. During the time-stop as well (13:08), there is no difference of register between Homura and her surroundings. Accordingly, no scene in which either stands in the operating position was confirmed.

[Note 2] What the materials give extends to these three points: that Kyoko’s puppet is drawn in the texture of paper; that it fits within the scale of the palm; and that the plane of the Madoka of episode 4 has no shadow and extends in scale beyond the frame. That is, a difference in the scale of the medium, and a difference in whether that medium lies within reach of the hand inside the frame. From here a road leads to a socio-economic reading: that one party has been allotted only material she can cut out for herself, while the other has been given a medium no individual could procure. This essay does not take that road. Neither cheapness nor the relation of having been given or not given appears on screen. Any attempt to anchor it would have no recourse but to reach for the conditions of life at the abandoned church and the history that led there—that is, for the level of the plot—and the chapter would break the line of demarcation declared at its own end. This reading is therefore recorded only as one for which room exists, and is not counted in any judgment hereafter.

[Note 3] Original Japanese of the quoted phrase: 「その前に現れた人形劇のスタイルとも視覚的に響き合い」.

Chapter 4 | Connecting the Theoretical Handle: De-subjectivation

(From Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Episode 7)

Up to this point not a single term of theory has been used. What chapters 1 through 3 established are descriptions only: palm and paper, scale, the distance between levels. This chapter applies a concept for the first time.

A word first about order. The term de-subjectivation used in this essay is a concept the author himself constructed across a preceding trilogy; it has not been borrowed from outside. Precisely for that reason the danger is great. It can become the work of throwing one’s own concept at a new object and announcing that it fits. There is only one way to avoid this: to set the materials out first, apply the concept afterward, and then look at what the materials return to the concept. Three chapters were carried through without theoretical vocabulary for that purpose.

The provenance of the concept is stated. De-subjectivation was constructed as the theme of the third essay, De-subjectivation: Between Extraction and Deployment, on Ave Mujica. The definition given there ran as follows: a mode of subjectivity standing at the opposite pole from the modern subject that actively seeks to maintain its self-identity, which comes into being by placing the self outside as an operable plane or sign—or which is made to come into being by being so placed [note 1]. Its original context of use was the scene in which Misumi Uika—Doloris when on stage—is turned into a puppet in episode 13 of Ave Mujica. That is: it was a term for describing a mutation of subjectivity occurring within the medium of the mask, rather than one produced by removing the mask.

This definition is now applied to the materials of chapters 1 through 3.

What Kyoko does in episode 7 corresponds exactly to the first half of the definition. She places her own past outside as a paper puppet that fits in the palm, and grips it, turns it, knocks it down. The self exists on screen as an operable thing, cohabiting a single frame with the hand that operates it.

What Sayaka is placed in from episode 5 through episode 8 is the second half of the definition. She places nothing outside. It is the level of her surroundings that approaches her; in episode 8 she herself is leveled into a binary plane and excluded from the organization of the point of view. She is on the side that is made to come into being by being placed outside.

Here two things the materials returned to the concept are recorded. This is the substance of the chapter.

First, the definition in the preceding essay folded activity and passivity inside a single term, by way of the clause “or which is made to come into being by being so placed.” It folded them because the materials of Ave Mujica gave no index for dividing them. The materials of Madoka Magica divide them. Whether the palm grips or does not grip. Whether the scales are commensurable or not. Within the same five seconds, two positions are assembled separately. What had been folded inside the clause has been unfolded as two positions.

Second, the passive side was not a single state. The Sayaka of episode 7 holds to the level of the cel even as her surroundings turn to paper; in episode 8 she is leveled into the same plane as her surroundings. Being placed outside has stages of depth. The definition in the preceding essay did not possess this depth.

The concept did not predict the materials. The materials pointed out the coarseness of the concept. Only in this direction can the use of one term across two works be justified.

Accordingly, de-subjectivation in this essay is used with the definition of the preceding essay rewritten as follows. It is a state of affairs in which the self comes to exist as an operable plane or sign; it branches into a position that itself operates the plane and a position that is made into a plane; and the latter forms stages according to the degree of distance. The branching and the stages are what constitute this essay’s redefinition.

