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This entry contains SPOILERS. Don't click the cut if you don't want to get spoiled!
↪「 character info 」
name: Akemi Homura
age: Canon does not give her an official age. Since Madoka is officially fourteen, and she and Homura share a homeroom, I will assume Homura began at the same age. Since her ability is to travel through time, and the number of timelines she has lived through is canonically ambiguous (five are shown in the series proper, yet the number of repetitions is described as "countless," Oriko Magica gives us another canon timeline, and the second Drama CD yet another), her true age is unknown. It is safe to say that Homura is at least somewhat older than she appears, but whether this is simply months or years is a matter of debate.
canon: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
role in canon: ROLE IN CANON
↪「 history 」
❝ This is not my battlefield. ❞
Homura is taken from the end of episode nine, after her conversation with Kyubey regarding Kyouko's death and the inevitability of Madoka becoming a Puella Magi. At this point, she has repeated the timeline untold numbers of times, and failed each time. Her determination to uphold her promise to Madoka has forced her to cut ties with her former friends more and more each time she repeats; her world shrinks to include only Madoka with each repetition. At the end of episode nine, Kyubey tells her that Madoka will form a contract to defeat Walpurgisnacht, and she says she will not let that happen - her determination only increases.
↪「 personality 」
❝ I'll repeat it. I'll continue to repeat it over and over. Visiting the same time again and again, searching for the single exit out. Searching for the path to save you from a fate of despair. ❞
i.
In the beginning, Homura Akemi was like any other girl. Quite a bit shyer and awkward than most, certainly, but spending that amount of time in the hospital does tend to stunt one's social growth. She is withdrawn, nervous, afraid to approach others for fear of being rejected. Her parents are never mentioned, and she lives alone; it is clear that she doesn't know how to interact with people beyond stuttering answers to direct questions, so she doesn't reach out or initiate conversation. She is polite, referring to everyone by their family name and the honorific -san, rather than the more familiar given name. Being so far behind in school and physically frail damaged Homura's self-esteem, left her vulnerable to negative emotion, made her believe that she would always be left behind, watching others from the sidelines. Still, she was fairly average. Normal.
And then she met Madoka Kaname, who saved her, who believed in her, who opened up a world she hadn't known existed.
To Homura, Madoka was the ideal, someone to look up to. She was brave, she was friendly, she was kind, she was gentle; everything Homura wished she could be, and felt that she could not, everything she was unworthy of. And yet, Madoka befriended her anyway, and in the process built herself up so high in Homura's eyes that when she died, Homura could do nothing but wish to go back and do it all over again, this time with herself in the role of protector. A life without Madoka in it was no life at all.
This devotion to Madoka is at the core of Homura's character, the one constant in all of her repetitions of the timeline. No matter what she has to do, or who she must become, the one thing guiding all her actions is her desire to keep Madoka safe. When she feels she has lost herself, lost track of the human part of herself, it is her self-imposed duty to Madoka that keeps her going. She knows that if she succumbs to despair and becomes a Witch, Madoka is doomed, and so she has no choice but to continue looking for a way to save her.
ii.
In the second timeline, due to Madoka’s influence in the first, and Homura’s new status as a Puella Magi, she is notably less shy, though her newfound confidence seems mostly to revolve around her proximity to Madoka. It is when she is with her that she is able to feel that she is cared for, and as a Puella Magi, that she is useful, a part of something important. She is still polite, continuing to use more formal terms of address, but she is more positively expressive.
In this timeline, Homura is certain she will be able to protect Madoka, and that by working with her and Mami, will be able to avert the fate Madoka suffered in the original timeline. We see Homura as a girl who is determined to repay a friend her kindness, and who is not above bending the law to do so. She is also shown to be fairly clever here, coming up with the idea to use bombs to enhance her offensive ability in conjunction with her time stopping, using the Internet to look up how to make them, and then doing so. At the end of this timeline, however, Homura learns the first of many awful truths - Witches are born from Puella Magi. This knowledge follows her into the third timeline, where she resolves to tell her friends that Kyuubey has tricked them.
iii.
