❝ when happily ever after fails ❞ ➡ application

[headedforhope]

Player Information

Name: Jake.
Personal Journal: squeaks
IM Service: skuldafn [aim]
Plurk Name: khajiit
Current Characters: N/A.

Character Information

Character Name: Mami Tomoe.
Canon: Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Canon-Point: Post-Episode 3.
Age: 14.
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 and 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 need for reward or thanks. She displays a remarkably tight control of her own emotions for a girl her age, staying unnaturally calm regardless of what she's facing. 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. Alhough taking that to a self-righteous extreme can mean the end of the magical girl trying to play hero, it's an accurate assumption: Mami doesn't risk her life simply for her own sake, preferring to lay it on the line for those in need. She essentially seems like a typical magical girl hero on the surface: the big sister/mentor figure archetype always able and willing to protect, comfort, and advise. 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 impact of being quite unlike most kids her age. Mami comes across as 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 contradictory, deliberately hidden beneath aloof courtesy and careful misdirection. Mami puts a lot of effort into hiding her flaws and struggles, attaining a weary skill at lying to others about what she's really feeling. Those who take what she says at face value will easily miss the subtle signs that something isn't quite right: her words occasionally lapse into startling degrees of cynicism, heavy topics like murder or suicide failing to outwardly rattle her - which can make that constant smile seem faintly unsettling. She's hard to read, closed off and guarded beneath the kindly smile. Yet it's ultimately much more comfortable to assume that Mami's as innocent as she appears to be. After all, she's always smiling and seems perfectly willing to help! ...yet at the same time, Mami puts a subtle distance between herself and others. An initial coldness is worked into all her interactions, masquerading as politeness and rarely melting away. Her smile is a mask more often than not, the first of many emotional defenses.

Underneath that cheery disposition is someone extremely lonely and starved for acceptance, a deeply unhappy girl haunted by the skeletons in her closet and crippled by anxiety, guilt and shame. Where others tend to idolize her and believe in her as an ideal, Mami herself is of the opinion that she's not someone to admire. A girl that self-loathes and self-doubts, Mami's survivor's guilt places the "blame" of her parents' death squarely on her shoulders: as she lay dying in the wreckage of a car crash, Kyuubey interpreted her frightened and half-conscious pleas for help as a wish for him to grant. He fulfilled this "contract", which saved Mami - and only Mami, making her believe that she had thrown her parents away. As such, being a magical girl that will save strangers and fight to better the world is her entire reason to live in part because it will supposedly make up for this act of "selfishness". Mami thus is someone who bottles up her true feelings - denying them, repressing them, masking them beneath a masterful veneer of confidence - in order to struggle on. Her unhealthy coping skills and internalized self-hatred make for a slow self-destruction of her own making that she can't break free from without help, and yet it's help that Mami mistrusts and hesitates to accept. Mami constantly struggles with her lonely existence, hating having to endure it yet overwhelmed with anxiety at the thought of taking the emotional risks necessary to leave it behind. 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 - that's what she repeats to herself as she hides behind her walls and pushes others away. Her strong, yet paradoxical fear of emotional intimacy leaves her both unused to overtures of affection and with the potential for clinginess; any meaningful relationships that she manages to form are at times given unwarranted weight, crushing her when they're broken off and only exacerbating her fears of abandonment.

While a sympathetic figure, Mami's flaws aren't a complete fabrication of her low sense of self-worth; she has a mean streak that, while small, still very much exists. A jaded and bitter girl, she's not above behaving passive aggressively or using barbed words to taunt and threaten others - both out of necessity and in moments of pure spite. Her loneliness has made her desperate to the point of selfishness and hypocrisy and she reacts badly to rejection, making her prone to holding grudges. Her duty as a magical girl has caused her to witness horrific and traumatizing things, which has left an indelible mark upon her psyche. Blunted to death and violence, Mami is dangerous to cross because she's serious when she says she'll kill you - it's neither a joke nor a childish bluff. Her innocence has been eroded, her idealism buried, leaving Mami with the callousness to back up her intentions.

Mami's inadequacies are an ugliness she doesn't want anyone to see, even as she aches to be accepted in spite of them and carries on with no clear idea as to how to grow away from 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 unvarnished truth, for all of Mami's flaws: she lies, yes, and sometimes her fear paralyzes her. She's cynical, miserable and bitter - emotionally fragile, manipulative and distant. At times, she can be more bully than hero. But Mami's honorable and motherly nature ultimately wins out all the same: her kindness, patience, and willingness to help others (to say nothing of her honest desire to atone for her sins, both real and imagined) are all genuine qualities that she possesses. Mami is ultimately an imperfect, yet still heroic person that has hidden her need for attachment and the wounded idealism that still drives her behind layers of distance and cynicism to ward off further pain. Even if all she has to cling to are her own fragile and brittle hopes, Mami continues to fight for others rather than herself.

