History Headscratchers / PuellaMagiMadokaMagica

** They're insane and don't recognize the world around them anymore. They're literal ''monsters'', of course they can't be reasonable or peaceful, their ability to ''be'' reasonable and peaceful has been taken away from them.

** Considering Madoka had come within seconds of making ADealWithTheDevil, she may had been in shock and dropped the gun without knowing or didnt want to scare Madoka away by approaching her with a weapon in hand. She probably picked the gun up afterward and they just didnt show it.

* This has puzzled me for a while, and it seems to come up a lot with the more angsty OCs...What if a candidate makes a wish regarding her own mortality, such as I wish for a peaceful death / I wish for a long and happy life / I wish to live forever / I wish to die happy / I wish to live long enough to play with my great-grandchildren ? The very nature of the wish seems to run counter to the whole [[BuffySpeak witchification]] process, yet Kyubey presumably ''has'' to grant it for the contract to be fulfilled. There are a couple I can imagine Kyubey getting around: a wish for immortality could mean an eternal existence as a witch and invoking WhoWantsToLiveForever...although you would assume they would have to be a very weak one, to avoid wiping out humanity, and one that can elude Magical Girls, to avoid being killed. The same would be true of a "long life" wish. However, if the candidate ''specified'' she wanted a long and ''happy'' life, or that she wanted to die ''happy'' or ''peacefully''...how does the Incubator get around that wish, since if she falls in battle it nulls the "peaceful" part of the contract, and if she falls into despair it nulls the "happy" ''and'' the "peaceful" stipulation. No magical girl seems to make it into adulthood -- does that really mean, in the entirety of human history, no candidate thought to ensure their own survival and life as a (pseudo-) human?

** No, I hadn't forgotten that at all. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch that a girl who'd had to confront mortality in some way would make a wish of that nature - whether she was ill herself, had lost someone close to her, or was simply going through the stage that many children go through, where they are obsessed by and terrified of the idea of death. In that case, she'd be vulnerable enough to draw an Incubator's attention, but the nature of her wish would be difficult to take advantage of. Madoka showed us that Incubators can be screwed over by their own system, and Kazumi (from the spin-off) showed us that some girls, no matter how grief-stricken, still maintain a level of respect for their loved ones, the laws of nature and the benefits of hard work (true, the wish itself breaks "the law of nature," but they don't realise that). Kazumi from ''Kazumi Magica'' could have wished for her grandmother's life, but since her gran had decided to let life take its course, she respected that and altered her wish accordingly. Surely a magical girl in a similar situation might decide "I can't bring my loved one back, but I can spare my own loved ones the pain of having to bury me..." or, more selfishly "They died too young. I don't want that to happen to me." It's also a wish she could justify to herself -- people ''do'' live long lives, it's not ''that'' unnatural a wish. But it seems that up until Madoka, the Incubators always "won." So my question was how could they "twist" this wish to profit from it?

** Well, for starters, they can't talk, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that once they've hatched, they don't even perceive the world the way humans do anymore. They don't have human bodies or human brains, so anything that a normal human would be able to do is off the table just because that's how twisted they are. Imagine the worst thing you've ever felt; a heartbreak, a betrayal, a disappointment, a loss. Now imagine that time stopped for you in that moment, so that it would ''never'' get better, that awful feeling would ''never'' go away, and the only thing that ''might'' alleviate that pain is to try to make someone else feel as bad as you do...and it doesn't matter if it doesn't work, because time for you won't progress enough for you to feel any relief. They lash out because it's the only thing they can do.

* This is probably going to be a really stupid question, but since Witches were made from Magical Girls, and therefore humans, why do they lose the capacity to communicate or not be hostile? What causes a Witch to want to cause people to commit suicide, or attack Magical Girls on sight? Couldn't a Witch try and explain to a Magical Girl what happened to her, and try and work with her? This is what puzzles me, because I don't remember if Oktavia showed any hesitation in trying to murder Madoka, her best friend back when she was Sayaka. Just, why can't they be reasonable and more peaceful, and if not, what is the mechanism or reason preventing them from being such?

* Why is the CounterpartComparison between Mami and [[Series/KamenRiderRyuki Kamen Rider Scissors]]? I can think of a lot comparisons that can be made between Madoka and Ryuki's cast, but this one makes the least sense since all they have in common is [[spoiler: getting by a MonsterOfTheWeek]] and wearing yellow. Aside from that, they're completely different. Mami was set to look like she was major character, Scissors was a villain that had pretty well shown himself to be an irredeemable asshole with his [[MoralEventHorizon actions]], [[spoiler: his death is nowhere nearly as a much of a shock because he was villain and the circumstances were completely different]], and his fate, while NightmareFuel, came off as his him getting what he deserved rather than a tragedy brought his recklessness.

*** If you had difficulty finding this information, it's because you didn't actually look for it. It's stated directly in the show. Kyubey even explains why magical girls are called magical ''girls'' in reference to what humans call females in their second growth phase. Multiple entries on this page and the Fridge page reference the question of why there are no magical boys, what would happen if a transgender boy or girl made a contract, what happens if a girl made a contract wishing to be a boy, and so on, and so on. So I apologize if I made my frustrations a little more obvious than is polite, but I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

*** Yes, and my point is that wishing for Sayaka to come back didn't make her superpowerful, even though it should have done so if revival wishes require lots of power to pull off.

*** You're point was made, but you could have been less of an ass about it. I just had difficulty finding concrete information so I wanted confirmation.

