Headscratchers / Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Per Spoilers Off policy, Headscratcher pages contain unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned.

I'm in despair! I've been left in despair because of the fact that my despair saves the universe!

• As of episode 9 we now know Kyubey's real goals (if he's actually being entirely truthful this time). However even if what he is saying is true, I really doubt that the energy generated by the emotions of magical girls, will actually help save the universe. Due to the fact that the energy the whole universe is spending by entropy is much more higher than whatever energy they could generate and regain by using the girl's emotions. For instance I doubt a witch could regenerate the used energy of a star in an hour. Much less the whole universe.
  • IT'S MAGIC. I AIN'T GOTTA EXPLAIN SHIT.
  • But on a more serious note, we're not sure what the conversion rate between normal energy and magical girl/witch energy is. Maybe one can effectively replace a star with enough emotion. And we know Kyuubey has enough contracts that there is active fighting for territory amongst the Magical Girls, not to mention that each of them effectively has two "modes" to create energy from.
  • Still, we're talking about the ENTIRE FREAKING UNIVERSE HERE, with TRILLIONS OF STARS. Also, doesn't it take work and therefore energy to contain energy in the first place? Therefore, storing the energy of magical girls would simply cancel the benefit for reducing entropy. And the fact that he can seemingly create mass and energy out of nowhere, why do we have a problem with entropy again?
    • It is explicitly shown that magic can generate amounts of power comparable to the Big Bang. That was a special case, of course, but even a non-special magical girl who still has to rely on conventional weapons was able to rewind time and create GOD in the process. Think for a second what magnitude of power an ability like this actually implies. No, we have every reason to believe that the magical girl system can serve its intended purpose. Soul Gems/Grief Seeds most likely serve as hypertech containing devices, storing nearly all energy generating during a magical girl\witch lifecycle, so it doesn't obliterate the entire Milky Way galaxy, or something like this.
    • Also, a lot of questions about how energy is supposed to work (i.e. the energy that should be necessary to contain energy in the first place) can be Handwaved with the simple fact that magical energy specifically doesn't follow the known laws of thermodynamics.
  • There are a couple of things to be considered here:
    • 1) Kyubey's explanation to Madoka was an extremely simplified one. In fact, he even makes a few small mistakes, since energy and entropy are closely related, but not the same thing. It's quite possible that he/they know more about the universe than we do and he just tried to give an explanation that she would understand.
    • 2) From a narrative perspective, this is a Cosmic Horror Story. One of the key points is that the antagonists are not just evil, but too alien to comprehend. Madoka obviously didn't get one iota of his explanation and only cares that they are being sacrificed for something that would in no way, shape or form ever impact them. Remember, Kyubey is worrying about something that will happen along the lines of 10^50 years from now. This may be a big deal for them, but the human race wouldn't care less.
    • 3) Combining points 1) and 2), we have no clue just what exactly Kyubey is going for. Perhaps the collected energy is not subject to decay and can be stored to fuel one island of civilization inside a dead universe forever. Perhaps they are testing whether the energy can be farmed on a more controlled basis. Perhaps we're already on the brink of heat death and we just don't know it. All that matters for story purposes is that the reasons are outside of human comprehension. What makes Lovecraftian gods so scary is that they are not just evil (because something like Satan's evil, we can still comprehend), but we don't even know why they do what they are doing or whether they can even reason at all. The writers here are going for the same effect.
    • We're really not on the brink of heat-death if the sun's still burning. Any star able to support life would have burned out billions of billions of years before the true heat-death of the universe - current estimates are 10^100 years before the galactic nuclei go cold, which is to the current age of the universe more or less what the current age of the universe is to one Earth year.
    • But we could be WRONG. What you said doesn't mean anything if it turned out we were making a mistake.
  • But even if we take for granted that harvesting angst energy will work and our Puny Earthling knowledge just isn't enough to understand why, why are they going after single individuals and giving them a choice? Given that they have absolutely no understanding of or respect for free will, emotion, or the sanctity of life, wouldn't it be more efficient to make factory farms or put all humans into The Matrix instead?
  • I, for one, think he's full of shit.
    • But that's pretty much what they've done. When explaining the relationship between humans and Incubators, Kyubey likens humans to cattle. He even explains that the main difference is that Incubators acknowledge humanity's sentience. Earth is already a factory farm.
  • Kyubey does seem to understand the notion of morality. He does seem to have principles like "don't lie" or "don't outright force or mind control" and a basic notion of fairness. It's quite possible that he wants to act in an ethical manner. They're just alien ethics. In fact, he more than once voices frustration about how bizarre human ethical standards are. Remember that, for example, asking interest or bribing officials are considered taboo in some parts of the world, while in many other places, they are considered perfectly natural aspects of business. Something similar may be going on here.
  • So by Episode 10, we know that once Madoka becomes a witch, she can destroy the entire world, along with all human on it, in 10 days. As QB came to Earth to harvest energy to prevent the heat death of the universe, rooting out the source doesn't sounds like a good idea in the long term. While it does mention that he has met his quota, you would think something like saving the universe to be a more long-term plan.
    • Perhaps that's because the moment Madoka becomes a witch and kills everything, she now no longer has anything that can kill her. Since she also violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and keeps emitting despair, she would basically be an eternal star that could fuel Kyubey's civilization past heat death forever. Admittedly, this is becoming WMG, but it would make the ultimate And I Must Scream Downer Ending.
    • It is possible that Kyubey is either a messenger, programmed to gather certain amounts of energy, or an alien equivalent of Corrupt Corporate Executive, who only cares about meeting his quota. Alternatively it was said that Incubators can use other species than humanity as well, so any particular species might be considered expendable... This is a Cosmic Horror Story after all, and "using up" a species can be perfectly acceptable for them, if the energy obtained will allow the Universe to go long enough for many new sentient lifeforms to arise. For that matter, with their implied level of tech, they can recreate humanity in some other place too. In fact, judging by certain strange details of Madoka's world, this might have happened in the past already.
    • Or he had an ulterior motive for saying this to Homura. Like, ensuring that she will keep "charging" Madoka with repeated rewinds. Why even talk with Homura otherwise? He can't either gloat or empathize with her and she's (if Kyubey is actually clueless) a walking corpse who doesn't have anything it wants.
    • But he didn't even know why Madoka had the potential to become so powerful because he knew about Homura's time travel ability, and that didn't imply he did.
    • Why on Earth do people assume this is the only place Q Bs are doing this? He needed a quota from his farm. They probably have trillions of planets they're doing this to. He made his quota and along comes the walpurgisnado of despair that will destroy the world, giving them one last bonus harvest. Let the place lie fallow for a thousand years and then seed the place with a new crop of people. There were probably magical girl dinosaurs.

• Actually he says that Magic is an energy NOT BOUND BY Thermodynamics. Which means Mana is reusable energy. If you take this interpretation it becomes scientifically correct. They wouldn't need to continually produce enough to counter the Entropy increase in the universe, just enough to turn the population into perpetual mobiles before the heat death. This would in turn make stars obsolete.
  • There is still a problem here, though, and a rather serious one at that. Namely, entropy is not what will ultimately do us in. The current model of the universe suggests that dark energy will tear every last thing in the universe apart in the so-called "Big Rip", long before the heat death of the universe becomes a problem. Unless the Incubators can somehow deal with that, what they are doing is completely pointless as the universe will be rendered uninhabitable long before anyone has to worry about entropy.
  • If the Incubators can grant miracles, it's possible that they can also stop the "Big Rip". Or maybe our current model of the universe is completely wrong. Remember, the Incubators are much more advanced than us.
  • The extra energy from magic also increases the mass of the universe. The incubators killed two birds with one stone Now all they have to do is not over do it.

• Why must it be pubescent girls? Like, plenty of people have emotional conflicts to be farmed. People of all genders and ages. If it's just for pun's sake, Kyubey's species is pretty cringe-worthy on doing so. I bet if he asked for, let's say, a bunch of nerds to contract with him, they not only would ask the details of the contract, but accept it anyways, by knowing that they'd basically become liches (it'd actually be really cool to many) and fight with awesome powers (not to mention they'd probably become kinda powerful witches, since most nerds tend to rage and despair a lot). And one of them would probably wish to reverse entropy, considering they're nerds. Then again, such a wish could put the whole Universe at risk (not to mention that quite a few nerds would just wish for animu waifus or to know how to speak Klingon)... Or, I dunno, just ask to emokids. Falling to Despair is what they're good at.
  • Kyubey has said it himself that the emotional state of girls on the cusp of puberty is just the most efficient for farming energy off of. Of course, he didn't say how much more efficient they are than the rest of humanity.
  • Is it bad that the thought of Kyubey looking to nerds made me wish I lived in such a universe?
    • Not at all. A rational person would recognize this as an opportunity to get literally anything once, followed by rather impressive magical powers for a time, in exchange for your soul and life. There are many calm, reasonable people who'd be glad to take advantage of an offer like that; it gives you the chance to make massive and permanent changes to the world or the universe, much more than a person could normally achieve over the course of their life. Of course, a calm reasonable person would never be given the offer in the first place, since they wouldn't be worth enough emotional energy to justify whatever the cost of granting a wish is. Little girls would swing from the hope and joy of getting magical powers for no cost that they're aware of, to the despair of realizing everything they've sacrificed, all for the low cost of curing one sick person or something equally trivial in the grand scheme of things.
    • Well, it certainly sounds like it could be a fun proposition, but the reality of it is that the contract is only really beneficial to the incubators. Sure, you would get some cool magical powers out of it, along with a wish,(though it would need to be within your power, so probably no hardcore reality warping for you), but the situation will ultimately screw you over eventually. Assuming your wish was straightforward enough that nothing went wrong there, you would still have to deal with the "spend all of your time gathering grief seeds" problem. It's not just despair that will cause you to witch out, you can do the same thing just by using up all of your power. On that note, since the witch you generate upon your "death" is going to do as much evil as you did good, you would almost need to be amoral on purpose so as to avoid killing a bunch of people when you die, turn into an Eldritch Abomination, and the proceed to try to kill anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Deals with the devil rarely work out well no matter what you get out of it.
  • It's to poke a fun at why Magic Users need to be Girls. Deconstruction, duh.
  • About that "Reverse Entropy" one, I'm guessing that even though they are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and then some, and have something they refer to as black-box magic to boot, Kyubey's people cannot do things that they cannot do. If they could reverse entropy with a snap of their fingers they would just do it, rather than all this. If magic works such that they could only do it if they found someone who'd wish for it they'd make that their selection criteria instead, or go about their plan with the goal of convincing somebody on the face of the planet that that was what they wanted (hint: Explicitly tie "reverse entropy" to "stop my people from doing X to you"). Reversing Entropy all at once is simply beyond their power.
    • Beyond their power, sure. Not beyond human power, apparently. It's emotions fueling all of this. The Kyuubeys clearly hadn't planned on ever getting a wish that managed to game the system that hard or they would have locked it out. Madoka rewrote the universe. The entire thing, not just our little pocket. Kyuubeys are a huge mind. They all forgot the old system. Madoka probably could have done away with entropy if she had understood it at a kyuubey level.
  • I buy before the twelfth episode why it has to be pubescent girls. How about after Madoka's ascension? What's the Incubator's reasoning of only teenage girls now?
    • More or less for the same reason, emotions power Magical Girls... the stronger they are (emotionally), the more powerful they become. That and the system changed but some things still remain. Madoka's own wish removed the witches from the equation... nothing more than that. What happens to the girls now is rather up in the air.
  • Could it be a comment on gender politics? A major cause of the girls' descent into despair is realising that what they wished for wasn't exactly what they wanted. Traditionally, men are encouraged to be forthright in their goals: it's hard to imagine the star of a shounen show being embarrassed about declaring outright "I want power" or "I want to marry Sally." In many cultures across time and place, women are "taught" (for want of a better word) to achieve their goals indirectly, usually through manipulating others and ideally without even admitting to themselves what they want in the first place. Instead of achieving academic excellence herself, the Education Mama lives vicariously through her son; instead of actually running a business, she might become The Man Behind the Man for her husband and let him take the credit, all the while telling herself she's doing it for her child/husband's own good. Many cultures insist that women be "virtuous," and they should be above such things as ambition, or even a desire to be loved rather than to give love. Maybe Kyubey's race studied this, and realised that the shattering of this illusion of "selflessness" was a good way to throw the girl into despair - if males were more upfront about what they wanted, and wished for the "selfish" thing outright, they'd take longer to succumb. Sweeping generalisation, I know, but the fate of Sayaka would fit this; she told herself that she was making a true sacrifice for someone she loved, and getting to help others in the process. Instead, she's confronted with her own thirst for love and desire for recognition. Sad thing is, what she sees as proof of her own unworthiness and selfishness is a perfectly normal teenage desire — but she's gotten it into her head that she's a bad person for wanting something of her own. As for age...Kyubey counts a lot on a recruit's inability to ask the right questions. Adults would be more cagey, and more likely to check the small print.
    • Well, this interpretation does make sense, though, being a Doylist explanation can only be confirmed via Word of God. Another possible explanation could be that it's not true that only pubescent girls are viable for energy harvesting... it's just that the Incubators think that.
  • It's strongly suggested that Kyubey doesn't produce the magic, but it is the own potential magic that the girls have that makes it possible. Maybe pubescent girls have more magical potential than any other creature?
    • Kyuubey says this is canon in episode 9.

• The whole thing with "turning the girls into witches saves the universe" - can we be entirely sure of that? The only person who ever told us that was Kyubey and taking into account his mastery in "omitting" crucial details, nothing he says should be fully trusted. Isn't there a possibility that behind the "saving the universe from heat death" plan there is another a more important one, about which again Kyubey "forgot" to mention?
  • It's possible, but unlikely. Kyubey doesn't actually gain much by lying to the girls about what he's up to, and it's only because of the multiple rewinds and Madoka's own desperation for answers that he has any reason to explain about the heat-death business in the first place. That's why, in the new universe, the Incubators have everything to gain by being up front and honest with the magical girls before they contract: there's no Awful Truth for him to hide anymore.

• If there are witches capable of destroying planets, then wouldn't Kyubey's plan destroy the universe faster than entropy would?
  • Not necessarily. We have no real grasp of the size of the Madoka universe, which means a planet or two might be worth the calculated sacrifice in the Incubator's eyes. Furthermore, the only world-eating witch we saw was created by incredibly convoluted circumstances that are unlikely to ever repeat to the degree that they did, and the description for that witch, Kriemhild Gretchn, implies that most of her incarnations are content to stay on Earth even despite her actions on the very last timeline; even Itzli from the PSP game, who travels the galaxies, is never specified to have actually destroyed any of the worlds she's been to.
    • This is fiction we're talking about: whenever something looks like a Million to One Chance, it will always be the one.
    • The Incubators are pretty smart but I'm quite certain that they have yet to figure out that they live in a fictional universe - and even if they they did, well, Deconstruction = realism, ergo a million-to-one chance stays a million-to-one chance until someone with enough karma wishes for it to come true.
    • Only Kriemhild Gretchen is actually capable of destroying a planet. We know this because Kyubey says it outright after she defeats Walpurgis; as the strongest magical girl ever, she's destined to become the strongest witch, and he's happy to let her be Earth's problem from now on. The thing about witches is that causing destruction is just kinda what they do, but they can't be active all the time, that's why Earth still exists despite Walpurgis being a wandering, largely-unbeatable disaster. We don't know what the exchange rate is, but Kyubey seems satisfied that the loss of a planet to a witch big enough to destroy it is more than a fair price to get the amount of energy released by her birth. And you figure that if a planet produces a magical girl with enough power to completely heal the entropy caused by all the energy-conversion that goes into a world full of carbon-based, sapient life, then creating that magical girl, turning her into a witch, and letting the witch reduce the planet to a lifeless chunk of rock and barren ocean might be the most efficient way to do the job.

Specifics are for the losers!

• Putting aside the Awful Truth, why doesn't anyone consider wishing for something like, "I wish that no living creature would ever get cancer again"? They talk about money and power and luxury and saving individual lives, but never anything big, which seems like a bit of a waste of a wish that can literally do anything. If you're going to gamble your life and/or soul, it seems like you should try to get as much out of the deal as possible. Madoka does learn this in the final episode.
  • This would cause OBSCENE amounts of horror and possibly end the world. Why? ->"Magical Girls are subject to the same amount of despair as their wish creates for ALL people it effects, as per the laws of equivalent exchange" Imagine shouldering the equivalent amount of despair to the joy of humanity realizing that cancer no longer exists. Walpurgisnacht would look like a freaking PUPPY compared to your witch form.
    • Okay, but the girls don't know that when they make their wishes - Madoka is the only person in the entire series who makes her wish knowing the full consequences of wishing. Obviously it would be horrific if it ever happened, but since the people who are choosing don't have that information, it doesn't explain their choices.
  • Probably because the fact that they're girls going through puberty. How many of you at that age would think, "Let's cure cancer," and actually wish it?
    • A lot of us, actually.
    • That's not an emotional enough reaction for Kyubey's notice. Wishing for something that clever would be the opposite of what Kyubey would seek out. He'd seek out girls that would want to cure their own/their loved ones ailments without thinking of a bigger picture solution.
  • There's a good reason for why many girls didn't wish for something like this. Kyubey reveals that every wish must have a curse to counterbalance it and keep the universe in order. This is why so many girls' wishes end in despair; it's because their wish wasn't in the bounds of reality and a curse with just as big of an impact of the wish must be created to keep the universe in equilibrium. If a girl had wished to cure cancer, it would have cleared the way for a (potentially) even deadlier disease.
    • But the girls don't know that! Madoka is the only person in the whole series who knows that when she makes her wish; they can't possibly be making their decisions based on information they don't have.
    • Maybe that's what happened. Say, a girl watched her loved one slowly die of cancer or was dying herself but still kept it somewhat together, so instead of wishing for only her cure or the cure of her loved one, she'd ask for research on cancer making a huge leap forward, enough to cure her? (would speak for the "She's dying herself" thing - even though the prospect of ones own death is terrifying as fuck, the death of your loved one is far, far worse - so yes, it's not impossible for her staying level-headed enough. After all, even though you might have made peace wth your approaching demise, the chance to live inspires IMMENSE hope). The witch Roberta established that Magical girls don't have to be around 13-15, so it might have been a slightly older girl with a bit more perspective?
      .... however. The wish was a leap forward in cancer research. Wish granted, she proits from it and gets better. ... now what during the days of Sexual Liberation if a disease appears that nobody can explain, that seems to spread overnight in certain minorities at first but nobody quite understands why and nobody understands exactly how it kills... only that it kills slowly? ... hmmmm...
  • The scene where Sayaka makes her wish also does not involve her actually saying it. This seems to imply that you have to be able to picture the wish in your mind. "Curing all cancer" or "World peace" is probably too abstract of a concept to picture. Most people would like for cancer to be cured, but don't really have a strong emotional involvement in it, unless you have a loved one suffering from it... but then the true wish would once again come down to saving that loved one. Not to mention that Sayaka asks earlier whether someone else can be the recipient of the wish, which also seems to imply that the wish can only have one recipient. Whether this is a subconscious limitation or an actual limitation of the wish remains to be seen.
    • Kyubey confirms this in Episode 10 when Homura wished to see Madoka again and protect her wouldn't work if she didn't have the resolve and visualization to make the wish. Also note that Kyubey tend to show up when the person is usually under emotional distress. Chances are, it would be difficult to make a wish clearly.
  • For that matter, what would happen if you found out about the whole thing beforehand and your wish was "I wish I never become a magical girl"? Logic Bomb?
    • Kyubey would probably just ignore it, since it'd basically amount to "leave me the hell alone."
    • Worst case scenario, he might just skip the magical girl part and go straight on to the witch part, since it seems like once a wish is made he has to fulfill the contract. If he can't do that, he'd probably just go for the next nearest thing, in this case turning the girl into a witch.
    • Kyubey doesn't need to know the wish in advance himself, and nor can he halt a wish in progress. It is likely he only acts as a catalyst for the wish.
  • Despair equal to the good things your wish makes. Congrats, you've just become a witch that gives tons of people cancer. Who said someone didn't make a wish like this already?
    • Hence why I said "putting aside the Awful Truth." My question was about why none of the girls considered it, not the results.(Also, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't give people cancer; it'd probably cause some other horrible disease, since cancer would no longer exist.)
  • I think this was actually answered indirectly in the finale. Kyubei says that Madoka has enough power that anything she wished could become true; this implies that the scope of the wish granted is limited by the Puella Magi's magical power. Very few people would have enough magic to do something that huge.
    • Okay then, why not wish for a time loop centered around someone else, so they get a bunch of magic power. Then, convince them to make some big world-changing wish to destroy some problem (like Cancer). Once that's been processed, freeze time (since we know time loop wishes provide that power) and shoot them in the Soul Gem. No witch produced.
    • Because that requires the knowledge equivalent to having watched the show. No Puella Magi will ever make that kind of wish because Kyubey will never allow a magical girl to know that much about the system before she makes it. Madoka is only the exception because of her immense magical potential. Being chagrined that the otherwise-mundane 13 year olds presented with the opportunity for a wish with only "You get a wish granted" as an explanation don't actively exploit loopholes in the Puella Magi-verse's laws of physics is more than a little unfair.
  • Madoka is also fairly specific about her wish and how she wants to accomplish it, thus avoiding being cheated out of her desired result.

• Following on the train of "a wish that creates hope must be accompanied by a curse that creates as much despair train," who's to say that someone didn't make this wish way back in the early days of human civilization with a plague just as bad. Their wish is granted, and then all of a sudden humans started showing up with these weird tumors that killed them in an even faster, worse way. Now Incubators, seeing that it ultimately killed humans faster with a perfect 0 gain in despair decided that it was ultimately bad for their quota and decided to discourage anyone from making a wish like that again.
  • Those types of huge wishes have been made by magical girls, and those wishes contributed hugely to the state of humanity to bring the world to the point it's in now. Which, if you haven't noticed, is more advanced than ours. You're splitting hairs about curing cancer; magical girls apparently got us out of the World Wars and the bubonic plague.
  • Actually, what kind of wish can screw up the system as Madoka wish?

• This has puzzled me for a while, and it seems to come up a lot with the more angsty Original Characters...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 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 Who Wants to Live Forever?...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?
  • Why does everyone forget that Kyubey targets emotionally vulnerable little girls for these things? He would never approach a girl whose life is so perfect that, when presented with a wish to give them literally anything, she would wish for something as as practical and boring as a long, happy life. And if he did, it means her life is long and peaceful and happy, which means she's got a one-way ticket to survivor's guilt: she continues her long and happy life, watching all the other magical girls fall into despair or die in battle. She'd just become a creepily sincere Stepford Smiler, unable to grieve or cry for her lost comrades, happy forever and unable to die.
  • 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?
    • Your question was already answered: she'd become a creepily sincere Stepford Smiler. If her wish is "to live a long, happy life", that doesn't do anything to subvert any of what a magical girl entails. Kyubey never says the girls are dead bodies, that's a conclusion they draw themselves. The incubators don't see a difference between a soul operating the body that houses it and a soul operating its body remotely through a Soul Gem, and since magical girls don't age, she could live potentially forever if she weren't killed. The "happy" part just means it removes her ability to feel sadness. She can still be angry, she can still be disappointed, she can still feel guilty. All it means is that her wish is, like so many others, completely wasted.
  • I'll try to keep this last post short; the question isn't "would the wish still screw them over" — of course it would, that's how magic works in this setting. The question is "how do the Incubators benefit from this?" She might be a Stepford Smiler, but she's still useless to Kyubey and Co as long as her wish protects her from despair (I would argue that "rage," "disappointment" and "grief" also null the "happy" part). They can't even use her as a sacrificial pawn (the way Kyubey did with Mami and Kyoko) until she's reached the status of a "long and happy life". Would they just wait it out? It seem that "one shot" wishes, like Sayaka and Mami's wishes, are easier for them to reap the reward from, while longer term / delayed ones pose a problem. So does the Incubator write them off, remain patient, or would find a way to turn such a wish to their advantage ("well, if you were a dog you'd be old by thirteen, so technically...)?
    • You could argue that, but you'd be wrong; assuming that Kyubey offered her the contract and didn't ignore her because her wish is so vague and aimless it would be incredibly weak and have no worth to him, the incubators don't understand emotions and the means of granting the wish is defined by their laws of magic. Charlotte is your walking example: she wished to share "a last cheesecake" with her mother, and it was, literally, the last cheese she ever ate, even her witch form can't make cheese. Wishing to "live a happy life" means always being happy, but a person can feel emotions in addition to happiness. It means she would always be smiling no matter what horrible things were going on around her, or what horrible things happened to her. And if she had more innate magical power, it would mean that her life is happy, not that she is; she could be rich, famous, loved by everyone, only to crack under the pressure, with Kyubey egging her on by saying "But your life is perfect now. Anyone would want to be you! How can you complain when you live such a happy life?"
  • So, in short, they'd warp the wish by messing with the way she perceives emotion, instead of granting her the happy circumstances she intended? And presumably if she wished for happy circumstances, the magic would ensure she was unable to enjoy them? That would make sense (although despair and grief are still anathema to happiness — presumably that would be got around hy making her "happy" emotions ever present but extremely weak). Twisted logic, but appropriate to the Incubators. Are you sure you're not working for the diabolical little fuzzball?
    • Of course not. I'm working for the good of the whole universe! /人 ◕ ‿‿ ◕人 *** But, that's the thing with wishing for "a happy life". The wording counts, and wishing for "a long, happy life" says nothing about circumstances, just the end result. Mami wished to tie herself to life and that's how she got her ribbons; the ribbons (which come pointedly from being a magical girl) are what bind her to the world of the living, because otherwise, she'd be proper dead, so her wish is granted despite her body being a corpse. That seems to be how we— I mean, Incubators, define "being alive", as being able to operate a functioning body with one's soul, so that's the "long life" part taken care of. And the more I think about it, there are lots of ways to turn a wish for a happy life into a curse of despair. Perhaps she can only feel one type of happiness, constantly, always. But happiness is a matter of contrasts! Happiness without sadness means happiness would become boring after a while. Even if she couldn't say anything was wrong, her brain would eventually develop a tolerance to the raised levels of the chemicals that cause feelings of happiness. Happiness would eventually begin to feel like neutrality, until she found ways to make herself even happier, but that higher happiness would lose its edge eventually too. She would eventually develop a manic disorder as she tries harder and harder to feel happy even when she knows she isn't sad... at least, until she realizes that there's a limit to human experience, and either falls to despair, or her brain has been boiled by all those chemicals, and who knows what that might do to a human? I certainly don't know, but that's what she wished for: a happy life!
    • In all seriousness, though, the point of the contract is that a magical girl wishes for something to introduce happiness into the world at the cost of taking the reciprocating unhappiness onto herself, which consumes her soul gem and turns it into a grief seed, which erases the girl (and her unhappiness) from the world when her grief seed is consumed, but the happiness her wish brought is left in the world she leaves behind, thus being an energy that overcomes entropy. Based purely on the science (in as much as the show gives us science, anyway), if you had a magical girl who wished for her own happiness, and the wish actually worked, her magic would be extremely weak and Kyubey wouldn't have any incentive to tell her that Grief Seeds can cleanse her Soul Gem, so she'd quickly use up her magic and become a witch.
    • There's a simpler answer, if a girl wishes for a long and happy life. She gets a charmed existence. She's not happy every moment, but the down times never really stick to her. If you ask her at pretty much any point she'd say she was happy and had a good life, even with the killing of witches. Her friends and family all live a long time too. She teams up with other magical girls and they all prove just as resistant to despair as she is. She almost never loses a team member. And then one day she realizes that she's lived a long time. Not really a big deal, just an, "oh" kind of thing. All of her wish is now fulfilled, because she asked for both at the same time. All that time her wish has just been pumping happiness into the system. Friends, family, other magical girls all massively benefited from her wish. And that's rippled out into the world. Then one day Kyuubey explains the magical girl circle of life to her. She kind of blows it off. It's not really a problem right now, now is it? Then one friend dies, and another, it's just a domino-fest of awful. The minute she realizes she's no longer happy is the minute she understands that everyone she loves is going to die in agony and horror and it's all her fault. Boom. Super witch.

• Why do none of the girls ever wish directly for what they want? Kyubey explicitly states that the girls always wish for things that they think will bring them what they want, so why do they never wish for those things directly?
  • For a lot of reasons, but I think it has more to do with Kyubey's picks than the girls themselves. Wishes are most powerful when they're made in earnest, and a simple wish ("I wish my family would never go hungry again" over "I wish people would listen to my father") is just meeting a need, cut-and-dry. A more emotional wish comes with an entire fantasy of what the magical girl wants the end result to look like: "I wish Kyousuke's hand was better!" has the unspoken-but-present fantasy of "Kyousuke's hand gets better and then once free of his depression at not being able to play the violin again, he realizes Sayaka has always been there for him and when he finds out she was the one who became a magical girl to heal him, he falls in love with her, and they live happily ever after as a cool hero of justice and her amazingly talented boyfriend". There's also the element of selfishness: good girls aren't selfish! They take joy and pleasure in helping others! What the girls wish for is an avenue to get what they want through their own effort, but the wish contract doesn't pay that effort off, it only gives exactly what they wished for. Wishing for someone else to fall in love with you is basically brainwashing, but wishing for someone to be healed is totally selfless! Which is exactly the problem: the selfish motive at the core of the wish isn't acknowledged, and so never gets granted, and so the disappointment ends up manifesting as despair.... and all that suits Kyubey's needs just dandy.

Ouch, my Soul Gem!

• Who thought it would be a good idea to put a Magical Girl's Soul Gem in a place where it could be so easily destroyed? As we saw in episode 10 in the alternate timeline, Kyouko's soul gem was shattered in one simple shot by Mami, who's gem in turn was sniped by Madoka.
  • Well, most of the Magical Girls don't know that the Soul Gem is a Soul Jar.
    • And I guess it's not like the force of magic that creates their costumes let's them decide where to put the Soul Gem. If Kyubey could decide that you'd think he'd at least put it somewhere where they can't be so easily hit, thus depriving him of the energy they make when they eventually turn into witches. Same goes for the aforementioned suicide.
  • Well, Mami is an ally who used guns for quite a long time.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Apart from the fact that it would be easy to drop or lose it in ring or egg form (it's safer just to have it in its own setting that's apparently fused to the girl's body, that's why no one figures it out. Of all the ones we see, only Homura and one of the girls that Madoka saves at the end have their gem situated somewhere that isn't on a vital point: most of the ones we do see are either on the head (Mami, the Viking girl, the Teddy Bear girl), the chest/neck (Kyoko, Madoka, the Purple girl, the Green girl) or the stomach (Sayaka). If a magical girl is killed in battle, any onlooker who happens to see it would assume they died of the injury the same way Madoka and Sayaka assumed Mami died of having her head bitten off; she could have survived it, but her Soul Gem was on her hat.
  • One other question that remains is how exactly Magical Girls fight with their bodies being virtually destroyed, as Kyubey claims. Even if Mami had kept her Soul Gem somewhere other her head, with her head bitten off, she would be blind and deaf, possibly paralyzed (with the loss of her eyes, ears and brain) even if she could use the Gem to control the rest of her body, and Charlotte would only have taken a few more seconds to devour the rest of her body (including the arms to use her magical guns and the hat she stores them in), regardless of whether she had already eaten Mami's Soul Gem.
  • That's a fairly decisive case, but presumably, he's discussing things like gut wounds and other wounds to the vicinity of the center of mass. Painful, lethal, but if you cannot die and can suppress physical pain, there is actually very little there that would stop you from continuing to fight if it were lost, short of physical dissolution/dismemberment.
  • Homura's various attempts on Kyubey's life shows that he can resurrect himself by creating a new body to inhabit if his own one is destroyed. That said, it's not a stretch to think that he can easily create a new body for a Magical Girl if her old one is destroyed or damaged beyond repair especially since bodiless Magical Girls are a wasted resource due to being unable to become witches and providing the Incubators with the energy they need. The Incubators are Crazy-Prepared as shown by their millennia-old system for countering the heat death of the universe which isn't due for a trillion years. They'd come up with ways to keep the girls up and running for as a possible.
    • Kyubey can't create new bodies for himself, it's more that he has an untold amount of bodies already running around. He is also a Hive Mind, so destroying one of his bodies isn't even an inconvenience (Gen Urobuchi compared it to pulling out a single strand of hair).
    • Not so, it was said that Kyubey creates new bodies out of the mana in the surrounding air. The hair thing is basically just saying the body is an otherwise irrelevant part of the whole.

