Alternative Character Interpretation / Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Alternative Character Interpretation in the Puella Magi Madoka Magica franchise.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

• Some suggest that Madoka's self-sacrificial nature comes from a sense of self-worthlessness. Madoka's Image Song adds to this, with lyrics indicating her as a Stepford Smiler.

  But the truth is I'm not really that strong.
  Both the scenery and the city are the same as always
  Even though I expected nothing would change,
  I still think I'm the only one who is small.

  • By extension, was Madoka's wish completely altruistic or partially a means of suicide?
  • Was Madoka always a strong magical girl who was supercharged by Homura's wish, or did Homura's wish make Madoka that strong entirely on their own? Different franchise statements, scenes, and adaptations imply different answers.
• Many witches are implied to have very tragic back stories, and aren't capable of changing or controlling their actions. Because of this, several people like to Draco in Leather Pants them, especially Charlotte before her backstory was officially revealed.
• Is Walpurgisnacht laughing or crying? Or both?
  • Was Walpurgisnacht defeated in timelines 1, 2, and 3 in mutual kills with Madoka, or did it kill Madoka and escape to destroy more?
• Sayaka Miki: A self-absorbed girl who thought she was entitled to someone's romantic love? A normal girl who was caught up in horrible crap and simply was unable to handle it? Or both?
  • Is Oktavia von Seckendorff really as powerful as she seems, or is that just because Kyoko was reluctant to fight her at full strength, not wanting to kill her but revert her back to her normal self?
  • Was Kyoko's Suicide Attack the only way to take Oktavia out because she had gotten that powerful, or did Kyoko decide to go out on her own terms after learning the Awful Truth about magical girls?
  • Is Sayaka a weak magical girl, or is she just overshadowed by three veteran magical girls while being untrained while her best friend's potential is just unfathomable and thus unfair to compare herself to.
• Kyosuke Kamijo: Is he a stuck-up, painfully Oblivious to Love jerk who is too wrapped up in the loss of his musical ability to appreciate his friends' well meaning gestures, or similar to Sayaka, a Broken Bird who's been denied his life's dream and sees himself as useless (especially since Japan has less societal tolerance for the disabled), or a little of both?
  • Similar to Hitomi, his actions in the PSP game have exacerbated this debate; after he finds out what the MG process did to Sayaka, and calls her a "disgusting monster" to her face... On the other hand, the bonus route goes the opposite end, with him approving of Sayaka being a magical girl (and one must remember the first set of circumstances basically had him face-to-face with Sayaka while half of her body had decayed: one could hardly blame him for freaking out).
  • The Different Story shows that had Sayaka waited just a few more days, Kyosuke would have thanked her for all the time she had spent taking care of him at the hospital and admitting that he should've done it sooner.
• There is a hefty fandom subset that believes Kyubey planned out the ending despite the fact that it goes against his character of being canonically emotionless and thus having no sympathy at all for the magical girls that are turned into witches. He even mentions that witches would be a more convenient way for him to collect energy.
  • There's also a branch that doesn't believe his Villains Never Lie claims and think everything he told Madoka about his motives, how his efforts have aided humanity, and how he's emotionless are complete bullshit. He's canonically a Consummate Liar in all but the most technical sense anyway.
  • Similarly, there are those who speculate if Kyubey is able to manipulate events in order to induce contracts, and if so what events in the backstory were genuinely accidents and bad turns of fate and which ones were orchestrated by Kyubey to get girls to contract. One particular theory in particular, based from statements about Charlotte's natural counter to Mami's fighting style, argues that Kyubey set up Charlotte to form where she did specifically to put Mami at severe risk to try and force Madoka to contract.
• Homura Akemi: Was her wish to redo time to protect Madoka out of a genuine desire to save her best friend or simply to validate her own existence? Or a mixture of both? This can also generally apply to all her actions afterwards.
  • And was Homura really doing a good thing by wishing to redo time to save Madoka, especially since that Madoka had already accepted that she would die defeating Walpurgisnacht? On this point, there is at least one timeline where Madoka asked Homura to use her time powers to prevent her from even making a contract with Kyubey in the first place.
  • Just how much does Homura care about the other Magical girls not named Madoka? While she is very upfront that she 'only' cares about Madoka, several of her actions (from her reaction to Mami and Kyoko's deaths to her smile when she retrieved Sayaka's soul gem to revive her, there is an argument that she does in fact care about them, she just cares about Madoka more and is more willing to accept them dying to get any sort of good ending but would otherwise prefer they stay alive.
    • Was Homura really threatening to kill Sayaka, or was she trying to shock Sayaka out of her downward spiral?
• Kyoko's behavior and her motivation for following Sayaka around surprisingly makes a lot of sense if you imagine that she has a one-sided crush on Sayaka. Alternatively, her interest on her stems from both having made their wishes for someone else and trying to help her in not committing the same mistakes as she did.
  • More on Kyoko: when she sacrificed her soul gem to die alongside Sayaka, was it also because she wanted to die on her own terms instead of becoming a witch, or was simply tired of her suffering and wanted to die, thus using Sayaka as an excuse/outlet to do so? And was she well-meaning or misguided in this action, especially since the result leaves Homura as the only magical girl left to combat Walpurgisnacht?
• Did Hitomi directly cause Sayaka's death? Is she a generally decent, if a bit oblivious, person who made an insensitive remark at exactly the wrong time? Was she really in love with Kyosuke, or was she just trying to help her friend confess? Was her time limit of twenty-four hours an acceptable window of opportunity for Sayaka to make the first move, or much too short of a time for Sayaka to confess within? The PSP game really doesn't help, due to it showing what happens when Sayaka actually takes her advice: Hitomi slaps her, implying that she was possibly trying to psyche Sayaka out of making a confession to begin with. On a less serious note, many wonder if she's actually in the Transparent Closet, as she was quick to claim that homosexuality is forbidden love when she ended up arriving to the conclusion that Sayaka and Madoka were lesbians.
• Are witches monsters, or are they misunderstood creatures who want other people (especially magical girls) to avoid their same fate? To get a little more specific, did Charlotte kill Mami because she's a heartless monster, or did she Mercy Kill Mami so that she wouldn't become a witch herself?
• Pastor Sakura is often subject to this. On one hand, Kyouko remembers him fondly and describes him as a good and honest preacher who genuinely wanted what was best for his flock, but snapped under the horrible revelation that he had unwittingly been brainwashing his followers. On the other hand, reading between the lines can give the impression that he was a Cult leader (which Kyouko admits one could get the impression of seeing it from the outside) with all the horrible implications that entails, and that Kyouko's recollection is colored by her guilt and still being indoctrinated by her father.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion:

