So what actually is this?

This is my personal notes for Hieronym’s To The Stars, a Madoka Magica fanfiction. I made this to motivate myself to actually tackle the almost 1 million word piece and to help keep focus whilst reading. Somewhere along the way I thought, “why don’t I publish this?”, and here we are.

This thing runs on a very hacked together mdBook setup, which frankly looks super ugly but at least it works. If you have a better way to do this monstrousity, let me know (inb4 “why not just use Bear again?” or equivalent).

You can skip around to whatever chapter you please using the chapters panel. I did my best to make this as organized as possible but please forgive me if something is out of place. The next chapter that I have NOT read will be grayed out.

Caution

This site contains unmarked spoilers for TTS. If you do not wish to be spoiled, leave now!!! Additionally, please do not expect anything super polished. A lot of these are just going to be random things I pick up on or questions I have. Also, please don’t spoil me thanks.

01 - A Wish

• The first thing I did was to check whether or not the image of the girl presented at the top is original or not, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it was. I thought it might be ripped from a manga or the like, but it’s cool to see an original illustration this early in.

  • Side note I almost spoiled myself trying to check this since I somehow ended up in a Reddit thread where someone said that she is “human and ||||||||”. Thank god they censored it, though I think I have a vague idea of what might be under it? I believe I recall aliens playing a major role in this story so that would be my guess given zero context and having only read the opening quotes.

• The quotes themselves seem extremely uncanny.

  • According to Wiktionary, “God does not play dice with the universe” is supposed to mean that understanding probability is not good enough to understand quantum mechanics. Now I was already informed that this is a series involving space travel, so I assume this has something to do with that, however I couldn’t say I particularly know what that would entail.

  • The “Universal Guidelines for Middle School Instructors” doesn’t appear to be a real thing from a brief Google search, which makes me believe that this is an in universe thing. That being said, it sets up for two possibilities in my mind.

    • The first possibilty is that the Incubators are running the world now and this is written in such a way as to continue the farming of energy for them.
    • The second possiblity is similar, however it differs in that the human race is still largely in control, but has some sort of deal with the Incubators where it is benefitical enough to sell out the youth.
    • Given the quote below it, I am inclined to believe some variation of the second one is more true for reasons that will be elaborated on there.

  • The PAL excerpt is very telling as I believe that it shows some sort of loss of hope that would translate into why someone would sell their soul to the Incubators. That being said, I do not understand the acronyms and am afraid to Google them after what happened with the girl in the photo.

• The girl is named Shizuki. I will not be revising my notes to add her name, though it is revealed at this point.

• Cake is mentioned on the second non-quote line wow that was fast.

• A chronometer is “a highly accurate mechanical timepiece, with an original focus on the needs of maritime navigation.” Why this and not a regular clock or even something synced to an NTP like system? That being said given the fact that this is Madoka, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is more time travel sheinanigans afoot, though I feel like that would require some kind of modified Chronometer but let’s be real here that most certainly exists if it is needed.

  • The quote after this, “the knowledge injecting itself into her stream of consciousness.” is an extremely weird way to word this, though I don’t think it has any significance other then how it feels to wake up at the ungodly hour of 9:30 AM.

• The contradiction in Shizuki’s appearance vs how she wants to be perceived in the same block of text is interesting. If you don’t want to be seen as a child, why continue to wear bunny slippers? On the contrary, why care what others think in that regard?

Others, preferring a more personal touch, had robots to do the dressing for them.

• This line in particular strikes me. Why not dress yourself? I understand being lazy, but this doesn’t feel like laziness. It feels like something closer to either learned helplessness or loneliness.

Governance ideology stressed the importance of having each new generation of children experience a little of the human condition, even the outdated parts.

• “The human condition” strikes me. I’m aware this is a very transhumanist series, but to follow something like that up with “even the outdated parts” feels super out of place. Additionally, I can’t imagine it would be that hard to make some form of sleep suppressent drug for minors given the fact they already have 5-hour energy on steroids.
  • A potential way this could be looked at is through the lense of the protection of childhood innocense and the hyper-capitalist nature of the word.
    • For the first lense, the idea of allowing children to sleep before exposing them to the harsh reality of the world which requires them to stay up 24/7 is interesting, but I am unsure what that could lead into. Perhaps the second lense?
    • The second lense is the idea that the billionaire class wants you to do everything for them, at all hours of the day, every day. A person willing to sacrifice their life for you is significantly more valuable then someone who isn’t.
    • If we want to connect the two lenses, it could be that they are giving the youth the ability to live a life before being sold out to their overlords.