• Why does Sayaka, and all the other girls, for that matter, freak out when they learn that their Soul Gems contain their souls in lieu of having them in their bodies? There is never any clear downside to this given (aside from the danger of turning into a witch if the gem becomes too impure, but that hadn’t been revealed yet), and while the concept of having one's soul removed from your body must be disturbing to say the least, it’s something you could easily come to terms with since the soul in question it hasn’t gone very far, it has only changed form. Furthermore, magical girls’ bodies don’t seem to change due to this. All of the magical girls, Sayaka included, should have spent enough time as magical girls to realize something is wrong if there was something wrong, but they don’t notice the change until Kyubey reveals it to them. If that is the case, then, that means they still experience their lives through their bodies; they still eat, sleep, sense, and have their consciousnesses centered in their bodies you could liken it to having a “wi-fi soul”, everything is basically the same, the “router” has just moved outside their bodies. There is also nothing to hint that in order to become a magical girl one must give up their soul, and be condemned to hell, never being able to reach the afterlife, or something like that in order to complete the contract]]. They are still THEIRS, so why does it bother them so much?
  • The magical girls do give up their souls, eventually. The Soul Gem becomes a Grief Seed, which is harvested by a magical girl, who uses it to cleanse her Soul Gem, and then gives it to Kyubey to eat. There's a very good reason Sayaka doesn't show up in the scene in Mami's apartment in episode 12: Kyoko and Mami are only dead, but Sayaka was annihilated.
  • Because that's horrible. They're basically undead, and their bodies are corpses made to continue functioning through magic; it doesn't change anything on the surface, but that's only going to last until they get close enough to someone for them to realize that they don't have a heartbeat and don't breathe. Sayaka says as much; no one can love an abomination.
  • But there is nothing to suggest they are undead. Their body seems to be working normally and there is nothing to suggest they don't have a heartbeat or don't breath.
    • Except where they explicitly state that they're zombies? Their souls have been removed from their bodies and given a physical form. Even if you're willing to assume that there's no physical difference and the body works as normal, they still have to deal with the fact that the point of doing that is to make them less prone to pain response, which means they just don't feel as much as humans do. It's easy to be okay with it when it's just a super power and has no meaning but that, but being less able to feel things because your soul is no longer housed in your body is pretty damn chilling to realize. That's not even getting into the cultural dissonance at work, either; coming into contact with death renders a person ritually defiled, and under normal circumstances, a defiled person must purify themselves before they have a chance to spread it around and quarantine themselves socially in the meantime, sometimes for a year or more. When you are a corpse, and can't get your proper life and body back? You can't purify yourself, you're as filthy as death is but there's no way to make yourself clean again. A lot of what Sayaka is worried about when she talks about never being able to love Kyousuke with the body she has now comes from the fact that she considers herself too dirty to be allowed to touch him.
    • That's mainly because no magical girl has ever lived long enough to notice she doesn't age, or gain or lose weight, or change at all once she makes the contract unless she magically alters herself. Their bodies don't function normally as much as they're kept in working stasis: Mami, Homura, and Kyouko eat, but if you pay attention, it's never because they're actually hungry: Kyouko is a compulsive eater, Mami only uses food to socialize, and Homura does it to keep up appearances at school. Homura proves they don't have a working heart, too: she's clumsy at first, and she does her breathing exercises, but once she becomes a magical girl she never suffers the symptoms of a heart condition again.
    • Where/when does she do her breathing exercises? I don't recall ever seeing an example of this
    • Right after her first training scene, where she beats up the metal drum with a golf club. When she's finished, we see her sitting on a handkerchief doing deep-breathing exercises.
    • Law of Conservation of Detail, anyone? Just because they don't eat onscreen doesn't mean they don't eat.
    • It doesn't mean they do, either. Food is used very carefully in this show, and it's always meaningful. In Sayaka's case especially, because we see her with a half-eaten meal at lunch at one point before she makes the contract; when Hitomi gives her one day to confess to Kyousuke, she has the same meal in front of her, but it's gone untouched.
    • Furthermore, the 'their body stops functioning' case is a bit all-or-nothing, because you have to define the point where the magic 'takes over'. To move anything, you have to move your muscles. To move your muscles, you need oxygen and food. To get oxygen to them, you need your breath and heartbeat. To maintain your muscles, you need cell division. All of the above also goes for sensory organs, and we know Homura still needs her eyes. Cell division causes ageing. Ergo, unless the soul gem magically makes the girls' muscles move, their bodies don't shut down like you all are suggesting. I would be more inclined to think the soul gem is simply the new centre of consciousness, and everything else is still functioning the same, so removing the soul gem is most analogous to a coma/temporary brain death. Adding further credence to this is the fact that the girls don't notice anything until The Reveal. I know I would notice if I never got hungry. There would also be other telltale signs others would notice even if the girls didn't - no heartbeat, body goes cold. That would get picked up on by others.
    • You might notice if you never got hungry, but would you ever conclude that if you ignored that hunger and stopped eating altogether, you wouldn't starve? It's a very passive indestructibility.
    • Considering the state the girls are in without their Soul Gem, that's exactly the case: the magic keeps the body functioning as close to normal as possible, but it is magic that's doing it, not normal body processes. We know that because healing and restoring the body depletes magic but it can work to restore a body to perfect non-working wholeness (Kyouko does it to keep Sayaka's body fresh long after she witches out). The only difference is proximity to a soul gem.
  • It also might explain the relative super-strength the girls tend to have. The brain tends to limit the amount of effort it can put into moving the body to prevent actually hurting itself, but the human body on its own is way more powerful than it looks. (If you've ever heard a story about a woman lifting up a car to save her kid, that's what happens when there's enough adrenaline to override that limit). Sayaka becomes way more dangerous once she realizes she's remotely controlling her body and is no longer subject to normal human limitations; Homura has the same thing going, only she puts hers into soaking the recoil of all that hardware she carries around. Half that stuff could break a grown man's shoulder, let alone a petite, anemic middle-school-aged girl.
  • Having your soul separated from your body and running on magic also means that you now require the soul gem to live not just detect and fight witches. If the gem gets too dark, then the girls wouldnt be able to control their bodies and essentially die. (They dont know about the witch part.)This has the effect of forcing the girls to continously fight witches for their grief seeds if they want to keep on living, meaning they couldnt quit if they wanted to. In most superhero stories, the hero can and often quit fighting when they get too tired of it and want to be normal, and while they do go back to fighting villains its when they realize they cant leave innocents in danger, the point is most heroes do have the option of settling in for normal lives with conscience dictating them back. These girls, on the other hand? They can never go back to a regular life because again, they will die if they dont continue to fight witches for grief seeds.
  • It's a bit disturbing to see how many may assume and contrite evidence to support Sayaka's view that "Oh nooooo. My otherwise intact soul has transferred to a vessel other than its supposed rightful body, thus I'm no longer human, disregarding becoming a magical girl in the first place, but an undead zombie monsteeeerr..." This is overlooking the fact there are indeed some girls who find the point moot. Kyouko pretty much just shrugs it off after a few days, and Homura goes on like nothing has happened (it's not explicit whether her sanity slippage is due to The Revelation or, you know, reliving her only friend's death thousands of times). Also, Suzune Magica comes to mind. Still doesn't explain why more girls won't come to realize they've just been cursed With AWESOME.
    • I think, for some girls, it would be less about the the transformed soul itself and more about how it was extracted. We normally think of the soul as being our very being - how degrading would it be to realize that its nature was so drastically changed, that it was ripped out of you so carelessly, without you even noticing? It would be different if girls knew forom the start they were selling their souls - that could be seen as a heroic sacrifice make your dreams come true - but to be tricked into losing it is an enormous violation.

On the density of Soul Gems.

• Why gems are so FRAGILE? They can be destroyed with a shot of a simple pistol! The entire argument about "being lich helps you in combat" looks weaker when you realise that a magical girl can be killed with one random bullet! Why can't Kyubey make gems durable so magical girls wouldn't be able to escape their fate by killing self?
  • Forgive me for the pun, but Diamond Is Breakable. The Soul Gems are likely pretty invincible against manmade materials, but only magic can break them. The Incubators haven't perfected that level of technology, yet. Although they sure know how to work around their limitations. Alternatively, their Soul Gems being durable against magic is a precaution against Magical Girls that try to infiltrate Incubator Homeworld, or something.

Oh dear, here she goes again

• So, who knows how many loops ago, Homura began her contract on the wish that she could redo her meeting with Madoka. Question 1: why does the wish kick in every time she reaches the same point in the new timeline? The wish didn't state "redo AND save" so the first reset should've been enough to fulfill it. Two: the Kyubey from our "true" timeline takes a very long time to realize that Homura comes from an alternate timeline. Where did he think she came from, when he's the one who creates Magical Girls in the first place? Didn't he think it was weird when all of a sudden there's this magical girl he's never even met and she's trying to kill him? As far as we know, he's the only one assigned to Earth, and his line about "completing his quota and leaving" makes it even more likely that he's alone here.
  • Here are the answers. 1)You forgot the second half of her wish : it's not the "I want to meet Madoka again" that causes the time loop, it's "as someone who can protect her instead of being protected" that resets time every time Madoka is killed/turns into a witch. And 2)we're talking about magic here. QB himself said that magic has the power to bypass logic. The irregularity could have been pretty much anything ; he narrowed it down to time travel after getting to know her more.
  • As it turns out, Homura actually has control over when she resets the loop; it's part of her time traveling powers and related to her time-stopping (the sand timer in her shield). As long as she keeps her sand timer with her, she can reset after a month has passed.
  • As for why he's not shocked at Homura's appearance. Kyubey admits that there are more of his kind on earth making contracts. Puella Magi Kazumi Magica, a prequel or interquel to the Madoka introduces us to Jyubey, another Incubator. Kyubey probably assumed that Homura was a Magical Girl who was contracted to a different Incubator and only caught on to who she was after making careful observation of her ability.
  • Kyubey is surprised at Homura's presence... at least, as surprised as someone lacking emotions can be. He admits to Kyoko that Homura is "irregular", and he isn't sure where she got her powers. However, Homura really isn't doing anything that hinders his plans in any great way, so... why bother worrying about it?

Wait, Homura's loop is messing things up again.

• Another question: the first time Homura looped back, it was to her first day at school. By that point, Madoka already was in a contract, just like in the original timeline. The rest of the loops we see hint at this always being the case, so how come the Madoka of the latest timeline hasn't gone into a contract, or even met Mami yet, by the time Homura is transferred?
  • By the fourth timeline, we see that it isn't totally immediate. She returns to the day she gets discharged from the hospital, and presumably only returns to school a couple days later. The fourth time around, we manage to see Homura holding a dead Kyuubey corpse, with the implication that she killed the Kyuubey that Madoka would have contracted with in the past timelines, thus staving off the contract.
    • You've got it. Homura's calendar shows she's being discharged on the 16th, and returning to school on the 25th. Madoka rescues her after her first day of school and remarks that she only made the contract with Kyuubey a week ago. Presumably he was en route to her house when Homura killed him.

• Why, though, does Homura go back to a few days before meeting Madoka? The wish was to meet Madoka again, so shouldn't she only be able to go back to the 25th, when Madoka was already a magical girl?
  • Because of the part where she wants to be the one to protect Madoka. In a way, it's pretty brilliant: after even just one loop, Madoka's potential as a magical girl is through the roof, so the only way Homura could be in a position to protect her would be if Madoka wasn't a supremely-powerful magical girl yet. It's just that in her first few loops, she didn't know that was what she had to do.
• If Homura just went back into the past, does that mean there is actually two Homuras in the same timeline? Time travelling Homura and specific timeline Homura? Time travelling Homura was in school with Madoka in our timeline, so what happened to the other one?
  • No. Homura doesn't physically travel through time, her consciousness returns to her body in the hospital on the 16th, so there is only ever one of her at a time. Since the Soul Gem is where her spirit is housed and not her body, the Soul Gem is what's going back, and her body is the same as always. "Loop" is really a bad misnomer for what she's doing.

YMMV on Supporting Characters and QB

• The fandom's treament of Hitomi, Kamijou, and Kyubey. Just because Sayaka is a main character does not mean that Kamijou is obligated to love her, even if she visited him a lot. Yes, it was rude not to let her know he was leaving the hospital, but how do we know that he knows her phone number? Plus, teenage boys aren't known for their tact anyway. On that note, Hitomi is not a man-stealing whore. She told Sayaka of her feelings for Kamijou beforehand, which is pretty damn courteous all things considered. If Sayaka had told her the truth about why she wouldn't confess, I think she'd hold off a bit. The fact that she's getting bashed for taking the initiative in pursuing Kamijou is rife with Unfortunate Implications. The fandom reviles Kyubey while ignoring the fact that his morality is more than a little different from ours. His kind has no emotions and is only concerned with staving off entropy. It shouldn't have been that surprising that he wasn't concerned when the Madoka of the fourth timeline turned into a world-destroying witch, since he doesn't have emotions.
  • On that note, not-OP would like to add in the fandom's reaction to the idea that Hitomi was confessing Sayaka's feelings for Sayaka, rather than Hitomi's feelings for Hitomi, as if this is any less unfortunate than claiming Kamijo belongs to Sayaka. Basically all this is is a show-don't-tell version of the same thing, so why do people act like it's necessary to justify Hitomi's confession? Especially when the in universe reasons given rarely make much sense....
  • I saw the Sayaka-Kyousuke relationship as something like the Gatsby-Daisy relationship in The Great Gatsby, in that Sayaka is idealizing him since she loves him and that he's not really all that. Yes, I understand that Kyousuke just got his arm paralyzed, which breaks his dream, but he does seem to be kind of unusually self-absorbed about it, even going on to believe that Sayaka is mocking him. Realistic or not, definitely not intended to be seen as your typical Love Interest. Kyousuke deciding not to tell Sayaka, the girl who had dutifully cared for him in the hospital, that he was released only confirmed my notion that Sayaka was pursuing someone who simply wasn't worth it.
  • Alternatively, he didn't say anything because he was having a snitfit. If you recall, when Sayaka brings him a violin CD, he asks if she hates him, since she's reminding him of what he can no longer do. Sayaka rather naively, thought that bringing him music would make him more comfortable, when in fact he wanted to try and forget. Since he has no idea she's the reason he's healed, he decided not to tell her to indicate that he wanted some space. But Sayaka never realizes any of this due to the Magical Girl Awful Truth, so she's unable to understand and cope.
    • I don't think Kyousuke was still angry abut that, since early in episode 5 he apologizes to her for being mean. He's more likely just oblivious.
  • More on Kyubey, even though he doesn't have emotions, he does have good intentions, even very admirable ones. He is, essentially, doing what needs to be done to save the universe. Therefore, Kyubey is nowhere as bad as everyone says. I honestly can't believe I'm the only person who actually likes him.
    • Oh, I like him, I just don't trust him. He doesn't lie, but he has an annoying habit of never telling the complete truth unless he's pressed to do so. You always have to ask him the right questions, and as many as you can think of.
    • Same guy from two bullets above, what really bugs me is that Fran from Franken Fran is a real sicko, but the fans swear she can't possibly be evil because she doesn't understand human morality. Yet everyone hates Kyubey, who isn't even that bad, when he has the same thing going for him. Am I the only one who sees this as saying that having a Blue-and-Orange Morality is a perfectly fine excuse for committing horrific atrocities - but only if you're the protagonist?
    • What does Franken Fran have to do with anything? Either way, you've got it a little backwards. Kyubey isn't a protagonist, and his goals are only admirable in the sense that he's working to save his own skin and isn't against that being beneficial to others. His "rules" are formulated in exactly the right way that he can skirt them whenever he wants (He has to deal "fairly" and he isn't allowed to give strictly untrue information or suggest wishes, but he can withhold whatever information he wants and he can casually "speculate" without being obligated to share any realistic wishes that he can reasonably expect will solve the girl's problems) and he's comfortable with obliterating humanity as an acceptable loss because it gets him what he wants. We see from multiple interactions with the magical girls that he understands exactly what he's doing and why they're upset by it, he just doesn't care, and when they object, he just claims he can't comprehend what they mean. It's easy to hate Kyubey because he consumes the souls of children, why is that so difficult to grasp?
    • Also, the timescale. The heat-death of the universe is going to happen, but not for aeons. Humans are at absolutely no risk of emerging to a dying cosmos, but they are at a very real risk of being consumed by the "waste" of Kyuubey's plans, even to the point of extinction. While everything he says in his lectures is true, it seems a lot like a handy cover story for a culture that has found a way to generate cheap, renewable power from the torment and suffering of other species. And an alien empire Powered by a Forsaken Child does veer into Dystopia territory. Still, YMMV.
    • Episode 11 confirms that Incubators have been making contracts with humans since the beginning of time. Who's to say that the heat death of the universe wouldn't have happened a lot sooner if they hadn't? I'm not saying he's not an antagonist. I'm just saying he's not pure evil.
    • The big problem with the fandom treatment of Kyubey is that loving to hate him obscures the fact that either his manipulations were aimed at creating a better world through Madoka from the very beginning, or the series have a plot hole the size of a moon and the creators were stupid by very explicitly giving telepathy of "can constantly scan minds of at least two humans at once without his targets noticing his presence in their brains" level to a character which the main heroine is supposed to deceive. And as there are no indication that the creators are stupid enough to turn a mere, seemingly throwaway, piece of a dialogue, into such such a gigantic plot hole...
    • Except that he can't read minds that comprehensively; if he could, he would have known that Homura was a time traveler from the start.
    • He can not only read human minds, but also manipulate them, at least to the point of hijacking sensory input. This is his observed, factually confirmed abilities. See: Episode 2 walk-in-the-park scene (specifically around 7:35-7:45) where Madoka and Sayaka find themselves able to telepathically communicate with each other through him, and, of course, Episode 11 mind screw. What on Earth makes you think he didn't know that Homura was a time traveller from the start? He didn't even stated so. No, rewatch the fountain scene and note his Exact Words, not meanings that can normally be implied from them. And remember, that in said scene he wants to drive Homura into despair by pointing how her actions only play into his hand - unless you think he lied through his teeth the entire series, he is very likely to be literally incapable of gloating, being angry, being shocked or even wasting time on idle chatting, and therefore every single one of his conversations and actions has a specific underlying goal. There is a caveat that he might need a physical contact with a Soul Gem to do his stuff on magical girls, like he did when torturing Sayaka. This, of course, leaves Madoka's dream at the beginning of the series without any rational explanation, as the only being capable of projecting it into her head was QB, and barring having awareness of different timelines on his own, QB could only extract the exact replay of a past timeline's battle with Walpurgisnacht from Homura's mind (then probably edit his own dialogue in). But whether he can read magical girls' minds, is not even relevant. Because we're talking about Madoka, a normal human, whose mind he outright invaded briefly before her final decision. That's not even touching upon the fact that QB repeatedly hammered the bit about "you'll get the power of God" into Madoka.
    • He does not really demonstrate an ability to read minds beyond surface latent thought reading, just as any other magical girl can do when in proximity to him. He shows no sign that he knows what Homura is up to up until she shows her hand in episode 8. Had he known about Homura's plans, he most certainly would have tricked the others into killing her. Furthermore, his manipulation of the soul gem looked like nothing more than giving her body the full sensation of pain from her injuries, whereas they normally feels very little (or nothing at all, depending on their state of mind.)
    • For someone who acts like they can remember the entire series in detail, you neglect to remember how Kyubey, in multiple timelines, has rhetorically asked the trail-off question "Akemi Homura... Are you..?", with the instance in the current timeline in a situation where she could not feasibly hear the question. Kyubey may have had his suspicions, but, at least in the current timeline, even when he had worked out that she was a time traveller, he still felt the need to gauge her reaction to being asked the question in Episode 8 in order to verify it. Additionally, due to the revision made in the BD version to make the scene in the prologue identical to the last shown Walpurgis fight in Episode 10, it's incredibly likely that the dream was more along the lines of "remembering something she shouldn't" than Kyubey's interference. In fact, if it were Kyubey's interference, that raises several other plotholes, such as him being a being that has such clairvoyance as to be able to see alternative futures, why he made contact in such a manner when, in previous timelines, he had already formed a contract with her prior to that day (which Homura prevented; likely the other time she killed him he indirectly mentions in Episode 8), why he never gave Homura the speech that caused her to almost fall into despair in any other timeline... Need I go on? Reading the minds of Magical Girls is likely beyond him, and if the dream was his work, it would be an absolutely massive plothole.
  • This troper, too, doesn't understand the Kyubey hate. You'd think people would root for an antagonist this days, especially when they're so cute.
  • At heart, there are 3 reasons that Kyubey is so hated: 1. This being a cosmic horror story, his motives are so grand in scale that they have no effect on humanity, other than his manipulation (heat death of the universe is ridiculously far away) 2. Kyubey is a superficially charming, emotionally stunted, extremely manipulative, and remorseless being, which basically makes him a psychopath (difficult to sympathize with) 3. He is shown purposely picking at the protagonists' insecurities in order to get them to agree to a contract that he knows will eventually turn them into insane, destructive, Eldritch Abominations; it's difficult to root for a character who purposefully kills people in such horrible ways even when their goal is a more stereotypically "noble" one, and as I said, his goal is too large in scale to seem noble to the audience.
    • There's also the fact that Kyubey is a consummate liar who never tells anyone anything unless he means for it to destroy them, but he makes excuses for it by using Exact Words and claiming it was the truth and saying that, since it serves the long-term goal of healing entropy, it's fine. Take Kyoko's last moments: she specifically asks if it's possible for Sayaka to be saved, and Kyubey deliberately says he "wouldn't be surprised", but later straight-out says he knew all along that it was impossible, but he needed Kyoko dead. And all that, is after Kyubey tells Madoka that his species tries to deal fairly with humans. And then you have Rebellion, where Kyubey, despite knowing that the wraith-universe is the product of a magical girl's wish and according to his own policy of dealing fairly and non-interference with wishes as part of that fairness, tries to control the Law of Cycles in order to bring back the witch system. The bottom line is that Kyubey, for all his claiming not to understand emotions and his adherence to Blue-and-Orange Morality, proves himself to be a lying, cheating, outright selfish little turd. He tells Madoka that when humans someday become advanced enough to join the cosmic community, it would be sad if there were no one left in it, but he's fully willing to completely destroy the population of Earth and in fact, spends the entire series planning to do that by turning Madoka into Kriemhild Gretchen, in order to preserve the universe for no one but himself. Any other species who benefits from this process is just a happy accident that he doesn't, and possibly can't, care about. His being a psychopath does not make him beyond human understanding, it makes him a psychopath. We have those on Earth.

• Kyubei stated that he can't suggest what the girl should wish for. But what was his speech in chapter eight (that Madoka can even become a goddess if she wished for it) if not a suggestion?
  • This is Kyubey we're talking about. Presumably he just didn't see it as a suggestion of a wish, but rather a simpler way of saying "your wish could be really, really powerful."
    • Considering he was caught off-guard by her actually making a wish that would result in her apotheosis, it is very likely that this is the case.
    • It does imply some things about Kyubey, though. He can't suggest, but he can suppose. Half of the stuff he says to manipulate people is done that way, presenting hypotheticals as possibilities when it suits him. Case in point, Kyoko. He knows there's no way to bring Sayaka back, but Kyubey still says that since the magic of magical girls is already illogical, there's no limit to what they might be capable of. Hypothetically, it could be done, but for Kyoko, whose magical abilities are a known quantity and with a wish already granted, it's impossible. Kyubey just supposes that a magical girl could do it, he never says it's possible for Kyoko personally. Supposing that Madoka could wish to be a god is just a hypothetical based on her magic potential.
    • Eh, I think it actually all tracks. If he is not allowed to suggest a wish it's still a pretty basic prereqiusite for a wish-granting entity to be able to lay out the limitations of what can be wished for. Particularly as the magnitude of wishes appears to be in some way tied to the "potential" of a magical girl. So like, Sayaka or Homura could never be granted the wish of becoming the god of this universe, but Madoka can, and it's not a suggestion to make her aware of that fact. Anyway it's kinda a moot point because I believe the wording was that he can't decide for them or tell them what to wish for not that he cannot tell them the kinds of wishes that can be made. So he can tell a girl that she could wish for a cake, but he cannot tell her she should wish for a cake.

Series Ending Headscratchers

• Did anyone ever say that Sayaka sacrificed herself specifically so that Kyousuke would make his audition on time? (Not that I have a problem with this, I just want clarification). This seems to get passed off as fact a lot, but the only thing I clearly remember was actually said was that it had to do with Kyousuke in some manner, which may or may not have to do with the audition (for all we know Sayaka's ghost could have gone back in time).
  • No, Sayaka sacrificed herself because she had a choice between dying and going with Godoka or become normal again but Kyousuke's crippled hand will return and lose his ability to play ever again and she could be at his side. Sayaka, being true to herself, chose Kyousuke's happiness over hers even if it meant she would never be in it. It seemed like they were in a place between Life and Death when they were watching over Kyousuke, who was really playing at a rectical at that moment. Hence he felt something odd.
  • Right, but something happened in the New World to make Sayaka die, and Kyouko very visibly saw her sacrifice herself for something related to Kyousuke.
    • I don't think Kyouko's line referred to whatever Sayaka had been doing just before vanishing so much as the fact that she contracted for the sake of some boy in the first place - contracting, after all, inevitably means eventually dying or disappearing.
    • Sayaka refused to come back to life because it meant undoing her wish. Puella Magi can only really die in two surefire ways - having the Soul Gem broken or becoming a witch. Since Sayaka's Soul Gem was never shattered, Madoka retconned her fate into preforming a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • According to Word of God, Sayaka's death was inevitable in any universe or timeline. In the retconned timeline, Sayaka was most likely still suicidal after realizing she would never be with Kyosuke because of the whole "magical girl destined to fight evil until dying an early death" thing, and willingly gave her life in the fight we didn't see taking out a demon so that the other girls could survive.

• Last episode: Magical girls vanish instead of becoming witches.]] If Neon Genesis Evangelion taught me anything, it's "as long as you are alive, you can be happy." Those pour souls don't even get a second chance... when Madogod saves them. They might go to where Madoka is, cause I can't think of Madoka being that cruel, but what about the dead magical girls?
  • Why is this bad? While you have a chance to be happy "as long as you're alive", you can't make this a blanket statement to mean "if you ever die you will be doomed to unhappiness forever", especially when everyone dies. Death is a natural part of life- in a way, it gives Magical Girls back some of their humanity.
  • You'e misunderstanding what exactly Madoka wished for: To stop them from becoming Witches with her hands, not completely change their fates. Madoka's wish was probably the only truly selfless wish on the show because it was pretty fair all around, it fulfilled: 1) a life of a Magical Girl is still full of sorrow, but that sorrow is necessary to mankind's progress, and 2) there is still a need of energy resources so Kyubey's kind can slow down the heat death of the universe, while saving the Magical Girl from a Fate Worse than Death. Madoka's wish at least allowed them to pass on peacefully and fulfilled and go to a sorta Valhalla with her (and the Magical Girls know that before contracting instead it being revealed from as an Awful Truth). It was a best outcome for everyone, really.
  • Wait if all Magical girls go to Vahalla and, let just say there is some kind of afterlife in that universe, won't that mean they won't able to reunite with their love ones after death? Unless their love ones are allow to enter Vahalla to reunite with them, won't their love ones wonder where the heck their friend/daughter/sister is once they pass on? Or am I thinking too hard?
    • Nope, you've got it right. In Ultimate Madoka's new universe, that is the sacrifice a Magical Girl is really making: in exchange for a single wish, they give up their lives and their afterlives to the cause.

