I’ve finished Muv-Luv Unlimited and started Alternative. Time traveling is troublesome…
Rika was constantly traveling from one kakera to the next until countless pieces of ‘her’ became a witch. Fortunately, she happens to be the rural town’s beloved shrine maiden, so her lapses into ‘Frederica’ and wine binging are excused as Oyashiro-sama’s doing. Apparently in each new world she starts somewhere later in life, meaning at first she had plenty of time to relive. Near the end it was only two weeks to live before she was killed, which she called a never-ending Watanagashi Festival.
Speaking of repeating two weeks of summer, Yuki suffered more than Rika did in Endless Eight. The iterations were shorter, and her orders from the Data Overmind were to observe and not interfere. The variations were also limited in the loops… no murder, no magic, and barely any action. Is the feeling of powerlessness the purpose of torture? If physical pain can’t break someone’s will, mental anguish should do the trick, right?
Battler watched his family die in two days every loop… not that he played an endless number of ‘games’. Actually, he only played one proper chess match against Beatrice. The next cat-box had an opponent replacement, the one after that went unfinished, and the next ended prematurely. Then Battler started killing off his family himself while the next scenario was on auto-play, for the audience’s sake. In the final episode, it’s revealed that everything was a case of recursive canon; a different book with different interpretations on the same setting.
Homura makes full use of her fifteen days to save Madoka… then again, she started them. The despair she experiences near the end must have been traumatic… but the fact that she changed so much from her ‘hospital’ self takes the cake. She had the choice to accept her friend’s death each timeline, and yet she chooses to experience the trauma all over again until the local Incubator ‘enlightens’ her of the consequences.
Takeru seems like Rika with the memories being copied and overwritten between realities, but then who is Hanyuu’s counterpart? And would Alternative turn out to be a story of Schrödinger’s cat?
Aletheia 