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THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!
Player Name: Jake
Player LJ: barrelrolls
Contact: aim:: flutterjake | email:: hipsterkyuubey@gmail.com
Character: Mami Tomoe
Fandom: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
History: Puella Magi Madoka Magica at Wikipedia | Fandom Wiki page | Episode summaries: [ 10 | 1 | 2 | 3 ] Backstory from Drama CDs: Memories of You & Farewell Story
Personality: Mami Tomoe is initially presented as an ideal, someone to admire and emulate. She's sensible and full of a quiet confidence; attentively polite, prone to modesty, yet by no means a doormat; a frighteningly competent fighter during battle and a gentle, helpful girl outside of it. Mami acts out of an intrinsic desire to do good, without any apparent need for reward or thanks. Despite her young age, she displays a remarkably tight control of her own emotions nearly all the time, staying almost unnaturally calm regardless of what she's facing. There are occasions when she slips up, of course, but these moments are ultimately rare when judged against the backdrop of her usual unruffled demeanor. She conducts herself with a mature kind of grace, efficiently tackling problems and keeping a maternal eye out for those less sure of themselves. To Madoka and Sayaka, she came across as an "ally of justice": someone that fights to save people. Even though taking that to a self-righteous extreme can mean the end of the magical girl trying to play hero, this is a pretty accurate assumption. Mami doesn't risk her life simply for her own sake. Unlike the pragmatic Kyouko, Mami didn't allow familiars to grow into full Witches for the sake of harvesting a Grief Seed; as it would have inevitably come at the expense of many innocent people, she considered it unacceptable, regardless of how she would personally benefit.
To those won over by her various charms (her thoughtfulness and kindness, her good manners and readily apparent sense of responsibility) she makes the strong impression of being quite unlike most kids her age: quieter, kinder, more aware of the world and the consequences of her behavior. If one contents themselves with this ideal first impression of a sweet girl that just happens to be wise beyond her years, that's likely the only side of Mami they'll ever see.
Her true personality is complex and sometimes contradictory, with layers of insecurity, guilt and spitefulness deliberately hidden under the surface. Mami puts a lot of effort into hiding her various problems and can quite easily lie to others (and often herself as well) about what she's really feeling. However, there are definite cracks in her armor; there exists a vague and easily-overlooked feeling of something being....off. She's always smiling and seems perfectly friendly, yet at the same time she puts a subtle distance between herself and others. An initial coldness is worked into all her interactions, masquerading as politeness and rarely melting away. This is because that aforementioned smile ever present on her face is nearly always just a mask to cover her own fear and bitter unhappiness; a facade Mami both hides behind and has in some great measure become.
Underneath that cheery disposition is someone extremely lonely and starved for acceptance, haunted by the skeletons in her closet and eaten up by incompatible fears and desires. Ever since blindly making a desperate contract with Kyuubey to save herself from the car crash that claimed her parents, Mami has been effectively alone in terms of first family and then friends. She lives by herself and has to juggle her double life of Witch-hunting with that of a normal schoolgirl, all while keeping up a certain measure of deception to hide her parents' death from the world. Although she claims to not regret her "choice" to keep living, the crippling survivor's guilt says otherwise.
Mami has outright admitted her belief that she's not someone to admire; a girl that self-loathes and self-doubts, she consciously puts up a facade of careless confidence while pushing herself to the brink and bottling up her feelings until there's nothing she can do but cry all alone. It's a slow self-destruction of her own making that she can't break free from without help, and yet it's help that she mistrusts and hesitates to accept. Mami constantly struggles with her lonely existence. She sincerely wants to need and be needed, to have people she can love and accept and who will do the same for her, and yet a long history of rejection and loneliness have smothered her courage when it comes to seeking out what she wants. Being lonely is painful, but crushed hope would be even worse. Her fear of emotional intimacy is strong, and the breaking of any bond she dares to make with another person affects her far more than it has to.
Sympathetic as she might be, Mami is a deeply flawed individual. Her mean streak is small yet most undeniably there: she's passive aggressive, a far cry from innocent, and prone to holding grudges. Her loneliness has made her desperate to the point of selfishness and hypocrisy and she reacts badly to rejection. Mami can taunt and threaten just as easily as she can tease, and she's not above doing any of those for any reason that seems good enough at the time. Her duty as a magical girl has caused her to witness horrific and traumatizing things like suicide and murder, which has left an indelible mark upon her psyche. She's blunted to death and violence and can be dangerous to cross, young age or not, because she's serious when she says she'll kill you. Mami's inadequacies are an ugliness she doesn't want anyone to see, even as she aches to be accepted in spite of them.
Viewing herself as she does through the lens of her own self-loathing, her faults are magnified while her virtues are diminished until Mami really does believe that she's a horrible person. This perception is not the truth: she's miserable, yes. Cynical and bitter, definitely. Emotionally fragile, manipulative and distant....undeniably so. But Mami's kindness and gentleness is not a lie, and neither is her patience- her willingness to help others- to say nothing of her honest desire to atone. Mami is ultimately a heroic and loving person that has hidden her need for attachment and the idealism that still drives her behind layers of distance and cynicism to ward off further pain, clinging to her fragile hopes as she fights for others rather than herself.
