New thread soon, eh?
>>3873538>>3874071I'm reading it right now and have just gotten to the halfway point (chapter 11). You can tell that the guy has done his homework, but it's an oddly exhausting read in spite of how well written and edited it is.
I don't know much about Buddhism, and philosophy as a whole has always been difficult for me to grasp compared to psychology, but some arguments, particularly in the chapters pertaining to the mid-late episodes of the regular show, feel more than a little bit forced to me, especially the Buddhist-related ones. The ones pertaining to depression also made me raise an eyebrow, especially his difficulty in avoiding outright calling out Urobuchi for being depressed (him going on and on about differentiating between the real and implied authors feels more like he's covering his tracks, especially the second time he makes this argument) and how he seems to imply that Madoka is probably the least depressed of the main girls.
It's still worth a read at the end of the day though. The guy knows how to make and present an argument. You can tell that his background isn't exactly in psychology and he (understandably) approaches this primarily from a western PoV, but he's done enough research to concisely get his ideas across, even with me disagreeing with some of them. Supposedly according to some reviews the arguments lose some of their luster once he gets to Rebellion, but I haven't gotten that far yet and his analysis of the main series alone is worth the price of the ebook imo.
More to the point, I think I remember seeing one guy on various forums who was really obsessed with his own analysis of the series and whose arguments also revolved heavily around Buddhism (with him usually mocking those who approached it from any other perspective). Is this the same guy?