When Homura wakes in her hospital bed yet again at the beginning of the third timeline, it is clear that witnessing Madoka’s transformation into a Witch has shaken her down to her very bones. And yet, rather than run away from everything as she might have once, her first thought is one of the others, of warning them. Unfortunately, the others do not believe her when she tries to explain, and she is not confident enough to argue with Sayaka and convince them otherwise. Instead, that conversation is redirected to her reliance on bombs, and lack of a safer power for use in group battles. Here again she shows remarkable ingenuity and bravery, freezing time and sneaking into a Yakuza facility to steal their guns.
When Sayaka transforms into the Witch Oktavia von Seckendorff, Homura spends that battle protecting Madoka, as per her wish. In order to save Madoka, she is forced to make the first of many awful decisions, and destroy the Witch form of a girl who might have been her friend. For Homura, choosing to sacrifice someone else to save Madoka is not so difficult, but it is clear that she is greatly upset by the act, apologizing to Sayaka before she plants her bombs and kills Oktavia. Immediately after this battle, Mami kills Kyouko to prevent her from becoming a witch like Sayaka, and tries to do the same to Homura. Though she is extremely scared and horrified, Homura does what she can to comfort a devastated Madoka. They will fight Walpurgis Night together, and everything will be all right. This is one of countless instances of Homura putting aside her own fear and doubt to do what is best for Madoka, a theme that will continue as long as she repeats the timeloop. Her assurances that everything will be fine, however, prove hollow.
At the end of the third timeline, both she and Madoka, having defeated Walpurgis together, are on the verge of becoming Witches. Homura seems to accept this fate, and decides that as long as she and Madoka are together, they can destroy the world and she will be happy. Her repetition of the timelines has definitely taken a toll by this point; all that she has seen as a Puella Magi has led her to believe that perhaps the best thing for the world is to end it. It is a terrible place, full of terrible things, after all. But Madoka has different plans, and uses the Grief Seed she kept from the battle with Oktavia in order to cleanse Homura’s Soul Gem. Homura is utterly horrified by this. She values Madoka’s life far, far above her own and all of humanity, and that Madoka would sacrifice herself to save her in such circumstances is unthinkable to her. Madoka has a request, one that shapes the development of Homura’s character for the rest of the series: she asks Homura to go back and stop her from being tricked by Kyuubey, and Homura promises that she will, no matter how many times she must repeat. But first, Madoka asks that she destroy her Soul Gem to stop her from becoming a Witch, saying that, in spite of all the bad things, the world is full of things she wanted to protect. Homura calls Madoka by her name for the first time, which makes Madoka happy, and then complies.
Homura's promise to Madoka in this timeline is the driving force for all of Homura’s actions from then forward, and the trauma of being forced to kill her is one of the things that serves to change her from the shy, self-conscious girl from the beginning to the one that appears in the following timelines.
iv.
Upon waking up in the fourth timeline, Homura is obviously devastated. Having to kill the friend she wished to protect, even if she can travel back and undo it, has taken its toll. She immediately pushes this aside, though, and gets out of bed, using magic to fix her eyes and presumably her heart condition, if she had not done so before. She means business.
In this timeline, she is much more direct, and uses Madoka’s given name exclusively. She has become much more focused and determined as a result of her wish, and has decided that she will not rely on anyone else to help her. Her experience in prior timelines has taught her that she cannot. She places the responsibility of hunting Witches and defeating Walpurgis solely on herself, so that Madoka will never be forced to become a Puella Magi to protect anyone. She will fight for Madoka, to fulfill her promise.
She seems to have befriended Madoka in this timeline, and true to her nature, Madoka arrives while Homura is losing to Walpurgis, and forms a contract with Kyubey to save her. Homura desperately tries to keep her from doing so, but she is too far to be heard, and Madoka transforms, defeating Walpurgis in one hit, almost immediately becoming a Witch herself. Homura’s reaction to this appears to be a sort of resigned despair - she knows that she must continue, and remains only to ask a question of Kyuubey. She learns that his plan is always to have Madoka become a Witch, so he can collect the energy released when she transforms. When he asks if she will fight, she states that this is not her battlefield, and turns back time once more, her resolve only strengthened.
v.
The fifth known timeline shows a Homura vastly different from the girl in the first timeline. She hides behind a mask of stoic indifference, has cultivated a careful distance between herself and anyone that might attempt to reach out to her. She appears, at first glance, to feel very little when tragic things happen to the other magical girls. Taking her background into account, however, makes it clear that this is not the case. Homura is hurt deeply by the events of each timeline, it is simply that she has seen these things happen too many times; she is forced to bury her feelings as a measure of defense against the hurt each death brings. She has learned through repetition that she cannot save everyone, and freezes them out to avoid hurting herself more than necessary. Being friends has failed, so she plays the part of enemy instead.
