This includes the 'Final' episodes 9-12 which were released earlier this year. I've now rewatched all of Madoka Magica Magia Record, and with that achievement I've rewatched every great anime that aired prior to 2022. A nice accomplishment proving I'm willing to back up all my words with actions. If I say an anime is good I watch it in full, and if I say an anime is great at minimum I watch it twice in full. There's no way a great anime isn't rewatchable, but if a show is rewatchable there's a very good chance that's because it's great. A good way of distinguishing the good from the great is to think to yourself whether you'd enjoy rewatching the show at some later date. Sometimes I get my prediction wrong like with Hatena Illusion or Cue!, but that's quickly corrected once I've seen the entire series and have a better grasp of its worth. Usually I get it right and the series I rank stay ranked and eventually become rewatched, like this one was.
Magia Gaiden was difficult to rewatch. It was on the cusp of rewatchability, barely worthwhile. But like a goal in soccer, if it's inside the net it's inside the net, it doesn't matter how it got there. When I adjust my top anime rankings at the end of this year Madoka Magica will go down due to how hard it was to rewatch this season, but it won't fall out of the rankings entirely.
The basic problem with the show is the sane, rational people are the villains and the heroes just offer up gobbledygook feel-good nonsense as a response, as though hugs or holding hands are the solutions to everything. I wanted Nemu and Touka to win, not be killed off in a convenient-to-the-plot manner where the heroes aren't even to blame. I see this in a lot of poorly written stories, like in Revenge of the Sith where the Jedi were clearly in the wrong by trying to pull off a coup against a duly elected Prime Minister of the Senate. Why on Earth would I be rooting for the same Jedi who had dumb rules like bans on marriage or children and a philosophy that says if your wife is in danger you should just leave her to die because it would be wrong to go against fate?
Also, it felt like the heroes got whatever powers were necessary at the moment to prevail, when previously they had shown no such power. It's all authorial fiat, nothing is ever foreshadowed or explained. The 'connect' power they keep relying on throughout the series has no basis in the original series, Madoka Magica, it's just thrown in there out of full cloth. What right do they have to mess with the way the world works as established by the real author?
My next problem with Magia Gaiden is there's nothing new philosophically or emotionally. All that happens is different girls experience the same situations and emotions as the previous girls did in Madoka Magica. What difference does it make? All girls respond in the same way to the same situation, of course they'll be mad or sad when they're deceived and betrayed into a life of pain and death. There's nothing more to say about the subject, if you've seen one case you've seen them all. So why belabor the issue by talking about more and more girls experiencing the exact same scenario as all the previous girls? Madoka Magica was never a series suited for expansion, it was perfect and made sense as a 12-episode series. Which is why the additional movies and spinoffs only make it worse, each new release drags the average down not up.
After six months of fighting Russia has captured Pesky, a small village that abuts the capital of Donetsk People's Republic (Donetsk). This is how glacial their forward progress is. I swear there was more territory captured in the trench warfare of World War I than we're seeing in this war. Modern warfare seems to be regressing back to WWI. Air power is completely ineffectual, anything that goes into the air is more likely to be shot down than to destroy its target, and the expense of the plane is always higher than the value of its target, so there's no point even having an air force. Surface to air missiles completely control the sky. By the way stealth planes don't work either, there are advanced radar jamming techniques that can see through stealth and those planes would be shot down too. The only difference is that they're even more expensive than the regular planes.
Aside from hypersonic missiles, missiles don't work either. They're shot down by anti-missile-missiles just like planes. Planes that fire missiles from long distance aren't any better off -- their missiles can also be intercepted. All the innovations of WWII and forward have been nullified. We're back to the ancient technique of mortars and artillery firing short range, slow, low altitude and harder to track shells and hoping they hit something worthwhile by chance. They're the only explosives that aren't intercepted in the air. Hypersonic missiles work like a charm but they're generally more expensive than the things they blow up so there's no profit in actually using them.
Tanks are also useless. In the heavily urbanized environment of Ukraine, where every kilometer another city begins, infantry can hide behind every corner and every window with a handheld anti-tank missile. Even if only one in ten work and actually destroy the tank, ten handheld anti-tank missiles are much cheaper to produce than one tank, so yet again there's no time you can actually afford to use your tank in battle. Like I say, we're back to World War I, except without the poison gas, so I guess you could say our weapons have become less effective than where we started.
