EVEN MORE CLARA DOLL DETAILS:
So you know how the Dolls have their own distinctive clothes?
Guess who else has their own distinctive clothes!
That’s right. The multiple Homuras are actually Clara Dolls.
And that’s why ‘Homura’ is smiling.
Here they are! The one with the striped hat is Nekura (Gloominess or Pessimism) and the one with the flower is Mie (Vanity).
Here’s their descriptions from the art book.
[The second one to come was Gloominess. Walking out with a tapping sound, she sneered at Good-for-Nothing. “This is Good-for-Nothing! How very unbecoming.” These dolls are only disciples of Freedom, and are devoted to their lust for it.]
[The tenth to come running is Vanity. She exaggeratedly avoids Good-for-Nothing's head and says a few words. “I wouldn't be able to bear dirtying my cape with that sticky blood!” These dolls make fun of the witch's self-mutilation.]
Good-for-Nothing is Homura, by the way, but the Clara Dolls seem to consider Good-for-Nothing to be good for something after all after she splits Madoka. She turns into the Devil, and the Clara Dolls are stated to be “okay” with the Devil. If the young voices in the trailer belong to the Clara Dolls, then they also call her “Akuma-sama” now. Something like Mistress Devil, implying a sense of respect.
[… if they are not summoned, they will simmer. There are orders they will comply with, and also orders they will disobey. What they are and the witch herself's own magic are not well understood.]
At the end of Rebellion, Homura gave Madoka her ribbon back. She declared that they might become enemies in the end. Honestly, I thought that Homura would try her best to avoid Madoka entirely. The trailer suggested that Homura was meeting Madoka, though. Here’s the answer: it wasn’t Homura herself, but Gloominess, who wants freedom.
Now, I’m not sure how this situation works out. Do Clara Dolls have free will? Are they obeying Homura’s orders? Acting out Homura’s true emotions? Is Homura perhaps directly puppeteering them in order to fulfill her goals, or do they act on their own?
I find it likely that it’s a mix of both: some of them obey her, and some of them will try and fulfill her (probably very conflicting) desires, as familiars usually do. Gloominess is likely part of Homura who wants the freedom to talk to Madoka, for example, but Vanity seems to me like a Clara Doll who is obeying Homura. After all, she still needs magical girls to fight wraiths, at least until she finds a way to wipe them out.
[I'm Vanity (Mie). I'm pushing myself to the limit for someone.] And she is, of course. All of the theatrics, the calls, the organization of magical girls. These are things that Vanity is shown to engage in. All of this is for Madoka.
We see with Gloominess, at least, that she seems to be fulfilling a specific desire: in the background are white spider lilies. Instead of the red spider lilies that mean death, final goodbyes, and lost love, white spider lilies mean a hope for the future and a fresh start. Maybe this really is the first meeting for these two in a while, and she wants to be friends again?
Or maybe, being Gloominess, she wants to warn her about something.
[I'm Gloominess (Nekura). Forcing smiles tires me out.]
Then there’s this Homura.
Nothing about her clothes is very different. She is wearing ribbons as Homura in the wraith universe does, but look closely: the ribbons are different. They have some wavy stripes on them, while Madoka’s ribbons are plain. She does not correspond to any known Clara Doll.
However, there’s mentioned to be a fifteenth Clara Doll that is not yet born: Ai, representing love. This could be her. Is it love for others? Or love for herself? I’m hoping it’s the latter, but very likely it’s love for Madoka and her friends. This would explain why she’s trying to fight Homucifer in the poster, as Homura believes that she’s a danger to everyone else.
How can this be? Well, here’s a few options:
- The Clara Dolls are grown-up familiars. They ate souls, and they became a copy of their witch. This is a process that was explained to us in the original series, where some magical girls are stated to farm familiars by letting them eat people so that they would grow souls/grief seeds.
- The Clara Dolls are not familiars, or wraiths, but instead a secret third thing. “What they are and the witch’s own magic are not well understood”, as said in the Rebellion art book. They could be magical constructs of a different kind, but I do think that this would get into overcomplicated explanations quickly, so I favor the familiar explanation.
- The Clara Dolls could be familiars, but instead of eating souls they’re simply powerful enough to change their shape. Their strength is equal to the strength of a magical girl…. when Homura was a witch, before Homura became something more. It could also be energy from the contracts making them stronger. Maybe it’s me being sentimental, but I don’t like the idea of Homura letting anyone’s soul be nommed on.