• So nothing changed in the end? Besides the girls feeling guilty about becoming witches, no one knows where demons come up from (they said distortions in the world, but it seems more like grief just manifesting into demons). Girls are still dying all across the world from sadness. The only thing different is it benefits Kyuubey to keep the girls alive instead of having them die. But even then, they still will face sorrow. How is this a good ending?
  • It isn't. It's bittersweet at best. Specifically, the scene with Mami, Kyoko, and Homura right after Sayaka dies in the last and permanent universe (as well as Homura's voiceover afterwards) is there to tell you that things are NOT good, and there's still a lot of suffering, regret, and sacrifice. The only difference is that they won't become witches, so at least there is some measure of comfort and the promise of mercy at the end of a magical girl's journey, rather than ultimate despair and the loss of identity.
  • Not to mention having the Incubators purify Soul Gems themselves rather than using a witch's Grief Seed removes the need for Puella Magi to compete for them which is what prevented them for being to form teams and even led some girls to try to kill each other. Removing this competition allows Puella Magi to be able to band together against demons which not only increases the chances of winning meaning they're less likely to be killed but also allows for close friendships to be formed which would have been nearly impossible in the old universe. In the Retcon we see Homura, Mami and Kyouko together as a team mourning Sayaka after she had just performed a Heroic Sacrifice which is different from their earlier interactions in the old universe. After watching The Power of Friendship get constantly get pounded to the ground throughout the series it was nice to see it get reconstructed in the Retcon.
    • But when Kyubuy leaves they'll have the same problems as they did in the main timeline, the only difference being that they'll eventually fade away, and we'll have a fixed number magical girls fighting against what is likely a never ending supply of wraiths, and the show kept saying that the fight will lead to them failing. Even when this tries to act like something is uplifting it's still depressing.
    • How do we know they don't just become demons instead? Instead of one big witch, the grief is put together and split up to form demons. Kyuubey says that no one knows why Magical Girls disappear and there is no real answer to where demons appear.
    • Because the show itself explicitly states it. Explaining how this happens (and I don't mean "vaguely implied" or "hinted at," but the characters outright say it) is the entire point of episode 12. But to state it again: Madoka purifies the magical girls' souls and takes them away when they've reached the limits of despair. We see her do this. We listen to characters explaining this. But after the creation of the new universe, no one is aware of Madoka's existence except for Homura. That's why no one knows why magical girls disappear, because they don't know that an existence beyond their awareness is saving them at the last second.
      Oh, and the demons don't come from the magical girls. They form ex nihilo from what Homura called "distortions" in the world.
  • Eliminating one injustice, even a major one, does not suddenly make the world a perfect place. Neither should it. But it does make the world appreciably better. Pre-retcon being a magical girl meant inevitably forfeiting your soul in exchange for a miracle. You could not even take solace in good deeds you might do as a magical girl, because you crimes as a witch will compensate for them. Post-retcon it is just enlisting for a dangerous job. And you still get your miracle, plus immortality until killed.
  • None of the girls die of sadness in the new world. Listen to Madoka's wish again, and keep in mind that everything she says after Kyubey interjects is also part of the wish.
    • This is directly contradicted by the scenes of Madoka taking the Girls away when they would have become Witches. She hasn't removed despair from the equation; if she had, the girls would never disappear, they'd just live until their soul gems were destroyed and they died. That we explicitly see Madoka taking away girls who've fallen into despair and are about to become Witches proves that yes, they do still die of sadness in the new world. They just get to pass on in the comforting arms of Madokami, instead of becoming Witches.
    • It doesn't remove despair from the world, but it does seem to remove despair from the equation as it relates to Witches, at least. In the new world, Kyubey says that Soul Gems shatter when they've exhausted their magic (which is what kills Sayaka) but even the Incubators don't know why. The scenes of Madoka taking the girls away when they would have become Witches are taking place in the old universe, which is then destroyed. Witches can't exist in Madoka's universe, which means the sufficiently advanced technology that the Incubators developed to produce Puella Magi could not have been designed to create Witches. There are a few ways to interpret how the 'Grief Cubes' produced by Wraiths work, but the end result is that it's the depletion of magic and not the Puella Magi's despair that causes them to shatter; Ultimate Madoka is more or less the law of physics that dictates it.
  • The World 1.0 had Mahou Shoujo that would die in battle, or due Witch-ification. This new world has negated the second clause, and if TV Tropes taught us something (And the show was indeed Troperrific) was the Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu: Witches are one, and powerful, Demons are hordes, so they are bound to be weaker. Yes, Mahou Shoujo still risk their lives and just like everybody, they will eventually fight their end. Madoka made a world a bit less of a Crapshack.
    • Although it can be considered a WMG, the demons can easily come from Witch!Madoka from Earth 1.0 It was a COSMIC amount of sorrow, and it surely has to go somewhere. Mahou Shoujo job is to clean all that sorrow, bit by bit, until Madoka can be free from that huge load of sin and sorrow she's bearing. Now, Mahou Shoujo are Saving their Savior.

• Under the new system, would it be possible for a Puella Magi to live until old age? Because, under the old system, it seemed to me that Puella Magi were really fated to die young, because either shattering your soul gem due to despair or some accident, or using up magical energy were bound to happen in a short span of time. But if it's possible for a Puella Magi to live a long life, then that raises all sorts of new questions: they obviously can't do this forever, so what happens? (Can they even age physically? Can they just "retire"?)
  • Even in the original timeline, they don't age. Their body just "stops" once their Soul Gem is extracted, becoming more of a puppet than a self-sustaining organism. The reason the girls in the main cast all died young was because they were thrust into the responsibility with little emotional preparation and they made mistakes while in the frontlines —Homura, OTOH, survived lots and lots of battles without corrupting because she was eased into the role by Madoka and Mami (both in combat, and psychologically.) And in the end, it's evident Homura's been at this for a VERY long time, with her endless recursion of time and the desolate landscape implying an After the End situation, so yes, it's possible for a Magical Girl to essentially live forever if she takes care of her body and her Soul Gem's regular purification. For all we know, the girls that Madoka came to to save from corruption had already lived for hundreds of years, but they had the same appearance as when their bodies stopped growing.
    I doubt they can "retire," though. Seems to me that simply maintaining the link between the empty body and the Soul Gem (or even just keeping the body "alive") uses a portion of the latter's magic, so they're forced to fight at some point to keep the Gem from corrupting completely. That's the catch of the wish —if they didn't have to fight Witches, then what's the point of the contract?
    • Okay, this is entirely speculation. In fact, it's Jossed speculation, considering we have confirmation by way of the production notes on Roberta that magical girls do age.
    • The notes on Roberta prove that magical girls can age, not that they do as a rule; the ending, with Homura in the desert with some apparently-evolved powers, definitely shows us she hasn't grown physically even though she doesn't have time-stop powers anymore. Since Roberta is the exception and not the rule, it could be that her ability to age is a bit like Sayaka's increased regeneration.
    • Besides the fact that a secret society of immortal girls might get uncovered someday (especially if you consider that they seem to stay in the same territory), they were never expected to live that long, anyways. Giving them anti-aging-magic is probably a waste of time.
    • The Incubators don't exactly care if magical girls are discovered or not. Kyubey's desire to have a girl contract is proportionate to the greatness of her destiny, that's why he wants Madoka to make the contract so much, knowing what we do about soul gems it's probably a bigger expenditure to make a magical girl's corpse-body age instead of just maintaining it in stasis like they do (remember, it's designed to combat entropy), and on top of that, they stay in the same territory but they don't normally work together because they have to compete for Grief Seeds. Madoka and company are an exception, but Kyouko pretty much comes to take Mami's territory after she dies and immediately confronts Sayaka because of it.
    • I would assume that stopping the aging consumes more energy than letting it happen, because then the magic has to correct for all of the other bodily processes that normally intersect with aging. Singling out specific body functions to shut down without damaging the body isn't as simple as cutting the power to a specific place - the girls are still digesting food and moving muscles and sleeping and things, so extra magic would have to go into limiting the effect of those processes on the body. But anyway, now that Suzune Magica is running it's pretty clear that the girls do age.

• If a Magical Girl with darken soul gem will be saved by Madoka, what happen to those girls whose soul gems got destroyed? Does they simply cease to exist all together? Or they can still go with Madoka to Vahalla?
  • All Magical Girls go to Valhalla. Knowing Madoka, all souls period would go to her heaven if she has the ability to do so.

• In the new system, magical girls fight demons instead of witches. Where do these demons come from?
  • They're described as being born from the fluctuations of the world. Basically, they come into existence to tie up the paradox caused by Madoka's wish. They have to fight something, or else why would all these girls become Puella Magi?
    • We know that Witches fed on "grief." This "grief" was a something, so presumably with no predators it became sentient.
    • Witches don't feed on grief, they're born of it, and don't so much 'feed' as 'fucking kill people'. The demons aren't sentient grief, but are personifications of the Time Paradox according to Word Of God.
    • I see it like this, as a law, the Hope and Despair created by a wish has to be zero sum. Normally, this manifests as the girl's Witch. However, Madoka's wish also stopped her own witch. The demons were created by the "despair equivalent to the end of the universe" QB mentioned.
  • Remember that Kyuubey said that any use of magic, including every miracle and wish that he grants, creates a "distortion" in the world, because it is doing something contrary to the normal laws of physics. The 'demons' are most likely physical manifestation of distortion caused by the wishes Kyuubey grants when a new Puella Magi signs up.

• What happens to the Soul Gem after the retcon? Does it still function as a Soul Jar? It does still require the corruption to be drained by Grief Seed after all.
  • We may assume it's still a Soul Jar.

• After she's brought back to life with no memory of the old universe, why does Mami still talk about being a Puella Magi like it's a bad thing? A) Madogod more than likely talked with her, which means she'd have had the chance to change her wish and save her parents; if the car crash is an unavoidable point in her life regardless of the time line, I can understand her still being a little resentful, but talking about how it's "best for them to disappear" is a tad overboard. B) In the timeline that scene was from, Mami knows about the Puella Magi system (Homura had told them that Puella Magi become witches, even if she didn't believe her until she saw it personally). Now their hope doesn't bring despair to the world and they're all going to die happily for their wishes in the end. Given how the circumstances regarding their wishes, fighting, and Sayaka's death changed, why is she so cynical?
  • I got the feeling that the revived Mami hadn't spoken to Madogod, since Madoka was retconned out of existance. So Mami doesn't know about the alternate past of being a Magical Girl. However ignoring that, she probably felt that disappearing was better than being a Witch or something similar, if she did remember speaking with Madogod. However, remember that she was still really lonely as a magical girl, and it was still probably a rather depressing job that doesn't allow much for human relationships....
  • Also while Puella Magi don't become witches, they're still liches (i.e. undead magic users whose bodies are basically meat puppets controlled by their consciousness which now reside in their Soul Gem. With their bodies no longer alive, this would indicate that they can no longer age preventing the Puella Magi from being able to form close social ties with normal humans since they would outlive anyone they know. Like the Cullens in Twilight, a Puella Magi would have no choice but to wander around endlessly since staying in one place for too long would mean drawing the attention of people who'd notice this girl wasn't aging.
  • Why are so many people convinced that Madoka actually spoke to all of the girls to give them a chance to undo their contracts or change their wishes? It wasn't even implied in the anime. I don't think Sayaka was ever even given a choice, either; she was just reflecting her sentiments on what happened.
    • Actually, Madoka says something along the lines of "To save you, I had to erase this future", and Sayaka replies that she doesn't mind how things turned out as long as Kyosuke was healed in the end. That's when they fade out. And given that Madoka had some sort of talk with Mami and Kyoko's spirits when she made her wish, it's not the craziest assumption ever.
    • I thought it was pretty clear that there was a choice, but it was Madoka's. Madoka explained that preventing the contract would come at the cost of Kyosuke's healing. This would have been necessary information if Sayaka had chosen off-camera; Madoka wouldn't wait until after she had already chosen to tell her.
    • Well, at that point, linear time no longer applied to Madoka, as her new form technically exists at every possible time at once. She could have easily retconned Sayaka's wish if she wanted. I also think that she really did talk to the girls' spirits. They simply forgot about it when they were resurrected in the new timeline.
    • Keep in mind, that scene with Sayaka happens after she dies. The way the scene is set up, it's basically Madokami had the option to prevent Sayaka from becoming a magical girl because Sayaka initially wanted to become a magical girl for the sake of becoming a hero of justice and protecting people; without witches in the new universe, Sayaka didn't have to become a magical girl.. but then she wouldn't wish to heal Kyousuke. That's really what she's talking about. Other magical girls probably didn't have that much wiggle room.

• Originally, emotional energy was harvested when magical girls turned into witches, right? So how how do Incubators collect energy now that magical girls no longer turn into witches?
  • Grief Cubes, the equivalent of Grief Seeds. Kyubey even comments that Homura's Witch world would be much more efficient.

• So, the universe is supposed to be improvement, because if the incubators still abandon planets when they reach their quota, it doesn't sound like one, seeing as Kyubey will still ditch the planet eventually, and the magical girl's soul gems will eventually get tainted to the point where they all vanish, and then we're stuck with another bunch of monsters we can't see or hear. Calling this even a Bitter Sweet Ending is too generous.
  • That's missing the entire point. Grief, sadness and death will *never* go away. But what was once a gruesome, dark mockery of the genre is now a straightforward magical girl show. Magical girls fight and suffer, but they get their happy endings. Even the most saccharine magical girl series are crawling with monsters and are about people who can die. But friendships can form uninhibited, the monsters are nothing more than dark things to be slain and forgotten, Kyubey is straightforward about the deal from the start, and the deaths of magical girls can be prevented with relative ease. It's not a happy ending so much as a new beginning. But that new beginning is a much brighter one, where despair is possible but not mandatory.
  • QB abandoned Earth not because his quota was met, but because Earth was about to be destroyed, but he had no reason to work on preventing this, as his quota was met. As long as no similarly catastrophic events happen, there is no reason to ever stop harvesting. That's assuming he wasn't just screwing with Homura in the first place.

• It is suggested that since the girls no longer have to compete for Grief seeds, they can now form teams and fight more efficiently. We even see that Mami, Kyoko and Homura fight wraiths together and later mourn Sayaka (poor girl, she's the only magical girl that dies in every timeline possible). But later, after the "Collecting energy from human emotions would be such a marvelous idea" talk with Kyubei, Homura seems to be fighting numbers of wraiths all alone (maybe with some "guidance" from Madoka). Where's Mami and Kyoko?
  • Given Rebellion, they're still in Mitakihara; they haven't been drawn into Homura's barrier yet.

• If in the end Madoka was able to rewrite the universe, why didn't she rewrite it in such a way as to repeal the second law of thermodynamics, or at least to create another source of energy that doesn't involve teenage girls, basically still children, being exploited by an amoral species with no emotion?
  • Technically, Madoka didn't rewrite the universe. The universe re-ordered itself to conform to Madoka's wish according to Kyubey's contract magic, she didn't have conscious control of how that worked out. Basically she becomes a god/personification of hope/law of physics with a non-linear view of time as a result of her wish, not the other way around.
  • There are probably still limits to what she can do. She's a god in a more traditional sense common in Pre-Axial Age belief systems. While she's extremely powerful by human standards, she's not truly omnipotent or omniscient. She can act as a force of nature, but can't shape the Universe entirely according to her will.

Magical Girls of the Past

• If Cleopatra was a Magical Girl and all the Magical Girls are liches, then, why Cleopatra died for the bite of a snake?
  • Maybe she later on broke her Soul Gem, and the whole snake thing was part of an act to give her death a plausible cause and not rise suspicion.
  • Cleopatra committed suicide so that she wouldn't face the Romans. It's possible that the despair of having lost to them transformed her into a witch, explaining why they thought that she died; hell, it's possible another magical girl killed her and then returned telling stories about a snake.
  • Could have happened like this: having reached the edge of despair, Cleopatra tries to commit suicide via snake bite. But since her body, like all other magical girls', is a soulless shell and unable to die from that, she realizes the truth of the Soul Gems and THEN becomes a witch, leaving her body behind with a convenient bite mark for someone else to find. Then some other random magical girl simply found her witch form and defeated her. Joan of Arc could have likely gone through a similar thing: a snake bite wouldn't destroy a body beyond usability, but having it burned to ashes would. Whether Joan despaired enough to become a witch or not, her body could still be destroyed (and Kyubey could've just picked up the Soul Gem from the pyre at his convenience.)
    • 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...
  • According to Word of God, magical girls who believe that they've died inevitably fall into despair and become witches. Most likely, she attempted to kill herself not knowing that her soul was separate from her body, felt the effects of the venom, and became a witch.

• So if Cleopatra, Queen Himiko, Joan of Arc and Anne Frank were Magical Girls, what were their wishes and what cause them to go into their Despair Horizon?
  • Anne Frank: "I wish for the founding of Israel." Israel comes as a result of World War Two. OR "I wish to be famous." Anne Frank becomes famous....through World War Two.
    • More likely: "I want the Jewish people to be saved."
    • Both are a bit too grand. My guess: when her family was being hunted, she wished for a place to hide her family. Her despair horizon probably came when the nazis found said hiding place and took everyone.
  • Joan of Arc probably wanted to help fight for her country/become a warrior of her faith. Kyubey gave her the potential only to be tried as a witch and canonized years later.
  • My take on all of the above:
    • Cleopatra: In desperation the land that adopted her, Cleopatra wished that the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt would continue, no matter who was at it's helm. Against all odds, she essentially leads for some time and holds the dynasty together, bearing Marc Antony many children and stabilizing the state - but in the end, the dynasty only truly survives... As a glorified province of Rome, stripped of all it's former independence.
    • Huh,based on freeze frame bonus of Kyubei showing Madoka the past magical girls,I figured Cleopatra wished to be queen,and her wish was powerful enough to retcon history so that she was a part of the Ptolemy dynasty,or that her family turned into the ruling dynasty(which,before her wish,was either different than the Ptolemy Dynasty or nonexistent),or at least into hypnotizing everyone into thinking she was queen,and making people,including the Ptolemy dynasty,fill in the blanks with logical explanations.Then,ruling became too tragic thanks to the Romans,so she tried to commit suicide via a symbolic way,but it failed,so she despaired and turned into a witch,leaving behind the body.
    • Jehanne D'Arc: At first, she needed no wish. With her belief in her God and her skill at tactics and oratory, she resisted Incubator until the very end. She was caught, however - and her final wish was simple - I want France to remain separate from England, independent and free. And so it does - however, the independence from the former Angevin family comes at a price. French exceptionalism leads the conquered to turn to conquerors, becoming harsh overlords of the European stage for roughly four hundred years, when finally the British - not 'England' for purposes of the wish - become a world power. If that isn't enough humiliation, her charred corpse is puppeteered into Witch-form as a symbol by the Vichy French, which leads us nicely from her despair horizon to...
    • Anne Frank: A simple wish. I want my family to be safe. Of course a simple wish is often precisely what Incubator is looking for, and through that wish, however granted, Anne's many other wishes - I want to be happy, I want to be loved, I want to grow older - become impossible in the cruelest ways possible.
    • I would go for 'don't let me/the Jewish people/the Holocaust be forgotten', hence the survival of her Diary.
    • Emperor Himiko: I use the term Emperor because in no way was her position subservient to any other. Himiko's wish - that the land of Japan would survive the threat of the great nations across the sea. And so it did - in a manner of speaking. However, Koshinto - Shinto in it's purest form - no longer existed in the majority, replaced by the emotion-culling beliefs of Mahayana Buddhism, the societal divisions of Confucian thought, the subjugation and assimilation of the Yamato and Ainu peoples by today's modern Japanese, who were likely descendents of Chinese colonists, and the fact that no woman in Japanese history would ever after bear a position as socially significant as her (yet). Possibly because she had such high spiritual energy(?), I think in many ways the destruction of Himiko's wish is fantastically cruel.
  • The take of an amateur historian on the above:
    • Queen Himiko: her wish was linked to the survival of her people in the face of the might of the enemies across the sea. She was very successful, and died suicidal after finding out the truth about the Incubators and magical girls, with early Japanese historians splitting her in three different figures (empress Jingu and the princesses Yamato-totohi-momoso-hime-no-mikoto and Yamatohime-no-mikoto) out of spite. As for the desperation brought by her wish... It's the rise of the simil-Fascist regime that brought Japan in World War II and the devastation of the war.
    • Cleopatra's wish was to bring welfare and eternal glory to her country. She did it, in spite of the powers arrayed against her (that even saw her briefly exiled), and, in the meantime, fought multiple witches and lived to the ripe age (for a magical girl) of 39. In the meantime she found out the truth about the system, and didn't have the heart to use her powers against the triumphant Octavianus, so, before becoming a witch, she killed herself by smashing her Soul Gem, but not without having herself bitten by the snake so that no Roman would be Pharaoh (the bite from the asp being a symbol of giving the kingship back to the gods).
    • Anne Frank met her Incubator in the lager, and wished him to make a repeat of that horror impossible. Anne died soon after, but through her diary and the birth of Israel a repeat of the Holocaust became impossible. The latter at the price of Israel being loathed by its neighbours.
    • Joan of Arc met an Incubator she mistook for the Archangel Michael and two magical girls she mistook for Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine, and made a wish linked to knowledge and driving the English out of France. This gave her power to know what she needed to do, that she first used outside the fight against the witches to inform the count Robert de Baudricourt of a recent defeat and earn the right to see the Dauphin. In the end, thanks to that knowledge, she inflicted the English many a defeat, and, once captured, was able to answer the inquisitors' questions in such way it became obvious her trial and conviction for heresy were a sham. She either died when her soul gem was burnt with her, or survives as a soul gem in ring form because she was stripped of it before the execution.

• Wait a second, just realized: Magical Girl or not, one would assume that Cleopatra still seduced Mark Anthony and produced Caesarion, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra the Second and Ptomley the 16th. Now, as we all know, becoming a Magical Girl turns you a corpse. So even though she could most certainly have sex (sucks to be the accidental necrophile, eh Anthony? ), how in the name of Madoka would Cleopatra be able to give birth to ONE, much less FOUR children when her body is incapable of sustaining and producing life anymore?
  • Even though it's never outright stated, I think we are to assume that a Puella Magi's body still has the same bodily functions as a normal body; eat, sleep etc. If not, you'd think someone would have figured out the whole Soul Jar deal by now. Also, both Kyouko and Mami are shown to be younger in the flashbacks to when they become PM. So ,for all intents and purposes, a PM = normal body with normal bodily functions with the exception of not being able to die. Wait, does this mean a PM can die of old age?
    • Probably not. Kyouko's life experiences, and the fact that she can't remember how old she is, imply that after they hit a certain age, they stop aging. But yes, a Puella Magi's body is only a corpse if something happens to the Soul Gem.
    • I think with Kyouko it might just be that she stopped caring, because she doesn't need to go to school (she might even be officially dead, what with her father offing all of her family) and whatever she could be doing for a living she can do now, so there's no need for her to care. So that implication might or might not be there.
  • Perhaps we could think of the Soul Gem as batteries. When near the body, it functions completely as normal. But when removed, the body loses its power source and 'dies'.
  • The body is a functional human body that essentially is in a coma as far as the consciousness is concerned (no mind inside) and is being controlled by the magical girl via range-limited possession. It can be changed somewhat by the magical girl it belongs (or belonged) to and is kept alive by the magical girl's magic, but for as long as it is kept alive it functions normally.

• If Madoka's wish prevented all Puella Magi from their original deaths and transformations, doesn't this make a significant change to the course of human history? Did Joan of Arc never get burned, Cleopatra never suicide-by-cobra, and so on?
  • And given Kyubey's comment that "without Magical Girls, (humans) would still be naked and living in trees", one could expect some even sweeping changes.
  • Madoka only prevented that the girls transformed into witches, not their deaths they simply vanished instead of transforming. It's likely that the demons that manifested then prevented history to change much.

Madoka made the most stupidest wish!

• Madoka made the most stupidest wish.She could have easily wished to be a god or wish to have the power of omnipotence and to make a world where magical girls, magic, incubators don't exist. As well as to make a world that has an unlimited source of energy and that mankind could develop without the need of incubators, so in other words create a world like ours and also create a world where she existed. Then after that erase her omnipotence if she did not want to be omnipotent. Problem solved. But no, they just have to make Madoka make a stupid wish so that that there would be a second season. For those that say that incubators will not grant this wish to be omnipotent is wrong as there is nothing in the anime that states that incubators will not grant this wish. In conclusion Madoka is not a God, if so why was she called a God?
  • She isn't God. Kyubey asks if she's trying to become a god; she says she doesn't care what she becomes as long as magical girls don't fall to despair anymore. She appears and functions more or less like a goddess, but she's a sentient law of physics. In the last episode, she becomes a principle that destroys witches and is thereafter referred to as the Law of Cycles. The rest of this little diatribe is just whining about the ending, not a Headscratcher.
    • Worst rebuttal ever. The truth is that wishing for omnipotence is possible. By being omnipotence the girls will never becomes witches nor fall into despair as by omnipotent she could create a better world and thus your rebuttal is invalid. You said that I don't like the show but I am just pointing out the plot holes and the truth. I like the show and that is precisely why I point out the mistakes and not overlook the plot holes that the show has. You said that this is not a headscratcher but it is as I am asking a question of why she did not wish for omnipotence and therefore MY STATEMENT is A FREAKING QUESTION/HEADSCRATCHER SO WHY WAS IT MOVED TO THIS FREAKING FOLDER. I AM NOT COMPLAINING I AM JUST STATING FACTS.
    • No, you are complaining. And now you are complaing more about it being moved to a folder when there's nothing wrong with that happening. Also, wishing for omnipotence requires already being omnipotent karmically which means she would never truly have enough power for that, which you should have already known if you actually watched the show; Madoka's wish was only fulfilled because she had enough karmic potential to make it possible. So wishing for omnipotence is just as stupid as making a wish "not to die", especially with the fact that without having enough power the wish would get hacked and backfire even more horribly. Additionally, any wish that uses enough power causes the magical girl to witch out almost instanteneously, so with the level of power Madoka has making any wish that would not stop her from witching out is a stupid wish, and "omnipotence" is not a wish that does that (if you think it is, you should not be allowed to make wishes lest you doom us all by making a stupid wish). Oh, and by the way, when Urobuchi wrote the story it was suppopsed to end at the end of the TV series, so it's not his fault that there is a "second season", and you are being a moron again for not researching your facts and then blaming the wrong person and complaining. Also, the fact that you ask and then do not try to understand what other people are saying is why your headscratcher was moved into a folder and cut, because with you not listening it was a pointless mess.
  • "Madoka made the most stupidest wish" is literally complaining that Madoka didn't do what you think she should have done. She didn't wish for omnipotence because she didn't want to be omnipotent. It is that simple, and your facts don't matter. You can have all the reasons in the world for why wishing for omnipotence is possible, but that isn't what Madoka wanted, so that isn't what she wished for, so it doesn't matter that it was possible. Yes. It was possible. But since she didn't wish for that, it isn't relevant. You as a viewer whining about how she didn't do what you wanted does not constitute a Headscratcher, and this was moved to its own folder because it was generating a huge mess. There. Your questions are answered. If you have any further need to discuss this, do everyone a favor and go to the Discussion tab and talk about it there.
  • Ok, serious answer to a not-so-serious question. The scope of a wish an Incubator can grant is directly tied to the amount of latent energy within a Magical Girl. Yes, Madoka has the greatest amount of latent energy of all Magical Girls that have ever existed, but omnipotence is kind of a big deal. 1) Omnipotence is, by definition, the ability to do absolutely anything with no restrictions, and it is a paradoxical concept impossible in reality (see the famous "If God is omnipotent, can he create a world where he is powerless?" paradigm). Achieving omnipotence may therefore be a flat-out impossibility. 2) Even if it were possible, it would by definition require an infinite amount of energy. Even Madoka does not have that much. Yes, she has so much energy that Kyubey deems her wish to be worth more than the entire planet Earth, but there's a lot more to the universe than just the Earth and alien magical girls are confirmed to exist. The number of timelines Homura created around Madoka is huge, but finite, therefore, the energy within Madoka is also finite, it's simple math. 3) You also have to consider this series' theme of wishes going horribly wrong. Even supposing that, against all odds, Madoka was able to wish to become God with a capital G. Who's to say she would be able to control so much power? Who's to say she wouldn't accidentally snuff out entire galaxies just by thinking the wrong thought and having it come to life? Who's to say she wouldn't go utterly insane from the burden of omniscience, and degenerate into an Almighty Idiot? Thrusting absolute power on a being not designed for it sounds to me like it's bound to go horribly wrong. Imagine one day waking up with 1000 arms and having to coordinate all of them to perfection, whereas most people struggle to even properly control their two arms and legs, and you would have an idea of what it would be to have not even one millionth of your theoretical Godoka's problems.

Why didn't Homura make the obvious wish?

• This has bugged me for a while, and I know the real answer is "because there'd be no series," but why didn't she just wish Madoka back to life? Instead of giving herself a chance to save Madoka, she could have definitely saved her, with the added bonus of Walpurgisnacht already being dealt with. Okay the karma price would've been a bitch and she still would have had to deal with Kriemhild Gretchen, but she didn't know that at the time (and Gretchen wouldn't be a world-destroying threat in the first timeline either).
  • Copy-pasting from what someone else posted on the page in response to a similar question: "That wouldn't have fit Homura's desires, though. It's more than just making sure Madoka lives; it's also to prevent her suffering, growing stronger to protect her, and making sure Madoka doesn't just sacrifice herself to save someone else like...the next day." To elaborate further, Homura wanted to save Madoka, but she didn't *just* want to save her. *She* wanted to be the one saving her. She wanted to be the cool girl who came in and made a strong impression on Madoka the same way Madoka became somebody Homura admired. She wanted a chance to do things over so that she could change her relationship with Madoka into one where she didn't feel useless. Had she had wished Madoka back to life, Madoka would've still been her senior and would've still felt obligated to watch out for Homura rather than see her as an equal (or at least this is how Homura would have thought Madoka would feel. We know that Madoka would never see her friends as a burden.) I don't think Homoura consciously thought to herself, "I could wish her back to life, but let's do this less likely to succeed thing instead," but I do think her ideation process on the wish was shaped by her own self-worth issues.
• I've been wondering this for a while. Homura saw her only friends die in front of her. Why did she wish to go back and save only ONE? I don't think being in love counts as an answer if the show cannot confirm if thats true or not.
• First, realistically, she probably spent a lot more time with Madoka than Mami. They'd already bonded before the run-in with Isabel and they were in the same class, meaning much more opportunity to become close. Homura might've also been less keen to go on witch-hunts than Sayaka was, so there would be even less contact between her and Mami. Secondly, Homura has an extreme guilt complex that fuels much of her behaviour. She blames herself for Madoka's death, whereas she might've felt that Mami's death was out of her hands.

A planet of bunny-cats?

• Forgive me if this has been addressed somewhere by Word of God, but do all the Incubators look like Kyubey? Or is that just a form they take to appeal to young girls/look like a traditional magical girl sidekick?
  • In Rebellion, we see a large congregation of Incubators gathered in one place, and all of them look the same as Kyuubey. They're in an isolated desert and they're there to observe Homura's unconscious imprisoned form, not to gather magical girl contracts, so there should no need to keep up a ruse. Based on this, the likely answer is that all the Incubators are naturally bunny-cats. Alternatively, they did modify themselves or else create "terminals" to act through on Earth that are physically cute and appealing, but if this is the case, it seems that they wear those forms permanently and full-time.

