Talk:Kyubey: Difference between revisions

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: Kyubey is incredibly vague about the contract, so it's unclear if puellae magi ''must'' fight witches outside of ensuring their own survival (as they need Grief Seeds to counteract the corruption caused by the use of magic and/or the build-up of negative emotions). I suppose a girl could contract, get her wish, and never fight witches, but she would likely end up a witch herself very soon. [[User:Momoism|Momoism]] 18:21, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
: Kyubey is incredibly vague about the contract, so it's unclear if puellae magi ''must'' fight witches outside of ensuring their own survival (as they need Grief Seeds to counteract the corruption caused by the use of magic and/or the build-up of negative emotions). I suppose a girl could contract, get her wish, and never fight witches, but she would likely end up a witch herself very soon. [[User:Momoism|Momoism]] 18:21, 26 April 2011 (UTC)


== Kyubey and Utilitarianism ==


I am working on Kyubey's utilitarianism, this space is for a rough draft.
== Gender ==
*On the Blu-ray commentary it was pointed by [[Gen Urobuchi]] that Kyubey has no gender.
**Does that mean that the references to Kyuubee on this wiki should be neutralised, ze/zie/sie instead of he/she? Might even help more people become aware of gender neutrality among humans! - [http://wiki.puella-magi.net/index.php?title=Kyubey&curid=17&diff=42969&oldid=42520] 08:16, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
:::The problem with that is they aren't in common dictionaries and aren't standard English. [[User:KM|KM]] 09:09, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
::::Not to mention it would be a nightmare, since we will have to hunt down every page that mentions Kyubey as "he". Personally I would let it be as it is since the girls think of Kyubey as a "he" even if "it" thinks of itself as being genderless...--[[User:Mutopis|Mutopis]] 10:06, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
:::::Kyubey refers himself using "Boku" so i think he consider himself as male [[User:Kimidori|Kimidori]] 10:29, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
::::::Only in "human terms" to make it easy for the girls when they are addressing to him. I dont think Kyubey thinks of iself personally as a "he"... --[[User:Mutopis|Mutopis]] 10:41, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
::::::Isn't "boku" kind of gender-neutral? I mean, I was taught that it can be used by anyone and tends to be the default in gender-neutral song lyrics. It's pretty commonly used this way in anime and manga. --[[User:CrownClown|CrownClown]] 02:05, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
:::::::In recent times, they grudgingly allow it (like the use of a universal "he"), but this is unlikely to be proper Japanese. For example, Kyon, in the Haruhi light novels makes a big point of how Sasaki refers to herself with the pronoun "boku", which gives her a tomboyish feel. [[User:Iruel|Iruel]] 03:00, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
::::::::It's proper Japanese for young people in casual situations in the real world, and is becoming more prevalent among girls around the age of Madoka and company. Anime and manga may emphasize the former status of "boku" as a male-only pronoun as a quick-and-easy way of characterization: "She uses 'boku,' so we can tell that she's a 'tomboy' without wasting a lot of time on extra dialogue!" Personal pronouns and other indicators of gentle/harsh speech are often used this way in Japanese fiction, but shouldn't be understood as indicative of how people on the street actually talk. (In normal Japanese speech, it's actually common to almost never use personal pronouns at all! "I," "you," and so on can often be inferred from context alone.) A girl who uses "boku" in the real world wouldn't necessarily be considered masculine -- it all depends on her personality and the context in which she uses it.


Urobuchi's view in energy conservation and connection to [http://wiki.puella-magi.net/SWITCH_2011-07_Vol.29_No.07 Kyubey's utilitarianism] [http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Spa_Weekly!_2011-07-19 kyubey's belief] and [http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Newspapers_2011 the overly romanticism of (good) reality (false perception) and good intentions with bad results of unhappiness]. By the way I am reading Michael Sandel's book "Justice" and it is a good source of understanding philology. Will finish when I can. --[[User:Mutopis|Mutopis]] 04:11, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
::::::::So far as Kyuubey is concerned, "boku" may be useful just because of the social status it implies: the standard "watashi" is slightly formal (and would put Kyuubey on the same level as the girls), "watakushi" would be too humble, and "ore" would be too harsh. Any of the less-common pronouns would lend unwanted additional flavor to Kyuubey's speech, since -- as I wrote above -- they're more often used as characterization shortcuts in fictional works. "Boku" allows Kyuubey to keep relations with the girls casual and congenial, while slightly insinuating that he's on a higher social level than them (that is, he can afford to talk down to them).