One confusion with an adjacent term must be foreclosed. De-subjectivation is not a term at the level of ontology [note 2]. Nor can the term be read as a restatement of an existing discussion in which individuation structurally declines. The direction is the reverse [note 3].

And finally, this chapter halts at the point where the concept has been applied. For the moment it is applied, a different reading of the same materials becomes tenable. That is the subject of the next chapter.

[Note 1] This concept is not attributable to any particular thinker. Recuperation through adjectival forms such as “Simondonian” or “Stieglerian” is not used in this essay. Wherever it is mobilized, which source and which level of argument is being drawn upon is stated individually.

[Note 2] For the level of ontology the author uses a separate term, disindividuation, designating a state of affairs in which a pre-individual metastability comes once again to the foreground. The de-subjectivation of this essay belongs to the level of subject formation and of the social, and the two are operated on separate layers.

[Note 3] In the Japanese translation of Bernard Stiegler’s De la misère symbolique 1 (trans. Mélamberger), p. 36, the passage in question is rendered descriptively, as a structural decline of individuation, and is not set up as a single technical term. This observation is anchored to the Japanese edition; the corresponding pages of the French original and of the English translation have not been checked by the author, and no claim is made about them. What is spoken of there is a descending movement in which individuation is lost, which differs in both direction and level from the two positions treated by this essay’s de-subjectivation. It should be added that désindividualisation, as used by Simondon himself, is a rare word; the corresponding passage in Japanese translation cannot be located, and it is not used as a systematic technical term. It is therefore not made an object of demarcation here. To go out of one’s way to distinguish a term that is not in use would be to weight that term as a technical term, which is an error.

Chapter 5 | Preserving the Undecidability: Letting Go, or Remaining Held

(From Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Episode 7)

The previous chapter applied a concept. The instant it was applied, the same materials began to support a different reading. This chapter exists in order to write that state of affairs down without resolving it.

The question is set out as two declarative sentences. No technical terms are used.

The first reading. Kyoko is letting go of her past by turning it into paper. The past is not inside her; it is placed on her palm as an external thing, gripped, turned, knocked down. That it can be knocked down means that her hand can come off it.

The second reading. Kyoko remains held by her past. What she is doing is staging the same events over and over with paper puppets. The staging does not end. It is not that the palm does not come off; it is that the palm cannot.

For the second reading, the work itself contains a strong footing internal to it. Ishioka Yoshiharu describes the witch as a being without a future, one that goes on repeatedly screening the residue of past memory (ibid., p. 167). It is worth noting the word used: screening. What Kyoko does in the abandoned church is a staging. Between the definition the work assigns to the witch and Kyoko’s three minutes, a bridge is thrown without a single technical term intervening.

The same footing is supplied from another angle by a second writer. Ueo defined the recollection in episode 7 as an occasion of raising the dead, akin to a witch’s barrier (ibid., p. 169). In that it makes the dead appear again, the staging is placed in the same class as the barrier. Yet in the second half of the same sentence Ueo writes that Kyoko barely manages to control it by her own hand. A single sentence supports both readings, and the qualifier “barely” is attached. The undecidability was not brought in by this essay. It is already present, as a reservation, on the side of the prior description.

And the footing for the first reading is equally strong. Kyoko is not a witch. She has a palm on the outside of the staging. The puppet fits within the scale of her palm and is not commensurable with her body. In terms of the three axes of chapter 3, she maintains separation. One who is held cannot maintain separation—that is precisely what the deepening seen in Sayaka in chapter 2 showed.

The materials do not select either one.

One temptation of terminology is set aside here. A road lies open toward naming captivity by the past in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. This essay does not take it. Set up a technical term, and the undecidability begins to look like an opposition between technical terms. What is actually opposed is two declarative sentences, and what supports them is the same three minutes of screen. Without the terminology, the essay stays more faithful to the order of observation-driven description.