This is not to say she has stopped trying to save them. In spite of her single-minded devotion to Madoka, she does make attempts to keep the others alive. It could be argued that she does this solely so she might have assistance once Walpurgis arrives, but her expression when her once-mentor Mami is cruel to her is one of barely-concealed pain, so this is unlikely. She also tries to warn Mami that the Witch Charlotte is different than the others, implying that she has seen Mami die fighting it before, and appears to be genuinely upset when Mami doesn’t heed her warning. When Mami dies, she is extremely harsh to both Sayaka and Madoka, driving home the point that being a Puella Magi is not glamorous or cool, but is instead an existence of despair - one that they would both be better off staying away from.
When Sayaka becomes a magical girl, Homura is both surprised and immediately accepting of this. She had thought her warnings coupled with the shock of Mami’s gruesome death would be enough to keep her from making a contract, and blames herself for not keeping an eye on Sayaka as well as Madoka. Because of her experiences in previous timelines, Homura tells Madoka to let go of Sayaka Miki - she is doomed to become a Witch in every timeline in which she becomes a Puella Magi, and Homura wants Madoka to be spared the pain of seeing that. But Madoka is Madoka, and she will not abandon a friend in need. When she throws Sayaka’s Soul Gem away, thinking it will help, Homura looks extremely shocked, and immediately goes to retrieve it. This shows that, even if Homura believed Sayaka would eventually become a Witch, part of her still held some hope that she would not. Otherwise, she would not have expended the magical energy necessary to go after the Gem. While another motive may have been to spare Madoka the pain of having killed her best friend, that does not seem to be the whole of it, judging by the look on Homura's face, and the swiftness with which she rushes to retrieve the Gem.
Kyouko is Homura’s best bet at defeating Walpurgis, and Homura treats her accordingly. She approaches her, and gives her information she withheld from the others. This is probably because she has observed Kyouko’s actions and reactions in prior timelines, and knows Kyouko to be the one magical girl whose outlook on life most closely matches her own. Kyouko is as selfish as Homura appears to be, and it is that common ground that allows them to be something like allies. Homura, who might have been as horrified by Kyouko’s selfishness as the others at the beginning, no longer cares. She understands this way of thinking now, and does not judge Kyouko for it.They both know that their partnership lasts until Walpurgis Night is defeated only. It is not a friendship.
As Sayaka slowly begins her descent into despair, Homura goes after her, intending to try to snap her out of it in order to spare Madoka more pain. Because of Homura’s interactions with Mami earlier, and a misunderstanding regarding the circumstances of her death, Sayaka wants nothing to do with her. Homura’s words to her are blunt and to the point, a reinforcement of all the negatives Sayaka associates with her, so Sayaka refuses her help. This clearly upsets Homura, and she attempts to talk her into accepting assistance, but Sayaka is too stubborn and too convinced that Homura is everything that is wrong with Puella Magi, and refuses again. To Homura, Sayaka’s blatant disregard for her life is the ultimate in disrespect to Madoka, who loves her and cries for her. This is something she cannot abide, and she transforms, intending to kill Sayaka before she transforms into a Witch and hurts Madoka more. She is stopped by Kyouko, to whom she explains and reveals nothing.
Homura is intelligent, she is determined, she behaves like a scientist searching for a cure to some terrible disease. She learns from her mistake, gets back up, and tries again, and she will do this as many times as necessary until she finds the one way out, the one way to accomplish her goal. But it is important to remember that she is still a young girl, that the demeanor she projects is not the one she feels. Underneath all her harshness, under the cold and uncaring facade, is a young girl who was so desperate to be loved, to be worth something to someone, that she sacrificed her life for a chance at it. She feels a tremendous amount of pain, it is evidenced in her stiff posture, the way she clenches her hands, the way she grits her teeth and turns her head. She lives like sheet of ice in the spring, constantly in danger of cracking. Sometimes it is all too much, and she breaks down. When Madoka speaks badly about herself, or thinks to sacrifice herself, it serves to undermine all the carefully constructed barriers Homura has placed around herself for protection. She is not immune to sorrow, rather she lives in a constant state of it, and the only reason she does not give up is because she cannot. She must continue, or all her sacrifice is for nothing, and Madoka will fall. When Madoka so carelessly, in Homura’s eyes, thinks to give up her life, it wounds her deeply. She is unable, in those moments, to maintain her composure.
