Hello! I just finished Madoka Magica (plus movies) and I have trouble understanding main themes, especially when it comes to Homura and Madoka's relationship. Could summarise briefly what are your thoughts on them?

Hello anon!

Thank you so much for this ask! I have wanted to talk about Madoka since forever, but I had never gotten the chance.

First of all, I will mostly concentrate on the series and I will mention the movie only in the last part of the meta. This is because the story told by the series can be considered finished, whereas the one told by the movie is not really over. Moreover, I have re-watched the series recently, while I watched the movie some time ago, so I remember it less.

When it comes to the main themes, I think there are several and they are all highlighted by short lines within the show.

The most important one is this:

Madoka is a story about wishes. To be more precise it is a story about people having to understand what they really want and which kind of wishes can help them reach happiness and a good outcome and which ones do not.

This theme is clearly underlined by the worldbuilding since in order to become magical girls the characters have to make a wish and their powers and abilities are greatly influenced by that wish. The girls have to find something they wish so strongly they can dedicate their whole lives to it without regrets.

This theme is explored in several ways and these different prospectives are linked to secondary themes. Each secondary theme is illustrated by each girl’s subplot and they all come together in Homura and Madoka’s stories even if in different ways.

To be more precise I would say there are two main secondary themes.

1) Growing up and what it means which is introduced through Mami’s arc.

It’s not that it was her dream to work somewhere, but she is still living the way she wants to live. Some dreams can come true that way. So you can make how you live your dream?

2) The importance of integrating opposites and to overcome a black and white vision of the world which is explored through Sayaka and Kyouko’s inverted arcs.

MAMI: THE CHILD BEHIND THE IDEAL WOMAN



Mami is introduced as a mentor figure to Sayaka and Madoka. She is older and appears more mature than the two other girls. Moreover, she offers to guide them and to give them advice.

It becomes soon clear that Madoka wants to become like Mami whom she sees as a sofisticated person and as far more adult-like than herself.

This fits with the image Mami wants others to have of her. This ideal image is shown also by Gertrud, the first witch Mami fights:

Gertrud is the rose garden witch and has several attributes Mami shares as well. This is not surprising. As a matter of fact each witch in the series is meant to underline something about the magical girl who fights her. In other words, they can often be seen as embodiments of the girls’ fatal flaws.

When it comes to Gertrud, I would say the witch is more than anything a representation of some superficial aspects Mami presents herself as having. For example, they are both associated with flowers. What is more, the witch is said to be distrustful and Mami’s fight against her has the girl being extremely cautious and prudent.

This battle underlines Mami’s experience and strength and makes so that Madoka starts to wish to become like her senpai.

In order to do so, Madoka decides to become a magical girl without thinking further about her wish since she only wants to become a magical girl. Mami’s reaction to this is important:

Telling Madoka to wish for a cake is an extremely superficial advice and it is very different from what Mami previously told her two apprentices. This is because in this moment Mami shows that she is really just an extremely lonely girl who wants someone with her. This means that, even if Madoka sees her as an adult, Mami is actually still a child under several aspects and this is why she dies by the hands of Charlotte aka the sweet witch:

Charlotte represents childishness. Her labyrinth is full of sweets and resembles a child’s room or a child’s birthday party.

Let us also consider what her wiki page says:

A line in the design for Charlotte’s labyrinth in the Official Guidebook says “It’s really a delicious cheese cake. My dying mother wanted to eat it, but maybe I should have cured her disease instead. However, that surely wasn’t appropriate.”



This line implies that Charlotte’s wish was to have a piece of cheesecake to share with her ill mother.

It is pretty clear how this wish makes the witch parallel Mami.

As a matter of fact Mami too regretted having wished only for her own survival and not having saved her parents as well.

Mami’s mistake (if we can call it so) is to have made a wish before she could realize what she really wanted. Of course, it is comprehensible why she made such a mistake since she was dying when Kyubey offered to realize her wish and she had no time to think about it.

What is important is that Mami who Madoka sees as a grown-up version of herself is actually a person who was forced to grow up too fast and that, as a result, has not completely developed on an emotional level and this makes her very frail and lonely.

Her “premature” wish is symbolic of this and the fact that she encourages Madoka to wish for a cake means that she is encouraging the girl to repeat her own mistake.

So, in the end Mami dies killed by the embodiment of childishness since she had no chance to conquer hers because of her tragic past.

Her arc underlines the importance of growing up and the fact that an attempt to do so by forcing oneself to adopt superficial behaviours which appear as more mature without solving one’s inner-turmoil and insecurities is not an available option.

SAYAKA AND KYOUKO: BLUE AND RED

Sayaka and Kyouko have inverted arcs and the scene in the church shows it. Here the apple means two different things in relation to the two girls’ character arcs.