Is there, then, no material clue for dividing the two readings? There is one place. The twenty seconds from 10:33 to 10:53 in episode 7.

Here Kyoko is inside the paper space of the witch while remaining in Aoki Ume’s drawing style, holding to her own scale. This is not the position she had been maintaining—that of inserting her palm from outside. Nor is she, like Sayaka, sitting and watching. At the same moment, her father exits the plane and becomes cel. Her entry into the inside of the plane and her father’s exit to the outside of it occur simultaneously.

The classification established in chapter 3 does not function here. It is neither operating nor spectating, nor being flattened. The distinction between two positions collapses inside Kyoko’s own body.

These twenty seconds are not the key that unlocks the undecidability. They are the place where the undecidability is implemented on the side of the screen. That no line can be drawn between letting go and being held is not because the critical description is coarse, but because the work has itself, once, made that line collapse.

Here the road this essay does not take is made explicit. Descend to the level of the plot, and an answer emerges. Take the sequence of events as grounds, and either reading—letting go or being held—can be established. But that is a retreat to a level the essay prohibited to itself in chapter 3. What divides is the relation between body and plane, not the transition of events. An answer obtained by leaning on the plot is not an answer on this essay’s floor.

This chapter therefore preserves the undecidability. This is not a failure of description; it is that the object of description has this shape. The same practice was adopted in the preceding trilogy—extraction and deployment, the living and the non-living, loss and resumption. In each case the pair was not folded onto one side but retained as a feature of the structure [note 1].

Preservation has a condition, however. It is a practice that may be used only where the materials do not decide. To invoke preservation when one’s own criteria have already decided is to evade taking a position. That this essay abandons the practice once, in its final movement, is announced here in advance. The conclusion is that place.

[Note 1] See the preservation of undecidability in De-subjectivation: Between Extraction and Deployment (the third essay, on Ave Mujica). This essay does not, however, repeat that practice mechanically. In the case of Madoka Magica, the ground for preservation lies in a specific cut—the twenty seconds from 10:33 in episode 7—and is not deduced from a general methodological principle.

Chapter 6 | The Distribution of the Load

What the five chapters so far treated was the relation between an individual body and the plane. This chapter shifts level. The five positions obtained in chapter 3 are reread from the standpoint of the distribution of the load. The description of positions lies at the level of the relation between body and plane, and the three modes below are translations of it into the level of distribution. This is not a different reading of the same materials but a transfer to a different level. The move is stated explicitly because the vocabulary used below comes from the side of social theory. The three axes of the preceding chapters are terms describing bodies and planes; the terms now to be introduced lie on a different layer.

The conclusion is placed first. All three of the modes this work presents at the scale of the individual fail to persist. Each is failed in turn.

I. Concentration — Madoka

When Madoka becomes one with the plane in episode 4, the medium given to her is of an entirely different nature from Kyoko’s paper. It is not something that can be procured for oneself. It has no shadow, its scale extends beyond the edge of the frame, and the point from which it issues cannot be specified. Where Kyoko cut out paper of a size that fits the palm and set up her own theater, Madoka’s plane exceeds the scale of her individual body from the outset.

This difference is not a difference of beauty. It is a difference of distributive structure. For a single being to take on, alone, a medium exceeding the scale of the individual is at the same time for everyone else to be released from that load.

One term of Joan Tronto’s is introduced here. Privileged irresponsibility, as used in Moral Boundaries (Japanese translation by Sugimoto Tatsuya, Keiso Shobo, 2024), designates a state in which those in privileged positions are able to get by without attending to the labor of care that sustains their own lives (p. 134). Its original context of use is a political analysis of the drawing of the public/private line in actual society, and of whom that line imposes labor upon.

This essay uses the term as an instrument for measuring a distributive structure internal to a fiction. When a single being concentrates the load of the whole in its own person, that structure simultaneously distributes irresponsibility to everyone around it. Madoka’s position can be read in this way. One may equally say that she did not take it on but was consigned it.