Ships can't contribute anything to the battlefield because anti-ship missiles have longer range than the weapons on the ships. They can fire off missiles if they want, but those missiles will just be intercepted, and you could have fired them off from land if you wanted so it makes no difference. There goes the invention of the ironclads.
The defensive advantage of modern war, where anything remotely threatening can be shot down before it reaches you or ambushed and destroyed before it sees you (in the case of tanks), means it's virtually impossible to accomplish anything. Only with overwhelming artillery fire can you slowly gain inches of ground by destroying eight years worth of concrete fortifications that completely ring the territory of Donetsk. It's like someone moving a mountain with a teaspoon. Yes, with enough shells, the mountain will disappear, but. . .
If Russia wanted, at any time, it could attach nuclear warheads to hypersonic missiles and wipe Ukraine off the map, killing all of their opponents and inheriting the empty wasteland that is Ukraine unopposed. But that isn't their war aim. Their war aim is to liberate the Russian-speaking half of Ukraine from their oppressors, not kill them, so they have to gain all this ground while not hurting the civilians they're fighting for. The task is ridiculously slanted against them, there are no weapons designed to hurt soldiers standing right next to civilians while not hurting any civilians. But with the superior resources Russia has compared to Ukraine, in manpower and manufacturing power, it's only a matter of time this war-of-pure-artillery-bombardment ends in Russia's favor. It's not like Ukraine can do anything to stop Russia. All they can do is delay the inevitable, they haven't made a single offensive anywhere or surrounded and destroyed one single Russian battalion.
Another tactic Russia could have employed is the mass mobilization of its citizenry for war, like they did in World War I and World War II. With enough manpower you could storm the battlements of every city in Ukraine, fighting at point blank range, virtually hand-to-hand, since troops can be hiding in every window and around every corner. This is what I wanted them to do, it would've ended the war quickly and decisively in Russia's favor. But they wanted to win with as few losses as possible, so they've sacrificed time in exchange for safety. Now Russian infantry never advance until the entire area has been cleared by artillery, and thus are never put in harm's way. Their only real task is to make sure the Ukrainian military can't re-infiltrate evacuated areas so that the artillery can roll forward another few meters and start bombarding new targets at maximum range. It must be the most boring war in history. At least in World War I infantry would occasionally be ordered to charge an enemy trenchline and take massive losses for no gains. Nowadays the artillery simply destroys the enemy trenchline and the infantry only move in to unoccupied zones. In the siege of Mariupol, where artillery couldn't work because the enemy was buried underground, they went all the way back to the Medieval era and starved them out with a siege. Military tactics are zooming backwards at frightening speeds. Soon enough it will turn out only phalanxes work in war.
Russia has already lost any momentum or chance to show off its decisive power, so it may as well draw this war out as long as possible, so long as the war of attrition is to their advantage, which it is. Ukraine takes more losses, and the sanctions hurt the NATO economy more than Russia's, every day. It's obvious who is going to prevail in the long run. I won't criticize Russia's refusal to use serious destructive firepower or serious numbers of troops to quickly win the war. They don't want to win the war quickly, they want to win it cheaply and with the fewest civilian casualties possible. The land they're inheriting after this war is victorious is basically heaven on Earth. It is absolutely full of the best arable land on Earth, rivers, natural gas, oil, coal, minable metals and navigable ports. Once the war is over, no matter how much Russia paid for it or how long it took, the reward will be worth it. It will be a permanent addition to the Russian mainland better than any land Russia currently has. This sliver of Eastern/Southern Ukraine is worth more than the entirety of Siberia, anything east of Moscow, I'd make that trade in an instant.
The reward is also metaphysical. The spirit of the Russian people will be renewed in their knowledge that they prevailed over the accumulated malice of the entire western world. The security of Russia will be guaranteed because NATO will see once and for all that Russia cannot be defeated militarily and thus must be accommodated in all future negotiations. (You would think Napoleon and Hitler were enough lessons as to this point but apparently not.) And the long-suffering Russians of Ukraine will finally be restored to their native land, where they always belonged and will never be persecuted again. The war must continue until all these objectives are met, and the reward will be worth any price that is paid to get there. Alternatively, losing to the likes of Ukraine, a third world basket case, is unthinkable. Russia may as well disband and disappear at that point. No nation could survive such a humiliation. It's do or die.
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