Now, before there’s a panic about how they’ll juggle fifteen extra characters, here’s a few thoughts:
- Just because they seem different doesn’t mean they’re actually different. It might be that the Clara Dolls are a way for Homura to present herself. As Vanity, she might show off more, or have dramatic flourishes like her throne and her dress. As Gloominess, it might be that she doesn’t believe that her plans will work, so she tries to do what makes her happy. It’s likely that the Clara Dolls are just extra ways to explore Homura’s character. They’re parts of her soul, after all, and right now she is extremely powerful. She might simply want to keep her true self away from humans.
- They could work like projections. Homura wants more bodies to work with, but she has to filter herself through the Dolls’ personalities. This could result in a lot of juicy character interactions, as the things she tries to keep hidden are closer to the surface.
- Will ‘Ai/Mystery Homura’ fight against Devil Homura? Very likely! How can this be when they’re the same person? Well, who hates Homura more than Homura? That’s right. Nobody. Anyone can fight and argue with their self, it’s just usually not on the level that a reality-warper like Homura can manage.
If this is true, there’s plenty of interesting directions they can take it.
- Because the Clara Dolls have a degree of separation from Homura, they can show other characters things that Homura herself has ignored or locked away. Bad memories, affection for her friends, the resentment she must feel - everything from concern to a cry for help can be plausibly shown through them as the actors.
- Manuke (Stupidity) is specifically more naive/sincere than the others. Maybe interacting with this Doll would show the Quintet that there’s something more going on than a Devil who wants to hurt other people.
- If Ai represents a love for other people, Ai can have a strange character arc where she learns to value Homura/herself, and become self-love.
- On the other hand, Ai can represent self-love from the start, and because Homura looks very fucking unhealthy in the trailer, she only wants to stop her because she’s hurting herself. This option plays into the themes of self-sacrifice and happiness, which I believe to be some of the major themes that they’re going for.
- The poster could be misleading and Ai ends up fighting everyone but Homura. I find this the funniest option.
- Homura can hug herself. It’s possible. In fact, every character can hug Homura 15 different times.
Smiles are a Clara Doll’s default expression. We have yet to see Homura smile for real.
Is this going to get very ambiguous and confusing? Probably. But rewatching for details was the fun part in Rebellion, so I’m looking forward to it!
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Returning to an old conversation about magic in LotR, something occurred to me the other day: Sting was a far more effective weapon against Shelob than Sam's sword, slicing through multiple of her webs with a single sweep and cutting into her belly without much apparent effort from Sam. The text is a bit unclear for the brief portion of the fight when Sam is using two swords, but it seems to me that the only wound Sam's own sword scores against her is against one of her eyes: "The shining sword bit upon her foot and shore away the claw. Sam sprang in, inside the arches of her legs, and with a quick upthrust of his other hand stabbed at the clustered eyes upon her lowered head." While both swords could potentially be shining, Sting is established to be glowing at this point due to the proximity of the orcs in the tower, so I'm inclined to believe that the shining sword here is Sting, the one that chops off the end of one of her legs no problem, while the other one strikes against her eye, established two paragraphs later to be her softest spot.
Now Frodo attributes this potency against Shelob to the sword's origins. "There were webs of horror in the dark ravines of Beleriand where it was forged." And basically this pans out, Gondolin, where Sting was made, was not too far from Ered Gorgoroth, where Ungoliant and her spawn (including, most likely, Shelob herself) lived until Beleriand fell. The logic here, is, perhaps, similar to the reasoning for why Frodo and Merry's barrow-blades were so potent against the Witch-king, having adopted a portion of their makers' loathing for a particular enemy. And there is indeed evidence enough for this: the first spider Bilbo encounters in Mirkwood "evidently was not used to things that carried such stings at their sides, or it would have hurried away quicker." This spider lived not too far from the Elvenking's halls, surely it had been attacked with weapons before, which does call up an idea of there being something especially terrible to it about this particular sword. (Though this spider is also inarguably quite inept and possibly stupid; no shade to Bilbo but losing a fight to a mostly-tied-up enemy that can't see in the dark and has never before fought anything more dangerous than a particularly stubborn door-to-door salesman doesn't exactly reflect well on its capabilities.)
But I think Sting had another enchantment on it, and one a great deal more recent, and possibly even more direct: the enchantment of its name.