The line of reading that takes Madoka as the work’s culmination is therefore not one this essay follows. A structure that is established by consignment does not persist so long as there is only one consignee. This is not a summit but a critical point. And it is diagnosed with the word critical point; it is not being condemned. One danger on the side of criticism must, however, be stated. The plane of episode 4 is beautiful. That beauty is an object of diagnosis, and the moment the register of the description rides on the beauty, this chapter ceases to be a diagnosis and becomes a hymn [note 1].

The Madoka of episode 12 does not fall within the object of this section’s diagnosis. As the scan in chapter 3 showed, what occurs there is not a relation between an individual and the plane but an event at the level of the system that governs relations. The layer is different. This chapter’s conclusion—that the scale of the individual is exhausted—states nothing about that layer. What this chapter diagnoses is the position of episode 4, and that the position of episode 4 does not persist implies nothing about episode 12.

II. Absorption — Sayaka

As chapter 2 showed, Sayaka places nothing outside. The load is not dispersed; her body itself becomes the vessel that absorbs it. The distance from her surroundings still maintained in episode 7 disappears in episode 8.

Tronto articulates care into four phases (pp. 116–119): caring about, taking care of, care-giving, and care-receiving. Without the fourth phase—care-receiving—care does not circulate and becomes one-directional.

On Sayaka’s side, this fourth phase does not activate. She stands only on the giving side and cannot stand on the receiving side. Absorption is not distribution.

III. Self-sufficiency — Kyoko

What of Kyoko? She places her own past on her palm and operates it herself. She neither disperses nor consigns, but neither does she absorb. Of the three she appears the most self-sufficient.

Yet this self-sufficiency has no circuit of distribution. Throughout the three minutes described in chapter 1, what Kyoko’s palm touches is paper alone. The load is placed outside, but what it is placed onto is not another person; it is a plane she has cut out herself. A staging complete upon the palm hands the load to no one and receives it from no one.

Measured against Tronto’s four phases, the shape of this absence can be specified. Caring about, taking care of, care-giving—these three hold on Kyoko’s side alone. She attends to her own past, takes it on, and moves her hands to turn the puppets. What does not activate is the fourth, care-receiving. Care-receiving is the phase of the other, and without another it does not activate. In the preceding section the fourth was lacking in Sayaka because she cannot stand on the receiving side. In Kyoko’s case there is no one to hand anything to on screen in the first place. The same absence of the fourth phase arises for a different reason.

There is one moment when contact returns from outside. Episode 7, 9:56: the green bear made of paper comes to take her hand. But it comes from the side of the plane she herself set down, not from the side of a person. This is not evidence that the circuit has opened outward; it is evidence that the circuit is closed. The only source from which contact returns is the plane she herself set down.

Kyoko’s self-sufficiency cannot, therefore, be set up as a solution. At the level of distribution that this chapter treats, self-sufficiency is another name for a state possessing no circuit of distribution. The grounds for the failure are exhausted by this. That the medium of the staging is paper, and by what history that paper came to be in her hands, are not counted in this verdict (chapter 3, note 2).

It should be recorded here that a directly different reading of Kyoko exists. Ueo reads Kyoko as positioning herself as a species distinct from the human, seeking to restore a balance of debt by preying on humans indirectly. Her combat with witches is a food chain in which what she herself has let go of is indirectly recovered from human beings by way of the human-devouring witch (ibid., pp. 171–172). This is a reading that grants Kyoko a circuit. Roundabout it may be, but a circuit is there, and it operates.

This section’s verdict does not deny that reading. The two speak of the same object, using different materials, and say different things. The materials out of which Ueo assembles this circuit are the dialogue of episodes 7 and 8, the fight with the witch in episode 5, and the apple in episode 7—that is, they belong to the level of events and utterances. What this section measured is the three minutes of chapter 1, and only what the palm touches. The line of demarcation declared at the end of chapter 3 confines this essay within those three minutes. Ueo’s reading is established in the territory this essay closed off to itself.

