Puella Magi Madoka Magica, or Magical Girl Madoka, is one of the most popular recent shows aired on Japanese televisions. It has become an instant hit, and people either love it or hate it – beneath the fandom lies a philosophy, thought, that may be seldom thought of with any depth by those obsessed with the cult of the characters’ personality, which is typical of fandom. Shaft, the studio producing Madoka, has included a lot of hints in this anime – numerous references to Goethe’s Faust, which betrays the entire Faustian element of the series and the nature of Madoka’s journey of maturation. Latin and German are two languages much featured in the background of Madoka, which are barely gleamable with the discerning eye, which are the two most prominent classical languages that deal with the occult or beyond. The main theme of the anime involved the evolution and destruction of the entire universe and our place within it.
The series’ titular character, Kaname Madoka, is a cute little high school girl with pink twin-tails, who loves her friends and family. She is sweet and pure of heart; around her exist her friends, such as Homura and Mami, who on one level or another want to protect her. Often times Madoka is confused and thrown in a world between calamity and dilemmas, and she doesn’t know what to do, torn between two alternatives. QB, the other main character in the series, wants Madoka to make a contract with him because she has the greatest potential to become a strong Magical Girl – she is torn between watching her friends die and disobeying he friends’ wishes that she not become a Magical Girl. Her friends each want to keep Madoka from becoming a Magical Girl, for a reason unknown to Madoka. This is done out of a form of love for Madoka; yet as she remains a normal human, she is madepowerless to stop the suffering and the deaths of her friends.
In this series, a magical being called QB offers the series’ characters the chance to become a “Magical Girl”, which means they are endowed with the power to fight beings called Witches, which tend to cause harm to humanity. In exchange for becoming a Magical Warrior, QB grants them one wish, which is possible given the magic and the immense power that QB can grant. However, the characters discover that nothing is without its price, that gain is always equated with some sort of sacrifice, that there is no “free-lunch”, so to speak. Though this can cause QB to be viewed as a sort of evil character that brings unnecessary hardship into these girls’ lives, he is a neutral character as the girls have all “formed contracts” with him of their own will. QB never forces them to become Magical Girls; they all do it for their own reasons, and each of them having different consequences and facing the truths of reality.
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| QB (the Incubator) |
The power QB grants is in a sense futile, since it works off of the principle of equivalent exchange or “you cannot gain something in this world without sacrificing something else”. To become a Magical Girl, you must consign your soul forever to it; to grant your one wish, an equal amount of suffering and despair must occur in the world. The series features the different Magical Girls coming into terms with the consequences of imbalance caused by their wishes and the price that must be tolled for each of them.
Through the episodes, the characters in Madoka come to terms with brutal reality. For example, Madoka’s soul becomes trapped within a small vile which she must keep with her at all times in order for her body to receive the soul’s orders, yet she doesn’t figure out this separation of body and soul until much later in the series. She sees the various costs of becoming a protector of the world, and she realizes the ultimate result of being a Magical Girl, and having to face all of the despair and pain of the world, is the transformation into a Witch – this is where Witches come from.
This ultimate dread forms what can be called the ultimate plot in Madoka; the advent of “Walpurgis Nacht”, an event in which the most powerful Witch ever known will manifest in the world. One of the main characters, Homura, has the ability to manipulate time, and so she has continually gone back in time again and again, each time unable to stop Walpurgis Nacht. She loves Madoka, who has the greatest magical potency as a Magical Girl. It is only during Walpurgis Nacht that Madoka finally agrees to make a contract with QB, becoming a Magical Girl, and it ends up this way every time. The wish she makes is always either to stop this powerful Witch or to save Homura. However, since the magnanimous wish always has an equal and opposite reaction, this will cause Madoka’s ultimate transformation as a Witch, and in the process becoming a Witch even more powerful than the one in Walpurgis Nacht and which will “destroy the world in the course of three days” according to QB.
Ultimately, Homura is faced with the ultimate despair that Madoka will become a Witch no matter what, and equally this symbolizes the ultimate despair of all Magical Girls becoming Witches. The transformation of a Magical Girl into a Witch happens when there is no longer any Hope in the Magical Girl, when she no longer has any hope to continue fighting and she gives up because it is too much, and therefore, consigned to despair, she transforms into a raging Witch, blocked off from reality and destructive to all around her.