This is Homura as the world sees her now: To her classmates she is the new girl, mysterious and cool, confident, smart, and athletically gifted. Distant, but polite. Someone difficult to get close to. Someone, perhaps, better to be admired from far away. To her fellow Puella Magi, she is an Irregular, an enigma, difficult to understand, and thus easy to believe the worst of. She is closed off, rejects any offers of friendship, and has an intense, suspicious interest in preventing Madoka Kaname from making a contract. She is blunt to the point of cruelty, and selfish, willing to sacrifice others to achieve her own ends. To them, Homura Akemi is no hero.
Neither is she to herself. She has cast away her humanity, embraced the fact that she is no longer human. Her goal is to fulfill her promise to Madoka, to keep her from becoming a Puella Magi, and though she may care about other things, they come in a distant second. Her devotion to Madoka eclipses all else, it is the only thing she allows herself to see. Homura has centered her life around learning all she can about Walpurgis, so she can eliminate the Witch once and for all. It is made clear that she will take any action, make any sacrifice necessary to do this, as she says herself, she will commit any crime, any sin, to make certain that Madoka is safe.
↪「 abilities 」
❝ I want to redo my meeting with Kaname-san. Instead of being protected by her, I want to protect her! ❞
When a girl forms a contract with Kyubey, she is granted a wish, and made into a magical girl. Upon being transformed, she is granted a Soul Gem, which takes the form of an ornate, egg-like jewel. This jewel can shrink to be housed in a ring her finger, and released when it is necessary to shift into magical girl form, giving her access to powers beyond anything a normal human could do. However, there is a catch to this! The Soul Gem is quite literally the girl's soul, pulled from her body for combat efficiency, effectively turning the girl into an animated corpse, or lich. If the Gem breaks, the girl will die, and the body is useless if farther than one-hundred meters away from the Gem. The Gem is also symbolic of the wish she makes, and as she uses her power, it becomes tarnished, and must be cleansed by a Grief Seed, the Witch counterpart of a Soul Gem. Additionally, upon becoming a magical girl, the girl is doomed with despair equal to that of the hope she creates, and this despair too can accumulate. As long as a girl has hope, this will not occur, but it is stated as an inevitability that all magical girls will experience such despair, at which point their Soul Gems are consumed with darkness and transform into Grief Seeds, turning her into a Witch.
Because her wish involves time-travel, Homura's powers are accordingly themed around time manipulation. Homura is able to freeze time, which is a highly exploitable ability when used in combat. For anyone else, it appears as though Homura is moving at incredibly high speeds, like she's using Flash Steps. Anyone touching her is unaffected by her time manipulation, so she depends on long-range combat and the element of surprise to avoid being caught. Additionally, she can use this ability to reset one month's worth of time, back to a short while before she first met Madoka. Obviously, this aspect of her power will be unusable in-game.
Her wish to protect manifests as a buckler shield, which contains a sand timer; the source of her ability to stop time. It also seems to exist as a limitless storage facility, and Homura uses it to stockpile various types of modern weapons she steals from the Yakuza and the Defense Force, such as the following: pipe bombs, hand grenades, flash bombs, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, mortars, guided missiles, bunker busters, rocket launchers, and rocket-propelled grenades, and plenty of ammunition. Her cache of weapons appears to follow her through timelines, getting larger with each repetition, provided she does not use everything up. Homura is essentially an army of one, prepared for extremely heavy-duty combat.
Because their souls are kept inside Soul Gems, and thus disconnected from the pain their bodies experience, magical girls are much more durable and capable of withstanding terrible injury than normal humans. Anything short of destruction of the Soul Gem is, in theory, reparable, though how long the repair process takes depends on the particular powers of said girl. Homura does not seem to have a great amount of magical power, so it would probably take her quite some time to recover from any grievous injury.
While the other girls are shown to use various other magical powers, the only combat power beyond her time manipulation Homura displays is the ability to produce purple bolts of energy. She is also seen fixing her eyesight to remove the need for eyeglasses, and it can only be assumed that she used her magic to cure her heart condition as well. While she may have other powers, she does not appear to use them - possibly to conserve magic and slow the tarnishing of her Soul Gem.