All about Walpurgis

• How exactly would two Magical Girls handle Walpurgis Night better than one? Based on what we've seen, the stuff Homura throws at it seems far beyond what a 'normal' Madoka and Mami could have done in the first timeline; likewise, Kyouko wouldn't have made much of an addition either.
  • Homura being stronger than Madoka is simply not true. Remember that Madoka still managed to defeat Walpurgis alone at the very first timeline. Having more numbers is always an addition. Sure two men facing a lion barehanded probably wouldn't produce a win, but would you rather fight that lion alone or with another comrade? We don't exactly know all of Kyouko's powers either as she wasn't fighting her best when facing Sayaka; at the very least Kyouko could have protected Homura from the fodder enemies Walpurgis was sending out.
    • Did Madoka defeat Walpurgis in the first timeline? I thought they only showed Madoka herself dead or dying, but I don't remember Homura mentioning Walpy's defeat. IIRC, the only decisive mention of having successfully defeated her happened in the "Madoka oneshots Walpy and becomes a witch immediately afterward" timeline.
    • She did... through a Suicide Attack that took out Walpurgisnacht. Notice that her Soul Gem was nowhere to be seen and Walpurgisnacht was gone? And consider the next few timelines that Madoka manages to defeat WPN without having to resort to a Suicide Attack and eventually into Witchdom? Madoka already had potential to be a great magical girl. Homura's time-traveling just multiplied to the point that Madoka could make a wish to recreate the universe!
    • The thing about Madoka's :potential and Homura's time traveling enhancing is unrelated to the discussion. The thing is, Walpurgis being absent from the "Madoka dies," "Madoka becomes a witch," and "Madoka and Homura together" scenes doesn't MEAN she's been defeated. The thing flies wherever it wants, it could have just moved on to wreak havoc elsewhere after defeating the local resistance. That's why the only EXPLICIT confirmation that Walpurgis really IS defeated comes from the "Madoka oneshots Walpurgis and THEN becomes a witch," when Kyubey actually says it. Madoka's Soul Gem also being absent doesn't say anything on its own. It could've just shattered after a fatal attack without Madoka accomplishing anything. A Suicide Attack can be inferred, but one can also infer a complete failure from the exact same scenes.
    • The PSP rendition of the first timeline seems to imply that Madoka really did kill it in a Suicide Attack, though given how the timelines can play out in different ways in the game, this may or may not be canon to the show. Timeline 2 isn't clear one way or another, but in Timeline 3 it seems like the Homura-Madoka combo drove Walpurgis away without killing it; they would be dead already if Walpurgis was still around, given that they were basically sitting ducks, but if they won against it they'd have had a Grief Seed from it (the one Madoka used on Homura can't have been from Walpurgis, or Homura wouldn't have been surprised that she had it.)
    • You are overthinking things. That confirmation also came from someone who didn't know Madoka's power was growing because of Homura's timeline hopping. Also, you have to make the distinction of between Madoka doing a Suicide Attack and Curbstomping WPN. It is heavily implied that WPN was defeated in the first timeline after Madoka's Suicide Attack. I don't think they would let WPN roam around without saying nothing or at least implied that they did. WPN was powerful enough to destroy the World even though it would take much longer than Madoka's Krimhild Gretchen. Also consider that Gretchen always more powerful than WPN BEFORE that One-Shot Madoka did.
    • Well, what I can say (based mostly on eps 10 and 11) is that:
    • a) Homura CAN'T use any magical attack, her only magics are time stop and moving stuff around (like the truck or the missile launcher) so far, before the Retcon she never had the bow and she balanced this with timestop, and Genre Savy.
    • Not true. Homura fires purple energy bolts the first time we see her chasing Kyubey, presumably so as not to give him any clues about what her magic really does, and to conserve her Soul Gem as much as possible.
    • b) Madoka is kinda like Nanoha, a mid-long ranged fighter with very very strong magic attacks. Mami also qualifies on this category. Kyoko one hit ko'ed witch-Sayaka with her suicide attack. And Sayaka can heavily increase her strength and speed using magic. So any of the girls with the exception of Homura can use strong magic attacks.
    • c) Walpurgis has an weird eye/magic circle aura around it. IMO Walpurgis is simply immune to non-magic attacks, regardless the Overkill, unless it aura is broken with a very powerful magic attack. That's why Madoka always defeat it, and why having at least one magical girl with a magic attack would greatly increase Humura's possibilities to defeat WP.
    • For that matter, Walpugisnacht's nature is helplessness. Maybe it's simply impossible to do with only one person, because that person is "helpless" - Homura can't win, but Homura + mouse that noms on Walpurgisnacht's ear can. Madoka breaks this by being Madoka.
    • A witch's nature is like her personality (she just laughs and floats upside down 95% of the time, and the rare photo(s) showing her right side up also show the city in flames). Homura's firepower hardly singed her dress, and considering all that magical witch-fire spewed, she seems to be magically-heat-resistant enough to laugh off "mere explosives". Ironic, as she is the 'stage-constructing witch'.
    • It might be that Walpurgis is just plain immune to fire, since it's her primary element, and all of Homura's bombs either count as being fire-element attacks, or they become fire-elemental attacks once they become reinforced with Homura's magic.

• How do the magical girls know of Walpurgis's existence before she is born? In Timeline 1, Mami even says "Kaname should become a pro before Walpurgis Night." But unlike Homura, they don't have the benefit of knowing its nature or knowing when it's going to appear, or even that it will appear at all.
  • Any decent magic girls already knew about Walpurgis, as Kyoko shown an intrest in fighting it without Homura having to explain what it is. As for Mami's comment, she might have known there will be a Walpurgis, but might not have known it would be so soon and it would hit their city.
  • Well, yes, we know they did know there was a Walpurgis. But where did they find out that she's coming? Did Kyubey tell them? How did he find out?
    • The witch's card says that stories about Walpurgis Night have been "handed down through history", so either some Puella Magi have told each other (trying to form teams against it?) or Kyuubey is telling. He can sense when witches are about to hatch. He most likely didn't tell Madoka in later timelines so that when Walpurgis did appear, she'd be overwhelmed and more easily forced into making a wish.

• I agree that Walpurgisnight is a collection of witches, but what causes the witches to gather? Charlotte and Gertrud, who we saw in the first three episodes were alone, so what was different about the witches who did make up WN?
  • She isn't a gathering of whole, complete, individual witches, she's a collection of curse energy that doesn't get absorbed into a grief seed (basically, the leftovers from when witches' kisses disappear after the witch who cast them is destroyed, or when familiars are killed without maturing into a witch first). It's called "a gathering of witches" based on the actual Walpurgis Night Festival, where witches gather on a mountain.
    • The above is pure speculation. Kazumi Magica includes instances in which Witches can be brought together to interact with one another.
    • Not quite. According to Word of God, WPN works "like tornadoes", so it seems to be a combination of the two. Walpurgis is a single witch that can absorb other witches, sucking up curse energy to become a huge, crazy-powerful witch.

• Forgive me if this has already been asked, but why doesn't Homura just kill the person who's going to turn into Walpurgisnacht? Also, if the only people who turn into Witches are Magical Girls, why isn't anyone aware that the Magical Girl who turns into Walpurgisnacht exists? Is Walpurgisnacht formed from something else besides a Magical Girl?
  • A number of reasons:
    • Walpurgisnacht is a conglomeration of multiple witches, she isn't formed from just one magical girl. This is why Madoka's attack in episode 12 destroys her without hitting her: since she stopped all the witches from ever being born, Walpurgis can't exist.
    • Homura's sandtimer only goes back a month, and Walpurgisnacht is a powerful witch that appears periodically, to the point that she's a figure of Magical Girl lore and has caused multiple "natural disasters" in the past.
    • Madoka and company are the only magical girls who know that magical girls become witches, so no other magical girl would ever have figured out that Walpurgisnacht was ever a human girl.

• In Episode 10,we're shown the past timelines, in particular the one where Homura becomes Puella Magi. In the timelines afterwards, Homura is seen warning the other Puella Magi about Walpurgisnacht. This makes sense, considering that Homura got this information from Mami back in the first timeline. What doesn't make sense is how that original Mami knew about Walpurgis in the first place. Kyoko is not an possible source for two reasons: one, she isn't shown in this timeline, as Mami didn't die until the fight with Walpurgisnacht, and two, if she had been the one who told Mami, then where did Kyoko get the information from? Kyubey is not a likely option considering that he doesn't generally give out information unless specifically asked, or if the act of giving in some way benefits his end goals. In order to get information out the Incubator,one would have a question exactly as specific as the information one wishes(no pun intended) to receive. Mami would have to ask something along the lines of "Is there some super-powerful witch capable of destroying the city and possibly the world, going to appear anytime soon?" The chances of Mami(or anyone else for that matter) thinking of a question as specific as that without any prior knowledge is VERY slim.
  • I can't remember where (I want to say it's in the concept notes somewhere, but I can't recall for sure), but it's mentioned that Walpurgisnacht has been around for a long time because no one is strong enough to defeat her, so stories of her have been passed down from magical girl to magical girl through the ages. Kyouko and Mami were friends before the start of the story, though, they just had a falling out and split up before the series proper, so she's just as valid a source as any. Even if not, Kyubey is a fine source either way: finding a girl and saying, "A gigantic witch is coming to destroy your city, but you have the potential to become a magical girl that can stand up to fight it!" is probably his idea of shooting fish in a barrel. He doesn't have to tell them they can't win, just that they can fight if they make a contract.

• What is that giant tree-like thing seen in Episode 1 before the opening credits? As far as I can tell from views of the Mitakihara City skyline, it's like it's not there until Walpurgisnacht turns up (it's there in Episode 10, we see Homura and Madoka on it with Mami's body). In Episode 12, it doesn't turn up, so I don't believe that Walpurgisnacht creates it. Apparently, whatever it is seems to have an Eldritch Location inside of it and is partially made of city infrastruture (eg. street lights).
  • I would assume that Walpurgisnacht does spawn the tree, just not consistently. She doesn't have a barrier, per se, but she does very clearly influence her surroundings magically when she manifests. We know that other witches' barriers aren't static and change their appearance and location, so Walpurgis' influence on the area could similarly be something that varies across manifestations. I mean, besides her, the only other magical being in the area when the tree shows up is Homura - between Homura and Walpurgis, it just seems more likely that Walpurgis did it, especially considering that "stage construction" is Walpurgis' whole schtick.
    • Or, Walpurgisnacht does spawn the tree consistently; that's what happens if it reaches the shelter. The reason it didn't appear in episode 12 is because it didn't get that far before Madoka stopped it.

• So we know that Madoka gets uberpowerful because of Homura's wish. But why does Walpurgis keep getting bigger and fancier (and presumably more powerful) whenever the timeline resets?
  • It's likely a side-effect of Karmic-destiny. Walpurgris is the end-game of what kills Madoka, and Homura places almost as much emphasis on Walpurgris as she does on Madoka.

Unsorted Headscratchers

• How does the whole Karmic destiny thing work re: a magical girl's potential? Kyubey implies it's how many people's fates rest on you, and that if Madoka had been a ruler or saviour of a country responsible for lots of people then he could have understood her vast potential. Considering that, shouldn't the rest of the cast have fairly equal strength and talents as magical girls? The hierarchy seems to go Madoka > Mami > Kyoko/Homura > Sayaka in terms of power, with Homura able to beat Mami only when Mami is hamstrung by her own issues and doesn't know what Homura's power is. But why? Sayaka having minimal talent makes sense - she's a schoolgirl and additionally a latchkey kid. Homura's strength being limited to the type of power she has also makes sense since it seems to be that she's an orphan. But why are Kyoko and Mami more powerful than Sayaka and Homura respectively? Mami herself is an orphan and after her death no one even notices she's missing for several episodes. Kyoko too is from a small family. Other than Madoka, what difference is there between the girls' karmic potential that their power levels vary at all? All are schoolgirls with limited social circles and either missing or dead parents.
  • I've done a lot of thinking about this, I can't be sure this is canonically correct, but it's the best answer I can come up with, given the details available: "Karmic Destiny" is the sum total of a potential magical girl's effect on the world based on how significant she'd be, and it determines how much power a magical girl has because it's a matter of Equivalent Exchange at that point. It's not just her current self, it's her entire future being converted into her magical potential: a Puella Magi is trading in her destiny for a destiny of fighting witches, that's how Kyubey can honestly say he never lies. Sayaka, the ordinary girl who behaves like a normal 14-year-old and chases after a boy not realizing she can't buy his love with sacrifice, is likely to grow up to behave like a normal adult woman and live an ordinary life. Mami, daughter of a wealthy and prominent family who obviously would have survived the car crash that killed her parents, could have gone on to be a famous figure of tragedy whose refined, delicate image would probably have at the very least gotten her the attention of wealthy bachelors when she came of age. Kyoko was poor but her father had a congregation, if she hadn't made her wish, she might have used all that idealism, work ethic and religious piety she once had to succeed where her father failed in their community. We'll never know for sure, but we do know that whoever they were before making the contract does influence their potential as much as their future does.
  • In Mami's case, she gets the benefit of her very particular role as a magical girl. See, the fact that she was completely alone before meeting Kyouko implies either that she was the only magical girl in Mitakihara when Kyuubey contracted with her, or that she became so very quickly. That means the entire city was dependent on Mami alone to protect them from witches, for months if not years. That's a lot of lives to influence, over a long period of time, so her powers would have started off very weak but grown at a very high rate. (It's also been theorized that she had the benefit of a longer-lasting Soul Gem than usual for her power level since her wish was related to staying alive, which would have helped her survive and get stronger, though this has never been confirmed.) In Kyouko's case, well, her wish essentially led to the creation of a new religion. Even if we assume that all her father's followers stopped believing after his suicide — which is not confirmed - that was still a big deal and it's something that would have disrupted life as it was known for hundreds of people. Sayaka, on the other hand, gets neither benefit. Sayaka isn't valuable as a magical girl because, from the second she contracted, Homura and Kyouko were already there operating in Mitakihara, and even if she put on a cynical front, Homura at least would have protected the town from witches and familiars if for no other reasons than to keep them from killing Madoka. (She tells Sayaka to stop wasting time and magic on familiars, but that's specifically because Sayaka isn't strong enough to deal with everything. Homura doesn't have that problem.) Therefore, even when Sayaka saves people, it's inherently worth less because Homura and Kyouko could have and would have accomplished the same work or close to it. Meanwhile, Sayaka also isn't that valuable in terms of her wish, because she only healed one person, and the only people who really benefit all that strongly are his family and Hitomi. Sure, lots of people get to hear Kyousuke play violin now, but realistically if he wasn't around, someone almost exactly as good would be playing in his place and nothing would change.
• This might be a bit too meta, but why in the ever loving blue fuck are there so many goddamn instances on This Very Wiki 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 Expanded Universe works he explicitly shows that creating and recreating life is well within his powers. Kazumi Magica 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 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).
  • Probably because "back to life" is a very vague phrasing. Kyubey does grant wishes that create clones or restore witches, but since he doesn't seem to define death the same way humans do (his views on Soul Gems illustrate that nicely), bringing someone back from the dead may be beyond his capability just because he can't grant a wish he can't understand. "I want my friend back" isn't necessarily the same thing as "I want my friend's soul to be restored to a functioning body identical to the one she used to have when she was alive." Case in point: Mami was dying and wished to live, and Kyubey granted that wish by making her undead. There's nothing to say he isn't physically capable, but he has to be able to wrap his head around the wish in order to grant it.
    • That is still blatantly underestimating Kyubey's capabilities and goes against canonical examples of what he can do. Kyubey has been around since the Stone Age, he knows how the human mind works, he may be bemused by the nature of emotional outbursts, but he knows the hows and whys behind them intellectually, at least enough to understand which phrases can deflect uncomfortable truths without false information, and certainly enough to understand that a wish like "I want my mother to not have died in a train wreck" entails. And even if he didn't, the end of episode 12 makes it clear that the fulfillment of a Contract happens without his control once a girl starts the process, with him powerless to stop or circumvent the wish as it is being granted, so even if he was malicious or ignorant enough to try to evoke Literal Genie or Jackass Genie with Contracts, it's impossible for him to do so because the magic is coming from the girls, and their intentions are the main force behind the machinations of the wish, (it's just most of the girls are self-destructive enough that it still backfires on them.)
    • Madoka's wish isn't a good example of what Kyubey can and can't do, wish-wise. She was the only magical girl in the history of magical girls who knew exactly how the system worked, figured out how to exploit it, and had the power to pull it off. Consider the powers of magical girls: they can keep a dead body fresh and restore it to nonfunctioning wholeness, but they can't actually put a soul back into a body, and they can't fix a broken Soul Gem. We know this because the Incubators' plandepends on Magical Girls harvesting Grief Seeds and becoming Witches themselves; a dead magical girl is a wasted resource, so if they could restore a soul back to its original body, it stands to reason that they would. Perhaps more to the point, Kyubey can't grant a wish that no one makes, or a wish that is made by someone who doesn't the power to pull it off. Restoring the dead to life is something that only Madoka is ever shown to do with a wish (in one of the video games, she resurrects Sayaka), while the others try and technically fail (Mami) or are so consumed with their own grief for their dead loved one that they can't even imagine it's possible to wish them back to life (Charlotte).
    • Keep in mind, all of the wishes made in the show (other than Madoka's last wish) have a cruel twist. It never seems to say that someone couldn't revive someone with a wish, but it would be likely to end poorly. Nothing in the show contradicts the idea that someone could revive a friend with a wish. In fact, it seems that was what QB was tempting Madoka with in the park (when Homura shot him to shut him up long enough to prevent making the contract).
    • That doesn't necessarily mean it would work, though. Again, Kyubey can't grant a wish if no one makes it, and he can't grant a wish with insufficient power. A true resurrection is shown to take Madoka-level magical potential.
    • Consider the hope you'd be generating from a wish like that. A magical girl's friend, assuming they're the same age, being brought back to life and presumably live a normal life span is a literal 70-90 years worth of practically-limitless hope that would otherwise be gone from the world: hers, for her own future, her family's hope for her...the witch born from that much despair would practically pop the magical girl like an M80 in a sausage.
    • Madoka brought Sayaka back to life during The Different Story. Revival wishes are canonically possible if you have enough karmic potential, and this wasn't a "oneshot Walpurgis" level Madoka so it doesn't seem like this wish required a whole lot of karmic ability either.
    • Sayaka still becomes a magical girl in the Different Story timeline, though, which means Madoka had at least one timeline's worth of increased karmic significance, probably more. Since each loop gives her 30 days' worth of the entire universe's energy, she shouldn't need more than one boost to have enough to restore a single human teenager. It's easy to assume that a human life is a pittance, but that's only because we're comparing it to Walpurgisnacht, Ultimate Madoka, and Krimheld Gretchen.
    • The actual amount of power Madoka gains with each passing timeline is never specified, and "30 days worth of the entire universe's energy" per loop is speculation that doesn't seem to match her average-looking power level in timeline 2. There looks to be a pretty big gap between 3 and 4 that could maybe support this but that's only if you assume that everything between Homura ditching the braids and glasses and the subsequent Walpurgisnacht confrontation were all the same timeline, which is not actually confirmed - we got confirmation that there were nearly 100 timelines, but nothing says that they all happened between 4 and 5 the way the fandom generally seems to assume they did.
    • It's never directly measured in terms of energy units, but it is specified: the timelines that Homura negates become Madoka's latent potential as a magical girl because she is the reason those timelines no longer exist. Homura's loop is about 30 days, and we see that there is no spacial limit on her powers, if she stops time, time is stopped everywhere, so it's literally 30 days' worth of the universe's energy (although since it's a relatively minimal impact for anywhere but Earth, the rest of the universe might not actually contribute a whole lot to Madoka's potential). She doesn't show exceptional powers in timeline 2 because at that point she only has one timeline attached to her, and her stat growth is exponential every loop. Timeline 2 is the smallest boost she could possibly have, short of having no boost at all.
    • Kyuubey's line from episode 11 doesn't refer to anything "becoming" anything from what I remember: checking the transcripts from the episode indicates that it's actually that all of those timelines "converge around" Madoka, and that causes the "threads of fate" from each Madoka to attach to to current one. With "timeline" and "thread of fate" apparently referring to different things, it doesn't sound like it's the literal negated timeline/universe (i.e. energy equivalent to the Big Bang) being sublimated into Madoka's magic each time, but rather, her own original potential from each timeline tying itself to her plus further growth from being the reason the world keeps being recreated and isn't moving forward past the end of the month (though based on the clarification below, it seems like this is your stance as well but in different words, but maybe I'm misreading.)
    • Er, to clarify: Madoka's ultimate potential isn't the product of a hundred individual timelines, she's the product of a hundred stacked timelines. She takes on each sublimated timeline as potential, including her own increased power from the loop before. The original Madoka has only her potential (+1 boost). The second-timeline Madoka has the original Madoka's potential (+1) in addition to her own (+1) for a total of +2. The third-timeline Madoka has her own potential (+1), second-timeline Madoka's potential (+2), and original Madoka's potential (+1) for a total of +4. Fourth-timeline Madoka has her own (+1), original's (+1), second-timeline's (+2), and third-timeline's (+4) for a total of +8. Fifth-timeline Madoka has her own (+1), original's (+1) second's (+2), third's (+4), and fourth's (+8) for a total of +16, and so on and so on down the line.
    • I guess the reason I'm confused about this answer is this: revival wishes are apparently mostly impossible because the amount of karma necessary. Madoka revived Sayaka in one timeline, which makes sense as it's Madoka, except this was in a timeline where she didn't seem to have gotten especially powerful or especially prone to Witching, which would imply her karmic burden wasn't that intense yet. The counter was that one reset is assumed to be enough to give her enough potential to make a super powerful wish, because one reset is hypothesized to be equal to the whole universe's energy - but *if a wish for revival is supposed to be a karmically powerful wish, and if Madoka already had powerful enough karma to make this wish, then shouldn't her power level reflect that level of karma, even if that karma's still growing?*
    • Yes, and it does, that's literally the entire crux of the show from the very first episode. We even see this with Homura's multiple timeline flashbacks in episode 10. Madoka goes from "dying alone against Walpurgis" to "one-shotting Walpurgis and instantly becoming a Witch so huge the clouds obscure her upper half". What part of that could be confusing? It's literally in the show. In the timelines where her power would be at its lowest, Madoka would already have been a magical girl when Sayaka died, so she wasn't eligible for another wish anyway. In the one timeline (that we know of) where she had the option to wish Sayaka back, she did, and it worked.
    • Yes, I did in fact watch the show start to finish. My point is that wishing for Sayaka to come back didn't make Madoka visibly more powerful than she was in timelines 1-3. If wishing someone back to life required an excessive amount of power to do, then making that wish would have made Madoka superpowerful, the way her wish in timeline 4 (which presumably involved taking down Walpurgisnacht) did.
    • Are you sure you watched the show? A magical girl's power level doesn't change her costume, Madoka's appearance as a magical girl is the same in literally every timeline, INCLUDING the one the show follows, the only time it changes is when she becomes Ultimate Madoka, which is the direct result of her wish causing and resolving a time paradox. Since wishing Sayaka back to life doesn't require Madoka to travel through time, become immortal and survive her own self-destruction, there's literally no reason why she'd look any different or have different powers.
    • A magical girl's potential doesn't change her costume, but it *does* change what she's allowed to wish for, and what she ultimately wishes for is what decides which powers she gets. Madoka wasn't noted to be extraordinarily powerful during the timeline she wished Sayaka back, so we can infer either that her potential wasn't that high yet, or simply that her wish didn't require a lot of potential to come true. Either one provides an answer to the actual topic of discussion, which was how hard it is to wish someone back to life. The "Madoka contains an entire universe's worth of energy as soon as the second timeline" thing is fanon. The amount of power she receives per new timeloop is never specified beyond "she gets stronger every time." Timeline 2 Kriemhild Gretchen looks impressive but is never shown to actually be powerful yet. The second Gretchen we see is a world-destroying witch because a) multiple loops have passed by now, confirmed to be more than what was shown on screen, and b) Madoka made an actual powerful wish this time ("kill Walpurgis") and not "save this cat" or "make my family happy." If Madoka were gaining "30 days of the universe's energy" eveyr time she looped, she should have been able to kill Walpurgis by herself during the third timeline, without Homura expending any magic. That didn't happen, so that's not the world we live in.
    • It's never stated or measured, but it's still visibly true that she gets the entire 30 days worth of timeline attached to her, that's not speculation. You can't have a timeline that only affects Earth, we know this because when Homura stops time, it stops everywhere, she can't freeze a person in time or isolate segments of time from each other. When she goes back to the start of the loop, everything from the previous timeline is sublimated into Madoka's magical potential, so yes, it is always 30 days' worth of the universe's energy, because Homura can't permanently isolate objects from each other in time, they always rejoin the flow when her powers are turned off. We don't get a conversion rate of karmic destiny to magical power, but we do see the proportional growth as the timelines progress based on Gretchen's size and Walpurgis' defeat(s). Based on what very little material we have on the subject, in order to do a full, true resurrection of a magical girl, you'd need a wish made by someone whose potential is at least enough to fully eclipse the magical girl being resurrected, because at that point you're pretty muching paying the difference in karma to "buy" back the karmic debt incurred with her death. In terms of Kyubey's magic, wishing to bring a magical girl back from the dead means buying back the dead Puella Magi's grief seed from wherever it goes when he eats it, and it would go against his entire stated purpose to do that and not turn a profit, so we know it'd have to have a decently high cost as a witch. Your assertion is that because she didn't one-shot Walpurgis she couldn't have had a power boost, but that's really not a good benchmark for measuring because Walpurgis is many magical girls and has, since Kyubey has arrived on Earth, never truly been defeated. Having two or three loops of 30 days' worth of the universe's total magical potential rendered from the karmic destiny of one girl's role in it doesn't automatically make her stronger than a Witch so powerful it masquerades as a natural disaster because it can't fit into a labyrinth. We also never see Madoka beat Walpurgis except at the end of the series, when she causes Walpurgis to be erased from time by preventing the birth of all the witches who would eventually become part of her, so we don't know exactly how strong you have to be to beat her, but it's definitely harder to beat a thousand girls than to wish one back. It's possible that in the timelines where she one-shots Walpurgis, at least some of them are because she wished Sayaka back, Sayaka just didn't live to see the final fight. The timeline where she wishes Sayaka back is in the video game, where characters' power levels have to be scaled so the player can win; by that argument, wishes don't factor into the strength of the magical girl because anime-Homura does no damage against Walpurgis no matter how hard she hits, but game-Homura can beat her alone, and they made the same one. Based purely on what we see and is stated in the anime, every time Homura restarts the loop, the previous loop in its entirety becomes centered on Madoka and therefore part of her karmic potential. The entire 30-days-long timeline, every second of it, every part of it, everywhere in it, every person in it, becomes part of Madoka's energy, which is far, far more than enough to buy off any one single human life (including her own, which she does with her wish), but making a wish that buys one life gives her one life worth of power when she was sitting on enough to buy several, but why would Kyubey tell her that? Walpurgisnacht is still stronger than her because she's been growing since humans were naked and living in caves, she's probably killed more people over the course of her thousands of years of life than Japan. You don't necessarily have to have a massive amount of energy like Madoka does, but you do need to at least be more significant than the person who died.
    • You're missing the point. Walpurgis is part of the universe. If Madoka were getting the entire universe's energy, then that would include all of the power Walpurgis had in the old timeline. That, among a million other reasons, is why this interpretation is illogical, because it requires that (Madoka + Walpurgis + the rest of the universe) < (Walpurgis). It's mathematically impossible.
    • You're not thinking fourth dimensionally. It's entirely possible, because Madoka + Walpurgis + Universe < Walpurgis is the paradox that Madoka's final wish resolves, that is the entire point of the ending. Madoka and Walpurgis are two sides of the same coin, but Madoka cannot defeat her directly, she has to pre-emptively keep Wapurgis from existence at all, by defeating the witches that would become Walpurgis before they become part of her. Yes, it's illogical, that is the stated problem with a time paradox, which is how the show ends.
• Similar to the above, what's this assertion going around that Puella Magi don't age? There is no evidence for that in any of the canon works, and a few pieces that show it is very much not the case. Kyoko in her flashbacks show an extremely clear difference in age between when she first start hunting witches and the present.
  • How do you figure? Because she changes clothes and has a different hairstyle? She looks exactly the same as she does in the series, just dressed differently and not smiling. As soon as she becomes a magical girl she's precisely the Kyouko from the series, even in the flashback. Magical girls don't age because they stop growing as young teenagers; the only exception is the magical girl who became Roberta, because she contracted in her 20's.
    • But there's not a single indication in canon that they stop aging, so saying they do as if it's fact seems strange. We don't know when exactly the Black Wings of Corrosion Homura happens, so that's not really evidence, unless you believe that it's a post-apocalyptic moment - Urobuchi says that while it can be taken that way if you wish, it wasn't his intention, so it can't count as a valid argument. Kyouko and Mami haven't been magical girls long enough for images to conclusively tell us one way or another whether or not they age normally; most people have differing views on that. As for the 'zombie' thing, they aren't literally undead - they die when their souls get too far away, but there's no indication that their bodily processes are arrested even when the Soul Gems are with them. If they did, surely Mami at least would have figured by now that something was off, yet Kyuubey states that she never once suspected anything, and if everything else is working fine then her aging should be too. So I'd say that based on that, it's just simpler to assume that they do in fact age.
    • Oh, also, that point about Roberta is wrong; she didn't contract in her 20s, she Witched in her 20s, or 30s. The Production Note describes her as "weak, as she was no longer a girl when she became a witch (mid-20s to 30s?)", implying that she did in fact become a magical girl as a teenager or younger.
    • That raises a lot of questions about the magical girl who became Roberta then. None of the magical girls except her are even suggested to be able to survive as magical girls for longer than a couple of years at most, Homura being something of an outlier because she's sort of cheating by reliving the same month over and over. As to them being literally undead, yes, they are. They're corpses animated by magic after their soul/life force/whatever has been forcibly removed from their bodies and are functionally immortal as long as it remains intact, that is the very definition of a lich; a Soul Gem is just a cute, egg-shaped phylactery. The only difference is that their bodies, being forced to function by magic, don't rot, and since we see in the show that Kyouko can keep Sayaka's corpse fresh with her own magic, we know that is something magic can do. All the evidence we get in the show would suggest that Roberta is the exception, not the rule. It's possible that her aging was a side-effect of her particular magic, like Sayaka's improved regeneration, but I don't think there's a canon answer either way.
    • The girls still digest food. They still breathe. They still sleep and are capable of awakening from sleep. Why would all these other automatic processes still function yet not age? Why would age be differnt? Meanwhile, Roberta's wish was for friends who wouldn't dislike her according to the Production Note. What does that wish have to do with aging?
    • The food thing's been addressed: they do eat, but they don't have to, they can't starve. It's the same with everything else: they don't notice anything is different, so they have no reason to test the limits of their physical functions and behave as if nothing has changed. Kyubey is trying to counteract entropy, what would be the point of having them pilot their nigh-indestructible corpses if they can age normally? As to Roberta's wish contributing to her aging, she wishes for friends who won't dislike her, which implies that she did have friends who came to dislike her. There are a lot of reasons for one girl to dislike another that have to do with age and maturity. It's a pretty broad speculation, but there's no indication that any magical girl except Roberta was capable of aging.
    • Cleopatra is a canonical magical girl. History tells us she lived through adulthood (AND HAD KIDS), and Kyuubey only contracts 'girls in their second growth phase', so she must also have contracted as a teen and then aged. Given that both of the girls who survived long enough to grow up did in fact visibly age, and one was still fertile, it seems like it's supposed to be the rule that they do age and aren't totally lichlike.
    • How do we know that the history in the show is identical to actual history, though? The PMMM universe has significantly advanced technology compared to the real world, so at least some things had to have been different. The girls' bodies function more or less normally as long as the Soul Gem is nearby and intact, and there's nothing that says she had to be a fully grown adult woman when she had children, only capable of childbirth, and her death is different in the show from how it was historically: she was bitten by a snake in the arm, not the chest. Also, the adults in this show aren't physically different from teenagers due to the cutesy art style, so it's impossible to tell just by looking. There's just not enough to go on.
    • And now, we have Puella Magi Suzune Magica, which clearly shows Suzune a lot younger in flashbacks than in the present.