1) When it comes to Kyouko the apple represents sin:

As a matter of fact it is implied that Kyouko stole them and Sayaka calls her out on her selfish way of living showing her that another choice is possible.

2) When it comes to Sayaka the apple represents the knowledge of good and evil:

As a matter of fact Kyouko offers Sayaka an alternative and deeper point of view when it comes to what is good and what is bad, but Sayaka refuses it just like she refuses the apple.

Sayaka and Kyouko represent two extreme positions and in order to successfully complete their arcs they should integrate with each other.

To be more specific Sayaka should accept that she is motivated not only by noble and altruistic reasons, but also by selfish ones, whereas Kyouko must realize that her way of life rooted in extreme selfishness is wrong.

However, Sayaka is not able to do so. She refuses the apple and metaphorically what Kyouko could teach her. She chooses to persevere in her fatal flaw and her fight with Elsa Maria is symbolic of this:

Let’s underline how black and white are heavily used in this scene. These two colours represent Sayaka’s black and white vision of morality which is simplicistic and rigid. Moreover, the witch symbolizes Sayaka’s hypocrisy. As a matter of fact Elsa Maria is praying, but from her back beasts who attack her enemies are born. In other words she gives her back to both who comes to attack her and to her own monstrosity. This is just like Sayaka who is quick to condemn people who think differently from her (like Kyouko and Homura) and who refuses to look at her own selfishness. Moreover, when Sayaka goes against Elsa Maria, the animals on the witch’s back take the shape of snakes and later on of a tree. The snake and the tree are a call back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve are tricked by the snake to eat the apple. Once again the symbolism around Sayaka highlights how she should accept that there is selfishness within herself. If she did, she could gain knowledge and could become wiser, but she refuses to do so.

This is shown also by her choice to suppress her physical pain during the battle. The suppression of pain lets her fight longer, but it is something even Kyubey advises the girl not to do since it would make her slower. In short, pain is said to be useful and necessary and this holds true for negative things in general as the series makes clear. The desperation the girls feel is what can oppose entropy and so save the universe, people are motivated both by selflessness and selfishness, a person can be both good and bad and so on. So, Sayaka repressing her physical pain is symbolic of her doing the same with the negative things about herself she doesn’t want to face.

However, Sayaka can’t keep repressing forever and in the end she realizes the truth:

But, when she does, it is too late and she becomes a witch. If she had accepted Kyouko’s advice, she could have avoided (or at least postponed) such an outcome.

As far as Kyouko is concerned she is able to positively develop, but since she is trapped in a system which doesn’t let her any way out she still dies.

Let us consider Kyouko’s fight against Oktavia.

First of all, it is interesting how, differently from Sayaka’s fight against Elsa Maria, this fight uses mostly red and blue.

Red and blue are the colours associated to Kyouko and Sayaka and their use in this fight symbolizes the necessity of an integration and how the good or bad result of this fight relies entirely on this.

In the first part of the fight we can see how there is somehow an equilibrium between red and blue:

As it can be seen the witch is blue, whereas the seats are red, so both colours are used heavenly.

This is because in the first part of the fight Kyouko still hopes that it is possible to bring Sayaka back. This is why she lets herself be hit by the wheels. She sees it as a form of punishment for her past behaviour towards Sayaka. By doing so Kyouko shows to have grown and to have understood her past mistakes. This is underlined both by her speech and by her blood being represented as a mixture of blue and red:

However, the wheels can be also symbolic of the wheels of fate and in this case Kyouko being hit by them represents the impossibility for her to bring Sayaka back and the fact that her hope is vain. This is quickly proven true by Oktavia attacking Madoka. Let’s highlight how Oktavia’s blood when Kyouko cuts her arm is only blue:

Even if Kyouko has grown and integrated her point of view with Sayaka’s one, Sayaka is not in the condition of doing the same and this is why Kyouko’s attempt is meant to fail. At this point the floor breaks and Kyouko falls downstairs where the equilibrium between blue and red is lost since the seats appear blue like the witch:

By this point Kyouko chooses to sacrifice herself and to be together in death with Sayaka. It is interesting how by doing so she starts praying. As a matter of fact finding some form of reconciliation with her faith is one of the most important aspects of Kyouko’s arc. However, what mostly interests me about it is the fact that Kyouko’s position resembles Elsa Maria’s one:

Still, Kyouko is not giving her back to Sayaka, aka to what magical girls are bound to become, but she is directly facing her because she has accepted both her good and bad parts. While she does so Kyouko’s red magic brings more equilibrium to the whole scene with red and blue being in harmony.

