Character · Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Homura Akemi
The new girl already knows your name, your house, and how the week ends, and she has no intention of explaining any of it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Transfer student who can stop time
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Homura Akemi transfers into Madoka's class in the first episode and behaves like someone resuming a conversation. She is cold, capable, unimpressed by the other magical girls, and she immediately tells Madoka to stay exactly as she is. The warning arrives with no reasoning attached to it, which makes it sound like a threat, and the show is happy to let it read that way for a long time.
Her weapon is a shield strapped to one arm with an hourglass set into it. Turning it freezes time for everyone else while she walks through the stopped scene, plants explosives and lays out the firearms she has quietly removed from real armouries. Against the ribbons and muskets of the genre this plays less like a transformation sequence than a heist, and the contrast is deliberate.
Homura is the reason the series rewards a second viewing. Details that read as arrogance the first time through mean something else once you know what she is doing, and Shaft plants them from her first appearance. The studio aired twelve episodes in early 2011 from a script by Gen Urobuchi, and the show became the most argued-over anime of its year.
Spelling HOMURA
Six letters, HOMURA, and it is the given name; Akemi is the family name and comes first in Japanese order but is not the answer. It is one of the Japanese words for a flame, which is an odd thing to call the coldest person on screen and probably the point. Three beats, ho-mu-ra, consonant and vowel alternating the whole way, so one confirmed letter narrows the row quickly.