This theme of Ultimate Entropy is also present in the presentation of QB’s true origin; he is an extraterrestrial sent to create Witches on Earth and harvest them using the Magical Girls, creating a circular logic of transformation that supplies both the tools for harvesting (the Magical Girls) and then the energy to be harvested itself (the Witches). QB explains truthfully that he must do this for his species in hopes of saving the universe from complete heat-entropy – once all energy has dissipated in the universe, his species nor any other will be able to survive. Therefore, since human emotions were discovered by his species to be a source of exponential energy, especially in extreme states of chaos such as that of a Witch, he was sent to go harvest it from Earth, since this source could be a potential method of producing more energy than the universe contains, thereby bypassing the laws of entropy. One could say that QB’s species is seeking a way out of the despair of heat-entropy, which is the death of the universe.
In the same way, Homura is continually trying to find a way out of Madoka’s entropy from Magical Girl into a Witch, yet fails every time. Homura realizes that it is always the fate of a Magical Girl to become a Witch, and that like universal entropy, this process is irreversible. He is thus consigned to the state of ultimate despair, because Magical Girls will always become Witches – it is the entropic law of the universe. The theme also implies the entropy of beauty in the physical world into ugliness, of purity into impurity and greatness into the vulgar, as seen in the historical processions of societies, civilizations and cultures. The ultimate despair then, on a deeper level, becomes the fate of things in the physical world to always decay or degenerate, and thus ultimately in the end die off with time because of this degeneration. The despair is that this process is irreversible, unhelpable, and simply this: you cannot change the world.
You cannot change the world: that is the despair of Homura. It is the resignation to the fact that the world can never come out of entropy and degeneration, that nothing can change, that the world will continue to decay until it dies off completely, that the beauty in the world will always be subject to entropy into defilement or destruction. It is the ultimate form of pessimism, the loss of fight for salvation. The despair increases every time she goes back in time because every time she is unable to stop this fate no matter what she does, and in the end of the series, Homura finally decides that this is the last time, that it truly is hopeless.
However, Madoka’s last wish becomes the salvation of the world. This is because she chooses not to benefit her corporeal self, unlike all the other Magical Girls. The others all wish for something that brings them earthly satisfaction, or fulfills a passion or wish of personal benefit for either themselves or someone they love. However, Madoka’s ultimate wish sacrifices all of her personal feelings for what she wishes, something purely beyond the physical or the passionate and purely beyond herself. Her wish is impersonal and instead of sacrificing things in the world, it sacrifices herself: she basically wishes that Witches cannot exist, that she will defeat all Witches that will ever and have ever existed through time until the end of time. QB is startled at this (he has no choice but to fulfill this wish) because it means the total reworking of the rules of the universe and reality; since Madoka’s wish means the destruction of every Witch in the universe before they ever even come into existence, by effect it creates a logical law that no Witches can or will ever exist in the universe. Madoka herself becomes a law of the universe, and transcends her corporeal existence into a higher realm of being, practically becoming a force of nature. And that universal force is called Hope.
It is through Hope that she prevents all the Witches in history from ever coming into existence. In all time periods, she travels to the point right before every Magical Girl becomes a Witch. At this point, the Magical Girl is about to break down, in tears, and about to give up all hope and resign to the ultimate despair, which will enable her transformation as a Witch. At this point, due to the new law of the universe, Madoka literally comes to bestow Hope within the Magical Girl, and even though the Magical Girl dies regardless because her time as a human is up, she dies peacefully in the arms of Madoka and does not transform into a Witch. Thus Homura’s ultimate despair in the end is solved by Madoka herself, who Homura was trying to save – Homura it turns out was saved by Madoka instead, instilling her with Hope in order to overcome Despair wherever it manifested in the universe.
Madoka thus becomes Hope, manifested as a physical law against Despair within the universe. It is because of her sacrifice that now Despair can always be combated with Hope, whereas before the entropy was absolute and unconquerable. In a sense she thus supplies “everlasting life” to combat “ultimate death” which is brought by entropy. And, just like QB’s mission to combat universal heat entropy, Madoka becomes the source of all Hope and the possibility of victory over all kinds of entropy, which before were unconquerable and where everyone was consigned to despair. Madoka becomes the Hope that Despair is conquered with, so that in turn entropy and decay can always be fought against and beautiful things always be sustained in the universe.
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