*** How many times are people going to ask this? Actually pay attention to the show, people, Kyubey explicitly states his reasoning, this is not a headscratcher if you have more brains than a goldfish does. It's because teenage girls are the most emotionally volatile demographic of humanity and the Incubators are extremely efficient. Teenage girls are guaranteed to get the results they want, which means contracting with anyone ''except'' teenage girls is a waste of their time. Imagine somebody puts you in front of two slot machines, a pink one and a blue one. They tell you that the pink one wins a hundred dollar prize every single time. The blue one wins a hundred dollar prize once out of every ten spins. Every pull costs ten dollars and you have a hundred dollars in your pocket, how many times do you use each machine?

* Is there a reason why there are only magical GIRLS? I mean, the out of universe reason is more or less obvious, but is there a concrete reason given why they only use girls for the contract?

* This is strange question but who exactly was responsible for the Morning Rescue meme? Here it said the fansubbers did it because they thought it was funny enough to offset the depressing episode but I notice it caught on in Japan too. Is this another [Anime/SchoolDays Nice Boat]] situation where both sides thought it was funny(which is kind of rare)?

** I thought that Madoka was saying that she could have undone Sayaka's wish, and have her stay a normal girl. But she didn't think that Sayaka would want that, because it would put Kyousuke back into his painful existance of not being able to use his arm or do what he loves with music anymore, which Sayaka agreed with. In the end, she was happy hearing him play again [something she had desperately wanted] and letting him and Hitomi be happy. It's nothing to do with Madoka not being able to undo the other girls wishes or not and everything to do with her understanding and respecting what Sayaka had wanted. Also, side note, what if she did change Mami and Kyoko's wishes? Because if she could change Sayaka's, there is no reason she couldn't change theirs. Where would that leave them? Mami would have died in a car crash, and Kyoko would be left stuck to starve with a disgraced father, with no guarentee that some other horribleness involving a disgraced priest wouldn't have killed them all. In a way, letting them make their ways in the new universe, hopefully find themselves a happier life when they're not doomed to fall to dispair, and ultimately be able to find peace and happiness with her in the Law of Cycles is much kinder than leaving them in certain and near-certain doom respectively.

* This might be a bit too meta, but '''why in the ever loving blue fuck are there so many goddamn instances''' on ThisVeryWiki of people claiming that Kyubey can't bring back the dead? Seriously, at what point in the franchise did someone reach into their own ass an come out with the assumption that the immortal magic weasel that can turn back time an fix medically incurable/terminal ailments was powerless against mortality? Doesn't that go against a lot of the spoken and shown extent of his abilities to claim that? That's not even getting into the fact that in multiple ExpandedUniverse works he explicitly shows that creating and recreating life is well within his powers. KazumiMagica sees him create a doppelgänger of one of the Saints that has all of the original ones memories (except for the childhood accident) and a lifeforce of her own, and if that isn't good enough, the alternate timeline of ''[[Manga/PuellaMagiMadokaMagicaTheDifferentStory The Different Story]]'' has Madoka make a contract when Walpurgisnatch comes to revive Sayaka after she had become a witch and been slated by Kyoko (though she doesn't remember being a witch and thinks Madoka instead saved her from being eaten by one.) So what gives, why is everyone claiming that he can't do it? He can rewrite the laws of the universe if the correct girl thinks to try. The only reason that he doesn't do it in the anime is because either A) the heat of the moment keeps the thought from occurring (like Mami) they become convinced that karmic recompense will screw over whoever they wish back into an even worse grave (Madoka) or they have wider intentions that won't be met by ''merely'' bringing a person back to life (Homura).

** Personally, I think that scene is less about "we could have undone your wish" and more "imagine if you hadn't made your wish." But if we do take a literal interpretation of Madoka's words, it does make sense that she would have a degree of leeway to change Sayaka's fate that she didn't have with the other girls. Notice that, unlike Mami and Kyouko who contracted long before the series, Sayaka is not a magical girl in the first two timelines — this implies that the reason she starts contracting in later timelines is because of Madoka and Homura's presence or interference, intentional or not. This makes sense if you think about it: the higher Madoka's potential gets with each reset, the more Kyuubey wants her, and the more Kyuubey wants her, the more incentive he has to contract with weaker friends of Madoka's to give Madoka more of a reason to contract. In the new world, since Madoka isn't around and Homura isn't artificially boosting anyone's potential, Sayaka's fate becomes a grey area: Madoka's absence means Kyuubey has less reason to approach Sayaka, but ''if'' he was to approach her, Sayaka would still have the desire to heal Kyousuke. I don't think Madoka could just arbitrarily rewrite things as she wished — she's a goddess, in a sense, but not the omnipotent kind, and she follows very specific directives — but I would imagine that any events between mid-March and April 30 would have been open to some extra influencing because that month had been completely screwed up by Homura's magic and then further complicated by Madoka's paradox.

*** [[spoiler:Regarding Joan of Arc, it's possible her Soul Gem was burned up. Nobody ever said they were fireproof. In fact, they actually look rather weak to me...]

* Why is the CounterpartComparison between Mami and [[KamenRiderRyuki Kamen Rider Scissors]]? I can think of a lot comparisons that can be made between Madoka and Ryuki's cast, but this one makes the least sense since all they have in common is [[spoiler: getting by a MonsterOfTheWeek]] and wearing yellow. Aside from that, they're completely different. Mami was set to look like she was major character, Scissors was a villain that had pretty well shown himself to be an irredeemable asshole with his [[MoralEventHorizon actions]], [[spoiler: his death is nowhere nearly as a much of a shock because he was villain and the circumstances were completely different]], and his fate, while NightmareFuel, came off as his him getting what he deserved rather than a tragedy brought his recklessness.