• Homura and Kyubey return as very ambiguous characters with ambiguous actions, but especially Homura, given their very highly-debated actions in the ending of the movie.
  • Specifically, for Homura: Was she a Well-Intentioned Extremist who did what she had to do to save Madoka from A Fate Worse Than Death? Did Homura initially respect Madoka's decision to become the Law of Cycles, believing it made her happy, with her usurpation and kidnapping of Madoka motivated by the Mind Rape she suffered at the hands of Kyubey as well as the misunderstood conversation in the field, which caused her to honestly believe that Madoka regretted her decision? Or was the conversation in the field manipulated by Homura's selective omissions to elicit the responses she desired to justify her abduction of Madoka? Or perhaps there was a pragmatic, unselfish motive for the usurpation and abduction of Madoka: to wit, the sincere belief that Kyubey would ultimately succeed in trapping Madoka, restoring the original witches system and subjecting Madoka to a far less pleasant captivity than Homura's Gilded Cage? Were her actions just rashly planned/a Moment of Weakness that she realized/snapped out of only after she thought it too late to undo them or a premeditated plan in order to capture and "save" her best friend to keep her with her? Or is her betrayal simply an Ass Pull completely inconsistent with her prior characterization?
  • Something else to consider: Did Sayaka's words factor into Homura usurping Madoka and recreating the world where everyone is alive? When Homura insisted on finding and killing the witch responsible for trapping everyone in the barrier, Sayaka said since everyone was alive, happy, and working together, that the heart who wished for a world like that couldn't really be all that bad and didn't deserve to be destroyed. Of course, Sayaka knew that Homura herself was the witch and was trying to make her feel better, but did Homura use her words as a justification for usurping Madoka? Adding weight to this point is the fact that Akuma Homura points out that everyone is alive and happy in her new world before Sayaka calls her a devil.
• The trailer for Madogatari in November 2015 heavily implies Homura sincerely believed Madoka was suffering. In addition, Word of Saint Paul from Christine Marie Cabanos at a convention in 2015 implies the Incubators torturing Homura to insanity had a hand in her actions. All in all, the second option seems the most plausible.
• The movie presents one for Madoka's role in the anime proper, courtesy of the flower field scene: Did Madoka act out of duty and obligation rather than her own desire to help all of those fallen magical girls? Is Ultimate Madoka truly happy to be able to watch over everyone? Or did Homura's words to a Madoka who did not have the same memories and experiences about how she “went to a place far far away from everyone she knew and loved” create a misunderstanding that lead Homura to believe Madoka regretted her wish? Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story heavily suggests Madoka was in fact unhappy and needs to give herself constant pep talks to keep herself together.
• One popular interpretation of Madoka and Sayaka at the end of the film is that they're deliberately playing along with Homura and her perfect world, either out of pity, trying to outlast the worst of it to act when Homura is more ammicable or their own amusement. A third interpretation is that Sayaka is doing an elaborate Batman Gambit to keep scheming under Homura's nose and find a way to bring the Law of Cycles world back.