Bilbo takes a sword from a troll-hoard, puts it on his belt and under his jacket, and then proceeds to carry it around for months without thinking about it at all -- until, that is, he finds himself face to face with a giant spider, a giant spider who, as is made clear in the text, was one of Shelob's own descendants: "Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew, spread from glen to glen, from the Ephel Duath to the eastern hills, to Dol Guldur and the fastnesses of Mirkwood (emphasis mine)."
So Bilbo takes his sword and makes his first kill, and what we witness next is a Moment by any definition: "Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves of of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath."
Then Bilbo names the sword, and he names it Sting, calling to mind the thought of a fly that can fight off a spider, a tiny creature coming out on top in a fight with a fierce predator. And then he sets off and uses his newly minted sword to rescue his friends from giant spiders. And though he uses the sword again in his adventure, it is never such a great moment, and indeed he ends up missing a great deal of the battle where it would have been most useful, leaving this incident with the spiders as not only his first use of the weapon, but his most significant -- as The Hobbit is meant to be adapted from his memoirs, certainly the only one he felt important enough to write about.
And for sixty years Sting laid quiet in the Shire, hanging over Bilbo's mantle, where he told stories about it to his nieces and nephews and cousins and anyone else who would listen, and doubtless the story he kept circling back to was the one about the great spiders and the christening of his sword, and even if nobody believed it, a bit of a legend grew about it, and whatever deeds, if any, it was involved in before it found its way to the troll's hoard were forgotten, and it became the Sting, the sword that was used to defend friends from Shelob's brood.
I hardly need to point out the power inherent in names and the naming of things and people in Tolkien's work.
And then, seventy-eight years after its christening, Sting finds itself in another spider's lair, the grandmother or great-grandmother of that first spider that earned it its name -- and this is what it is, now. This is its entire identity, insomuch as a sword can have one of those. I think that over seventy-eight years Bilbo quite inadvertently but also quite effectively wove an enchantment against Shelob and her ilk on that sword, never knowing how much it would matter in the end. Indeed, I would put forth that there was no other weapon in contemporary Middle-earth that would have been such a bitter sting to Shelob; similar enchantments, perhaps, could be found in Thranduil's halls from his people's long struggle against the spiders there, but on a blade from Gondolin, which shared a mountain range with the land where Ungoliant herself lived for a time? And Glamdring and Orcrist would have inherited those properties alongside Sting, but they had a legacy of goblin slaying, not spider slaying.
So, quite by accident, Frodo and Sam walked into Shelob's lair with the best possible chance of escaping her.
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This election day, I'm thinking of my Nana.
I'm thinking of how as a young woman, she fled political violence in her native Colombia to build a new home in a more stable country. I'm thinking about how she lived a long life, but not long enough to see her home country elect its first ever progressive president (just a few months ago!).
Coincidentally, I was living in Colombia at that time (in the very city she grew up in), and I was able to witness what felt like a miracle. A very conservative country, suffering from the violent inheritance of colonization and catholic invasion and the war on drugs, against a backdrop of the dangerous global rise of the far right--this unlikely country managed to elect one of the most progressive heads of state in the world, in 2022. That's a pretty big deal.
And I'm thinking about this, this election day, because that election was won by a very thin margin. I'm thinking about how it almost didn't happen. I'm thinking about how it was only possible thanks to the highest voter turnout in 20 year. And I am thinking about the countless number of voters who chose to vote for the first time. I am thinking of the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens who showed up at the polls. I am thinking of the indigenous women who rode 12 hours on public buses to vote at the 'nearest' polling stations. I am thinking of all the money and corruption that went into preventing minority citizens from voting, and I'm thinking about how they showed up in the millions and voted anyway.
I am thinking that I would like to see a miracle like that in my own home country.
So if you're on the fence about waiting in line today to cast your vote, I hope that you will think--about the country you want to live in, the future you hope will unfold, and about all of the people it takes to make a miracle.
Because history may deem us nameless and faceless, but when we show up en masse, we are the ones who make history happen.
And yes, maybe also spare a thought for my Nana. Who was in fact a very angry and judgemental woman who supported the republican party for 50+ years, and who would be turning in her grave right now (if the family hadn't had her cremated). Think about the mean angry ghost of my Colombian grandmother, who very much wants you to not show up at the polls to support abortion and other sinful progressive values. Think about her. Do it for her. Do it for Nana.
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