Abilities: Girls become Puella Magi by making a contract with an otherworldly creature called Kyuubey/Incubator. In exchange for being granted whatever wish they desire, they are assigned the duty of exterminating dangerous lifeforms known as Witches. They're given the power to accomplish this by making it possible to transform into a stronger persona with their own customized weapon and abilities. However, this contract isn't as equal as it might seem; the process of becoming a Puella Magi involves having one's soul ripped out and placed into a Soul Gem, which then controls the now-empty husk of one's body. If the Soul Gem gets too far away from the body, or shatters, the body becomes nothing more than a corpse. While the upside of this creepy lich arrangement is that the magical girl is effectively immortal as long as her Soul Gem remains intact, there's yet another problem; using magic energy, as well as feeling negative emotions, causes the Soul Gem to become corrupted. If magical girls don't use the Grief Seeds gathered from defeated Witches to siphon off the corrupted essence, they will eventually become Witches themselves.
All of Mami's real power is tied into her role as a Puella Magi. While transformed, she's capable of pulling an infinite number of muskets either out of thin air or from equally impossible places like her skirt. A crack shot, Mami is also adept at using the guns as clubs. Unfortunately, this style of fighting has flaws; all of Mami's guns, even the massive matchlock she uses to land a finishing blow, only have a single bullet. She must constantly materialize, use, and throw away guns in order to fight. Other abilities of note is that, although Mami is already athletic and graceful, her prowess is multiplied while transformed, enabling her to pull off acrobatic feats. Her hair ribbon can cut through almost anything, and her Soul Gem in ring form can expel larger version of the same to bind enemies. While the Soul Gem is in its original shape, it can track down Witches- even identify their unique energy pattern.
Apparently, while within a Witch's dimension, Mami can morph items brought in from the outside; she was able to transform Sayaka's ordinary bat into a much more powerful one with magical properties. She is also seen magically healing Kyuubey's injuries, suggesting at least minor healing powers.
Link to an image of the character: One! And two!
Sample writing:
Mami Tomoe is, in a single and imperfect word, a smiler.
At school, she's the perfect picture of an ideal upperclassman, inviting confidence and promising assistance with small, encouraging upward quirk of the mouth. It flashes back to life after any number of upsets, big or small- never goofy, never loud, but steadfastly there. Looking at her, one might think she simply doesn't have anything to frown about, and it becomes the most simple thing in the world to forget how such a girl somehow has no time for clubs, for friends, for fun. Even in battle the upbeat expression remains- tighter, thinner, grim and focused. But still there, in place like an anchor as she rocks gracefully with the recoil of countless muskets summoned from nowhere and nothing to be fired once and then discarded. It doesn't matter that there's only one bullet to be had from each gun; Mami is so used to this routine that drawing out one, two, six more from the creases of her clothes has become second nature to her. The smile is routine by now, too, as is the blankness in her eyes carefully cultivated as calmness.
It frightens her deeply whenever she allows herself to think about that. It would frighten anyone watching, if they knew what to look for. But no one is, and no one does, so Mami tries not to reflect upon the fact that she lives as something empty does; as a well-oiled but soulless machine operating in the dark, against the dark, being slowly consumed by the dark. Needless to say it doesn't work all the time, this not-thinking about it. But Mami tries, and tries, and tries anyway, because it's that or a surrender....and she's borne the burden of bitterness for too long to accept such an alternative.
Yes, it comes easiest when fighting, the forgetting- at those times, risking her life against horrors as disturbing as they are uniquely twisted, it almost feels like a relief to let these cold, methodical reflexes take over. Aim and shoot, aim and shoot, what's there to think about? What's there to worry about, outside of this duel that normal humans would almost never normally see? She just has to kill the Witch, to put an end to its' corrupting and invisible influence, to take its' Grief Seed, to make it die. Like she almost died. And when she comes home to an empty house where the faintest noise sounds like the whisper of ghosts in her ears, she wonders if she's really still living. It's not regret that leaves gnawing pains in her chest when she passes by the photos on the wall on her way to bed, or when the clinking of dishes in the sink calls to her mind the sound of shattered glass hitting pavement. No, it's not regret- Mami doesn't regret choosing to live, even though it wasn't much of a choice at all.
Yet the unrelenting ache can hardly be called happiness, either.
Sample journal entry: I don't know what I did to make myself a target for kidnappers, but please understand that I'm not worth the effort. Nothing I have is valuable [a lie] and you won't get any ransom on my behalf. No, that's not a threat- it simply can't be paid. I'm sorry.
So please, let me collect my things and go. Why would you want to waste your time on a ninth-grader from Mitakihara? I'm sure if you think about it, you'll realize how silly you're being.
...Oh, unless you were hoping to get a rise out of me? In that case, I'll gladly lose my head if that will satisfy you.