All in all Sayaka and Kyouko’s stories are meant to convey the importance of integrating between opposites, to face the negative parts of oneself and how bad and good can be side by side and they can be difficult to separate.

Sayaka and Kyouko’s wishes are used once again to communicate this idea as well.

Both girls made a wish for someone else and ended up suffering for it, but the reason of their suffering is different.

Kyouko’s mistake was to think that what she wanted was what his father wanted and that his father would have been happy if magic could make people listen to him.



Sayaka was right to think that Kamijo would be happy to have his hands healed, but she refused to admit that a part of her hoped to receive a reward for such a wish and to be more specific that she hoped that Kamijo would love her.

Sayaka and Kyouko’s wishes underline the grayness within the ideas of selflessness and selfishness and how these two concepts are often both present and intertwined in people.



MADOKA AND HOMURA: A DIFFICULT CONCILIATION

Mami’s arc explores the theme of growing up and Kyouko and Sayaka’s arc the importance of reconciling good and bad, selfishness and selflessness.

Both these topics find a resolution through Madoka’s final wish.

As a matter of fact Madoka chooses to erase all the witches and to dedicate her own life to it.

The idea of making of one’s lifestyle their own dream is something which has been touched at the beginning of the series. There, Madoka wanted to make of her magical girl style of life her wish, but back then she was still looking at things in a superficial way. As a matter of fact Madoka was trying to solve her self-esteem and self-loathing problems by acquiring magical powers. By the end of the series she doesn’t become a magical girl in order to grow up, but she can become one because she has grown up.

Similarly, it is important to note that Madoka’s wish doesn’t erase evilness or desperation or the negative things happening in the world. This is because the series underlines how these things are a part of the world itself and can never be completely destroyed as Sayaka’s attempt shows. So, Madoka chooses not to eradicate the magical girls system. After all, if she did the universe would have been ultimately destroyed as Kyubey explained (alternatively the Incubators would have found another cruel way to collect human energy). After having considered this, Madoka decides to respect the will of other magical girls to risk their lives to realize their wishes and simply makes the system less cruel. The ending suggests that the system has been changed and that now magical girls go around fighting monsters representative of human negative emotions. By doing so, they collect energy which is then given to the Incubators to use. They do something which is much closer to what magical girls typically do and they are not tricked into becoming witches by the Incubators anymore.

In other words, Madoka’s wish embodies the themes of the series.

Another important thing about it is that by making the wish Madoka becomes active.

Throughout the series Madoka’s passiveness and her self-loathing have been two of her biggest flaws as her meeting with Elly shows. The witch catches Madoka and forces her to see Mami’s last moments again by showing them on the screens. Madoka being completely helpless and prey of the witch could symbolically represent her feeling of being useless and without worth since she thinks she is not able to help people. As it is clear she overcomes these feelings in the finale.

Let’s now consider Homura and how she herself is linked to the two themes underlined above.

Homura’s wish is born by the unwillingness to accept Madoka’s death, so by her being unable to move on and this is symbolically shown by her repeating the same month several times.

So, Homura’s wish negates what the series wants to convey since 1) it is born by Homura’s refusal to accept something negative which happened to her (Madoka’s death) and 2) it literally makes so that the time won’t keep flowing and so that Homura and all the other characters won’t go on and won’t grow up.

This is shown also by the witch which represents Homura’s character flaw aka Walpurgisnacht.

Let’s consider what Walpurgisnacht’s wiki page says:

She will turn all of fate’s misfortune to nothing.

She will flood the earth with magic,

and take all of humankind into her play.

A moving stage construction.

If everything is a play, no unhappy things will exist.

It may be a tragedy, but it’ll all be part of the script.

The play stops on Walpurgisnacht,

and the earth does not turn even once more.

The story will not change.

Tomorrow, and the day after, is the night of Walpurgis.



And also:

She symbolizes the fool who continuously spins in circles.



The fool who continuously spins in circles is a reference to Homura and to her quest to change the future by continuing to live again and again through the same situations.

What Homura does is similar to Walpurgis’s attempt to turn the whole world into a play because by making reality into fiction people won’t be forced to truly accept the bad things which happen to them. As a matter of fact every time Homura reaches a bad ending all she has to do is to refuse the outcome and to go back in order to change it until she reaches a situation she can accept as reality. However, no matter how many times she repeats things, she will never be able to obtain what she wants.

In short, whereas Madoka affirms the series’ themes in an active way through her wish, Homura has to convey them in a passive way by giving up her wish to save Madoka. This is because growing up means both to find something which is worth to fight for, but also to realize when it is time to give up.

Madoka and Homura represents these two different kinds of growth.

At the same time though, Homura’s wish is not condemned as useless by the series.

