Alternate title: “Spoiler Alert: the story, the picture, the anime, the musical, the movie, the article.”

Warning: there will be Rebellion spoilers (big ones at that) in this article. Read on with caution, and watch the movie already, my word.



In this article, I will go over Homura’s actions in Rebellion with regard to the solitary state that she had been placed in over the course of the series. If you want to know more, I wrote articles in which I break down her loss of Madoka and the other girls. Anyways, the rest of the article is on details from The Rebellion Story. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s been out for almost a year now, watch it.

The Situation at Hand: Inside Her Soul

We start at the middle of The Rebellion Story. Homura finds herself, for lack of a better term, inside her own soul. She knows that what’s going on isn’t right. She keeps finding clues that something’s wrong. When fighting Hitomi’s nightmare, Homura asks if this is always the way they fought these beasts. When she takes Kyouko on the bus, she never reaches Kyouko’s town, only traversing an empty, bleak wilderness before returning to Mitakihara. Over the course of the movie she slowly finds out what’s going on.

This situation is, ultimately, a sick experiment of sorts performed by the incubators. Confused by the fact that soul gems purify themselves (thanks to the Law of Cycles aka Madoka), they decided to observe Homura’s soul gem in isolation. If it was purified, they would find the purifying agent (Madoka) and would seek to harness that power. If not, they’d find a source of more powerful entropy (witches). And so, Homura manifested herself and her memories in her soul as she slowly shifted from a pure gem to a hyper-condensed grief seed. Mami and Kyouko entered her soul as memories, but there were three foreign entities in there- familiar to her as though they were from a past life.

Sayaka, Nagisa Momoe aka Bebe aka Charlotte, and Madoka (with her memories and powers suppressed) all entered the soul of Homura with the intention of freeing her soul and either purifying it or taking her into the Law of Cycles if she had already gone too far (which didn’t quite work out). So, interestingly, this entire story happened because Homura was, in fact, alone.

The Climax: It’s All My Fault!

Homura eventually finds out from Kyubey what is actually going on and how the incubators are using Homura as bait to draw out Madoka. In doing so, they drop the scales out of balance and Homura begins to transform into Homulilly, her witch form. At this point it becomes clear that “Mitakihara” is actually a quasi-barrier of Homura as she slowly became a witch, and that the reason why Kyouko couldn’t find her hometown is because it never existed to Homura, and if she didn’t know the town, it wouldn’t exist in her world.

Homulilly begins a procession to her own execution, a fate that she would seek to repeat for the rest of eternity. She blames herself for everything, and seeks to atone for it through death, though she returns again and again to die. Such is the story of Homulilly. She is impeded by the forces of Kyouko, Mami, Sayaka, Nagisa, and Madoka. Angry that she cannot, as she sees it, die to atone for her sins, she fights back. Eventually though, the combined powers of Nagisa, Mami, and Madoka are able to break the barrier surrounding Homura’s soul gem.

The Law of Cycles in its true form makes its arrival to free Homura’s soul, which is the point where Homura, her soul still dangerously tainted with an unprecedented amount of despair and brought within reach of the one she loves, finds the strength to rip Madokami in two. Using the power of her concentrated love and despair, she expands the barrier of her Witches realm to consume the entire universe and becomes the antithesis of Madokami. Whereas Madoka is a perfectly selfless being, Akuma Homura is a perfectly selfish being.

The Irony of Homura’s Barrier: Many Friends but None of Them Mine

When the world reforms as Homura’s barrier, nobody remembers anything. It is as if Homura had used her magic one more time and went back to the beginning. Nobody, that is, except Sayaka. But while Sayaka had maintained her ability to invoke Oktavia, Homura was able to dismiss it with a simple gesture. After doing so, she began erasing Sayaka’s memories of the events in Rebellion, and she went back to a normal magical girl once more, only after declaring that she won’t forget that Homura is a demon.

She then encounters a new exchange student, a girl by the name of Kaname Madoka. She confronts Madoka, trading ribbons with her as she had done when she made her wish. Homura supresses the latent power of Madoka’s ascended form, hidden within her physical body.

The irony in the ending is, even though Homura now has this perfect world, an almost dollhouse-like existence where she can control every event that occurs, the fact remains that she must remain vigilant that none of the other Quintet members, or even the familiars inhabiting the new world, rise against her. And so, even in this world, where she controls everything and everyone could be her friend if she so wanted, she remains. Alone.

The End?

And so we find ourselves at the end of Rebellion, up to date with the goings-on of the Madoka universe. and we see that at no point after her first return to the past was Homura ever not alone. Perhaps it was this selfish pursuit of Madoka and a “happy ending” which, ever so ironically, lead her down this dark path. Perhaps Madoka and Homura were like the star-crossed Romeo and Juliet, lovers fated never to be together. And how could one who was once so kind that she was welcomed by the Holy Quartet devolve not just to a character that Sayaka refused to trust, but to the point where she became distilled evil?

Homura’s main motivating factor through the series and into Rebellion was her love of Madoka. When Madoka died, Homura went back to protect her. When Homura could no longer protect her, she sought to reach her once more. When Homura finally reached her again, now she had to fear her. I am eager to see how this interaction plays out when the next season releases, and I hope that one day we might finally see Homura no longer be alone.