On the Opposing Reading

A reading directly opposed to the diagnosis above exists. Ueo Masamichi reads the phase of the work’s question as changing from the middle of the series onward: from the question of a salvation of witches at odds with the world, to the question of whether an encounter that makes salvation possible can hold. From there Ueo reconstructs the work’s hypothesis and states that, through an encounter with an object that grants forgiveness to the act of praying itself, the one-directional circulation of wishes “must be closed” as a circle (ibid., p. 179) [note 3]. It is a reading in which closure is the condition of salvation, and it is incompatible with this essay’s line.

This opposition stands, however, upon a shared diagnosis. That the wish is one-directional, and that its binding of the other is a defect—on this point Ueo and this essay agree. The absence of circulation confirmed of Sayaka in section II points to the same structure Ueo calls one-directional. Where they part is the prescription. Ueo would resolve it through the completion of the circle; this essay establishes, separately, a level at which one asks to whom the load is distributed if the circle is closed.

There is one further opposition. As recorded in section III, the two readings also diverge on Kyoko’s self-sufficiency. But that opposition arises from a difference in the level of the materials, and is of a different character from the opposition in this section.

Let the opposition be recorded without weakening it. Ueo’s reading has on its side the strong gravitational pull of the work’s own structure. A structure of consignment, so long as it is presented in completed form, is more naturally read as closed. That this essay does not close it is not because it goes against the work’s structure, but because it establishes, separately, a level at which one asks what is distributed to those around when it is closed. To the question of which is more faithful to the work, this essay holds no answer. The grounds for choosing a line lie not in a comparison of fidelity but in the order of description: the three-axis scan of chapter 3 drew from the materials the limit of what can be measured at the scale of the individual, and it is because the three axes proved unable to measure what lies outside that limit that this chapter establishes a scale at a different level, that of distribution. Holding no answer, it chooses a line.

Two Reservations

First, a note to avoid confusing layers. In The Story of the Garden [『庭の話』] (Kodansha, 2024), Uno Tsunehiro calls a mode of independence established by pluralizing one’s points of dependence on others weak independence [弱い自立] (p. 301). It appears adjacent to the dispersal this essay moves toward, but Uno’s argument is a proposal of design directed at actual society, whereas what this essay carries out is a diagnosis of a distributive structure internal to a fiction. The layers differ. Hereafter the term is used only as a term of contrast and is not brought in as a prescription for this work [note 2].

Second, a reservation concerning gender. The three failed in this chapter are all girls. But the three axes this essay used—contact and grasp, commensurability of scale, degree of dimensional merging—possess not one scale for measuring gender. This chapter’s diagnosis is therefore not written at the level of “a girl” but at the level of “the scale of the individual.”

This reservation is not a claim that no question of gender exists in the work. The gender restriction of the magical-girl genre, and the cultural arrangement that concentrates load upon the bodies of girls, both exist. They simply cannot be measured with this essay’s instruments. Indeed Tronto herself discusses the danger of framing care as a morality proper to women (pp. 85–102). The moment care is named as women’s, it is pushed back into the private sphere and drops off the political agenda. That this essay does not write “a girl” is also in order to avoid that danger.

Conclusion of the Chapter

None of the three modes presented at the scale of the individual persists. Concentration is consignment; absorption lacks circulation; self-sufficiency lacks a circuit. None of the three can be set up as a solution.

The chapter halts here. To the question of where, then, the load goes, the conclusion replies.

[Note 1] This self-examination is a methodological requirement. When the object of diagnosis is beautiful, the register of the description is drawn along by it. Of the plane of episode 4, this essay uses no descriptors other than three material features: light, the absence of shadow, and scale.

[Note 2] Recuperations by adjectival form, such as “Uno’s weak independence” used attributively, are not employed. Wherever this essay uses the term, it states that the description on p. 301 is what is being referred to.

[Note 3] Original Japanese of the quoted phrase: 「閉じられねばならない」.

Conclusion | Toward Commensurate Capacity

Chapter 6 closed leaving one question. If none of the three modes presented at the scale of the individual persists, where does the load go?

The three shapes of failure differed from one another. Concentration consigns the whole to one body; absorption stores it up in one body without circulation; self-sufficiency closes inside one body without a circuit of distribution. What differs is the shape; what is common is that in each case a single body attempted to handle the whole. The cause of failure lies not in defects of the individual modes but in the scale at which the handling was attempted.