<b>What is Utilitarianism?</b>
::::::::Also, CrownClown: I think "boku" tends to be used more often in song lyrics simply because it's easier to fit in, mora-wise! :D [[Special:Contributions/64.89.144.110|64.89.144.110]] 03:13, 17 April 2012 (UTC)


The Human Philosophy known as [[wikipedia:Utilitarianism|utilitarianism]] can be easily breakdown as the philosophy that pursues the maximization of happiness and the reduction of pain, or at least the creation of happiness that surpasses the overall total of pain. If that was all that it was about utilitarianism, then this would be the end of it. But utilitarianism, like all philosophies, have taken several different developments and each one has a distinctive flavor. This will be an attempt to understand Kyubey's own brand of Utilitarianism.
====Fan-Video====


According with [[Episode 9|Kyubey's mission]], he wants to save the universe by offsetting the depletion of the universe's energy (actually, Kyubey's statement is wrong, the correct assessment would be to stop [[Thermodynamics|the permanent loss of heat]], but who am I to question an advance alien race?). To accomplish this mission, Kyubey's alien race has found the answer to the problem, the harvesting of human emotion. The process is simply, give a human magical powers to maximize their sense of hope, then reverse their hope to be turned into despair, during the process the despair energy would be released during the witchfication process thus repairing the damage done to the universe. Repeat the process countless of times until an appropriate energy quota per planet is reached. Sounds simple yet horrifying at the same time. For many this is an example of utilitarianism as its worst, many critics believe that Kyubey is justifying the exploration of little girls to save the universe. However, before we can accuse Kyubey of anything, it is essential to understand the moral nature as well as Kyubey's reasoning, within their own alien boundary, to determine if their reasoning is justifiable.
Features Kyubey getting ripped to shreads , pretty well made. [[User:Espeon|Espeon]] 20:53, 6 July 2015 (UTC)


<b>Kyubey and Bentham: Let us just enslave the human race!</b>
==When was this stated?==
 
*I read under the unproven theories section that Kyubey states early in the series that he cannot bring dead people back to life. I've just watched the entire series through recently, and not only did I not catch on to that, but that goes against certain events in the first audio drama and The Different Story, in which he revives a cat and Sayaka respectively. If I did in fact miss anything he might have said, would someone please point it out? [[User:McKnight|McKnight]]
Invaders from another galaxy have decided that to save the universe, they must harvest energy to repair the damage already done to it. Their race is incapable of producing such energy by themselves, but thanks to their advance technology they have detected a source of energy that is perfect to solve their crisis. They have detected a "bizarre" mental behavior known as "emotions" capable of producing the required energy but it goes unprocessed and it is located in another galaxy. The inhabitants of this alien galaxy are equally strange as primitive, not only do they suffer from this mental anomaly known as emotions, but they are being wasteful by not fully developing its potential. Such a waste of energy would be a crime to be left unharvested. The alien race decides to invade this galaxy, enslave the inhabitants, and fully exploit its potential by maximizing the production of energy to meet their quota... or so it should be if this was Bentham's utilitarianism but it is not. This is the first indicator that there is something odd about Kyubey's utilitarianism.
** A friend of mine also once said that the same thing is mentioned during the final timeline, which is presumably the anime's finale, but I've re-watched that whole episode in particular just shortly afterwards, and there isn't ''anything'' said about wishes in general. [[User:McKnight|McKnight]]
 
According with Bentham, the goal of Utilitarianism is to produce as much happiness as possible. But most importantly, all forms of happiness and all form of pains have their own equal value. Which means one form of happiness cannot be measured against another form of happiness and the same can be said about pain. It takes people's preferences as they are without passing judgement on the moral worth. It would be presumptuous to judge some pleasures to be inherently better than others. At the heart of it, Bentham's utilitarianism is nonjudgmental, to him all pleasures are equal. This means that if saving the universe by exploiting the emotions of humans has the same moral value than domesticating cattle to feed society, then it should reasonable to say that Bentham would not object to enslaving the human race to achieve that objective. After all, saving the universe at the expense of the human race would create the greatest form of happiness. It will suck for the human race, but stopping the end of the universe trumps anything and everything. 
 