• Okay, I understand that all of the different time loops converging on Madoka is what caused her to be so insanely powerful by the time the show takes place, but what I don't get is why this didn't also affect Homura, Mami, Sayaka, and Kyoko. Episode 10 shows that Homura, Mami, and Sayaka were in all of the time loops, and that Kyoko was also there for a couple. Why didn't they have just as much potential as Madoka? Likewise, since Sayaka is fated to become a witch no matter what, why wasn't Sayaka's witch form just as powerful as Madoka's witch form, if not more since Madoka doesn't witch out in every time loop?
  • I really wish we had a better word for Homura's ability than "time loop", because that's not really what she's doing, it just looks that way from her perspective. When Homura activates her sand timer and goes back to the first day, all of the energy becomes Madoka's magical potential/karmic destiny (in other words, how big a role she plays in the fate of the world) because Homura uses Madoka's condition (alive and fully human) as the criteria for whether or not she negates that timeline. Each "different timeline" is actually a potential future that can only exist as part of Madoka's magic because Homura has prevented it from becoming reality. The other girls have nothing to do with it. When Homura goes back to the start, all of the other timelines become potential futures that are hinged solely on Madoka. It doesn't increase anyone else's magical potential because it doesn't affect how big a role they play in the world, only the circumstances of the role they play.

• So Madoka, being a little weirded out by Homura's pleas at the end of episode 8, decides to go look for Sayaka, whose current status she knows nothing about. So where do we find her walking around in the beginning of episode 9? On train tracks closed off by barbed wired fences. Makes sense.
  • Those train tracks might have been the site of a tragedy or something, and we know witches love to spawn in those kinds of places.
    • Stepping in front of an oncoming train is a fairly common method of suicide in Japan; all things considered, it's a pretty logical place to start looking for a witch's presence.
  • Wait, if there was a tragedy near a train... and Sayaka became a witch while on a train...
    • I don't get that... can someone explain that to me, please?
    • I'll try to give my thoughts. Witches never seemed to spawn in areas where many can see its barrier form (this could just be for plot-convenience though), so Madoka likely figured Sayaka was witch-hunting and looked in areas that a witch would typically spawn.
    • Where was Sayaka earlier, before her breakdown? On a train. Witnessing two men trash-talking about their girlfriends. She interrupts their "conversation", transform and possibly kills (at least in the manga) them. I suspect that the train tracks might even be the same ones as the ones where she killed the two men.

• So we've seen that Homura can stop time, apparently long enough to break into Yakuza headquarters and nick some serious damaging weapons. We also know that firearms and explosives deal enough damage to witches to kill them. So why doesn't Homura just stop time and bombs Walpurgisnight into oblivion? She might be the strongest witch, but she could eventually die of a thousand cuts. It seems weird she doesn't even try to abuse that more.
  • I just assumed that Homura couldn't plant enough explosives to stop it without pushing her power too far and going all witchy herself. And since in that timeline all the other nearby Magical Girls are dead, that wouldn't really improve Madoka's situation a lot.
  • Answered in episode 11. She did. In the final battle, she used hundreds of RPG's, dozens of artillery units, an improvised fuel tanker bomb, a battleship, and a huge pit filled with explosives. It all did jack shit anyway.
    • Which leads us to how could she transport and operate a battleship by herself.
    • Obviously, she put it into her shield.
  • Couldn't she just take a sword, freeze time, and slowly cut the witch in half like a big cake?
    • She laughed off Homura's explosion jamboree like it was an elevator fart; what makes you think there's a sword sharp enough to even scratch Walpurgis? Even if Homura did somehow manage to find one, she'd still have to touch Walpurgis to attack her with it, negating the time-stop effect. Theoretically there are a few ways to apply that in a helpful way, but it'd deplete her magic; she'd be winning the battle only to lose the war because defeating Walpurgis doesn't mean Madoka will never make a contract.
    • Actually, that would be the one thing Homura couldn't do. It's established that anyone that Homura touches while her time-stop ability is in effect becomes able to move in time. That's why Mami goes after her first when she's driven mad by the truth about magical girls, and ties her up with her ribbons: as long as they're connected, Homura can't use her time-stop ability on her because they'll both be moving within the stopped moment. As soon as Homura touched her with the sword, Walpurgis would be able to move normally again.
  • I always assumed that either Walpurgrisnacht was so powerful that only magic attacks could effect her, or she absorbed a Magical Girl with the ability to be unaffected by non-magic. If the answer is the former then it would explain why Witches choose to stay in their barrier, since they would just get blown up by the government and whatnot.

• At which point in time(s) did Homerun find out Kyuubey's real name was Incubator? I really can't put in my head that Kyuubey just went ahead and told her for the hell of it. So either she is a very smart girl and figured it out herself, or she has indeed gone through more timelines than the ones shown. Is there any other convincing way it could have happened?
  • Same goes for how she found out Soul Gems are Soul Jars. She says she knew it when questioned in Episode 7, and her response hints that she knew it in the third timeline, where Mami killed Kyouko, but the only thing we ever see her discover is that magical girls become witches.
  • It was probably revealed in the time loop that she finds out that they are Immature Witches. It's very likely Kyubey revealed how the system worked as his full name off-screen. However, it doesn't nix the possibility that Homura may have experienced more timelines than what we saw.
  • In Episode 11, Kyubey mentions that Homura has gone through countless time loops to prevent Madoka from being a witch which would indicate that she indeed has gone through more time loops than the five shown in ep. 10
    • Countless for him. All he knows is what Homura told him herself or what he could conclude from the informations he had. He has no real idea how many times Homura traveled through time.
    • Homura did seem to mention that her cold personality came from how the people she saw die were too many to count. As in too many Madokas in too many timelines.

• A relatively small one, but how did Kyosuke know the way to Hitomi's house? Since she said she kept her feelings for Kyosuke a secret, I can accept that she'd been visiting him at the hospital like Sayaka was and just asked him not to tell, but he wasn't in school very long between being discharged and her confessing to him.
  • It's probably reasonable to assume that Kamijou attended school with them prior to his accident.
  • He didn't. Hitomi walks with him back in the direction to his house, not hers; he even mentions that he didn't realize that she lived so close to him because he just assumed they were going the same way, and Hitomi says she doesn't and just wanted to talk.

• When Sayaka started ranting about how Homura supposedly let Mami die, why the hell didn't Madoka just tell her that that wasn't the case? It's not like there was anything stopping her?
  • Madoka may not have realized that Sayaka actually had a good reason to think that; Madoka was stunned by Sayaka's ranting and didn't really recover in time to explain.
  • A moment ago, Madoka thanked Homura for saving them showing that she knew Homura fought Charlotte as a rescue and not to collect a valuable grief seed. She probably assumed Sayaka thought the same way too and was shocked when she found out otherwise.
  • What are you talking about? Madoka outright says "That's not what happened!"

• Post-episode 3, Mami's dead. She's not around to snap and kill everyone. Homura could have tried to tell the truth about magical girls to Madoka and Sayaka. Sure, it may not have worked, but it would be worth a try. Even better, she could have done it in front of Kyubey; they'd ask him, and he wouldn't deny it. Is Homura that dedicated to being secretive?
  • She just doesn't believe that outright telling people will lead to belief, and has the evidence of at least one loop where it didn't help, which is why she's being all mysterious and hinty.
  • Assuming that she's got through more time loops than shown, chances are she probably did try that but failed.
    • In one of the previous time loops, Sayaka was the one who spoke out in opposition to teaming up with Homura, complaining that she might get caught in one of her explosions, and seemed to distrust her from the moment they met in class in the current timeline.
    • Incorrect. Sayaka starts distrusting Homura not until after Madoka told her about Homura's cryptic warning and later Homura seemingly threatened Madoka.
    • You're talking about the present timeline. They meant a previous timeline, when Homura is still Moemura, a timeline where she isn't cryptic or threatening, yet Sayaka still distrusted her.
  • As for telling the Awful Truth in front of Kyubey, it probably wouldn't work since he'd likely turn it to his advantage. Note, while he cannot lie or tell any false statements, it doesn't stop him from twisting statements or withholding information in order to achieve a desired result. In ep 9, he manipulates Kyouko into performing a Heroic Sacrifice even after she stated she wouldn't listen to him. If Madoka and Sayaka were to ask him, he could answer that Homura would say or do anything to prevent Madoka from contracting out of fear of her power which would be the truth. They'd think that Homura was the one lying and wouldnt listen to her then.
  • Still, Homura does come off as fairly callous in the wake of Mami's death. She could at least have read Sayaka and Madoka's reactions and made it clear that it was for their benefit (even if she's only truly interested in Madoka), and this would have made her easier to trust, since Madoka finds to be quite cold even as Kyubey turns out to have kept more and more information from her and the other magical girls.
    • Also bear in mind, Homura has at this point watched Sayaka, Mami and Kyouko die a unfathomable amount of times, and has undoubtedly reached the point where she's desensitized to it. "It was inevitable and I really don't care about their deaths" was probably at that point her default setting.
  • Dont forget that before all this happened, Homura was orginally a Shrinking Violet due to a long period of hospitalization which made her uncomfortable around people (Madoka was the only friend she had). While her battle skills have been improved by the "Groundhog Day" Loop, her people skills are still lacking, not helped by the fact that the rest of the cast keep dying around her despite her efforts.
  • Homura's goal was to prevent Madoka from ever making a contract with Kyubey. Following Mami's death, being callous and blunt served that goal. She wanted to put the idea in both Madoka and Sayaka's heads that "If you make a contract with Kyubey, you will die a horrible and pointless death just like Mami did." Saying, "Oh, by the way, being a Magical Girl makes you really hard to kill," would have been actively counterproductive to this end. Would Sayaka have been unwilling to make her contract if she knew she'd become a lich? That's hard to say. It didn't stop Madoka when she almost made hers on the park bench.
  • Homura's best weapon in the fight to keep Madoka from making the contract was, unfortunately, one of ignorance. She knows better than anyone how ready Madoka is to give herself up for the greater good; telling Madoka the truth wouldn't have changed her mind just because she already knows that Madoka wouldn't consider her soul too high a price to pay. Leaving her to watch Sayaka and Kyouko fall apart without truly understanding the how and why of it all was the best deterrent Homura could have asked for. After all, once she had all the puzzle pieces, Madoka immediately stepped up to make a contract; without them, she would have waffled in confusion until long after it was over.

• When Mami tied Homura up before going off to face Charlotte, why couldnt she tell her why fighting the witch would be a bad idea, namely that the witch has 2 forms, a doll form and a giant worm that can spring up to devour people like what eventually happened with Mami. If she had, Mami would have likely lived due to being more prepared. The spin-off Oriko Magica shows that Mami is capable of defeating Charlotte as long as she remains guarded. People criticize Mami for not listening to Homura, but really what did Homura warn her about? Homura only said that the witch was different, without going into details about its abilities and that Mami wasnt ready for it, which to Mami's point of view sounds like "You've too weak for this witch, now stand aside and let me take the grief seed that should essentially be yours since its your territory." It shouldnt have surprised Homura when the other Puella Magi tied her up. And when Mami and Madoka started walking away, why not warn them with telepathy? Better yet, why not offer to team up with Mami against the witch or at least hang back, follow Mami and Madoka and intervene when Mami's about to be killed which is what happened in the PSP Portable with better results?
  • Because there's no point in trying to save Mami once Mami made it clear she wasn't interested in accepting help from Homura (which she'd been doing every time they talked; Mami is actually a really condescending bitch when she wants to be). She either dies in the fight against Charlotte, or she goes insane when she finds out the truth about Soul Gems; letting Charlotte kill her where Madoka could see, up close and personal, was the best deterrent Homura could have for keeping Madoka from making the contract.
  • Except for the fact that Homura is in need of allies to fight against Walpurgisnacht. The fourth timeline showed that Homura on her own isn't enough to beat it and if no one can stop Walpurgisnacht, then Madoka will contract to save the city, which leads to Madoka turning into Kriemhild Gretchen once the battle is over. While Homura might have been leaning on Kyoko, having two veteran fighters would have increased their chances since Mami has been at the MG business longer than any of them Homura's timeloops withstanding and employs long range weaponry since is useful when Walpurgisnacht can chuck debris at you. And all Homura would have to say is that Walpurgisnacht is coming and Mami's heroic nature would drive her to fight the witch, without Homura having wrangle any deals than with a more self-serving girl.
    • What would be the point? Mami never makes it to the Walpurgis battle anyway. The only timeline where she actually survived the month was the first one, and in that one, Sayaka didn't become a magical girl and didn't witch out so she never found out the truth about Soul Gems, and she still died long before Madoka did. The only magical girls to survive to the end of the month are Homura and Madoka, so once Mami made it clear she wasn't going to cooperate, Homura wrote her off. She even says "This witch isn't like the others" in an effort to warn her, but Mami shuts her down; considering how many times a similar event must have played out for Homura in other timelines, it makes sense that she'd just give up on saving Mami. Sayaka was heading down the path to becoming a magical girl and Mami was too hostile to listen; better that Mami should be killed in battle than commit murder-suicide later on.
  • Homura might've said more had the conversation progressed, but Mami was very quick to immobilize her (the pacing on the scene portrays it as basically a surprise maneuver, especially as neither girl had transformed. Given that Homura wasn't given the same "avoid magic" warning as Mami, I assumed that Homura not transforming was supposed to be an equivalent to dropping your weapons to show that you aren't hostile). When Homura saw that Mami was already that distrustful of her that early in the timeline, she was likely hesitant to give any details on Charlotte on the grounds that either Mami wouldn't believe her or she'd be suspicious of how she got the information - and as Mami and Kyuubey were still cordial at that point, Homura didn't want Kyuubey to know too much about her foreknowledge.

• I thought Sayaka was Madoka's best friend, Not Homura. That poor girl just can't get a break. Homura seems equally fixed on Madoka as well, thinking of Madoka as her only friend. She and Mami were friends in the first three timelines, but after that...
  • It could be that because in those previous timelines, Madoka already was contracted by Kyubey and was probably felt separated from Sayaka due to the consequences of being a magical girl. She probably was close to Homura because she inadvertently stepped into their 'world' of sorts. Notice after Homura kills Kyubey before he gets Madoka, Madoka isn't as close to her, especially when Homura emotionally shuts herself away.]]
  • Madoka only calls Homura her best friend after she becomes omniscient. People are allowed to change their minds when faced with new knowledge, especially when that knowledge is of somebody who loves you enough to repeat hell just for you.
    • Then again, you can always have more than one best friend...
    • That's true, Madoka has just realized how hard Homura has been fighting for her sake, as she says immediately before making that declaration.

• So why is Kyouko around in the third timeline? In the only other timeline where she appears (the current one), it's a result of Mami dying, but Mami is alive and kicking in the third timeline.
  • I think that it was more than Mami that made her that interested in that place. Notice that Sayaka got contracted in that timeline? My bet is that Kyouko was wandering around the world, possibly looking for a new area to hunt witches. While she was passing through that place, she saw Sayaka.You can probably tell what happens next...◊
  • Don't forget, Mami, Kyouko, and Homura all knew about Walpurgis Night, and the scene where Mami kills Kyouko indicates they had already talked about it. It's likely they had called her in to help against it; that would be in character for Mami, and Walpurgis was the one witch Kyouko had shown an interest in killing without mentioning a Grief Seed.
  • First point of divergence, when Homura shows up. Second point of divergence, Madoka. What we're seeing is the world where Mami "lost it" in episode 10, but now she has hope (and Madoka). In "mainline", Mami and Kyouko are in the waiting room (or maybe lounge) for the next world (notice how Kyouko just pops into existence when the camera isn't looking). The only constant in the universe(s) (besides Madoka) is Homura (who created many of them if not all). She's doing the whole eternal champion thing.
  • In The Different Story and the PSP Portable game, Kyouko shows up in Mitakihara Town, even in routes where Mami lives, ostentibly to look for new hunting territory but really to check up on Mami. In the Mami route, Mami catches her in town and the two get into an argument with Kyouko going back to Kasamino City without meeting Madoka and Homura. Its possible that the same scenario occurred outscreen in timeline 1 and 2, and maybe 4 which is why we dont see Kyouko, maybe only staying long enough to get noticed when Sayaka contracts.

• So do the Yakuza and the Godzilla Defense Force ever start noticing that their weapons stockpiles are running suspiciously thin? Does Homura keep every weapon she's ever stored in Hammerspace for all the timelines like a New Game Plus scenario since I'm pretty sure that all those RPGs in the ending would be missed by those who owned them in the first place.
  • You're probably right, but the show isn't called Yakuza Chronicles: The Missing Arms Stockpile.
  • Even if they notice, if their weapons just disappeared and even security cameras didn't record any more than "puff, they're gone", they can't do anything about it. And since it's a massive pile of weaponry, they wouldn't think a schoolgirl is responsible for stealing them.
  • It would be fairly noticeable if Homura obtains her weaponry in the short window of time (albeit which for her, can last as long as she needs it to) while the locker is open, as she seems to, instead of finding some way to pick the lock.

• Hold on a second, Madoka supposedly has the a shit load of power, right? and Kyubey has to grant any wish. so what would happen if Madoka wished for A: Witches not to exist, or B: kyubey not to exist? Would he (be able to) grant that wish?
  • Isn't A exactly what she wished for? And Kyubey said her wish was "treason against the wish itself" but he was forced to grant it anyway. The latter point would have also been granted as later in the episode Madoka disappeared from existence and her wish was still intact. so Kyubey would have likely been able to grant it, but Madoka isn't spiteful enough to make that wish. She knows the incubators have been a boon to human civilization and they are trying to do what they think is right. So she reworked their game rather than erasing them all.
  • Kyubey is a telepath who has no problem with entering girls' minds, as revealed in episode 2 and further hammered in during episode 11. (It also can just outright edit contents of their brains, as there is no other possible explanation for Madoka's temporary loss of all memories of Homura in episode 8). We can safely bet that it mindscans all the girls regularly. Even if it has to grant a wish - which is not actually confirmed - it will know if a wish is going to be harmful to the Incubators, and simply won't be there to grant it. Particularly true in Madoka's case, as it visited her right before she went to save Homura, when Madoka almost certainly knew what she's going to wish for. The idea that the ending didn't go Exactly as Planned by Kyubey is based on the assumption that Kyubey ever told the girls the true extent of its plans. This is far from a given, when we talk about a being notorious for omitting parts of the truth it isn't directly asked about. As about its motive for changing the system, even assuming that the Incubators have no ethics whatsoever, consider, that its race is supposed to think and plan forward on the scale of billions of years and most likely intends to exist for infinity. However, their current way of generating energy from nothing is inherently risky. Even if the risk of accidentally producing a witch capable of actually threatening the Incubators is infinitesimal, it is not zero. It cannot be assumed to be zero, because they are playing with power they do not fully understand. The main timeline Kyubey should be particularly aware of this, as he has an example of a magical girl capable of screwing with space-time on the universal scale right before him. In fact, had Madoka made any other wish, the entire universe would have been in in peril. Of course her actual wish also meant that the main-timeline Kyubey is going to cease to exist and be recreated, so at the moment of wishmaking itself it is distressed (unless it just failed to pick the correct tone of voice, or wanted Madoka to think she won). Once the wish is done, it becomes calm and contemplative again, even as it witnesses literal end of the universe.
    • I think you're making a massive misinterpretation of events in Episode 8. Madoka had a moment of realisation, that Homura knew her from before their "meeting" in Episode 1, but was more concerned with Sayaka's wellbeing than pressing the issue further.

• This is probably just a factual mistake, but why is it that Kyouko's father was allowed to continue to use the church building after the (presumably Roman Catholic) church excommunicated him for his "heretical" ideas? Wouldn't the church heirarchy have simply appointed a new priest for the church in his place instead of letting him take over the building and scattering their parishoners elsewhere?
  • Privately owned?
  • Maybe the ruined church was built or acquired after he got his followers from Kyouko's wish.
  • Going with the above, his new followers might have paid for the church's construction.
  • This troper always assumed that Fr. Sakura simply wasn't a Catholic priest, but a Christian minister, given that he is married with children (you know, Catholic priests have that celibacy thing). Also, there are a lot of Christian denominations with different ideas about Christ and Christianity so him having a 'different' approach in his church (thus his own Christian denomination) is not so strange.
    • Considering the slight alternate reality thing that the Madoka Magica world has going on, with how advanced their society is and how a lot of important female historical figures are magical girls, some of the rules in the religious branch Kyokos father was in may have been different. i.e. the Church in their universe doesn't have rules on celibacy or having families despite being ordained. So the distinction between priest and minister may be a bit more negligible in their case.
  • Artistic license aside, it's also hard to swallow the Sakura family's misfortune after Kyouko's father was excommunicated. He could have always joined a more receptive branch of Christianity or started his own church. This troper has seen the latter happen quite often (OK, maybe not in Japan).
    • Maybe his new ideas included something radical that people are very likely to revolt against, like polygamy or theocracy?
    • We only have Kyouko's word for it that her father was ordained at all. It's entirely possible that 'Father Sakura' was actually the leader of a cult, and after having been raised in it, Kyouko doesn't know the difference.

• So, exactly when does Oriko Magica take place before the anime. It was pretty easy to follow, until Homura showed up. The whole time travel element to the story kind of screws with my attempts to place it on a timeline.
  • Well, if we assume there are only five timelines overall before Madoka's wish, then it's either Timeline 4 or Timeline 5 because it's not Moemura. Since she and Madoka are on chatty-friendly terms with Hitomi and Sayaka, it's not Timeline 5. If we have 5+ timelines and a buttload were simply not shown, then somewhere between four and five. On the OTHER HAND, the promo of the manga describes it as "the paths of Magical Girls never meant to cross", so it's possible this "Oriko Timeline" is entirely aberrant. Does this help?

• Homura's heart disease. Common Knowledge takes that she cured that with her eyes in the 4th loop, but I doubt it. Restorative magic implies restore the state to a previous point of time; and Homura's heart disease is likely to be congenital, as the case usually be, so there's no such a previous time point that her heart can possible be without deformity...
  • She's a Magical Girl AKA a fucking immortal zombie/lich thing that is pretty much a magically animated meat puppet. She doesn't even NEED her heart anymore.
    • Your answer does not align well with the fact she still needs to use the Soul Gem to cure her eyes. Based on what you said, her eyes should have been healed when she got the Soul Gem. In my opinion, even Soul Gem would heal injuries and attenuate pain, it cannot force the holder to go beyond the physical constraints of the holder.
    • The functionality of your eyes has nothing to do with being able to live. All Kyubey told us that their new state does is make it so they can regenerate from any injury, and will remain alive as long as their Soul Gem exists. The way you're trying to interpret things is purely fanfiction and has no basis in anything. The girls are zombies. They don't really need any part of their bodies because magic will keep them going one way or another; on top of this, it also filters out their pain to a degree that they can shrug it off for the most part (or not feel pain entirely at the cost of body-soul reaction lag).
    • Zombies Liches still need eyes to see through. As we witnessed with Sayaka, just because the girls are liches doesn't mean they don't need their bodies. The heart disease isn't going to threaten her because the implied regenerative properties of the Soul Gem should prevent it from being able to progress any further. Her eyes are actively inhibiting her ability to fight, and have a previous state they can be restored to that would resolve this problem, so she resolved it. They're two completely separate issues.
  • "Fixing" the eyes of a person who requires glasses at a young age isn't a matter of repairing damage or restoring to an earlier point; the eye trouble is far more likely to be genetic than the heart condition. Meanwhile her athletic performance in the first episode implies that she's at pretty much the peak of human ability. I interpreted taking off the glasses to mean that she'd altered her body to optimal functionality, removing eye conditions, heart troubles, any trace diseases, and any excess fat, and increasing muscle mass, immune response, and nerve conductivity all at once. Heart condition or no, someone who just got out of the hospital without serious physical therapy isn't going to be setting any region-wide records without magical alteration.
  • Of course she has to fix her eyes. Her heart doesn't need to work anymore because it's being kept alive by magic, but your eyes don't use a biological process to absorb light, she's just correcting her astigmatism and letting her eyes work like normal, just like her heart. Also, re: the hospital, magical girls would be the exception. Since a magical girl's body is basically a construct being remote-operated by a soul gem, things like atrophy and anemia become irrelevant; Homura can break statewide records because she's operating on several years' worth of muscle memory and practice.
  • Who says she's restoring her body to its previous limits, or to a state they were at an earlier point in time? Healing magic usually involves restoring the body to an ideal state, not a previous one.
    • Yes, in any standard Magical Girl series, that would be the case. Here, though, I doubt it's restoring it to an "ideal" state without them actively trying to change it. But it doesn't matter because their magic will keep their bodies going anyway, so at most having an ill body will just mean some extra expenditure of magic (or horrible death at the hand of a witch if the illness kicks in at the wrong time). Also, some heart diseases don't kill you outright but simply make it so that your body can't function as well as it normally would, and that is not a problem for a magical girl.
    • Actually, we have proof that healing is done by restoring the body to an ideal state and not a previous one: Homura fixes her eyes so she doesn't need glasses, which means either: A) she's had poor vision since birth or B) she developed a vision problem as a child and got corrective lenses. If her healing magic was a product of turning back the clock on a specific part of her body to a point when they worked correctly, they would shrink. Even if it was only by a couple of millimeters, they wouldn't fit properly in her eyesockets.
    • That's not really proof, more of a speculation about something the specifics of which are unknown to us. It might be restoring it to an ideal state, or it might be "just" healing and being able to change details like their vision if they use more power, or it might be something else entirely. So no, we don't have proof.
    • How do you figure? The word "restoring" literally means returning something to a state it previously was, so if Homura was using time magic to return her eyes to a point that they were previously (something that she has never been even suggested to be able to do, since she can only stop time temporarily or restart the 30-day time loop) she would be making parts of herself physically younger. There's no question that she heals her eyes in some fashion, and all the magical girls have the capability to at least freshen a corpse by using magic to keep it from rotting, which is what their Soul Gems basically do for their undead bodies anyway. The question here is whether her healing magic works by restoring her body to a previous state, and there is a bucket of evidence that this is not the case.
    • I figure because each of their powers works with its own rules, and that the character calls something "restoring" because she thinks of it as of restoration does not mean it really works that way. And there is no confirmed info about it, so the best we have are guesses and speculations of characters; sure, sometimes those speculations make a lot of sense and might very well be right, but there's no proof of that. And yes, I don't think that her "healing" really restores her body to a previous state, but what you said before is that "we have proof that healing is done by restoring the body to an ideal state" and there is no proof whatsoever of that being the case. And when you get into powers that work however they want, there are more than just two ways for "healing" powers to work. Not to even mention the fact that you are using an English word as a proof, when said word is only a translation from a Japanese word with more meanings than just the one you see. So, to sum it up: I am not saying that you are definitely wrong, but rather am pointing out that you aren't definitely right either and that the proof you think you have isn't really there and we can at most speculate.
    • Alright, if basic biology isn't good enough proof: all of Homura's time-related abilities are controlled by her sand timer (she stops it for her time-freeze ability and turns it upside down to restart the timeline), but she uses her soul gem to fix her eyes without transforming. Since we know her time powers affect reality as a whole whenever they're used (ie, she can't rewind time only a few minutes or alter the flow of time in a limited area) and we know that healing and object reinforcement are magic abilities that all Magical Girls have (as Mami, Kyouko, and Sayaka all display at least one of these abilities at some point in the series) we can infer that Homura's magic cannot be used to revert a single object to a state in which it previously existed and her healing magic works the same way as everyone else's.
  • Let's not forget: nobody in the canon ever once referred to Homura's eye-fixing as restorative magic. That's a fandom convention, so trying to base a whole debate on the spell's mechanics via the semantics of that one word is sort of futile.

• In episode 2, Mami explained that if you didn't clean your Soul Gem, it will become dull and dirty. No one was the least bit of curious to ask what would happen after that? Did everyone just assume that you can't use your magic anymore? All of this could have been avoided if they just asked the question that should have came hand-in-hand with that explanation.
  • As a viewer, I had assumed that you just couldn't use magic anymore, so I'm guessing that's what the girls thought too.
  • I wondered the same thing for the longest time. The fact that a Grief Seed of all things, cleans the darkness and can USE (to regenerate the witch) when a Soul Gem can't, says a lot to me.
  • Remember, back in the early part of the story, the girls along with some of viewers thought that they were in a regular Magical Girl show with the Soul Gem as a Transformation Trinket and Kyubey as the helpful Mentor Mascot recruiting them to Savethe World from evil monsters. The girls most likely did think that the Soul Gem's brightness served as a mana meter and that they wouldnt be able to use magic once it got dark. If it was life-threatening, then surely Kyubey would warn them about it. Of course, Kyubey couldn't care less about their lives and well-being except for the amount of energy they give him and his job is to turn them into monsters. Once the Awful Truth about the Soul Gems came out though, that definitely should have sent alarm bells ringing into the girls' heads, considering that it's their SOULS that has been dimming all this time, yet rather than further inquire into this they wait until Sayaka turns into a witch to find out about dark Soul Gems turning into Grief Seeds.
  • Well, if asked, Kyubey would probably answer something like "If your Soul Gem becomes too dirty, you are going to eventually die", which is technically true. Even if turning into a witch doesn't qualify as dying, this witch getting sooner or later killed by some another Puella Magi does. And such an answer would probably satisfy any curiosity.
  • After her first fight, Sayaka even asked Kyubei how important was that she purify her soul gem and what would happen if she didn't. Kyubei just said that she won't be able to use her magic "as she please" and therefore she won't be able to ever beat Kyoko. He quite clearly implied that Kyoko is so powerful because she harvests and uses a lot of grief seeds from witches which supposedly makes her magic more powerful every time. But of course if Sayaka have possibly persuaded Madoka into becoming a magical girl, defeating Kyoko would be a piece of cake...

• In episode 11, we learn that Sayaka has been missing since the twelfth. What. According to this, it would mean that:
  • April 4th: Sayaka contracts with Kyubey.
  • 12th: I'll assume "missing" to mean that Sayaka stopped showing up at home for some reason, yet continues to go to school.
  • 16th: Sayaka fights Kyoko.
  • 18th: Sayaka finds out that Kyosuke was released from the hospital. She almost visits him at home. The truth about soul gems is revealed. Sayaka later confronts Kyubey. Sayaka has been "missing" for six days at this point, so this scene most likely does not take place at her home.
  • 19th: Sayaka skips school. It is implied that this is the first time she does so. Sayaka has been "missing" for a week at this point, so she is not at home, yet Kyoko finds her. Where is Sayaka staying?
  • 20th: Sayaka returns to school and Hitomi delivers her ultimatum. At night, Sayaka battles Elsa Maria.
  • 21st: Madoka searches for Sayaka, and learns that Sayaka has not returned home since the last night. The fact that Sayaka has already been missing for nine days to begin with is not mentioned. What.
  • 27th or 28th: Sayaka becomes a witch.
  • 28th or 29th, the following day: Kyoko sacrifices herself to kill Sayaka.
  • 29th or 30th, the following day: Sayaka's body is found in a hotel room most likely procured by Kyoko after Sayaka became a witch. Sayaka's body is buried.
    • It might be a mistranslation of "missing for twelve days", which would fit if she disappeared some time in the night of the 18th and is found on the 30th.
    • The translation I saw said the 22nd, which fits in well. I think the linked calendar is just misinformed?
    • (OP) So it's a simple mistake due to a mistranslation. That makes sense.
    • (OP again) It seems that the linked timeline has been altered since this Headscratcher was written. Now Sayaka disappearing on the 12th makes perfect sense.
• A defeated Witch drops a Grief Seed. The Grief Seed is a corrupted version of the Soul Gem the Witch had as a Puella Magi. Kyoko claims that Familiars can "mature" into Witches, wherupon they too will drop Grief Seeds. Where would the Soul Gems for these Grief Seeds come from? Soul Cloning? For that matter, what would happen if a male familiar, like Oktavia's Holger, matured? Would it become a Witch?
  • Based on the information presented to us: biological reproduction with a magical twist. A Familiar is a newborn Witch. There are no "male" or "female" Familiars, as Witches reproduce asexually. They may look like what we would think of as male or female, but they have no gender. Their Grief Seeds come from the same place that the souls for any other form of new life comes from.
    • I think what you mean is that they have no biological sex. Some familiars do appear to have gender identities - the Gotz, for instance, are described as "idiotic men". Also, Candeloro's familiars are supposed to be (twisted, subservient) copies of Madoka and Kyouko, and Oktavia's Klarissa's are obvious callbacks to Hitomi, although in those cases it's not clear whether they view *themselves* as girls or not.
  • Familiars grow up into perfect clones of their mother Witch. Therefore they grow Grief Seeds identical to the Grief Seeds of their mother. Since they mature by killing a buttload of people, it's apparently forged directly out of the grief of it's victims. Conversely, a Witch's Grief Seed becomes more valuable (able to absorb more grief) by killing people, so it seems a Witch can empty it's Grief Seed. It's all about how hope and despair have to balance out.