The answer, therefore, does not exist at the scale of the individual. The load can only be dispersed and distributed according to commensurate capacity.

Here this essay abandons its own practice once. This is the place announced in chapter 5.

The work does not depict dispersal. Within Madoka Magica there exists no implementation in which load is distributed commensurately across multiple bodies. The proposition written above is not derived from observation. What the three-axis scan yielded is only the outline of the scale of the individual being exhausted; what is to be placed outside that outline is not decided by the screen. Since the materials do not decide, the road of preserving it as undecidable was open.

It is not taken. Here a decision is made. This is the one value judgment this essay performs, at the end, once, and it demands to be read as such. The six chapters built up from material description and this one sentence stand at different levels. It will not do for them to be read as mixed.

That said, what the word dispersal means is written out so as to leave no room for misreading.

Dispersal does not mean that the load becomes lighter. The total does not diminish. It means that what does not diminish is also handed to the side that has until now been exempted from it. In Tronto’s term, introduced in chapter 6, dispersal is the cancellation of privileged irresponsibility. So long as someone takes it all on, those around get by without seeing what they are sustained by. That the getting-by-without-seeing ends is the content of dispersal.

This is therefore not a matter of solidarity. The warmth called up by the phrase sharing together is not present here. What dispersal demands is that those who have until now taken on nothing take something on. It is written not as an agreeable proposal but as an unwelcome demand.

One more term is made precise. Commensurate capacity, it was written. Not equal shares. To divide the load by the number of heads is to distribute it while ignoring differences of capacity, and that is itself a violence of another kind. What was confirmed of Sayaka in chapter 6 was a structure in which only the giving phase concentrates upon someone lacking the phase of care-receiving. Equal division replicates that structure once per person. Distribution must be made according to capacity, and the question of how commensurateness is to be measured remains. This essay does not possess a way of measuring it. Nor does it intend to put the not possessing in the place of a solution. This is left open.

One further thing not measured is recorded. The three failed in chapter 6 are all girls, and the question of who is exempted from load involves the distribution of gender. This essay’s three axes possess no scale for measuring that. What the demand to redistribute according to commensurate capacity means with respect to the gendered distribution of load therefore lies outside this essay’s instruments. It requires a different scale. This is a cost this essay did not measure, which is not to say that measuring it was unnecessary.

There is one more absent measure. The position from which this demand is written is also not outside the distribution. If one who writes that the load be distributed supposes himself not to be counted among those to whom it is distributed, the demand is merely another form of privileged irresponsibility. This essay possesses no means for measuring its own share either. The two are the same absence. They stand side by side on the single point that there is no way of measuring commensurateness, and the one is not counted as self-awareness and carried over to the side of achievement. This too is left open.

Finally, the consequence of what this essay has written about Kyoko is confirmed.

The demand for dispersal is not a demand that her technique be spread as a model. As section III of chapter 6 showed, a staging complete upon the palm possesses no circuit of distribution. What dispersal demands is precisely that circuit, and a position possessing no circuit cannot be set up as a model. The separation Kyoko maintained is a position measured by the three axes; at the level of distribution it is not a solution. That this essay failed self-sufficiency as well rests on this single point.

What this essay has laid is a floor. Three axes for measuring who holds a plane, who is made into a plane, and to what degree the distance between them extends—and the five positions obtained by them. On this floor, the sequel too can be read with the same instruments. What ought to happen this essay does not forecast, because a forecast is not a diagnosis. It ends at the point where a floor for reading has been laid [note 1].

The load does not diminish. Redistribute what does not diminish, according to commensurate capacity. That is the sole value judgment of this essay.

[Note 1] Arguments treating the film Rebellion, or the framework of the franchise’s continuation including its sequel, do not belong to the spine of this essay. The same holds for production history, industrial structure, and reception history outside the work. This essay has not used these as grounds, and it therefore stands on the materials of the twelve television episodes alone.