Yet, as stated before, that is not the case here, at least not to the alien race that created Kyubey. Apparently, Kyubey and the aliens, have some sort of moral code of their own that disallow them to force humans to enter into a contract (slavery) but they are also not allowed to deceive (false advertisement) or lie to them either (this is, of course, up to debate).
 
One objection to utilitarianism is the attempt to measure pleasure and pain in a single scale ignoring the qualitative experience of pleasure and pain. For many, certain forms of pleasure are not only higher but also worthier than others. The pursue of a nobler pleasure would allow utilitarianism to the arrival of the greatest good. One could make an argument that saving the universe would create happiness but the quality of that happiness would suffer at the expense of perverse method used for to attain it. Instead, Kyubey could created the greatest form of happiness by using much more nobler (albeit questionable) methods to attain it. Rather than force the human race into submission and slavery, why not entice them into a fair contract?
 
<b>Kyubey and Mill: Humans are not Cattle.</b>

Latest revision as of 10:16, 27 September 2016

Redirection

Requesting name change to Kyubey. reason : [1] Mic2070 10:38, 24 January 2011 (CST)

Anyone object this? Otherwise I'm going to move it. --0x99 19:53, 24 January 2011 (CST)
Go for it --MomoiroKakarichou 15:02, 26 January 2011 (CST)

I'll just leave this here ◕‿‿◕

◕ ω ◕

／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼

Shouldn't we add somewhere that he uses telepathy?

I only today realized that the page was renamed from Kyuubey to Kyubey recently. Just finished updating the spelling everywhere. --KFYatek 16:44, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Multiple Kyubeys/Respawning Kyubey

I remember there was quite a lot of speculah as to whether there is only one Kyubey, or multiple 'Kyubey' clones. Since it's mentionned in the 'Obervsations' section, I wondered if that theory has been mentionned in one of the articles? If so, it should be a good idea to add a link here. --Homerun-chan 21:23, 24 February 2011 (UCT)

Maybe I overlooked it, but I couldn't found any article stating about respawning QB. --0x99 22:06, 24 February 2011 (UCT)
I'm not sure about the respawning, but I think mutiple instances of QBe has been discussed at some point (hence the 'Kyubey Army' image macro). It may not be on the wiki though. I'll look for it in depths tomorrow if nobody's done it before, I have stuff to do now (like sleeping, for example) --Homerun-chan 22:11, 24 February 2011 (UCT)
What's this about him being a cat? I don't think he looks like a cat. I think he looks like a little demonspawn.

--

"Familiar"

I'm not really sure where the term "familiar" comes from in his description? --Fallacies 02:30, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, Kyubey is the romanization of the name of a restaurant in Ginza, Tokyo. --Fallacies 03:09, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Where's that "familiar" you're talking about in this article? --0x99 03:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
The diff before I edited it, at the top. I replaced it with Mahou no Shisha, per the description on his official chara profile. --Fallacies 03:16, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Also, in plot synopsis on main page, the "there exist familiars" part obviously refers to Kyubey and possibly others of his kind. --KFYatek 03:18, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Edited. Though, again, I'm not sure where "familiars" came from. It seems like it's always been there, but nobody ever noticed. In any case, it's not really accurate. --Fallacies 03:20, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Energy

the article states that he needs energy for the earth. But as i understood he is an alien who needs energy for his planet and stores the energy that get´s released while using magic or transform into witches.

Anonymous: In actuality, he needs energy for the entire universe. Even though the show's understanding of thermodynamics is flawed (the amount of usable energy in the universe will decrease over time, but not the total amount of energy), we can't treat Earth or any other planet as a closed system; thus, when Kyuubey says "sekai" (I think that's the word he used?), he's almost definitely referring to the universe as a whole.