That way they wouldn’t forget their roots and grow into soulless posthuman monsters, or something like that.

• Holy Chekov’s gun lol.

The government always made a big deal about these things. Governance ideology was responsible for the built‐in restrictions on direct mental communication and virtual reality, for instance. They were expected to move their lips to talk, except for deliberately slow long‐range messaging, and time tickets to activate your VR implants were exorbitantly expensive.

Anything else would be inhuman, after all.

• This feels almost dystopic. It is one thing to heavily monetize your ability to communicate, but to have such specific requirements including making the service worse feels like an active deterent. There is an effort to make communication harder for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious.

She ordered her blinds open with a thought, then leaned onto her windowsill, observing the cityscape from her vantage point on the forty‐second story. Behind her, her long hair silently untangled itself, prehensile strands waking up for the day. That was one convenience that was not restricted—hair that maintained constant length, cleaned itself, and arranged itself was astonishingly useful.

• I could be misunderstanding how this works, but this feels more invasive then the pills do. Perhaps I am just misunderstanding it.

She felt really stupid sometimes, like a square peg in a world of round holes. It had been drilled into their heads in school: the story of human history was all about escape. Escape from hunger, from need, from want. Now, humanity had really reached the end of history, and was finally on its way to building a perfect society.

It didn’t feel perfect to her.

• This is actually an extremely good point. For their to be a utopia, you must ultimately become a cog in the machine. You don’t have free will, because to be perfect is to lack a sense of self.

She looked out at Mitakihara City. The city hummed with activity, with transportation vehicles constantly on the move on the surface, along the countless elevated roads and tubes, and, she knew, deep underground. Air vehicles had turned out to be impractical and inefficient—the only true solution to congestion was to go 3D.

• All this and no public transport. Yeah this place is cooked.

Pedestrians and bicyclists swarmed the skyways, drones patrolled the skies, and, if you looked hard enough, you could see the edges of the species diversity preserve, the SDP.

• I know this means some kind of wildlive sancutary, but what actually does this entail? Probably irrelevant but still named weirdly enough to draw my attention.

In a world where you could have almost anything, spaceflight was still one of the true scarcities. Heavily restricted and carefully regulated, pleasure flights were deliberately priced to absurd levels, to restrict civilian travel. You could go and be a tourist if you wanted—if you were willing to pay.

• I have a theory that this is used to try and control the population but I have no grounds for this right now.

She leaned over and peered into the telescope she had mounted next to her window, tossing the dustcover onto her bed. A gift from her grandmother, it was one of those automatic models, requiring only a transmitted instruction from her cortical implants to automatically find and focus on the desired target.

• Could these implants be used to manipulate someone’s vision into seeing what someone else wants them to see?

She kept telling herself she’d get over it, that she’d find a hobby, maybe get a boyfriend

• Straight people? In my Madoka fanfic? Bleh. (/j)

Many things were cheap, but space in a dense urban hub like Mitakihara City was always at a premium. As a consequence, most families in the city rubbed elbows in extremely cramped flats

• This reminds me of Hong Kong’s cage homes. I’m going to guess that this is different from that, but the description feels like that.

In truth, the only reason they knew that was because they had yet to receive an official death notice. Sometime over the past twelve years, the woman had simply stopped writing.

• I’ve got some bad news for you guys…

For those living on Earth who were unhappy with their medically eternal lives, there was a ready solution. Those with ennui, those unable to fit into society, those who had divorced after sixty years of happy matrimony—they all joined the military

• Glad to know even in the far future, we still cannot escape the military as a last resort to kill yourself.

“Well, speaking of resource cuts,” she said, changing topics with disturbing efficiency. “The food synthesizer is on the fritz again. Nothing came out this morning but inedible mush.”

• Very low level observation, but I like how Hieronym describes Mitakihara are very futuristic and high tech, whilst not explicitly stating the poverty issues out right.

Stopping at “Ryouko waved goodbye to all of them, and headed out the door.”