↪「 character info 」
name: Akemi Homura
age: Canon does not give her an official age. Since Madoka is officially fourteen, and she and Homura share a homeroom, I will assume Homura began at the same age. Since her ability is to travel through time, and the number of timelines she has lived through is canonically ambiguous (five are shown in the series proper, yet the number of repetitions is described as "countless," Oriko Magica gives us another canon timeline, and the second Drama CD yet another), her true age is unknown. It is safe to say that Homura is at least somewhat older than she appears, but whether this is simply months or years is a matter of debate.
canon: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
role in canon: ROLE IN CANON
↪「 history 」
❝ This is not my battlefield. ❞
Homura is taken from the end of episode nine, after her conversation with Kyubey regarding Kyouko's death and the inevitability of Madoka becoming a Puella Magi. At this point, she has repeated the timeline untold numbers of times, and failed each time. Her determination to uphold her promise to Madoka has forced her to cut ties with her former friends more and more each time she repeats; her world shrinks to include only Madoka with each repetition. At the end of episode nine, Kyubey tells her that Madoka will form a contract to defeat Walpurgisnacht, and she says she will not let that happen - her determination only increases.
↪「 personality 」
❝ I'll repeat it. I'll continue to repeat it over and over. Visiting the same time again and again, searching for the single exit out. Searching for the path to save you from a fate of despair. ❞
i.
In the beginning, Homura Akemi was like any other girl. Quite a bit shyer and awkward than most, certainly, but spending that amount of time in the hospital does tend to stunt one's social growth. She is withdrawn, nervous, afraid to approach others for fear of being rejected. Her parents are never mentioned, and she lives alone; it is clear that she doesn't know how to interact with people beyond stuttering answers to direct questions, so she doesn't reach out or initiate conversation. She is polite, referring to everyone by their family name and the honorific -san, rather than the more familiar given name. Being so far behind in school and physically frail damaged Homura's self-esteem, left her vulnerable to negative emotion, made her believe that she would always be left behind, watching others from the sidelines. Still, she was fairly average. Normal.
And then she met Madoka Kaname, who saved her, who believed in her, who opened up a world she hadn't known existed.
To Homura, Madoka was the ideal, someone to look up to. She was brave, she was friendly, she was kind, she was gentle; everything Homura wished she could be, and felt that she could not, everything she was unworthy of. And yet, Madoka befriended her anyway, and in the process built herself up so high in Homura's eyes that when she died, Homura could do nothing but wish to go back and do it all over again, this time with herself in the role of protector. A life without Madoka in it was no life at all.
This devotion to Madoka is at the core of Homura's character, the one constant in all of her repetitions of the timeline. No matter what she has to do, or who she must become, the one thing guiding all her actions is her desire to keep Madoka safe. When she feels she has lost herself, lost track of the human part of herself, it is her self-imposed duty to Madoka that keeps her going. She knows that if she succumbs to despair and becomes a Witch, Madoka is doomed, and so she has no choice but to continue looking for a way to save her.
ii.
In the second timeline, due to Madoka’s influence in the first, and Homura’s new status as a Puella Magi, she is notably less shy, though her newfound confidence seems mostly to revolve around her proximity to Madoka. It is when she is with her that she is able to feel that she is cared for, and as a Puella Magi, that she is useful, a part of something important. She is still polite, continuing to use more formal terms of address, but she is more positively expressive.
In this timeline, Homura is certain she will be able to protect Madoka, and that by working with her and Mami, will be able to avert the fate Madoka suffered in the original timeline. We see Homura as a girl who is determined to repay a friend her kindness, and who is not above bending the law to do so. She is also shown to be fairly clever here, coming up with the idea to use bombs to enhance her offensive ability in conjunction with her time stopping, using the Internet to look up how to make them, and then doing so. At the end of this timeline, however, Homura learns the first of many awful truths - Witches are born from Puella Magi. This knowledge follows her into the third timeline, where she resolves to tell her friends that Kyuubey has tricked them.
iii.
When Homura wakes in her hospital bed yet again at the beginning of the third timeline, it is clear that witnessing Madoka’s transformation into a Witch has shaken her down to her very bones. And yet, rather than run away from everything as she might have once, her first thought is one of the others, of warning them. Unfortunately, the others do not believe her when she tries to explain, and she is not confident enough to argue with Sayaka and convince them otherwise. Instead, that conversation is redirected to her reliance on bombs, and lack of a safer power for use in group battles. Here again she shows remarkable ingenuity and bravery, freezing time and sneaking into a Yakuza facility to steal their guns.