Puella Magi Tart Magica:

• Kyubey decides not to try to manipulate Jeanne into turning into a witch despite the massive amount of energy she'd release because he feels "gratitude" towards her for stopping Isabeau. This is a bit strange given Kyubey normally claims to be incapable of feeling emotion and only exists to get energy by any means necessary. There are hints that Cube (this story's alternation of Kyubey) was one of those 'mentally ill' Incubators that caught the 'illness' of emotion from his prolonged exposure to Isabeau's power thirst, which brought fear into his heart because her madness was that deep.
• Just what is the opinion of Charles VII regarding Tart when looking at her execution? Does he genuinely think that she's a real saint, or does he only use her as a means to bring down his mother and readily abandon her when she has fulfilled her purpose (Gilles seems to think so)? Does he think of her as a saint, and it was simply his chamberlain's manipulation and his own mental breakdown caused him to abandon Tart, or does he think that ransoming her would make him lose face out of his hatred for the English? The way it is portrayed also opens the possibility that the cause of his son Louise XI’s fervent rebellion against him in his adult years is because Louise adored Tart and blamed Charles for giving up on her.

Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

• Alina raises questions on how much she's a crazy psycho and how much she's a Cool Big Sis. The incredibly different appearances between her Halloween 2017 debut and her main story chapter debut sent much of the fandom into a whiplash.
  • This is compounded in the EN server compared to the original, as while in the JP server Alina's first introduction was in the Magical Halloween Theater event as Karin's aloof yet caring senpai, the EN server's first introduction to her was in Chapter 5 as an Ax-Crazy villain.
• How much the relationship between Nanaka and Hazuki is either of Friendly Rivalry or full-blown hostility that both decide to hide for the sake of their less pragmatic-minded teammates? Nanaka, along with Masara, were already shown that they're willing to take a less-than-optimal option to maintain their teammates's peace of mind, however it might be different when it comes to Hazuki, who has a pretty similar temperament with Nanaka. The only thing everyone agrees on is that there's a lot of Foe Romance Subtext there.
• Kanagi's motivation on helping the heroes fighting the Wings of Magius is called to question when it is revealed that she's planning to destroy Kamihama anyway.
• There are several ways to interpret the reason why Nagisa didn't help her mother when she was fatally injured. Either she was making true of her vow to never again live but for herself to the letter, refusing to obey a request from someone she had disowned, and she was too prideful to take it back even though she knew she really loved her mother. Or she was just too much in shock from the extent of the atrocity that she had witnessed that she couldn't help but to just stare in horror, knowing that in some part it was her fault.