• Is the whole show a vicious Take That! at Pretty Cure? It's very similar in formula to it out of any other Magical Girl show, just...much darker. But then again, one of the VA's from that is in here, so... (I haven't seen past the first two eps of Magica, so I could be wrong.)
  • It's a Take That! at the entire genre; it's just that Pretty Cure is just so goddamn formulaic that it pretty much hits every note that Madoka is deconstructing.
  • No, it's a love letter to Magical Girl Warrior core ideas, that also takes some shots at some of its overused supplementary tropes. And half the seasons of Pretty Cure would be almost as dark if their actual plot is condensed to twelve episodes and they are not marketed as Pretty Cure (so that it would be possible to sucker the audience into expecting a Downer Ending).

• So what exactly is the unidentified substance that darkens a Soul Gem and must be transferred to a Grief Seed? And why do Grief Seeds have a limited number of 'uses'?
  • It's basically Grief. The darker magic and energy born of magical exhaustion and negative emotion; in the Puella Magi universe, the hope and despair created by magic have to balance out to 0. As for why the Grief Seeds have limited uses: If they get too full, the seed hatches back into the Witch it was before.
    • (not OP) I'm going to assume the Witch becomes more powerful on every iteration, right? Otherwise you just need one witch eternally for soul purifying purposes. ~~~
    • Also a different troper: I don't think that's true. The Incubators are way too efficient to pass up a respawning witch like that. I was under the impression that a Grief Seed has a max capacity the same way a Soul Gem does. Witches expend magic in combat just like a Magical Girl does, but regain their power through killing people and (presumably) absorbing their grief/their souls. Cleansing a Soul Gem with a Grief Seed is just refilling it with Grief, and once full, Kyubey eats it because being dead, it has no body to act with, and so can't expend anymore magic to deplete it again. Filling a Grief Seed to its limit is the end-product of the Incubators' Witch System.
    • Actually, Kyuubey confirms that Grief Seeds can turn back into witches in episode 6 when Sayaka used a Grief Seed for the first time. Sayaka: "It turned black..." Kyuubey: "It's dangerous now. If you taint it any further, a witch might hatch."
    • Well yeah, it'll hatch into a witch, that's not being questioned here, it's the respawn part. A grief seed can hatch into a witch once it's full, but that just means it has to be defeated, which empties it, and filled with grief again, so it's not actually gaining anything for the Incubators to let a grief seed hatch over and over.

• How exactly did Homura fight and defeat Charlotte? As her shield is not present at all during that entire sequence, even in the DVD version her shield is not present. Just a production error?
  • It's entirely possible that it was just her dodging with the physical power innately given upon becoming a Puella Magi. Then the bombs she left where she was standing did the rest.
  • If she was dodging with her own abilities (which would be amazing) that doesn't explain where the bombs came from. As we saw in episode 10, her shield is a hammerspace closet. It's likely a production error.
  • All the Puellas can make their weapons appear and dissapear out of nowhere(Both Mami and Sayaka with multiple muskets and cutlasses). Maybe Homura was abusing that ability constantly.
  • Confirmed in episode 10. Homura has no other powers besides stopping time and storing items in her shield. She had to physically take the weapons and place them in her shield. I doubt Sayaka had dozens of swords lying around.
    • Why does everybody keep saying that? Homura has plenty of magic powers, she's just very careful about using them. She has the purple energy bolts she attacks Kyubey with when we first see her, her time-stop and her infinite-space buckler, and then the normal healing/reinforcement magic that all the girls seem to have, and then her parakinesis that she uses on the fuel truck and giant SHAFT missile launchers against Walpurgisnacht.
    • Also, her buckler can produce a larger energy-shield, as seen in the first episode 'dream'.

• What exactly is this thing◊ that appears before the prologue. Even now, long after the show's ended, it just seems like a Red Herring to get people speculating.
  • It's Kriemheld Gretchen.
    • Agreed. Compare to this◊ and this◊.

• Why don't any of the characters find Kyubey the slightest bit unusual? This is a world with very real animals, so something like Kyubey would at least raise a few eyebrows, especially since it can TALK. In any other Magical Girl anime, the Weasel Mascot is reacted to very noticably, especially when they see that it can talk, but in this case, no one bats an eye, especially Madoka, who protects this potentially rabid, unidentified animal simply because it's hurt.
  • The witches are also fairly strange, especially in comparison to other Magical Girl monsters. Perhaps they assume he's one of the many supernatural creatures they're dealing with.
    • Maybe, but by then Madoka and Sayaka hadn't encountered any. They found Kyubey injured, protected him from Homura, and then got caught in a barrier.
    • Madoka was contacted telepathically and by that point had already had a precognitive dream, and Sayaka asks if Kyubey were a stuffed animal. Look, when something talks and offers you wishes, you tend to just assume it's not a normal animal.
    • Actually, his appearance of being cute and the like may have been what caused them to immediately help him, which just leads to some more Fridge Horror.
  • I'm guessing deja vu.

• How did Kyouko's father find out about her wish? This is the only case of someone who does not ever form a contract with Kyubey finding out about the wish, and the only time besides Madoka's wish that the wish's beneficiary finds out about the wish. Kyouko's narration also doesn't mention an explanation, so I have to wonder- is there a reason why her father found out, or does she know?
  • It's implied that she came forward with it herself in order to make him proud of her. It's also possible he caught her fighting a witch and asked WTF was goin' on.
    • The latter seems more likely, since (at least in the manga), she says the "truth came to light," which would imply that somehow, he found out by some way other than her own admission.
    • Confirmed by The Different Story spinoff. A witch came to the Sakura church and Kyoko's father saw her fight it.

• After Mami's death, why didnt it occur to Madoka to just wish her back to life? I mean, there's a genie hanging around her who states it can grant any wish she desires. And its never mentioned by Kyubey that resurrection was impossble. I can understand why Sayaka didnt since she probably was saving her wish for Kyosouke who she has a crush on but there was nothing preventing Madoka especially since she was deeply affected by Mami's death. Her reluctance to make a wish would've been understandable after the reveal of the Awful Truth but until then there was nothing stopping her. Also it seems rather out of character for Kyubey not to use this to his advantage to coerce Madoka into becoming a Puella Magi to bring Mami back given that he spends the rest of the series pressuring her to make a contract when things are about to go wrong.
  • Probably because you can't bring someone dead back to life, but screwing with time if fine. Future Diary worked the same way.
    • Because Madoka's not stupid enough to throw her life away for a friendly acquaintance she's only known for two days that's going to die in some other fight anyway. Madoka's not stupid; if she's going to sell her life she's going to get the bang for her buck.
    • Yes she is (Well, far too kind is a better term than stupid, but still). In the first timeline she became a magical girl by wishing to save a cat.
  • I see it as Madoka being unwilling to make the contract for 'any' wish at all, even reviving Mami, who I'm sure she was attached to (even given the short time span they were together). Remember that she understands Mami died a horrible death because she was a Puella Magi, and it was exactly the event which caused her to rethink making the contract. She simply didn't want to die with the dangerous job of being a Puella Magi, just like Mami did.
  • I think Kyubey might have been hoping Madoka and/or Sayaka would, on the spur of the moment, make a contract with him to revive Mami (and thus be able to fight and save their own lives), just like Mami had been forced to make a contract to ensure that she survived the car accident, since immediately after Mami is eaten, he tells them to make a contract with him. Then again, perhaps if it were that simple to revive the dead, Homura could just have asked to bring Madoka back from the dead as an ordinary human in the original timeline. Problem solved.
    • That wouldn't have fit Homura's desires, though. It's more than just making sure Madoka lives; it's also to prevent her suffering, growing stronger to protect her, and making sure Madoka doesn't just sacrifice herself to save someone else like...the next day.
  • It never occurred to her that it would be possible. Charlotte went through the same thing: she became a magical girl wishing she could share one last cheesecake with her dying mother, and when it actually came true and she got a single cheescake, she falls to despair realizing that she could have wished for her mother to get better. By the time she came to understand the magnitude of the wishes Kyubey is capable of granting, she'd already seen enough of the system to realize that Mami dying was still better than the alternative. For Madoka, bringing back a single person, knowing so many others are still suffering so much, would be unthinkable... which is why the wish she finally makes doesn't leave anybody out.
  • She might have made that wish, except that Homura stepped in in time and defeated the witch, and then Madoka's train of thought shifted from Mami to Homura.

• Sayaka's witch form is a mermaid, Kyoko's magical weapon is a harpoon spear, make of that what you might. Also, in the episode Kyoko took Sayaka down with her, the episode-end guest-image is a Cat Girl Kyoko.
  
  ...no, I don't get it. Can someone please explain what's so homoerotic about this?
  • Presumably someone reading too much into it. Dying together is probably the obvious one, but also spear fishing, the symbolism of the "spear" (as contrasted on this wiki with the distaff in an unrelated trope), and finally, how cats eat fish, with all the...other meanings fraught in that verb choice. It makes more sense if you start with the conclusion and look backwards for details to support it, rather than the more usual converse.
    • I will tell you when you are older.

• Why does the suicidal woman Mami saves in Episode 2 look so much like Madoka's mother (the only major differences are that her hair is longer and she wears a vest instead of a blazer)? The only other indicator that she isn't Madoka's mother is that Madoka doesn't say anything to the effect of "That's my mother!"
  • Speculation time: it initially WAS going to be Madoka's mother, but the production team decided that it would cause too many problems down the line so they made a couple last minute changes.
    • The hell are you going on about? They look NOTHING ALIKE. They're both women in business suits? Ooooh that only describes every woman in the Japanese workforce.
    • In the original TV version, the woman had reddish brown hair, making her look quite similar to Madoka's mother in a ponytail. Likely the confusion is the reason why they changed her hair to black for later releases.

• When Kyouko is facing off against Oktavia, and Homura steps in, why didn't she ask her for help in defeating her, rather than giving a full on Heroic Sacrifice?
  • The necessity of the Heroic Sacrifice itself is very debatable. It looked less like something she had to do, and more like something she wanted to do, especially based on her words to Sayaka as she performed it. The idea was that Kyoko killed herself with Sayaka so that Sayaka wouldn't have to die alone; a small-scale form of Madoka's wish. Asking Homura to help her kill Sayaka would certainly have prevented Kyoko from dying, but that would be counterintuitive to what Kyoko was trying to accomplish after her attempt to save Sayaka failed.

• Okay, this isn't really a plot hole or mistake, just an ambiguity I'm curious about: what would happen if you got an insta-kill shot on a magical girl? Like, decapitation, or even vaporization, with the soul gem intact. Would that destroy the body/soul link and send them into stasis? Would their soul gem try to repair the damage and turn into a witch? If the link was already broken (e.g., by reaching the distance limit) when you destroyed their flesh, would there be any way to wake up the magical girl?
  • According to Kyubey, as long as the soul gem is alright, the magical girl is immortal and can keep fighting. Interpret as you please.
  • Word of God also has it that if a magical girl who doesn't know the Awful Truth about Soul Gems dies, they'll witch out instantly from the despair of dying.
  • Could also depend on whether or not they saw it coming. A head-on blast would probably lead to "despair of dying" instawitch, but if they got vaporized from behind before their nervous system could process the damage, it might be a while. Sayaka's example indicates that soul gems separated from bodies aren't conscious/aware/feeling during that time (though that would probably change as the separation continued), so they might not be in a position to realize what happened and feel despair at first. Regardless, even without a body to maintain I assume the soul would have to expend magic to sustain itself overtime, so even if the girl didn't regain consciousness, she would still probably become a Witch unless she could restore her body first.

• Here's something I don't quite get: The general consensus seems to be that Homura can't use magical attacks (which is why she has to use firearms), yet the very first episode has her firing pink balls of energy at QB (and I don't think Homura can travel into the future to steal a plasma rifle). There's also this scene in Episode 9 where Homura tried to kill Sayaka before she could become a witch. She didn't pull out a gun, she was more likely trying to blast Sayaka's head off with another pink energy ball, after which she would've most likely destroyed her Soul Gem.
  • My theory: She doesn't use firearms because she can't use magical attacks, she uses them instead of her magical attacks. From what I can see in episode 1, her magical attacks seem to be pretty weak (one direct hit didn't blow a hole through QB like a bullet did later), and she doesn't seem to be able to stop time and fire her energy balls at the same time. The latter is probably the reason why she only uses her magical attacks as to not reveal her true powers to QB: Her "timestop followed by massive firepower"-combo is so powerful that she never bothered using anything else. Too bad Walpurgis seems to have massive damage reduction...
  • Another theory: She used her time-magic to advance the explosives to a point in time in the future when they're either in the midst of exploding or so far in the past that they're pure energy. Her using her powers like this also explains how she could control the truck in Episode 11- restore the engine to a time it's running, the wheel to a time when it's turning this way or that... The truck even glows the same color as the energy pellets. As for Sayaka's soul gem, she might have been planning on crushing it in her hand or something.
  • My theory: The writer couldn't think of a better way to keep her powers a secret and still have her actually DO SOMETHING. Episode 10 seemed to make it pretty clear that she can only stop time and store bombs and guns in her sand timer/disc thing, and Word of God states that he didn't think the mechanics of her disc all the way through.
  • Another possibility: Homura does have magic attacks, though possibly weak ones, but she chooses to use firearms instead for efficiency. Given how powerful they have turned out, how using magic depletes the Soul Gem more quickly than just the background power draw to stay alive, and how Homura wants to last as long as possible in case she needs to reset the loop again, keeping magic use to a minimum would be wisest. There is no indication that she comes back with a full Soul Gem, and given that she is a magical girl from the first timeline in the second, it's quite possible that her Soul Gem is what actually gets sent back to the beginning of the loop, meaning draining it would make the next timeline that much harder.
  • Homura does have magic attacks. Why does everybody forget the first episode? Even if you ignore that, becoming a magical girl doesn't mean you get attack magic, you get magic that allows you to fight witches. Mami doesn't have magic matchlock rifles, she has magic ribbons that she forms into rifles. Most of them seem to have straightforward attacks and weapons, but there are a few that require more creative applications. Homura is one of them.
    • Adding to this, it's canonical that you can learn magic beyond what you originally got from your wish. Pretty much all of Kyouko's magic is stuff she probably was forced to teach herself once her original illusion magic disappeared, Mami had to learn to make shit out of her ribbons to get the rifles. Sayaka figured out how to make platforms in midair to jump between, a skill that has nothing to do with healing people and thus probably didn't come with her wish. Homura might have been restricted to her magic shield hax for the first few timelines but she's clearly picked up new tricks since.

• A tiny question: The hospital that Homura is hospitalized in, is it the same hospital that Kyousuke Kamijou resides in as well, or is it a different hospital altogether?
  • The PSP game implies it's the same hospital, but that the two never cross paths unless Homura deliberately does so.

• Where on earth are Sayaka's parents? They supposedly let Sayaka skip school, are always missing whenever we see her at home, and don't even get one mention or appearance until Sayaka's funeral!
  • The PSP game implies that Sayaka is a latchkey kid.

• Wouldn't the best possible path for Kyubei to approach the heat-death of the universe problem be to find an extremely powerful magical girl, and manipulate her into wishing that decay of energy would not happen? He's supposed to be coldly logical, but he's following a remarkably inefficient plan when the power he's exploiting surpasses all physics and logic.
  • This is kind of addressed; a girl's maximum energy output requires that she make a wish founded in emotional, earnest desire. The wishes that pay off best aren't the ones you sit down and think over, but the ones you've always wanted, and make without thinking it through. Also, what you're suggesting requires a girl powerful enough to rewrite the laws of physics. It might require more power than even Madoka had, and she was pretty much infinite. The decay of usable energy is a result of the process that allows events of any sort to take place in the universe, so using anyone short of Madoka could've granted the wish by permanently freezing time or something.

• Kyubey says he could grant any wish in episode two, but later he says that the extent of the wish depends on the girl's magical talent. So what happens when a girl wishes for something beyond her powers? Won't it be granted? Or is it impossible for her to even THINK of a wish which is too powerful?
  • It would probably be granted to the best of their ability. For instance, if someone tried to emulate Homura's wish and didn't have the potential to satisfy it, it might grant it by reviving Madoka with amnesia...
  • Or maybe the people who would wish something like that are the people with lots of despair in their life, so they will have enough power to grant it?
    • ...And now we have an excellent (yet fanon) reason as to why QB hunts for despairing girls.

• Kyubey says that he needs teenage girls to become witches because they are the most emotional beings and thus produce the most energy when they go beyond Despair Event Horizon. So after Godoka undoes the existence of witches altogether and the Incubators harvest the grief cubes from the wraiths, can't they leave the teenage girls alone and employ adult Magical Warriors instead? Letting teenage girls do the job seems pretty unnecessary now.
  • Magic and emotions are the same thing, remember; meaning that young girls are still the most magically powerful human candidates, and thus the best for gathering Grief Cubes. You also neglect that energy is released and collected by the forging of a contract (and also when the Witch transformation occurs).

• It's established that magical girls get a special magic based on their wish in addition to their weapon, i.e. Sayaka's healing, Mami's ribbons. What was Madoka's magic?
  • Not really an answer to your question, but healing seems to be a power all Magial Girls have in common (Mami heals Kyubey, Homura heals her eyes, Kyouko keeps Sayaka's body fresh); Sayaka is just ESPECIALLY good at it. So maybe Madoka is ESPECIALLY good at something that all Magical Girls can do to some extent.
  • In the Drama CD 1, she seems to be able to enhance Homura's physical performance during PE class, but it gets out of control. But what does it have to do with her wish to save the life of the black cat from the opening?
  • Magical girls seems to have the ability to enhance everything they want (Kyouko's telescope, Mami's spell on Sayaka's bat), but if we're to ask about Madoka's wish magic, we don't really have a clue. Though Madoka has a knack to make a wish that has something to do with happiness of others (in PSP game Madoka's wish in the second timeline is for her family to be always happy), so maybe she's an empath?
  • Possibly the powers aren't necessarily related to the wish. What have ribbons have to do with surviving a car accident?
    • According to Word of God, her wish was to "tie herself to life" hence the ribbons and Healing Hands
  • According to the PSP game, in actual gameplay Madoka's powers include especially powerful healing of other characters, including the ability to bring characters back from 0 HP. She also has the ability to SLIGHTLY PURIFY SOUL GEMS ON HER OWN, use less MP than other characters for the same actions, use 'purifying' powers that destroy enemies on the screen, "giving them peace" according to the description, and her arrow attacks are specifically based on an angelic Cupid motif. All of her attacks and abilities tie into her Messianic nature, even on the first timeline.

• Why doesn't Homura use her time-stopping powers to help her defeat witches as well as to move really fast? She could pause time and that would give her all the time in the world to find more weapons, recruit more magical girls, or even just keep firing away until the witch dies without having to take any hits herself. Hell, she could probably have defeated Walpurgisnacht this way without needing Madoka to contract.
  • There's a limit as to how often or how 'long' Homura can stop time for before her soul gem runs out of magic. You can see in the current timeline when Homura fights Walpurgisnacht she runs out of sand/magic (I forgot which), and would've had to go reset the timeline again if she didn't despair. I think Urobochi said she had 1 month worth of sand in her timer, but then again he also said he didn't think the timer's mechanics through.
    • Homura's shield works like a literal hourglass, so while there's still sand falling, she can block the flow and stop time along with it. The fight with Walpy ran too long, so the last of the sand was flowing into the bottom half, so there was no more flow to block, so she subsequently fell to despair and starting running out of magic, too, knowing the consequences of continuing to reset. (This also implies that, had Homura succeeded in saving Madoka without a world reset, she would've lost her timestop magic or needed to modify it somehow.)
  • Homura did try to use that technique, and what we saw is that, even if she fires the rounds, activates bombs and whatnot, she still needs to let time pass in order to have any effect.

• Grab your torches and pitchforks folks! Am I the only one who thinks that the fandom is reading much, much, much more into the yuri undertones than implied by the series? I think it's especially true for Sayaka × Kyoko; I watched the relevant episodes several times over now and I don't find anything homoerotic about them. It seems like people forget that platonic friendships between girls actually do exist, and to me, it seems to be the far more likely option (and of course the more boring to phantasize about). As for Homura × Madoka, yeah, I see how we get the idea, but frankly, not before the final episode. So tell me, is it just that The Power of Friendship is too boring to be discussed or am I Oblivious to Love?
  • This troper agrees 100%
  • Not to mention, the whole "yuri" thing obviously wasn't intended to be there in the first place. People seem to love missing the point and latching onto things that aren't there. Seriously fandom, take off your yuri goggles and smash them to bits. Thank you.
    • The entire show is girl's Declaration of Protection to the girl she loves that lasts for twelve episodes. If she had been a male character, there would be no question that his feelings for Madoka were romantic, and Madoka's apotheosis, where she leaves him behind with no reward but the memory of her existence, would see the fandom crown Bromura the High King of the Friend Zone and demonize Madoka into a joke, assuming they'd want her to live at all. It is hugely important to the themes of the story and the genre that Homura and Madoka are girls with intense-but-unrequited feelings for each other, and those feelings are explicitly stated to be love on Homura's part. You're welcome to your own opinions, but that's not a matter of opinion in this case; to say that something in a work "obviously unintentional" when it's literally the text of the work is nothing but willful and needlessly hateful ignorance.
    • Fuck off (person above me, not OP). People ship what they ship because of many different reasons. For the young girls who ship yuri, it's quite possible they ship it because they see themselves in the characters, and see the relationships as ones they themselves want. This troper latched onto any lesbian ship she could, even if it was just hinted at, because it made her feel normal and accepted, especially in a family/environment where she was told everything about her was wrong. Older yuri fans can easily see the potential of the ship- especially in things like the game, where they literally get married. The yuri undertones, even if they aren't put in on purpose, do exist, and to deny that they do is just ignorant. Plus, would you really sacrifice what equals 12 years of your life for someone who was just a 'friend,' and someone who you had known for less then a month (because Homura only knew Madoka for 3 weeks before everything happened. She goes back in time a full month, but she spends a week resting before she goes back to school. So 3 weeks)? The yuri is strong with Hodoka, even if it is just one sided.

As for Kyoko/Sayaka, I will agree that one is a bit more of a stretch, but the yuri is still strong in their final scene. Think about it this way: Kyoko knows that this giant, city destroying witch is coming, and her being alive to fight it would be the best thing possible. She would be saving multiple people, many of whom are people Sayaka cared about, she would get a huge reward out of it, and overall she'd be a hero. She would be honoring Sayaka by protecting the people she cared about, and personal gain would come as well. However, Kyoko decided that it was better for her to kill herself along with Sayaka, both because she didn't want to keep fighting without her and because she didn't want her to die alone. Again, for someone you've known for what, maybe just over a week, would you be willing to kill yourself just so they wouldn't have to die alone? That doesn't mean the feelings are mutual, it's more likely they're one sided, but again, to dismiss the fact that they're there is just ignorant.

• IMHO, in the case of Madoka Magica, the yuri undertones are not coming directly from the (canon) series itself but rather from the (non-canon) supplements and artworks around it; especially Kyou/Saya. Mado/Homu in episode 12 can easily be seen as Pseudo-Romantic Friendship (as they're middle school girls), and from here, it's easy to cross the line to Les Yay. Pseudo-Romantic Friendship is a very real phenomenon (it's very normal for girls in their early teenage years to hug and cuddle a lot) but as we grow out of the middle-school age, we tend to forget that and become more prone to see such behavior as lesbian. In the Yuri Fans' defense, I think most of them take their Shippings with a grain of salt and are perfectly aware that they're not even close to being canon.
  • I don't know about you, but latching onto your friend and declaring that they're not allowed to be interested in boys because "you're mine, mine mine!" crosses the Les Yay line pretty quickly.
• I Blame Society. Romantic love is always given the focus of any given media that is very easy to forget that other kinds of love exist, and most people resort to default to romantic any friendship, regardless of logic. So two friends that spend time together? They're in love. Brother and sister show they care about each other? Incest.
• Kyoko bled images of her and Sayaka in a heart shape, I don't think that counts as sub-text.
  • I just came back from watching The Movie; that image has been removed from it. Also when Godoka and Homura hug in Godoka's realm, the two are clothed, while they're nekkid in the TV show. Probably safe to assume that the creators want to tone down the yuriness. The new opening sequence looks pretty romantic, though.
  • Could be a case of censorship, depending on which version you watched.

• If Madoka became a witch, she would become the most powerful one in the world, and would destroy the earth (and probably her whole universe), but that also means she is undefeatable, so what's supposed to happen if she does destroy the world? Would she just spend eternity as this unkillable witch?
  • That's it exactly. She does, after all, have a Utopia inside herself to manage.
  • My guess: She destroys the world and "eats" all of humanity, and eventually starves to death.
    • Or depending on your interpretation of "absorbs all life into her barrier", she maintains civilization in a Lotus-Eater Machine (with some sort of negative side effect, probably) and feeds off just enough of the population to stay alive. Of course, even though Witches feed off of people, it's never made explicit that they actually have to in order to survive, so either way maybe she'd just be immortal.

• If Homura is trying to protect Madoka, then why the fuck does she keep leaving her alone when she's an absolute danger magnet?
  • Think about what she has to do. She has to steal new equipment, probably assassinate Kirika and Oriko, keep Kyubey away from Madoka as long as possible, kill witches that can deviate things outside of her scenarios, keep her soul gem clean on top of all that, and also save a certain kitty. Protecting Madoka's life isn't the problem; the problem is keeping her from contracting.

• So, if the Incubators just leave planets to their fate when their quota is reached, what do they if a witch starts getting too powerful that it might pose a huge danger to the rest of the universe like Madoka became in some of the cycles? For a species of aliens that are trying to prevent the death of the universe eons in the future, they seem more like they'll end up causing the death of all life in it far sooner.
  • The witches don't seem to care about what goes on outside their home planet.
  • We never hear anything about whether witches stay on one planet or not.
    • In the PSP game, the witch Itzli is supposedly from the other side of the galaxy, so apparently it's possible for some of them to travel from planet to planet.

• Why does Kyubey tell Homura why he figured out why Madoka would become so powerful is she became a magical girl. One would say it might to prevent her from resetting time, but he could just let her do that and odds are she'd either end as a witch or dead. Really it seems like the only reason he does that is exposition for the viewers.
  • And to push Homura into despair, creating another Witch to reap. Telling this information to Madoka also gives her incentive to contract in order to come to Homura's aid.
  • It might also serve to stop Homura from time-looping again. Kyubey's biggest problem with Homura was that he couldn't figure out how her powers worked, and once he realized she had time magic, he realized exactly what a problem her powers are: if she restarts time forever, the Incubators' plan can never be completed. One way or another, he'd have to eliminate Homura, and pushing her into witching out was the surest way.
  • It's to make Homura feel more helpless, and potentially witch out. Homura is trying to stop Kyuubei from doing something, so him telling her that he figured out something about her is equivalent to telling her that she is not as much in control as she would want to be.

• Why do witches hide in labyrinths anyways? It seems redundant to hide in an invisible Evil Lair when most people can't see them and don't even know they exist, and they only things that do know they exist can find them easily. Really, hiding seems pointless. There might some practical reasons to making sure nobody but magical girls know they exist, but witches don't seem intelligent enough to grasp them.
  • The labyrinths are (pale, messed-up) reflections of the witches' hearts and minds, so it's more like they just do it to try to grasp the wishes they gave their lives up for but really didn't get anyways.
  • So the real reason that Walpurgisnacht doesn't hide in a labyrinth is because it's combination of witches rather than simply being born from a magical girl?
    • I think only exceptionally powerful witches can ever break out of their labyrinths, like Walpurgis Night and Kriemhild Gretchen.
    • Isn't it canon that the random tree in the beginning of the series is an extension of her Labyrinth (or in this case, would-be barrier)? The weird place Madoka was in during the beginning of the dream is part of Walpurgris' Labyrinth. She does, after all, want to turn the world into a stage, so it's fitting that the world around her would become her Labyrinth.
    • Actually, normal people can see Witches. Jeanne manages to destroy a labyrinth in Tart Magica, and people do see the Witch herself before she defeats her.
    • That sounds more like a plot hole/continuity fail than a confirmation. In the series, we get people who are victims of witches, and none of them can actually see the witch in question unless they end up inside the labyrinth (even if they've been directly touched by a witch) and no one seems to be able to see familiars, either. Kyubey and Sayaka even camp out watching Charlotte's Grief Seed for around a whole hour in a very public place, and not only does no one notice either of them, no one sees the Grief Seed and there's no mention of what happens if a normal person happens to find one sitting around on the ground somewhere. Walpurgis is the only witch that makes itself plainly visible, but normal people can't see her and just assume she's a natural disaster.
    • Not really. As far as I'm aware there's no real evidence that humans can't see Witches. Walprugrisnacht probably just has the power to hide herself from humans. Or maybe witches can turn their Weirdness Censor off, but it's clear that humans are able to at least see Familliars.
  • Labyrinths don't seem to be a conscious decision on the Witch's part. Kyuubey implies in Rebellion that the formation of a barrier is the natural outcome of a blackened Soul Gem, not something designed or chosen. This somewhat matches what we saw of Oktavia: the barrier was much more fleshed-out on its second appearance, full of allusions to Sayaka's life as a human, than on the first, where it was just a distorted version of the train station where she transformed. This implies that the barrier formed pretty much automatically, so until she had time to 'decorate', it basically went super off-the-cuff with her immediate surroundings.