--picture- the mangaka of kuroshitsuji actually made a fanart crossover of kyubey and sebastian http://d-6th.com/blog/images/110217_qseba.jpg quite ironic since sebastian also has a faustian pact with ciel and will rip his (ciel´s) soul of as payment to fullfill his wish

Contract

Fight with witches it's a part of the contract? Or contract mean only become to puella magi? A 06:30, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Kyubey is incredibly vague about the contract, so it's unclear if puellae magi must fight witches outside of ensuring their own survival (as they need Grief Seeds to counteract the corruption caused by the use of magic and/or the build-up of negative emotions). I suppose a girl could contract, get her wish, and never fight witches, but she would likely end up a witch herself very soon. Momoism 18:21, 26 April 2011 (UTC)


Gender

  • On the Blu-ray commentary it was pointed by Gen Urobuchi that Kyubey has no gender.
    • Does that mean that the references to Kyuubee on this wiki should be neutralised, ze/zie/sie instead of he/she? Might even help more people become aware of gender neutrality among humans! - [2] 08:16, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
The problem with that is they aren't in common dictionaries and aren't standard English. KM 09:09, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Not to mention it would be a nightmare, since we will have to hunt down every page that mentions Kyubey as "he". Personally I would let it be as it is since the girls think of Kyubey as a "he" even if "it" thinks of itself as being genderless...--Mutopis 10:06, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Kyubey refers himself using "Boku" so i think he consider himself as male Kimidori 10:29, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Only in "human terms" to make it easy for the girls when they are addressing to him. I dont think Kyubey thinks of iself personally as a "he"... --Mutopis 10:41, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Isn't "boku" kind of gender-neutral? I mean, I was taught that it can be used by anyone and tends to be the default in gender-neutral song lyrics. It's pretty commonly used this way in anime and manga. --CrownClown 02:05, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
In recent times, they grudgingly allow it (like the use of a universal "he"), but this is unlikely to be proper Japanese. For example, Kyon, in the Haruhi light novels makes a big point of how Sasaki refers to herself with the pronoun "boku", which gives her a tomboyish feel. Iruel 03:00, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
It's proper Japanese for young people in casual situations in the real world, and is becoming more prevalent among girls around the age of Madoka and company. Anime and manga may emphasize the former status of "boku" as a male-only pronoun as a quick-and-easy way of characterization: "She uses 'boku,' so we can tell that she's a 'tomboy' without wasting a lot of time on extra dialogue!" Personal pronouns and other indicators of gentle/harsh speech are often used this way in Japanese fiction, but shouldn't be understood as indicative of how people on the street actually talk. (In normal Japanese speech, it's actually common to almost never use personal pronouns at all! "I," "you," and so on can often be inferred from context alone.) A girl who uses "boku" in the real world wouldn't necessarily be considered masculine -- it all depends on her personality and the context in which she uses it.
So far as Kyuubey is concerned, "boku" may be useful just because of the social status it implies: the standard "watashi" is slightly formal (and would put Kyuubey on the same level as the girls), "watakushi" would be too humble, and "ore" would be too harsh. Any of the less-common pronouns would lend unwanted additional flavor to Kyuubey's speech, since -- as I wrote above -- they're more often used as characterization shortcuts in fictional works. "Boku" allows Kyuubey to keep relations with the girls casual and congenial, while slightly insinuating that he's on a higher social level than them (that is, he can afford to talk down to them).
Also, CrownClown: I think "boku" tends to be used more often in song lyrics simply because it's easier to fit in, mora-wise! :D 64.89.144.110 03:13, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Fan-Video

Features Kyubey getting ripped to shreads , pretty well made. Espeon 20:53, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

When was this stated?

  • I read under the unproven theories section that Kyubey states early in the series that he cannot bring dead people back to life. I've just watched the entire series through recently, and not only did I not catch on to that, but that goes against certain events in the first audio drama and The Different Story, in which he revives a cat and Sayaka respectively. If I did in fact miss anything he might have said, would someone please point it out? McKnight
    • A friend of mine also once said that the same thing is mentioned during the final timeline, which is presumably the anime's finale, but I've re-watched that whole episode in particular just shortly afterwards, and there isn't anything said about wishes in general. McKnight
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