When Sayaka transforms into the Witch Oktavia von Seckendorff, Homura spends that battle protecting Madoka, as per her wish. In order to save Madoka, she is forced to make the first of many awful decisions, and destroy the Witch form of a girl who might have been her friend. For Homura, choosing to sacrifice someone else to save Madoka is not so difficult, but it is clear that she is greatly upset by the act, apologizing to Sayaka before she plants her bombs and kills Oktavia. Immediately after this battle, Mami kills Kyouko to prevent her from becoming a witch like Sayaka, and tries to do the same to Homura. Though she is extremely scared and horrified, Homura does what she can to comfort a devastated Madoka. They will fight Walpurgis Night together, and everything will be all right. This is one of countless instances of Homura putting aside her own fear and doubt to do what is best for Madoka, a theme that will continue as long as she repeats the timeloop. Her assurances that everything will be fine, however, prove hollow.
At the end of the third timeline, both she and Madoka, having defeated Walpurgis together, are on the verge of becoming Witches. Homura seems to accept this fate, and decides that as long as she and Madoka are together, they can destroy the world and she will be happy. Her repetition of the timelines has definitely taken a toll by this point; all that she has seen as a Puella Magi has led her to believe that perhaps the best thing for the world is to end it. It is a terrible place, full of terrible things, after all. But Madoka has different plans, and uses the Grief Seed she kept from the battle with Oktavia in order to cleanse Homura’s Soul Gem. Homura is utterly horrified by this. She values Madoka’s life far, far above her own and all of humanity, and that Madoka would sacrifice herself to save her in such circumstances is unthinkable to her. Madoka has a request, one that shapes the development of Homura’s character for the rest of the series: she asks Homura to go back and stop her from being tricked by Kyuubey, and Homura promises that she will, no matter how many times she must repeat. But first, Madoka asks that she destroy her Soul Gem to stop her from becoming a Witch, saying that, in spite of all the bad things, the world is full of things she wanted to protect. Homura calls Madoka by her name for the first time, which makes Madoka happy, and then complies.
Homura's promise to Madoka in this timeline is the driving force for all of Homura’s actions from then forward, and the trauma of being forced to kill her is one of the things that serves to change her from the shy, self-conscious girl from the beginning to the one that appears in the following timelines.
iv.
Upon waking up in the fourth timeline, Homura is obviously devastated. Having to kill the friend she wished to protect, even if she can travel back and undo it, has taken its toll. She immediately pushes this aside, though, and gets out of bed, using magic to fix her eyes and presumably her heart condition, if she had not done so before. She means business.
In this timeline, she is much more direct, and uses Madoka’s given name exclusively. She has become much more focused and determined as a result of her wish, and has decided that she will not rely on anyone else to help her. Her experience in prior timelines has taught her that she cannot. She places the responsibility of hunting Witches and defeating Walpurgis solely on herself, so that Madoka will never be forced to become a Puella Magi to protect anyone. She will fight for Madoka, to fulfill her promise.
She seems to have befriended Madoka in this timeline, and true to her nature, Madoka arrives while Homura is losing to Walpurgis, and forms a contract with Kyubey to save her. Homura desperately tries to keep her from doing so, but she is too far to be heard, and Madoka transforms, defeating Walpurgis in one hit, almost immediately becoming a Witch herself. Homura’s reaction to this appears to be a sort of resigned despair - she knows that she must continue, and remains only to ask a question of Kyuubey. She learns that his plan is always to have Madoka become a Witch, so he can collect the energy released when she transforms. When he asks if she will fight, she states that this is not her battlefield, and turns back time once more, her resolve only strengthened.
v.
The fifth known timeline shows a Homura vastly different from the girl in the first timeline. She hides behind a mask of stoic indifference, has cultivated a careful distance between herself and anyone that might attempt to reach out to her. She appears, at first glance, to feel very little when tragic things happen to the other magical girls. Taking her background into account, however, makes it clear that this is not the case. Homura is hurt deeply by the events of each timeline, it is simply that she has seen these things happen too many times; she is forced to bury her feelings as a measure of defense against the hurt each death brings. She has learned through repetition that she cannot save everyone, and freezes them out to avoid hurting herself more than necessary. Being friends has failed, so she plays the part of enemy instead.