• So, I'm confused about the ending saying this a reconstruction and supposed to be uplifting, the final scene has Homura on her own in a Bolivian Army Ending out in the middle of a desert, implying she's killed, everyone else was killed, and that the magical girls fail against the demons. It feels like Gen couldn't resit dropping the depressing elements even when he's trying not to be depressing.
  • You're misunderstanding. That desert is only described as "Not Japan." It doesn't imply any sort of post-apocalyptic atmosphere at all; only that Homura walks the earth. She's protecting the whole world, not just one town.
  • Reconstruction? Nope. It's not necessarily a Downer Ending of any sort (assuming you take the series as a stand-alone and care not about the movies, in which case there's not head to scratch there because the 3rd movie expands on the ending and thus we know exactly what is happening), but remaking the universe once is not enough to reconstruct it, the situation they are all in is still grim, just not as grim as it was.

• Why does Kyubey still stick to young girls in the new timeline? Before he was doing that because he needed their despair when they became witches, now it doesn't seem like there is any reason and since he wants them to actually win, why doesn't he go making contracts with a bunch of commandos or something?
  • For the same reason he contracted them in the first place. The power of magic comes from emotions. According to Kyubey, young girls are the most emotionally volatile humans, both good and bad. Not just despair, but hope, crushes, joy over little things, etc. The wish has to be deep, heartfelt, and desperate.

• I don't get the spellings of "Kyoko," "Kyosuke," and "Kamijo." I thought they were spelled without the "u"s, but it seems that most people are spelling them as "Kyouko," "Kyousuke," and "Kamijou." So...what are the official spellings?
  • With the u's.
  • It depends on the romanization. The spelling 'Kyou' is a 1-to-1 mapping from 'きょう', where 'う' alone is a 'u', but in this combination indicates that the preceding vowel is long. 'Kyoko' is an alternative spelling of 'Kyōko' with the bar left out. A somewhat archaic spelling is 'Kyohko'. You can see the different spellings in the other wiki.
  • On the Japanese DVDs, Kyoko is spelled — with the English alphabet, mind — without the "u." Seems to be the official spelling.
    • English alphabet or not, it's spelled with the "u" in Japanese. What they wrote in English is just one of many possible transliterations. So all of the spellings (Kyouko/Kyohko/Kyoko, Kyousuke/Kyohsuke/Kyosuke, and Kamijou/Kamijoh/Kamijo) can be correct, but one simply has to be consistent and choose just one set.

• I don't even know how to categorize this, but: there's this scene in episode 5 with Madoka and Sayaka walking over a highway. Two lines of cars, perfectly horizontally aligned as if their doors were welded together, pass by in opposite directions. Then the same thing happens two more times. What in the world was going on there? A perpendicular funeral procession? All the other times traffic makes an appearance, like in Sayaka and Kyoko's confrontation on a bridge, the cars are arranged realistically.
  • Just a moment where the animators screwed up or something.
  • But they fixed a ton of mistakes and unfinished things in the disk set version. They didn't fix this, even though it would have been pretty trivial (they wouldn't need to draw anything, just shift some frames around). Maybe it was supposed to be disconcerting?
  • It's just supposed to be a composition choice. See also: the surreal Kaname family clock, as well as some architecture, like the minimalist interior of the school.
  • Maybe they're self-driving cars, and they're all just keeping pace with each other because 'keeping up with the flow of traffic' is a better way for their autopilot to manage the vehicle speed than just 'obey the speed limit'?

• How did Madoka end turning into a witch after a few seconds in the timeline where she killed Walpurgisnacht anyways? It occurs off-screen, which kinda feels like a Hand Wave because nobody could think of reason for it to happen onscreen. Despair doesn't make sense given she didn't seem to angst much about the destruction caused, and we don't any dialogue implying she used up too much power so her soul gem go corrupted.
  • I would point towards the "too much power used" option. Imagine how devastating must have been her attack if she killed "the ultimate witch" with one shot. Madoka probably had used all of her power on the one, specific attack (which is a quite common tactic in final battles) which led to shattering of her soul gem which led to her changing into a witch. And since in that timeline (was it forth or fifth timeline?) Madoka didn't ask for a "mercy kill"...

• Why does Kyubey eat his damaged and useless bodies?
  • He's shown as overly posessed by the idea of energy conservation, so he's not going to let his own body just rot in vain.
  • It's also just the smart thing to do. He forms his bodies from ambient mana in the environment, but "mana" is a substance that humanity hasn't actually discovered yet. Leaving a vaguely cat-like pile of mysterious, apparently-chewy marshmallowish crud around where any idiot might find it could be potentially dangerous. Who knows what would happen if a normal animal licked it up? Or worse, if it tastes as much like candy as it looks, a little kid took a bite of it? Kyubey doesn't really have a reason to care one way or the other, but his goals mean keeping a careful account of how much magic is being applied to the people of Earth at a time, so it's probably just eliminating a needless variable from the environment.

• About energy conservation : Kyubey mentioned that his species came to Earth because humans can express emotions and energy collected from our emotions "save the universe". He also did mention that on his planet, there are "beings" that can express emotions but they are treated as mentally ill. As for species that obsessed with energy conservation, shouldn't they use them to gather energy instead of poor human girls? Of course, he mentioned that such situation is extremely rare but it might have been just enough to save a girl or two.
  • You're assuming Kyubey gives a damn about saving girls at all, for one thing. For the other, Kyubey is a hive mind creature; if the ones with emotions are considered mentally ill, they're probably not under his control anymore, and unlikely to do as they're told. For all his manipulation and scheming, Kyubey does obey his own rules to the letter, and he can't actually compel anyone to do anything. A mentally-ill Incubator, capable of feeling emotions and understanding what a soul is and knowing full well what happens to those who make contracts, would never do it.

• What would happen if one wished that incubators never existed?
  • Depending on the potential of the girl in question(Madoka levels, or more powerful), the wish can be granted, creating a world timeline were incubators don't exist(but possibly the girl remembering them), or if her powers are weak, the wish could be interpreted as "not existing... for her" so essentially becoming a magical girl without memories of how she became a magical girl.
    • The "not existing for her" explanation seems most likely; Magia Record has a side story where a girl's wish for her accidental killing of her parents to never had happened is fulfilled by rewriting her memories so that she remembers the cause of the deaths differently, rather than undoing the deaths. It seems sufficient for the wish to be true in a girl's perspective without needing to match realitreality. Given the sheer, likely impossible amount of karmic weight such a wish would need to be truly granted, erasing all a girl's knowledge of incubators and making her oblivious to them seems the only possible outcome.
  • Assuming the magical girl who made the wish had the power to pull it off and Kyubey wasn't lying about the role of magical girls in human history, we'd all go back to living naked in caves.
  • That depends on how much power the one making this wish had and on what the exact wish is. Most people would just wish incubators out of existence right here and now, which might destroy the body of that particular incubator or all the incubators on that planet or even all the incubators ever; I'm sure you have already realised that it won't stop those who made a wish from changing into wishes, but it definitely would make it progressively harder to get grief seeds as time passed. If you wished for just incubators not to exist ever, not even in the past, then it's possible that another race would exist instead, with the same function (the same as what happened with witches and apparitions/daemons/majuu/whatever after Madoka's wish. I guess one could make a wish to erase every single incubator with their own hands similarly to how Madoka did her wish, in which case it might actually turn out for the better depending on how good at judjing what incubators are about to do the person who made the wish is, but not only is it not guaranteed to be better, it's also a wish one couldn't make without ridiculous levels of power and without witching out immediately. So in the end, incubators are safe from being wish-genocided ... well, safe-ish.
  • Not really. The wish in question is "I wish Incubators had never existed". If the magical girl had the power to make it happen (and we do have to assume that, because we don't know what happens if a magical girl makes a wish she's too weak for), then it causes a paradox: no Incubators means no magical girls, no magical girls means no wishes, no wishes means Incubators still exist, Incubators mean magical girls, magical girls mean wishes, and a magical girl wishes for the Incubators to never exist. That's the kind of thing that causes a universe reset, where the Incubators can never exist and the magical girl who made the wish becomes the principle that makes it impossible for Incubators to exist, which either opens the door for another advanced species to develop Soul Gem technology, or humanity is forced to progress without the benefit of granted wishes, which, according to Kyubey, means we'd all still be cave people.
    • It might cause a universe reset, but it wouldn't necessarily cause the magical girl to become a principle the way Madoka did. Madoka's ascension happened because she wished to erase all the Witches with her own hands AND ALSO because she herself was doomed to become a Witch eventurally. So when she became a Witch, there was a irreconcilable (in the current world) logical contradiction: she was becoming a Witch, so she had to disappear, but she had to keep existing to destroy other witches, so she had to survive. Madoka couldn't simultaneously be alive and dead (Schrodinger's Cat can fuck right off), so the world had to start over with her as something entirely removed from mortality - a sentient law rather than something living or dead, and certainly not a human, a magical girl, a witch, or anything that could become any of the three. If the girl Wished Incubators had never existed without specifying who was supposed to enforce that, then it would do one or more of the following: create a logic paradox leading to a universe where there are no Incubators, human history progressed by other means, and all the current magical girls including herself go back to being normal girls who didn't get wishes; a world where there are no Incubators where everyone's still living in caves and there might be changes in which humans still exist and which ones don't; or a world like either of the first two, except that the girl who makes the wish is the only magical girl ever, despite the cause of the contract no longer existing (similarly to how, when Homura rewound time with her wish, she was still a magical girl even though the moment of her contract had technically been undone). The first case is probably the best case scenario, while the last is the worst, because she'll become a Witch eventually and there will literally be no way to end her. If she wished to erase all the Incubators herself? Since she isn't herself an Incubator, there's no logical paradox there - so probably what you'd get is a magical girl with limited omnipresence (oxymoron, but you get what I mean) killing Incubators, until she becomes quickly becomes a Witch who continues to kill all Incubators while probably also screwing a bunch of other people over with the godlike despair magic she'd have to have. I mean, I guess you could wish "I want to ensure that Incubators never existed and never come to exist, with my own hands, as the only action I ever take again," which would theoretically protect humanity from your Witch-form, but that doesn't erase the other issue: any Wish that requires a sapient being to exist forever without causing the kind of logical paradox that Madoka's did would require infinite power, which should theoretically require infinite karma, which would be impossible for anyone, even Madoka. And you would have to exist forever to ensure that Incubators as a race don't suddenly arise at some point in the future after initially making your wish.
• Why does Homura drop the empty gun after after killing QB on the bench? You'd think an empty gun with her fingerprints on it, surrounded by shell casings in a random park would raise questions.
  • Considering Madoka had come within seconds of making a Deal with the Devil, she may had been in shock and dropped the gun without knowing or didn't want to scare Madoka away by approaching her with a weapon in hand. She probably picked the gun up afterward and they just didn't show it.
  • Recalling the scene from memory, Another Kyubey stepped in to eat the remains of the dead one. Even though a gun lying on the ground at night may look suspicious,anyone who found the gun would have be unable to report an incident because there was no body.
    • That. Also, Homura is officially Delicate and Sickly and just got discharged from hospital and has no access to any sort of firearms and probably wouldn't be able to fire it that many times without first harming herself with the recoil and having to stop before that point (as far as the authorities know), so nobody would suspect her of anything regardless of the fingerprints.

• The whole plot just bugs me. I know Madoka's the most important person in the universe because of Homura's wish, but magical girls have been around for centuries. Are we really supposed to believe no one else has made the same wish? Secondly, why has no one else wished to put an end to the witches?
  • Because Kyubey doesn't tell them what witches are before they make their wish; he tells them that he needs magical girls to fight witches, so the logical conclusion is that if Kyubey had the power to wipe out witches, he'd already have done it. That's not true, but a magical girl isn't likely to find that out until long after it's too late, if at all. The only reason Madoka knows witches exist at all is because Homura stopped Kyubey from making a contract with her... but she doesn't stop him from doing it to Sayaka; Madoka sees everything horrible happening to her best friend firsthand. Even if you assume that Madoka was the first and only magical girl whose magical potential was powerful enough to rewrite the universe, she's still the only normal girl who gets to see what the life of a magical girl is like, and thus the only one to realize that that wish is a viable one.
  • Well ... if that's the only explanation, fine, guess I'll have to take it. My first question is still unanswered, though: how has no one else in the history of magical girls wished to go back in time to save a friend?
    • What makes you think Homura is the only one who's ever done that?
    • The reason I think that is because Madoka is supposed to be the most important person in the world because of Homura's wish — but wishing to go back in time to save a friend seems like it'd be a pretty common (or, if not common, definitely not unheard of) wish. Is Homura the only one that managed to mess it up that bad?
    • In a word: yes, but "mess it up" is overly harsh. See, most girls have families, they have other friends, they live in less-dire times than the arrival of Walpurgisnacht, the most dangerous witch known on Earth (at the time, anyway). Most magical girls who wish to go back in time to save a friend from something have way fewer obstacles to it than Homura did. And even if those circumstances were equally difficult, that magical girl is more likely to fall to despair upon realizing she failed.. or worse (and more likely) that she suceeded, but it would have been better for their friend to have died. Homura began a physically disabled orphan with no self-confidence and no friends who was able to focus all her determination on fulfilling a specific set of criteria: Walpurgis defeated, Madoka alive, Madoka still not a magical girl. There's also the possibility that her potential as a magical girl was sufficient enough to give her multiple resets, where a weaker girl might have gotten the moment-stopping magic, but not the endless loop option, and only gone back in time for one try. So basically, other girls may have tried it, but only Homura had what it took to make it happen the way it did.
    • Additionally, even if the wish's goal were the same as Homura's, its wording might well be different- and could easily be warped. Homura didn't ask for Madoka's life back, she asked for the strength to retroactively protect that life. The wording of her wish was very complicated and specific- it's unlikely that other girls would just happen to say the same thing, even if they had similar goals.
    • Yes, it is about the wording. The devil's in the wording, people. Homura's wish was heaving influenced by Homura's insecurities and her low sense of self-worth, Madoka being Homura's first and only friend as far as she knew it, by the wording of the wish itself. "To keep on redoing your meeting with someone, not as one to be protected but as one who protects" is one heck of a specific wish, and just wishing to "come back in time and help" wouldn't help because you are being helpful as a magical girl and "poof, wish granted" whereas Homura's wish was a self-fueled accidental hax that used Madoka's karma to fuel itself further which further increased Madoka's karma, and so on, and so on, all because the wish could not be fulfilled until Homura became more powerful than Madoka and the wish itself made Madoka more powerful as time passed. So Homura simply hit the jackpot ... sort of, with a simple wish that was supposed to only be fulfilled at a certain (low back then) threshold, but the effect of the wish itself catapulted the threshold itself into absurd values.
    • Wishing to go back in time to save a friend sounds like a complicated goal to achieve, owing to the different variables in place regarding the events surrounding a friend's death. Perhaps, a girl could wish to travel back in time to undo a death and found out she made things worse. It would make more sense for the contractee to wish for a resurrection rather than time travel. BHAM, their friend is alive again without the hassleof a time loop. Homura's case is special since she wasnt only dealing with the trauma of seeing her only friend die but also her previous feelings of self-depreciation and inadequency. Wishing Madoka back to life would have solved the issue of death but done little for Homura's inferiority complex hence a wish for being a protector of Madoka instead of the protected and hoping to use info from the month to present herself as a different person to Madoka the next time they met.
• If this has been asked before, please forgive me, but... why didn't Homura just reverse time and LIE to Kyubey? Just admit that you're a time traveler but tell him that one day there will be an even more powerful Magical Girl then Madoka will be, but you'll only tell him/it about her if Kyubey never forms a contract with Madoka, from there it's a simpler matter of bringing the magical girls together, you have the time to learn all the things you need to know about Sayaka, Kyoko and Mami to convince them that you're on their side, you could have solved this so easily, Homerun-chan!
  • You forget that Kyubey has a hivemind with all incubators ever, and is likely aware of the magical power of everyone on Earth. Even if that person wasn't hypothetically born yet, Kyubey would probably demand proof.
    • Not quite. Kyubey is intrigued and surprised to notice Madoka's potential, so he can't really be omniscient as far as magical potential goes. But there's another reason that wouldn't work: Kyubey is too patient. If Homura tempts him with knowledge of the future in exchange for never contracting with Madoka, he already wins by default because Homura wouldn't know about it if it wasn't already going to happen.
    • She's also probably already tried that. We only get to see a handful of timelines, but she's gone through close to a hundred of them. Leaving aside the fact that Kyubey is a hivemind and a telepath, telling him that there'll be another, more powerful magical girl than Madoka doesn't make Madoka any less appealing as a candidate. And since Homura is already a magical girl, there's nothing she can do to compel him to keep his end of the bargain anyway.
  • Sayaka can't be convinced by Homura because she doesn't trust her and is stubborn as a mule, so she always makes a contract and always dies or witches out. Kyouko could be convinced, but she trusts Kyuubei who could manipulate Sayaka who also trusts him into witching out and then manipulate Kyouko herself into a suicide attack. Mami also trusts Kyuubei, and can either be made to freak out to eliminate her, be made to freak out to scare Homura into releasing the information, or sicced on Homura to eliminate her or get the information. Heck, both Kyouko and Sayaka could also be manipulated into doing the same, assuming they trust Kyuubei more than they trust Homura, which (surprise, surprise) they do. And Homura knows that. Also, her threatening Kyuubei like that gives him a clear message that doing something to Madoka is the key to making Homura witch out, which is a very risky gamble for Homura as even without her stating that explicitly Kyuubei was almost able to manipulate her into witching out in the series' main timeline. Remember, you can't scare Kyuubei, so whatever you tell him it's also a piece of information about your motive for doing stuff that he can use to piece something about you together, something that you probably do not want him to be aware of.

• As we see with Homura and Kyoko (the latter is regarding Sayaka), the Soul Gem can heal more than just injuries and it can also be used on other people. Going on this, if Sayaka had, say, wished for cake (or, if it's possible, wished for Mami to be revived), would she have been able to use her Soul Gem to heal Kyosuke's arm/hand injury?
  • No, the Soul Gem can't be used to heal ordinary people; what you're describing is essentially a Magical Girl capability to modify their unnatural body (which is basically an undead magical construct by that point), and Sayaka's abilities go beyond even that because she wished to heal a normal person.
    • Do we know that for sure? I don't think any Magical Girl has tried it yet, because it would mean showing the afflicted person the Soul Gem and explaining it all. Kyouko seems to freshen Sayaka's corpse just fine, so at least we know a magical girl can use her powers on people other than herself, but we don't have anything to go on about how it'd work on a normal person.
    • No, we don't know that for sure. But we do know that the magical girls can modify their own bodies, temporarily infuse people with magic for buffs (which explicitly isn't healing but just using magic to artificially increase performance, as evidenced with the results of Madoka buffing Homura during PE in the first timeline) and items with magic for protection/damage, and any powers outside of that depends on their wish and personality. As you probably have noticed, there's nothing about healing there and for all we know their self-healing might simply be restoring their bodies to the forms they knew and used before the injury. And since Kyouko has a gamut of powers at her disposal, it's possible that she has one like that that she simply isn't using; or alternatively, it can be that any magical girl can "heal" a body of any other magical girl that way without it actually being healing.
    • Madoka doesn't buff Homura for PE. She fails PE miserably in the first timeline. She doesn't become any good at it until after she's gone through multiple loops and has had enough practice as a magical girl to be good at it, and doesn't need the boost anymore. The only one of the magical girls to use magic on another person is Kyoko, when she freshens Sayaka's corpse.
    • She does. It's in the first drama CD, which is canon as Urobuchi wrote the script for it. Madoka does buff Homura during PE to make her run faster because Homura's earlier performance during PE was terrible. It ends with the enchantment going out of control, Homura not being able to stop, Madoka having to ask Mami to dispel it, and Homura losing consciousness from exhaustion once it is taken off of her. Also, the bit about someone not becoming "any good at it" is kind of a non-sequitur there as whoever it is about it's not about Madoka and the example was about her.
    • No. That part refers to Homura: in the anime, she fails her first run through PE, but she becomes competent after multiple loops and is an ace athlete when she's first introduced in the show. In other words, the drama CD hadn't been referenced, so the implication was that Madoka used reinforcement to improve Homura's performance in the anime, and referring to Homura's improvement over multiple loops was the counterpoint.
• Forgive me if this has already been asked and I just missed it, but does nobody in this series have parents? Okay, so Madoka's appear on screen multiple times, Kyoko's are dead, and Sayaka's appear at her funeral. What about Mami and Homura? I read somewhere that Homura's parents died whilst she was in the hospital and that Mami's parents were killed in the accident she made the contract in, but this wasn't mentioned in the series that I can remember and I haven't found any definitive proof of this being canon.
  • Mami's is, at the very least, heavily implied in canon. We see the car accident in a flashback, and considering Mami would have died had she not contracted with Kyubey, it's safe to assume her parents did die. This is outright stated in the game, where Mami regrets not using her wish to save her parents instead of just herself. So only Homura's parents' fates are left ambiguous.
    • Homura's parents are dead, she's been living (before she moves out after making the contract) in a Christian orphanage, and wasn't exactly well-liked there, thus why Madoka was her first actual friend (though Madoka did it at least somewhat out of pity in the first timeline), and why Homura went to such lengths to do something for her.

• So what the hell is up with Mami pulling her rifles out so suggestively? 0:22 here, Victoria's Secret Compartment, and 0:42 here... yeah. We know they appear on the spot, and we know she can make them appear from anywhere - Mami has to be doing it on purpose. And this clearly isn't the type of show for Fanservice, or there would have been much more done with the transformation sequences. So what on Earth is the deal? Is Mami trying to tell Madoka something, or is it something entirely else?
  • This Troper thinks you need to clean your filthy glasses. That first example has the rifle manifesting from her heart, not her tits; the second has them dropping out of the sides of her skirt in a mock-curtsey, not from her crotch. She can manifest them from anywhere, but she does have to draw them out of herself somehow.
  • She's trying to have fun while fighting, because why the heck not. Hence, pulling rifles from various weird places and moving as if she was trying to dance when fighting.

• So... how is Kyubey expecting to harvest Kriemhild Gretchen's grief seed, exactly?
  • He doesn't need to. The Witch transformation itself gives off a crapload of energy his species absorbs.
    • If that were true, Kyubey wouldn't have the girls use grief seeds to clean their gems, and he wouldn't need them to fight witches. The grief seeds are his means of collecting the energy he needs. If the transformation was all he needed, it would better serve his needs to just let the girls fall to despair as quickly as possible, and let the witches already in existence spawn familiars and harvest the energy produced when they mature.
    • He says outright that the transformation into Witches in of itself releases huge amounts of energy. Also, this is Kyubey. It's not an either-or deal, he can have the witch transformations AND the Grief Seeds! Also, your argument implies that Girl-to-Witch and Familiar-to-Witch transformations are the same as far as energy output goes. This isn't necessarily the case. Either way, the method of letting girls hunt witches, collect the Grief Seeds, and enjoy their fallout yields more energy than just witching them all out immediately; ESPECIALLY since the Witches need to be hunted regardless or his cattle will be wiped to extinction.
    • He says it releases lots of energy, yes, but he doesn't collect that energy. He doesn't need to, it's already been released into the universe. Although we never specifically see it, the only time he says he's gotten close to meeting his quota is after Walpurgis is killed by Gretchen and, presumably, he picks up her Grief Seed. Kyubey doesn't care if humanity survives or not, they're only cattle when they produce an end product that must be renewed between harvests. Grief Seeds fit that description, the energy of the transformation doesn't. If he didn't need the Seeds, humanity wouldn't need to survive. And more to the point, he wouldn't encourage the girls to cleanse their Gems with them, since it delays them turning into witches.
    • Whether he needs the Grief Seeds is irrelevant to his need for humanity to survive if he wants the energy released by the transformation into a witch. No more humans, no more Magical Girls, no more witches. He needs them to transform, but letting them rampage will just cause candidates to die. Letting Magical Girls witch out without culling other witches will reduce the number of candidates. If Grief Seeds are the only way he can get energy, though, it would actually be counterproductive getting Madoka to contract with him. Humanity would be wiped out, meaning no more Magical Girls, and nothing to kill Gretchen to get it to release it's Grief Seed.
    • In that scenario, Gretchen's Grief Seed isn't necessary. He already has Walpurgis' and the energy of Gretchen's transformation is already released, and that meets his quota. Again, he doesn't collect the energy of transformations, there's no need to.

• It's been said that Kyubey's species is a hive mind, but how exactly? For example, when Homura kills him to prevent Madoka from making a contract, another one steps in immediately. Is this a clone of that original being, with the same mind? Or is it a different one entirely who just shares the same goal? Is QB one of millions of identical minds (i.e. QC, QD, QE, etc.) or does every incubator share the same personality as Kyubey?
  • Kyubey is one being with multiple bodies, according to Word of God.

• I get that witches' domains are reminiscent of their wish as magical girls, but what I want to know is, how sentient are witches? It's said that they are responsible for all of the pain and suffering of humanity, but do they seek to cause disasters? Or is are disasters caused by their presence. Could a girl who had just turned into a witch do anything to prevent tragedies, or is she so wrapped up in her grief that they happen without her control?
  • Falling to despair means being so wrapped up in grief that all she can do is try to take her pain out on the world by sowing curses in various forms; this is explained very early on.
  • I think the third movie shows it fairly well: they are mentally broken to a degree varying from witch to witch and helpless in face of what is happening, but fully aware of what is happening.

• In many timelines, there's at least one person who knows that magical girls exist without becoming one: Madoka (and Sayaka, for a shorter time) in the main timeline, and Homura in the original one. In Homura's case in particular, it seems as though Kyubey never even made her an offer until she makes her wish (she has no knowledge of the relevant issues the first time around, and she doesn't have a time-traveller to warn her, so what would have stopped her from making a wish earlier if she could have?). By contrast, someone like Hitomi is never even aware of this reality as far as we know – even though she had something similar happen to her in the main timeline as Homura did in the first timeline. I'm just somewhat surprised that Homura (with Madoka, we eventually know why Kyubey wants her) is allowed to know the secret and keep hanging around all these magical girls despite not being one. (Also, Madoka and Sayaka communicate telepathically through Kyubey in episode, like, 2.) At least for the sake of keeping the whole thing a secret – nothing's stopping your grandma or someone from being like "oh yes, many decades ago I was offered the chance to become a magical girl, but I said no." Or is it that everyone Kyubey bothers to reveal himself to becomes a magical girl eventually, even if they refuse the first time he asks them? (With one of those things being the cause of the other, though I'm not sure which one.)
  • To put it simply, Kyubey doesn't lose anything by revealing himself to potential Puellae because he's invisible to normal people anyway. If they try to tell anyone about him who isn't a candidate for the contract, he can just disappear and make them look crazy, and proving he exists at all means proving the existence of magic... and unless she's made a contract or has a friend who has, she has no way to do that. Kyubey is extremely patient, though: every girl he reveals himself to eventually becomes a Puella Magi, but it's not because he's just that good at picking winners. It's because the better he knows the girls, the better he'll know how to manipulate them. Homura makes a good example in the first timeline: Kyubey has no reason to stay in Mitakihara now that Walpurgis has flattened the place and his current girls are gone, but he stays behind to watch Homura because he knows that Madoka's death will give Homura a reason to make the contract. There's a better-than-average chance that he had a hand in convincing Homura to stay within sight distance of the battle, instead of taking shelter someplace safe until the battle is over like any sensible person would have done, for exactly that reason.

• So hope and despair balance to zero right? This means that for equal amount of hope there is the same amount of despair... and the opposite should be true too. What happens when your wish initially is more like a curse (like wishing your stepmother to be dead because you don't like her) and brings despair to the world? To balance this out, somehow your wish should bring hope too? How?
  • The point is that the magical girl has to endure the despair no matter who gets the hope. Sayaka makes a good illustration: she heals Kyosuke's hand, so he instantly gets the hope of being able to play the violin again, which gives Hitomi the chance to see him at school and confess. The two of them get all the hope from Sayaka's wish, but Sayaka has to take on all the despair. It's the same for any wish: a magical girl who wishes her stepmother dead gets the despair of killing her, while everyone around her gets the benefit of the stepmother's death. (If you've ever seen The Craft, Nancy does something like that: yeah, it works out for all concerned because they get to cash in on her stepdad's life insurance after he dies, but the power still goes to her head eventually and drives her insane)
  • Just because Kyubey can grant any wish, it doesn't mean he does. He's very good at picking his victims and he only picks ones that will make naive, hopeful wishes that will give him the greatest amount of energy. Kyubey wouldn't make a contract with a girl if she was going to make a wish like that. If he did, though, it would still work the same way as any other wish does: the magical girl is the one to suffer the despair brought by the wish, no matter what, so even if she were happy about her stepmother's death, it would eventually be overtaken by grief: if she really is so much of a bitch that her stepdaughter wanted her dead, then other people must not have liked her much either, or her death could bring people a lot of happiness by having her estate divided up amongst her children, or any number of ways. They get the benefit of living in a world without her, but the magical girl still has to live with what she did, on top of all the things she now has to do (fighting Witches, cleansing her Soul Gem, struggling with other Magical Girls).

• A meta example, but why are PMMM and Neon Genesis Evangelion compared so often? Genre Deconstruction aside, they have no similarities. While Eva's Kaworu says that mankind is fundamentally alone, Madoka preaches True Companions. Eva's Esoteric Happy Ending contrasts PMMM's Bittersweet Ending and even the methods for breaking their cuties are different - Eva's version of Deranged Animation has bright, contrasting colors, even in Instrumentality, the reds, oranges and whites were bright. But PMMM's witch barriers are often muddy and grey and much more dull in comparison. And the finale for each series has Eva's protagonist choosing to exist of his own will, while PMMM has Madoka wishing herself out of existence. They're the total antithesis of each other at best.
  • Not sure I agree with your contrasts, but that aside the comparison comes mostly from not just their deconstructionism, but their immense popularity and gamechanging potential; the way things are going it's possible PMMM might influence its genre, and possibility the industry as a whole, similarly to how Evangelion did.
  • I think the comparison is mainly in the Genre Deconstruction, but I think your comparisons there are too narrow. Shinji and Madoka are both hesitant heroes who are constantly having to face the ugly realities of the world they live in, and would be completely justified in abandoning the conflict altogether, but they pull through in the end because they can't stand by while others suffer. They're also both betrayed by a mentor they're supposed to have been able to trust. They both have a singular relationship with someone of their own sex who openly cares for them but becomes one of the monsters they've been fighting the whole time. The thing that provides the means to participate in the plot (EV As for the Children, Soul Gems for the Magical Girls) is presented right away and described accurately, but later events show that there's more to it than initially explained: The EV As aren't just super robots made of meat, they're actually living things, and Soul Gems are literally a soul formed into a glass egg. They're also invested with a person's soul. Oh, and they both begin the end of their respective series by being asked what they wish for.
  • At their cores, both stories are about the hell that is growing up. Madoka goes with the more fairytale-style motif where the young, pure-hearted, virtuous (and implicitly virginal) girl is the embodiment of all good in the world (the Princess archetype), but time marches on. As the girls mature, they lose their innocence, until they reach their "adult" forms as witches, consumed by the despair that comes with the pain of realizing what they had to give up in order to grow. Evangelion does the same thing, but having a boy protagonist changes the context a bit: Instrumentality is the same concept filtered through a male perspective, where instead of a loss of childish hope to adult cynicism, it's a loss of self to absolute intimacy; in other words, fear of sex as a rite of passage. Shinji's major conflict is that he wants to be loved without feeling vulnerable, but without taking on that vulnerability, he's doomed to isolation. That's why the barriers between human minds to maintain their own individuality are called Absolute Terror fields. Asuka's issues fall more in line with the Puella Magi approach: one of her earliest sources of suffering is her period, the physical signal that she's become a woman. She fights as hard as she can to reject childhood, but adulthood (and more specifically, womanhood) comes with terrifying risks: what is and isn't acceptable behavior for a woman works against her horribly, and she eventually falls into a Heroic BSoD afterward. It's no coincidence that she's constantly compared (unfavorably) to Rei, who is more or less the feminine ideal epitomized: quiet, pretty, and passive, but always ready at a moment's notice to destroy herself for the benefit of others because she views herself as having no value. Asuka rejects the preconceived notion of what a woman should be, but the story shows her being brutally punished for it, particularly through a Mind Rape that serves as a metaphor for an actual rape (and later, an overtly sexualized dogpile that bears more than slight resemblance to a gang rape), and her either rejecting or being rejected by the men in her life she wants to be close to. Her downfall as a character isn't all that different from Sayaka's, except that in the end, one lives and the other doesn't. Sort of.
• Why is the comparison between Mami and 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 getting by a Monster of the Week 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 actions, 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 Nightmare Fuel, came off as his him getting what he deserved rather than a tragedy brought his recklessness.