In order to understand it, let’s consider Madoka’s witch form aka Gretchen.

The wiki says interesting things about this witch:

Witch of salvation. Her nature is mercy. She absorbs any life on the planet into her newly created heaven–her barrier. The only way to defeat this witch is to make the world free of misfortune. If there’s no grief in this world, she will believe this world is already a heaven.

And also:

In short, Madoka’s witch form is meant to show that also a noble feeling like mercy can lead to desperation and destruction if it is imposed and extreme. Moreover, Gretchen seems to be a witch which is complementary to Walpurgis i.e. the embodyment of Homura’s flaws.

In other words, Madoka and Homura are opposites and alone would not have managed to do much, but the union of their efforts and the integration of their different world views led to some kind of result.

As a matter of fact, Madoka’s wish to sacrifice herself for others would not have accomplished much if fueled by an absence of self-worth. However, when coupled with Homura’s feelings it let Madoka change the world. It is thanks to Homura, thus, that Madoka became so powerful in the first place and could finally grow up. In other words, symbolically, Homura’s love gave Madoka the self-worth she lacked making her a better person, so that she could then help the whole world.

Their two wishes, one born out of a selfless desire to help everybody and the other born by the selfish will to twist time in order to help one person are complementary and, in different ways, lead to the series’ ending.

This resolution is sealed by Madoka giving Homura her ribbons.

The ribbons have a double meaning.

1) When it comes to Madoka, her giving them to Homura underlines her finally growing up. This is because they were given to her by her mother at the beginning of the series, so Madoka finally giving them to someone else shows that she doesn’t need to depend on a parent anymore.

2) When it comes to Homura, they represent her relationship with Madoka and are a memento of her friend. After she receives them Homura shows to have accepted Madoka’s wish to fight in order to protect the world and she is determined to fulfill it. Basically, the ribbons represent Madoka’s legacy.

I have analyzed the series, so I will now do a short section dedicated to the movie and to Homura and Madoka more specifically.

In short, Homura regresses throughout the movie. Her growth lies in letting Madoka go and in partially accepting her pov. In the series she did so even if in a passive way (meaning she was not given any other choice) and in the movie she changes her mind and acts to change things.

Basically the movie shows that a new conflict will be born in the future between Homura and Madoka and the root of this conflict will be this:

H: “Kaname Madoka, do you treasure this world? Do you consider stability and order more important than desire?” M: “Well, I…Um…I do treasure it. I guess I do think it’s kind of bad to break the rules because you feel like it”. H: “I see…Then I suppose one day you will be my enemy as well”.

Homura despises the world which makes people and Madoka especially suffer and thinks that desires should be fulfilled no matter what, whereas Madoka treasures the world despite its flaws and thinks that to respect its laws is more important than the satisfaction of one’s desires.

They are two opposite visions which will lead the two girls to fight each other.

What follows this conversation is an inversion of what happens at the end of the series since Homura gives Madoka her ribbons back.

Once again this has two meanings.

1) Homura refuses Madoka’s POV she had previously partially accepted and in this way she also gives up her friendship with Madoka since she affirms they will be enemies.

2) In a sense the ribbons are symbolic of Homura tying Madoka and imprisoning her. Let’s underline that when Madoka is about to awake her true powers her pigtails are getting loose. However, Homura stops Madoka by embracing her and later on she ties her hair with the red ribbons. Moreover, as explained above, the ribbons are symbolic of Madoka’s childishness, so this means Homura is making so that Madoka remains stuck in her childhood. This is coherent with Homura wanting to protect her by any hardship which is something not only impossible, but also detrimental for a person’s growth.

This scene is also interesting because it is also a call back to a previous one in the movie:

As a matter of fact Madoka too at one point tries to calm Homura down through tying her hair and Homura is tempted to lose herself in such a dream, but in the end she refuses this consolation.

This leads us to explore what is probably the main problem of Homura and Madoka.

Basically they both have a very low self-esteem and in order to prove their worth they are both determined to be useful and to succeed in their mission as magical girls. However, Madoka’s mission as a magical girl is in opposition with Homura’s one and this leads the two girls to never be completely satisfied at the same time. If you notice, both in the series and in the movie, when Madoka is active and confident Homura is unsure and lost and vice versa. Homura especially needs Madoka to be safe in order to prove her self worth and this is a problem because it makes so that it is impossible for Madoka to claim any form of agency since it will lead to Homura being left unsatisfied.

So, if we will ever have a sequel I think it will explore the conflict between Homura and Madoka and will offer a new integration between their two points of view other than Homura actively letting go of her wish this time.

Thank you for the ask and I am sorry for the long answer, I hope you enjoyed it!