This is not to say she has stopped trying to save them. In spite of her single-minded devotion to Madoka, she does make attempts to keep the others alive. It could be argued that she does this solely so she might have assistance once Walpurgis arrives, but her expression when her once-mentor Mami is cruel to her is one of barely-concealed pain, so this is unlikely. She also tries to warn Mami that the Witch Charlotte is different than the others, implying that she has seen Mami die fighting it before, and appears to be genuinely upset when Mami doesn’t heed her warning. When Mami dies, she is extremely harsh to both Sayaka and Madoka, driving home the point that being a Puella Magi is not glamorous or cool, but is instead an existence of despair - one that they would both be better off staying away from.
When Sayaka becomes a magical girl, Homura is both surprised and immediately accepting of this. She had thought her warnings coupled with the shock of Mami’s gruesome death would be enough to keep her from making a contract, and blames herself for not keeping an eye on Sayaka as well as Madoka. Because of her experiences in previous timelines, Homura tells Madoka to let go of Sayaka Miki - she is doomed to become a Witch in every timeline in which she becomes a Puella Magi, and Homura wants Madoka to be spared the pain of seeing that. But Madoka is Madoka, and she will not abandon a friend in need. When she throws Sayaka’s Soul Gem away, thinking it will help, Homura looks extremely shocked, and immediately goes to retrieve it. This shows that, even if Homura believed Sayaka would eventually become a Witch, part of her still held some hope that she would not. Otherwise, she would not have expended the magical energy necessary to go after the Gem. While another motive may have been to spare Madoka the pain of having killed her best friend, that does not seem to be the whole of it, judging by the look on Homura's face, and the swiftness with which she rushes to retrieve the Gem.
Kyouko is Homura’s best bet at defeating Walpurgis, and Homura treats her accordingly. She approaches her, and gives her information she withheld from the others. This is probably because she has observed Kyouko’s actions and reactions in prior timelines, and knows Kyouko to be the one magical girl whose outlook on life most closely matches her own. Kyouko is as selfish as Homura appears to be, and it is that common ground that allows them to be something like allies. Homura, who might have been as horrified by Kyouko’s selfishness as the others at the beginning, no longer cares. She understands this way of thinking now, and does not judge Kyouko for it.They both know that their partnership lasts until Walpurgis Night is defeated only. It is not a friendship.
As Sayaka slowly begins her descent into despair, Homura goes after her, intending to try to snap her out of it in order to spare Madoka more pain. Because of Homura’s interactions with Mami earlier, and a misunderstanding regarding the circumstances of her death, Sayaka wants nothing to do with her. Homura’s words to her are blunt and to the point, a reinforcement of all the negatives Sayaka associates with her, so Sayaka refuses her help. This clearly upsets Homura, and she attempts to talk her into accepting assistance, but Sayaka is too stubborn and too convinced that Homura is everything that is wrong with Puella Magi, and refuses again. To Homura, Sayaka’s blatant disregard for her life is the ultimate in disrespect to Madoka, who loves her and cries for her. This is something she cannot abide, and she transforms, intending to kill Sayaka before she transforms into a Witch and hurts Madoka more. She is stopped by Kyouko, to whom she explains and reveals nothing.
Homura is intelligent, she is determined, she behaves like a scientist searching for a cure to some terrible disease. She learns from her mistake, gets back up, and tries again, and she will do this as many times as necessary until she finds the one way out, the one way to accomplish her goal. But it is important to remember that she is still a young girl, that the demeanor she projects is not the one she feels. Underneath all her harshness, under the cold and uncaring facade, is a young girl who was so desperate to be loved, to be worth something to someone, that she sacrificed her life for a chance at it. She feels a tremendous amount of pain, it is evidenced in her stiff posture, the way she clenches her hands, the way she grits her teeth and turns her head. She lives like sheet of ice in the spring, constantly in danger of cracking. Sometimes it is all too much, and she breaks down. When Madoka speaks badly about herself, or thinks to sacrifice herself, it serves to undermine all the carefully constructed barriers Homura has placed around herself for protection. She is not immune to sorrow, rather she lives in a constant state of it, and the only reason she does not give up is because she cannot. She must continue, or all her sacrifice is for nothing, and Madoka will fall. When Madoka so carelessly, in Homura’s eyes, thinks to give up her life, it wounds her deeply. She is unable, in those moments, to maintain her composure.