Abilities/Powers:

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 a great deal more resilient as long as her Soul Gem remains intact, as having her soul removed from her body allows for a huge buffer that lessens the consequences of injuries, there's yet another problem; using magic energy, as well as experiencing 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. Originally gifted only with the ability to conjure and manipulate magical ribbons, over time Mami succeeded in turning these ribbons into the endless supply of single-shot rifles and pistols that she's seen using in canon. (She wanted to create state-of-the-art guns, but her magic only allowed for the old-fashioned muskets, and even then only after a great deal of study and effort on her part.) She can conjure these weapons from thin air or improbable places like her skirt or hat. And conjure them she must, for all of her guns can only fire once - forcing her to constantly materialize new ones in order to fight. Mami is a crack shot: she can fire quickly and with deadly accuracy, her skill born of experience and training. Mami has demonstrated two impressive finishing moves when it comes to her muskets. One is unnamed and involves her summoning a large number of muskets while airborne and firing them all at once, peppering the ground with magical energy. Her second is called Tiro Finale - this is a massive matchlock that fires off a single cannon blast.

As mentioned before, Mami's original power was being able to control magical ribbons. She didn't totally sacrifice this ability to produce her muskets, but rather continues to make good use of the ribbons in their original state. She's been shown to create bridges and other platforms out of them, along with ropes strong enough to hold a great deal of weight, and can also bind her enemies. Other abilities include minor healing powers and that of her Soul Gem to detect and identify Witches. Her natural grace and athletic ability is multiplied tenfold, allowing her to pull off impressive acrobatic feats.

Items:

↪ her school uniform
↪ two flower-shaped hairpins
↪ her Soul Gem, in ring form

Samples

Mirror Post:

[The clear surface of the mirror shimmers for a moment, then reveals a young girl with golden hair bound in two immaculate curls and a small, friendly smile that's balanced more precariously upon her face than is readily apparent. She had woken up in a glass coffin, her first sensation the unwelcome pressure of a stranger's mouth against her own, and Mami has struggled to keep herself afloat ever since.

After all, wasn't a coffin where a corpse belonged? She had no right to leave it. And if bafflement, fear and pain hadn't conspired to send her mind reeling, forced her feet to keep walking until they eventually brought her to the nearest village, Mami would not have.]

Ah, hello. These mirrors are a rather strange way to hold a conversation, huh? [A pause. She touches one haircurl - tugs on it gently, lets it go. The gesture is idle and yet self-comforting.] Mm, but I don't mean to complain - it's not like it can be helped. Anyway, my name is Mami Tomoe and I had something I wanted to ask.

[Her voice is clear and unafraid and her gold eyes regard whatever audience might be watching with unwavering calm....yet there's a subtle emptiness in her words, a lack of warmth or sincerity that's easy to miss, and her gaze is as inscrutable as it is composed. She doesn't trust this place, nor any of the souls that dwell here, and for the briefest moment her smile goes brittle: alone yet again, it seems, even worse than before.]

Is it possible to procure a weapon in this place? I have experience with firearms, but anything will do. [Reassurance, sweet and yet false, colors her next words.] Purely for self-defense purposes, of course.

3rd Person Prose:

As creatures of despair, Witches are attracted to places of suffering. There's something about the concentrated misery of these locations that draws them; go to where an accident has occurred, or places like a red-light district, and eventually you'll find a Witch. As for hospitals.....well, hospitals are the worst.

Mami knows this from tired, hateful experience, and she thinks on it now as she tracks her latest prey. It really was awful how these living curses preyed on innocent people, shielded from sight by their invisible barriers. Normal humans had no defense against a Witch's influence, against that hunger and insanity, and those destroyed within the monstrous lairs were never found again. Without magical girls like Mami, the casualties would be much higher. It's a brittle sort of hope, Mami reflects as she gazes into her Soul Gem again to check that she's on the right path, her calm and habitual little smile becoming a tight, thin line: you could never totally obliterate evil, just stem an inevitable tide. To believe or attempt otherwise was just foolish and naive.

Mami remembers being naive, once, as much as she tries not to. Those are memories better left buried; they are painful and useless.

At least this time she's being led toward a rarely-used railroad instead, if she's reading her Soul Gem correctly - and how could she not be, after all this time? ...But such a quiet place, gathering dust away from the bustle of the city and those who live within it....that makes Mami think of suicides. A Witch could easily draw humans to such deserted locales and make them commit something so irreversible and tragic. There's a dim and uncomfortable twinge at the thought, the idea of taking but a few steps to end it all for good and forever. Mami tries to shove the thought away as she quickens her pace, but it persists; gnawing at her, festering. She doesn't remember a time without weariness, when her limbs didn't feel so heavy in battle, when she could smile with warmth or honesty. There have been occasions where her psyche and her control - both brittle in places, subject to snapping under the right pressures - have faltered. The question of "why bother?" has flitted across her mind more than once, and it does so again now. Why not take the easy way out, that thought cajoles, and end this lonely existence?

Her teeth clench, the only outward sign of her anger, her frustration and her grief and a thousand other things she can't afford to fully or openly feel. Because, she tells herself, to give up now would only be selfish.

Her Soul Gem begins to flash in brighter, quicker intervals now. Mami frowns and breaks out into a full sprint, transforming as she goes; she's close now, and time is a precious commodity in these situations. Fighting Witches isn't like something out of the magical girl shows Mami used to watch when she was still innocent. It's not a conflict without bloodshed or loss, where the hero always won and the villain was fated to lose. It's not something so black and white, so free of consequences and complications.

In this bitter and broken world, people died if the hero was too late.