Watching #MadokaMagica yesterday has prompted a flurry of thoughts about "emotional energy" as a concept. I feel like it's a valid one, although I haven't the faintest idea how to quantify it. At any rate I feel like I've gotten a considerably better grip on how my moods and emotions work by regarding them as a kind of physical system with a _very_ complex energy surface (with three local minima, one for each of my major personalities) continually executing complicated oscillations around an equilibrium.

Any interaction with another person results in disturbance of this system, along with the other person's system; communication can be regarded as an exchange of energy between the two systems. This exchange, if it goes badly, can throw one or both systems out of equilibrium in such a way that it's not easily restored. I've encountered the term "emotional regulation", which I interpret as the various negative-feedback mechanisms in my brain that tend to maintain my emotional system's equilibrium. I've been developing more of these with time, to become a stabler and more functional person.

The thing is, though...in _any_ system, physical or emotional, disequilibrium is a source of potential energy. The system "wants" to get back to its stable point, its ground-state energy, from its "excited" state, and you can use that difference in energy with care to do work ("work" is here used is it is in physics, force x distance.) However, extraction of work also disrupts the system, preventing it from returning to equilbrium by the fastest possible route. Think of damming a river: dam it too effectively and now the river won't reach the sea any more.

With this model in mind, it's easier to see how "toxic" people can flourish, because it's possible to latch onto a person or a community and deliberately keep knocking it out of equilibrium in order to feed off the potential energy of that person or community trying to get back to emotional equilibrium. Gaslighting someone, for example, is in essence trying to maintain a high potential energy difference between what the victim knows to be true and what the gaslighting villain wants their victim to believe to be true. There will always be a disparity that the abuser can exploit and draw energy from.

"Madoka Magica" puts this in very stark terms. What turns magical girls into witches faster than anything else is feeding off a wish that affects other people. Sayaka says she wants to heal her friend Komijo, but even as she does so she admits to herself that it's largely because she's got a secret crush on him and wants him to be grateful to her without knowing why. Even before then her relationship with him is toxic; she views him not as a person but as a player of beautiful music, and she tortures Komijo with recordings of the music that he can no longer play--so that the relief of being healed is all the sweeter.

The greater the difference in potential energy, the more powerful the resulting witch when that magical girl goes bad. Homura inadvertently builds up a -MASSIVE- potential energy difference around Madoka by messing with timelines, causing the girl (who STILL THOUGHT SHE WAS A WORTHLESS NOTHING much to Homura's dismay) to become literally the most important person in the Universe.

Homura presents an interesting case. She is not at first a powerful magical girl, and her friends struggle to find a use for her unusual ability. Possibly her initial wish to save Madoka was not a wish with much inherent potential, because initially there was nothing much special about Madoka. However, by going back again and again to save her again and again, Homura makes Madoka powerful—and ironically in, in so doing, makes her initial wish more powerful.

As a consequence weak, troubled Homura becomes one of the most powerful magical girls in existence, just by sheer force of will to change an entire Universe a thousand times over rather than lose her only friend. And now we have a happy association of #madokamagica with my favorite game, #Undertale. For Dr. Alphys, as it happens, gave us the word for this quality of Homura's, defining it literally as the drive to grab the Fates by the throat: DETERMINATION.

In a way Homura is an Alphys figure, making up for her lack of native ability in magic by resorting to human technology. You know, I used to think the "guns, lots of guns" aspect of "The Matrix" was silly, resorting to action tropes to lieu of a better attempt to depict uncanny powers. But Homura's "guns, lots of guns" moment is GLORIOUS. I never thought a scene like that could possibly be beautiful but it WAS. Pure determination, on screen.

And ironically it is Homura's unequalled determination that ends up changing the outcome, but not in the way she desired, because it kindles Madoka's determination not to flee from magic as Homura wants but to embrace it and let it literally consume her existence, leaving behind only an abstract notion with the merest traces of individuality. It's a fascinating outcome...and possibly a real-life endpoint.

But I've gone off on a tangent. Back to the point about "emotional energy" and equilibrium. The aliens in "Madoka Magica", represented by the very lawful neutral Kyubey, don't care about "emotional equilibrium", a concept they barely understand; they just want the energy. They deliberately set up vulnerable humans for catastrophic failures, the bigger the better, after throwing them into permanent disequilibrium by separating their souls from their bodies.

And it occurred to me when watching "Madoka Magica" that many humans do the same thing, causing explosions to occur in their family's or friends' lives, feeding off the detritus. One thinks of the nauseating example of those afflicted with Munchhausen Syndrome by proxy, who manufacture health crises in children or other victims, make a show of being burdened, and feed off the attention that goes to such persons. See also many "autism parents".

"Madoka Magica" provides us with a fascinating case of such emotional parasitism in the case of Sayaka and her unhealthy fixation on Kamijo and his music. She loves him, she thinks, but really she loves the idea of his performing his music for her and her alone. She "helps" the ailing boy by supplying him with classical recordings, trapping him forever in the identity of "violinist" and refusing to let him grow out of that identity after his accident.

Thus without knowing it Sayaka primed herself to become her crush's ultimate savior, maximizing his pain with constant reminders of what he's lost, then swooping in to rescue him from his pain. And haven't we seen abusers like this, swooping in to bail out survivors of trauma, promising to be the light in a dark forest—all the while rubbing the old wounds a little sorer, in order to make the purported relief the savior offers all that much more relieving?

Sayaka ends up just one, especially brutal example of a provocative theme in #madokamagica, the notion that it's virtually impossible to want to help someone else without a deeper-set, half-acknowledged desire to help oneself. Kyoko provides a milder example. She wants to help her father, a radical and unorthodox preacher who's lost his flock, but secretly it's because she was tired of the poverty and hunger from her family's ostracism.

Hence Kyoko gets a mild punishment. Because she was really thinking of her empty belly, she's cursed with the need to eat constantly. As a magical girl she achieves equilibrium of sorts. She's a rascal but her crimes are petty crimes arising from appetite. She needs food, she steals it; she needs to kill witches to live, hence ruthlessly defends a "territory". Sayaka, however, because her wish was intended to control another person, goes downhill fast. She craves acknowledgement of her sacrifice from Kamijo. When she doesn't get it from him, she wants it from ANYONE. When she doesn't get THAT, she falls into the abyss.

This is one of the ways that "Madoka Magica" teases a very interesting theme without quite resolving it in 12 episodes: it's suggested that a magical girl who bound herself with a wish made truly on behalf of _herself_, as opposed to a selfish wish made under cover of altruism, would somehow avoid the disreputable fate of Kyoko or the tragic fate of Sayaka. Not one magical girl we see, including Madoka, makes such a wish--although Madoka's wish is something else entirely, a wish based on utter and complete willingness to lose her sense of self and be reduced to an abstraction.