This is Homura as the world sees her now: To her classmates she is the new girl, mysterious and cool, confident, smart, and athletically gifted. Distant, but polite. Someone difficult to get close to. Someone, perhaps, better to be admired from far away. To her fellow Puella Magi, she is an Irregular, an enigma, difficult to understand, and thus easy to believe the worst of. She is closed off, rejects any offers of friendship, and has an intense, suspicious interest in preventing Madoka Kaname from making a contract. She is blunt to the point of cruelty, and selfish, willing to sacrifice others to achieve her own ends. To them, Homura Akemi is no hero.
Neither is she to herself. She has cast away her humanity, embraced the fact that she is no longer human. Her goal is to fulfill her promise to Madoka, to keep her from becoming a Puella Magi, and though she may care about other things, they come in a distant second. Her devotion to Madoka eclipses all else, it is the only thing she allows herself to see. Homura has centered her life around learning all she can about Walpurgis, so she can eliminate the Witch once and for all. It is made clear that she will take any action, make any sacrifice necessary to do this, as she says herself, she will commit any crime, any sin, to make certain that Madoka is safe.
↪「 abilities 」
❝ I want to redo my meeting with Kaname-san. Instead of being protected by her, I want to protect her! ❞
When a girl forms a contract with Kyubey, she is granted a wish, and made into a magical girl. Upon being transformed, she is granted a Soul Gem, which takes the form of an ornate, egg-like jewel. This jewel can shrink to be housed in a ring her finger, and released when it is necessary to shift into magical girl form, giving her access to powers beyond anything a normal human could do. However, there is a catch to this! The Soul Gem is quite literally the girl's soul, pulled from her body for combat efficiency, effectively turning the girl into an animated corpse, or lich. If the Gem breaks, the girl will die, and the body is useless if farther than one-hundred meters away from the Gem. The Gem is also symbolic of the wish she makes, and as she uses her power, it becomes tarnished, and must be cleansed by a Grief Seed, the Witch counterpart of a Soul Gem. Additionally, upon becoming a magical girl, the girl is doomed with despair equal to that of the hope she creates, and this despair too can accumulate. As long as a girl has hope, this will not occur, but it is stated as an inevitability that all magical girls will experience such despair, at which point their Soul Gems are consumed with darkness and transform into Grief Seeds, turning her into a Witch.
Because her wish involves time-travel, Homura's powers are accordingly themed around time manipulation. Homura is able to freeze time, which is a highly exploitable ability when used in combat. For anyone else, it appears as though Homura is moving at incredibly high speeds, like she's using Flash Steps. Anyone touching her is unaffected by her time manipulation, so she depends on long-range combat and the element of surprise to avoid being caught. Additionally, she can use this ability to reset one month's worth of time, back to a short while before she first met Madoka. Obviously, this aspect of her power will be unusable in-game.
Her wish to protect manifests as a buckler shield, which contains a sand timer; the source of her ability to stop time. It also seems to exist as a limitless storage facility, and Homura uses it to stockpile various types of modern weapons she steals from the Yakuza and the Defense Force, such as the following: pipe bombs, hand grenades, flash bombs, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, mortars, guided missiles, bunker busters, rocket launchers, and rocket-propelled grenades, and plenty of ammunition. Her cache of weapons appears to follow her through timelines, getting larger with each repetition, provided she does not use everything up. Homura is essentially an army of one, prepared for extremely heavy-duty combat.
Because their souls are kept inside Soul Gems, and thus disconnected from the pain their bodies experience, magical girls are much more durable and capable of withstanding terrible injury than normal humans. Anything short of destruction of the Soul Gem is, in theory, reparable, though how long the repair process takes depends on the particular powers of said girl. Homura does not seem to have a great amount of magical power, so it would probably take her quite some time to recover from any grievous injury.
While the other girls are shown to use various other magical powers, the only combat power beyond her time manipulation Homura displays is the ability to produce purple bolts of energy. She is also seen fixing her eyesight to remove the need for eyeglasses, and it can only be assumed that she used her magic to cure her heart condition as well. While she may have other powers, she does not appear to use them - possibly to conserve magic and slow the tarnishing of her Soul Gem.