• What happens if a magical girl makes a wish that would prevent her from falling into despair ("I wish I was happy all the time")?
  • Kyubey wouldn't make a contract with a girl who would make such a useless wish, but if he did, she'd either become a Stepford Smiler (being forced to appear happy whether they really are or not), a sociopath (all empathy for others removed so she'll be happy in a vacuum, and eventually be overcome by loneliness or other negative emotions that don't conflict with happiness), or Kyubey would prevent her from learning how to use Grief Seeds so that she'd deplete her magic and witch out. In the witch world's magical girl system, you don't get any option that doesn't end in either death or witching out, no matter how clever you think your wish is. Even Madoka eventually becomes a witch, and in the movie, so does Homura, despite her infinite mulligans.
    • Mami provides another possibility, it was her happiness that caused her death because she was too reckless to recognize the unusual characteristics of Charlotte.
  • Madoka's wish demostrates that Kyubey isn't infallible, and even if the girl in question never falls into despair, she can still become a wish if her soul gem gets depleted, specially if her definition of "happy" is "carefree", as she would easily orget to use the grief seeds.
    • Kyubey isn't infallible, but Madoka's wish still resulted in her becoming a witch. Even Madoka's wish doesn't eliminate witches, it only prevents them from manifesting in the physical world (which is why in Rebellion Nagisa and Sayaka can transform into and summon Charlotte and Oktavia, respectively). Homura's wish gave her infinite hope by giving her infinite retries to get it right, but as soon as she realizes she's only making it worse, her Soul Gem goes from clean to near-black in a heartbeat. That's because despair is not sadness and happiness is not the opposite of despair: despair is the opposite of hope. So a magical girl who wishes to always be happy is not wishing for anything that will stop her from becoming a witch the way every single magical girl is inevitably destined to do, if she doesn't die before that happens.
  • That would implode so fast. Imagine you always wish to be happy. Always. You're happy when you get an answer wrong in class and everyone laughs at you. You're happy when your phone gets stolen. You're happy when your parents get divorced. You're happy when your dog dies. You're happy when you fail your midterms. You're happy when your best friend commits suicide. You're happy when your house burns down. There's a whole world of things that just aren't okay to be truly happy about, and it's hard to stave off despair as you gradually realize that for the rest of your life, people are going to see you as "that creepy sadistic girl who likes to smile a the suffering of others".
• It's probably just a case of 'the writer hadn't decided on this at the time', but the fact that Maddy is back in the real world in Rebellion kind of flies in the face of the retgone she is supposed to have experienced at the end of the series proper. She can clearly do it, so why didn't she do it from the start and save herself and Homu a mountain of trouble?
  • Because she never actually left it, that's the point. At the end of the series, Madoka erased her human life from existing in the new world she created, but she still exists as Ultimate Madoka. That's what she tells Homura: that she'll always be there, even if she can't be seen or sensed. In Rebellion: Madoka is the Law of Cycles, the principle that defeats witches before they're born by shattering the soul gem first. The only time she physically appears in the real world is after Homura has destroyed and re-made it the way Madoka did, undoing the retgone in order to have Madoka by her side again.
  • In the movie, Madoka exists not as a person but as a part of the Law of Cycles. However, because Homura's wish had not yet been fulfilled at that point and her attempt at stopping Madoka had to succeed, but at the same time Madoka's wish wouldn't be fulfilled if Homura succeeded, Madoka split into two and now exists both as the Law of Cycles and as her own avatar inside of Homura's barrier. It's literally an "unstoppable force meets immovable force" situation, with the universe taking the third option because doing anything else would stop one of their wishes (either Homura's or Madoka's) from being fulfilled and that simply could not happen.

• What would happen if someone made the wish to never die? Their Soul Gem could never be destroyed because that IS their death, and becoming a Witch is essentially death so they wouldn't become a Witch either.
  • Like the common "wish away entropy" idea, this is the kind of wish that would probably require Madoka levels of potential or higher, given the actual logistics of what would need to happen for a girl to be able to live for eternity. But even if it was a easy wish to make, there are tons of things that could go wrong. There's nothing to actually indicate one way or another whether or not becoming a Witch qualifies as dying, for one, so it could result in an unkillable Witch after a while, which would basically doom the world (granted, the girl making the contract isn't likely to know about that). But let's say that yes, the girl can't become a Witch; that doesn't mean her Soul Gem won't darken. If she ever had a streak of failing to acquire Grief Seeds for whatever reason, such as there not being enough witches in her area to grab Seeds from, or if she fell into bad enough despair from something, she'd end up with a blackened, magicless Soul Gem, unable to fight Witches and therefore with almost no hope of purifying it - and it's been demonstrated that letting your Soul Gem stay significantly dark for too long is both exhausting and mentally harmful.
  • There's a lot of semantics there to exploit. For one thing, if you become a magical girl, you're already undead, which we know doesn't contradict wishing to stay alive because that's what happened to Mami. For another, becoming a witch doesn't mean you're dead, it means you're a witch, and if your Grief Seed is harvested and consumed by the Incubators, you don't die, you're annihilated, there's a difference. You could wish for your Soul Gem to be indestructible, unable to turn into a Grief Seed but also impossible to shatter, knowing what a Soul Gem is, and nobody knows that before they make a contract except Madoka. In that case, you'd never turn into a witch or die... but then you'd end up gradually going insane. Since the laws of the witch-system demand equivalent exchange between grief and hope, a soul gem that can't become a grief seed probably can't release its own grief to be purified.
  • The first rule of making a wish when forming a contract with Kyuubei: do not assume. You get what you wish for, nothing more and nothing less. Some things may change to accomodate your wish if you happen to have enough power for it, but overall wishes are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). Is turning into a witch considered death? Arguable, and most likely not. And considering that grief seeds can change back into witches, it's more accurate to say that witches, when defeated, are sealed or deactivated rather than killed.
    So a wish to never die, it would probably result in something like getting regeneration powers that always try to heal you at some pace that you can't really control, and probably with nothing to dull the pain when you are getting healed. So most likely a quick trip to witchhood as soon as you get hurt, really. Or maybe it would give you a power to take over other people's bodies instead, and force you to get used to being someone new every time you get seriously hurt unless you spend magical energy to heal your current body? Just as depressing after some time.

• What happens to a magical girl if she survives long enough to grow into an adult? As in she doesn't fall into despair or a least becomes a witch or die in a fight? Does she lose her powers or does she become a magical woman?
  • Presumably she becomes a magical woman. The jury seems to be out on whether or not they age normally (their being undead would suggest they wouldn't, but the magical girl who became Roberta witched out in her 20's, so either they age normally or Roberta's extra effect like Sayaka's regeneration made her age) but assuming that magical girls do continue aging, they become magical women, but that doesn't save them from witching out or dying in battle eventually.

• Forgive me if this has been explained elsewhere, but I want to know, after Kyubey has a proper foothold in Madokas life, why doesn't he explain to her about entropy in simple enough terms for her to understand, and suggest that that be her wish? He doesn't even have to explain about the witch/magical girl relationship, hell by wishing for the universe to have enough energy to stave off entropy for good would probably do nothing but benefit him. Sure, Homura would probably just time travel but I don't recall Kyubey even mentioning this to Madoka until the point that she's horrified by Kyubey and what he's doing.
  • Because the wish has to be made in hope in order to work within the confines of the Incubator's magic system. Saying "Some hundreds of thousands of years from now, probably long after your species has died out and your planet is frozen in the barren wastelands of its next ice age, the heat death of the universe will destroy everything. Could you be a bro and consign yourself to a life of fighting witches for us, even though that won't benefit you or your planet in any way?" Ironically, wishing away the heat death of the universe doesn't create hope, so it would fail as a wish.
  • Incidentally, that's also why the Incubators can't just wish away heat death themselves. Their magic is powered by emotional investment, but they don't have emotions except for their mentally ill. It'd be next to impossible, if not impossible outright, to find someone so emotionally invested in the continued existence of the universe that they can understand the concept of heat death well enough and still wish it away.
    • But saving the world is something that requires emotion. Without emotions one would not wish for a better world without entropy therefore wishing to create a better world is possible as it involves emotion. Every wish has emotions for example wishing for world peace, wishing for someone to be healed,wishing for a better world and etc.
    • So? The incubators aren't saving the world. They're not doing any of this out of love for the lives of individuals or for love of the human race, or even love for themselves. They think that the heat death of the universe will destroy everything and something should be done to prolong the life of the universe, but that isn't sentiment, it's just logical. They don't care about anyone being happy and they don't care about healing anyone, they just want the universe to continue existing. That's why they had to leave their own planet/galaxy/whatever in order to find a species that has emotions, because they have none themselves apart from their mentally ill.
    • There's also the problem of "What would a universe without entropy look like?". I'm not an expert on thermodynamics, but a universe where no energy is lost because all changes in energy occur at a fixed rate is a universe where the human race doesn't function at all like it does now... assuming it can support complex life forms at all. What kind of creature would a human being be, if it took the same amount of time and energy to digest a cheeseburger as it took for the cow to mature to adulthood?
    • There's also the fact that Kyubey literally CAN'T suggest wishes. Kyubey says in the show that he works on very specific principles- he can't force anyone to make a contract, he can't lie to anyone when they ask a question (withholding information isn't technically lying, since everything he says is true), and he can't suggest a wish. Now, if Madoka had asked why he was doing what he was doing (which she does), and had then come to the conclusion of wishing away entropy herself, then that would be one thing. That would totally fall within the rules Kyubey has to follow- he didn't lie when he was asked about why he was doing this stuff, and he didn't suggest the wish. But if he was to say anything about the wish being an option, that would be breaking the rules he has to follow (what the consequences of this would be, I'm not sure, but there probably would be some, which is why he doesn't just break that rule and do it anyway).

• Something confuses me about Kyosuke's condition. His family seems rich enough, so why don't they just have his paralyzed arm amputated and then fit for a prosthetic? Then he could play the violin again and magic wouldn't be necessary.
  • Because that's not a thing. A prosthetic isn't just a replacement hand that can do all the same stuff a working hand does. Even the most advanced prosthetic hands only have set grip patterns, they don't have fine motor control suitable for playing an instrument. There's also the fact that maiming a thirteen year old boy just so he can play the violin is not something any doctor with a soul would do. Yes, Kyosuke is a violinist and that matters a great deal to him, but that isn't the be-all and end-all of who he is and what makes him a worthwhile person. Yes, being unable to play depresses him terribly, but that's something that someone who suffers such a major injury has to deal with.

• What would happen if a girl wished to become a boy; mentally, physically, and emotionally. Would he be a magical boy or an ordinary boy?
  • Presumably, she would wish to become a boy and would thereafter be male. Since being a girl only matters to the Incubators for the actual making of the wish and becoming a magical girl is the trade for making the wish come true, what you'd probably get is an ordinary boy with a soul gem who can transform into a magical girl.
    • And thus someone who either has to turn into a girl in order to stay alive (resulting in despair, if we assume that they made the wish because they hated being a girl that badly), or doesn't do it at all and witches out after their soul gem dims completely. Yup, sounds like something that probably had already happened somewhere at least once, because it's grim enough to be Kyuubei's cup of tea.

• Why does Kyubey tell Homura that she is the reason Madoka is getting stronger? If Kyubey had just let Homura jump the loop a few more times without Homura knowing this, Madoka would have grown to cosmically stronger proportions, becoming even MORE powerful. Granted, Homura could have just kept going, and maybe demoralising her served a more convenient purpose, but there's no guarantee she wouldn't have been killed in a timeline where Madoka was even stronger, leaving Kyubey to harvest more energy for his quota.
  • Wasn't there a response to this before? Anyway: it's because to Kyubey (and to everyone else except Homura), there's only one timeline. It doesn't matter how many times she re-does the loop as far as Kyubey is concerned, because he can't actually get any of the energy from Madoka's contract unless Homura stops rewinding to the beginning of the month and lets time progress naturally. On top of that, he already knows (to the best of his understanding, anyway) that Homura, like all magical girls, is already doomed: either she dies, or becomes a witch. To him, Madoka's potential is just massive for no reason, but once he figures out Homura's time magic, he realizes it's out of his hands. He doesn't need Madoka's magical potential to be any bigger than it already is, but he's not actually able to get his hands on that potential until Homura is out of the picture.

• Charlotte's Grief Seed is found at the hospital, just about to hatch, but... why? Why did it need to hatch? If it had been defeated and needed to recharge with grief to become a full Witch again, where's the magical girl who beat her? If not, why isn't it a full-fledged Witch from the start since the magical girl who became Charlotte probably witched out at that hospital, possibly only minutes or hours prior.
  • Either it was a familiar about to evolve into the same sort of witch, it was a witch that had already been defeated before but the magical girl ignored or could not find the grief seed and it needed time to hatch again, Kyuubei planted it there after the magical girl who had defeated her gave it to him, or they just chanced upon this random event and witches really need time to fully witch out (the amount of time varying from witch to witch). You can choose whichever, but my guess is either of the last two ones.
  • The differences between Sayaka and Madoka's witch sequences would point to the last option. Alternatively, maybe younger magical girls' souls take longer to witch? Nagisa isn't a teenager so she's not actually, as Kyuubey put it, a "girl in her second growth phase," so perhaps her soul gem needed more time to finish maturing into a grief seed.

• Why is Sayaka a Magical Girl in the third timeline? Im just asking b/c in the first two timelines she didn't appear to have contracted and her not contracting in Oriko Magica could be due to Homura preventing it. Her contracting in the fifth timeline and 'The Different Story could be due to Kyubey trying to pressure Madoka to contract to aid her friend otherwise she could die to a witch or other magical girl or wish Sayaka back to normal as she tried to do in episode 8 before Homura interrupted. However, Madoka was already a magical girl in the third timeline so what was Kyubey's reason for contracting Sayaka in that timeline?
  • It's possible that Sayaka's magical potential just isn't potent enough to catch Kyubey's attention by itself. Kyubey never seems to offer her the contract like he does with Madoka, and since she doesn't contract in every timeline, she probably doesn't become a Magical Girl unless asks Kyubey for a contract herself.

• If Madoka became the patron goddess of all magical girls, does this mean she also appears to alien magical girls (since she said "all"), or does she only appear to Earthling magical girls? I clarify because I've heard that once her witch form engulfed Earth, it was implied she'd stay wherever Earth was because it was now Paradise to her perspective.
  • Kriemhild Gretchen only cares about Earth because that's her thing. Witches don't seem to be overly concerned with, or aware of, the world outside their labyrinths, so she probably doesn't have much reason to care about anything that's not on Earth. Ultimate Madoka, on the other hand, specifically said she wanted to defeat all Witches before they were born, so unless there's an alien race out there that managed to give the Witch principle the slip altogether, she appears to them, too. Of course, being human (or at least looking human), seeing her would probably freak an alien out pretty good, so the impact of the Law of the Cycle probably has a different cultural context for alien magical girls.

• The question "What would happen if someone wished they were immortal?" has already been asked. But what would happen if someone, with the knowledge of magical girl-witch evolution, wished that they never became a witch? Would they just become forever a magic girl?
  • No. They'd just die. There's only two options for magical girls: become a witch, or die. The only character who can become a magical girl and still avoid becoming a witch, dying, erasing herself from existence, going insane, or being annihilated, is Mary Sue.
  • Either she'd die very early on, because she can't be allowed to spread lasting hope as a magical girl if she's not able to spread despair as a witch, or she'd go insane from her corrupt Soul Gem (remember, even before actually Witching, Sayaka's corruption made her crazy enough to (probably) murder the two misogynists on the train) and it would come out to basically the same thing as being a Witch.

• I know that the franchise was supposed to have feigned being saccharine before revealing its true colors. That would obviously explain why the volume numbers on each manga installment after Madoka Magica assume a more serious font than what they started out with (and also why they each have a more mature art style from the anime ^note although the different artists for each would have something to do with that as well. Presumably, the real question here would be, why do all manga titles after the original manga have the same, whimsical font as from Madoka Magica?
  • Because the title and font are part of the franchise. It's a highly recognizable logo at this point, it has nothing to do with the tone or content since the anime.

• This one is rather Flame Bait heavy, so please try to answer this as neutrally as possible. What if the girl that is being offered a contract by Kyubey comes from a community wherein souls are not considered separate from their bodies (for example: the girl is a Jehovah's Witnesses)? Will the rules regarding the Soul Gems apply to this particular girl?
  • Yes. Putting the Real World aside entirely and focusing purely on the Madoka Magica universe... there isn't any subjectivity to how the Soul Gems work. They work the same way regardless of the beliefs of the girl in question. Remember, as far as this universe is concerned souls are just a special cluster of neurons in the human body, and the process that extracts them is really just advanced technology. (Whether that cluster of neutrons is in fact supposed to be the same 'soul' as what religious texts refer to is a whole other debate, of course.)
  • Actually.. in terms of souls being the immortal inner self that most religions/spiritual belief systems refer to? .. Yeah, they are. We can tell because of the scene right after Madoka makes her wish and has a vision of Mami and Kyoko, but not Sayaka. She's missing from that scene because she wasn't killed, she was annihilated; that's what makes the ultimate fate of witches so terrible. A Soul Gem can just shatter and the magical girl will only die, but when a witch is defeated, the magical girl is gone, utterly, for good. Keep in mind there's no one around to harvest Octavia's grief seed, which means only one of two possibilities: one, that Octavia will one day regenerate (which seems unlikely, given all the imagery and symbolism of Kyoko following Sayaka into the depths) or, more likely, that her Grief Seed was destroyed. Basically a Grief Seed becomes all that's left of the magical girl, soul and all, condemned to a nightmare of suffering forever, or being consumed by Kyubey and condemned to oblivion.

• Is there any confirmation that the fate of all magical girls is die in battle or turn into a witch/fade away (post-Ultimate Madoka)? We know Kyubey trusts this is the usual reaction, but could a hypothetical girl simply decide to not use her magic, live a decent life without any major distress, and end up dying of old age? Or is grief strictly cumulative?
  • It's never stated directly that it's impossible for a magical girl to live out her life and die of natural causes, but only because it's theoretically possible based on the way Soul Gems work. According to Kyubey, a magical girl matures into a witch when her Soul Gem accumulates an amount of despair equal to the amount of hope generated by her wish. While it might be possible in theory, it's not possible in practice: no one can go through life completely untouched by despair, and the Soul Gems and Grief Seeds are basically just tiny condensers for ordinary human grief. What it all boils down to is that no, a magical girl cannot and will never simply live a peaceful, normal life, or die a peaceful, natural death.
  • I also assume keeping your body going costs magic, so unless another girl is feeding you Seeds/Cubes, you're sort of obligated to kill witches/demons. There's a reason magical girl-witch relations have so many food references (Kyouko points out the predator-prey relationship, Kazumi's' food fetish, even just the term "witch hunt") - the girls are literally hunting prey to feed themselves and keep themselves alive.

• So if Kyuubey's species can't experience emotions, how did they manage to create a technology that converts emotions into energy? Kyuubey also mentions that they had to scour the universe to find a species that they could use to counteract entropy, with the implication being that emotions are not something commonly encountered. So how exactly did they invent a technology that relies on something that they've never been exposed to?
  • Kyubey's species can experience emotions, but the ones that do are considered insane and non-functional. Incubators function as a hive mind, more or less, so the overwhelming majority of "sane" ones probably studied the insane ones to try and correct the issue, and upon realizing what emotions are and can be used for, went out into the universe to find a species that could provide a ready supply of emotions and still sustain itself without being depleted. He even talks about being surprised that humanity can function if each individual human has its own thoughts and feelings, which implies that he knows what they are and how they function, but doesn't fully understand what emotions actually feel like.
• How come Witches don't have names, Natures, etc. anymore? Puella Magi Oriko Magica was the last installment for which any cards were made, and even then, only for the Witches themselves and without any information. Familiars in that installment have no information whatsoever, even within the manga itself. Puella Magi Kazumi Magica is the last installment where Witches' names or natures/aspects are stated, plus the naming scheme is different from in Madoka Magica. After that, nothing. Not even in The Different Story or Oriko Magica: Extra Story. Did the creators just decide it was too much brainpower to bother with anymore?
  • If I had to take a guess? They're probably sick to death of working on it. But if you really want to get Meta about it, the answer is obvious: Madoka already defeated all Witches in all timelines, including this one. Once the materials for the original anime timeline were resolved, including movies and promos and whatnot, they couldn't make any more.
• After reading extra material like The Different Story and Portable, a question comes to mind: Did Kyoko literally lose the ability to create copies of herself after her dad went mad or does she simply choose not to use that power anymore?
  • She probably still can, but she didn't have any real reason to in the anime timeline. Whenever we see her using her powers, she's either focused intently on a one-on-one fight against Sayaka (where multiple copies would have defeated the purpose) or dividing her attention between protecting Madoka and fighting Octavia, where multiple bodies wouldn't be as effective as her sigil-barrier-thing. It probably helps out considerably when she needs to steal stuff, though.
    • Yes and no. Kyouko has illusion magic because of what she wished for, and Kyuubey explains that because she now rejects the wish she made, she can't use her enchantment powers anymore. Indeed, we see her make a conscious effort to utilize them shortly after her family's deaths and fail. However, as we see later in The Different Story, changes in Kyoto's mindset can potentially allow her to regain that power.
• At least in the movie version, when Homura first meets Mami and Madoka as magical girls being attacked by Isabel, the archway shows two girls on either pillar, and they are very clearly Madoka and Mami, but Mami is decapitated. This only happens in the very first timeline, before Homura gets her powers, and although Mami dies in the fight against Walpurgis, she's in one piece. It's not foreshadowing because Mami has already been dead for some time at that point, so how did Isabel know?
  • Mami's soul gem is on her hat, which means that any witch that kills her was probably targeting her head. She didn't literally get decapitated in the first timeline, but Walpurgis probably did try to inflict some sort of head injury to her (whether Witches know/remember enough about magical girls to know to intentionally go for the Soul Gem is a whole other story, but headshots are generally fatal either way, so it's not an unrealistic way to die more than once). From there, it's simple to assume Isabel has some form of precognition - and hey, copying artistic images from seeing future events would tie in to her purported plagiarism issues really well.
    • I don't think that's a simple assumption at all. I mean, first off, that's not precognition, that's being able to see into an alternate future while existing in a different timeline altogether, which itself is going to be erased— not impossible, but definitely beyond the scope of anything a normal witch can do. More than that, though, if she depicted Mami without her head because she was targeting her soul gem, why doesn't she depict Madoka with a wound on her chest? That whole scene is weird.
• Can somebody explain why the teacher's random bitching about her love life counts as "foreshadowing"?
  • They're probably referring to one of her rants, not necessarily about her love life, about her talking about the Mayan apocalypse. It sorta happens, what with Walpurgrisnacht, but I personally think that it being "foreshadowing" is a stretch.

• Why didn't Homura leave Mitakihara city to go look for more Puella Magi to help her defeat Walpurgisnacht? I understand that its part of her character to want to do things on her own, to want to be Madoka's singular protector, but I mean- COME ON. She's gone through so many timelines,and you're telling me that she never once thought to ask for help from outside Mitakihara? And its not like in Rebellion where they weren't able to leave either. It was never stated that they couldn't leave Mitakihara city.
  • Who's to say she didn't? But more to the point, it wouldn't be any different. Her whole problem is that, at the start of the timeline, her friends are all complete strangers who have no reason to believe her about anything. That doesn't change if she goes looking for more magical girls for help, and she can't just ask Kyubey, because that risks tipping her hand. By the time it's obvious that Team Mitakihara isn't going to help her, she's so dead-set on the idea of saving Madoka herself that actually going out and making new friends probably never occurred to her. Her social skills have always sucked, and half the story is centered on how set she is in her ways, even when she knows they won't work.
    • You're also forgetting how magical girl relationships in this setting work in the first place. Magical girls in general are shady characters who fight for territory, stab each other in the back, and generally have zero reason to risk their lives to protect a city they have no reason to care about from a witch that will probably kill them. But even just discussing magical girls who've been named in the series, let's go down the list of which girls and what cities we have outside the Mitakihara girls. Nagisa's around, but Homura probably doesn't even know she can be saved before becoming Charlotte. There probably weren't any other girls in Kazamino besides Kyouko, because if there were, she'd have driven them out. Oriko might be willing to stop Walpurgis, but Oriko isn't someone Homura can team up with and trust not to kill Madoka out of hand, and her battle power is lacking anyway - she has considerable magical talent, but most of that goes into her precog abilities. Kirika isn't going to fight for Homura without Oriko, so forget that, but even if she did, her magic is essentially a weaker version of Homura's, anyway, so she wouldn't contribute all that much. Yuma might not even always become a magical girl since it happens over the span of Homura's repeated month, especially since the first time we saw her contract it involved Kyouko, but while she'd probably honestly be more useful than Sayaka (younger, but same type of magic and less emotional baggage/ties to Madoka to make her a liability - note how Yuma makes a selfless wish that doesn't turn on her) I still can't see Homura bringing her in. The Pleaides Saints are good girls and apparently live close enough that Mami could stroll through prior to their formation, but given the "rejection" system they were trying to maintain in their own city and everything else they had to do, as well as how close they all were to witching since Juubey wasn't cleaning their gems correctly, they might not have be available to help even if Homura knew to reach out to them.

• I haven't seen this been asked/answered, but if it has or this is in the wrong place, I'm really sorry! Anyways, how has Kyouko been able to stay at her hotel? Based on how the timeline goes, she's in there for roughly 3-4 days. Unless I'm mistaken, she doesn't exactly have any money, and even if she did sneak in(doubtful with how you'd need a keycard or something), how would room service just never bother to check? Would they really leave a room unattended for 3-4 days? And to add on that, could that mean someone had checked out the room Kyouko was in and discovered Sayaka's corpse that way?
  • We don't have any way to know how long she was using the hotel room, or if she used it for anything besides having a place to leave Sayaka's body, but most hotel cleaning staff aren't required to clean unoccupied rooms every day. There's plenty of ways for her to break in without causing problems, since she's fine with stealing money (or else she wouldn't be able to play in a video arcade), but the simplest, least-assumptions explanation is that she used magic to alter or manipulate whatever locks were between her and the room she wanted. As to how Sayaka was discovered... Kyouko was deliberately keeping her fresh with magic, and we know that when a magical girl dies, her magic dies with her. Most likely, somebody either somebody checked into the room, or somebody came to investigate the stench.
• When talking about wishes and magical girls, Kyuubey says that of course the wishes went wrong, the girls wished for things that defied the laws of nature (physics, and so on) and should not be possible. What would happen if someone would wish for something that was possible and easy, like the cake Mami brings up to Madoka?
  • I think Charlotte's wish probably could answer that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but she wished for one "last" cheesecake to share with her mother. Even if the last part makes it a bit of a special case, it should help clear things up. Basically the wish was granted, then the wisher realized that they could have made a better wish that would have benefited them in the long run and would have fallen to despair. And in the event that someone just wished for something straight and easy, Kyubey could have chosen not to tell them about the grief seeds part or otherwise trick them into somehow turning into a witch.
  • No matter how easy to fulfill a wish might seem, magic inherently defies nature. Even just wishing for a cheesecake requires creating matter that didn't exist before, transforming matter from one state to another with no apparent catalyst, or teleporting something without explanation. Whether or not the wish is possible doesn't change the fact that you chose to achieve it by bending the universe. This means that there will always be an accompanying distortion and an equivalent curse, even if it's small. Furthermore, the curses you're destined to spread are equal to your wish and to your good deeds as a magical girl, so unless you're crap at the job in the first place, there's no way to get out of your magical girl work becoming ultimately futile.

• Going off a question above about a theoretical girl whose wish was to be a boy, would transgender girls have a chance to become magical girls? Would Kyubey seek them out for wishes, would they have to be the recipient of a wish, or are they simply out of luck?
  • They'd be out of luck. The Incubators probably aren't capable of understanding the concept of gender identity at all, much less the idea that gender identity and physical sex aren't necessarily the same thing. They don't contract with boys because that's what their business model demands, so it's a waste of time to comb through the young male population looking for transgirls. Given what some of the studies about post-transition life suggest, though, that's a hell of a way to get a witch: wish to become a girl in exchange for becoming a magical girl, renewing your own hope every time you transform, but at the cost of your entire old life and having to suddenly deal with the everyday misogyny that, by 14, most girls have already gotten accustomed to. It probably wouldn't happen in canon without extenuating circumstances, but that's still a killer character concept.
  • But the Incubators are probably identifying candidates as girls based on gender presentation rather than their biological sex, not because they necessarily have any concept of the difference between gender and sex (though it's not impossible that they do), but because gender presentation is usually how humans try to categorize people into genders at first glance.
    • Not quite. Kyubey's whole explanation of why they contract with only girls is because "females in their second growth phase" (ie, adolescence/puberty) yield the best results. He might scout a transgirl on the assumption that she's biologically female, but based on how he describes his requirements for magical girls, being biologically male would disqualify her.
• Why doesn't Homura enchant any of her weapons?
  • Most likely for fuel(magic) efficiency; she'd be better off not spending magic to keep herself from turning into a witch, and the weapons she uses are enough to do what she needs them to do. Another possibility would be that she can't, but for now we can't say for certain.
    • But it's not enough. Sure, her weapons kill ordinary witches fine, but they do jack-diddly-prick against Walpurgisnacht. It was implied in Episode Two that enchanted weapons are better than non-enchanted weapons. And Homura can dispatch an ordinary witch in literally no time at all, so using magic and getting Grief Seeds doesn't seem to be a problem for her. Remember the timeline where she killed every single witch (and possibly all of the magical girls, see Fridge)?
    • It might be a matter of complexity. A baseball bat is just a block of solid matter, so it's not difficult to enchant that into something better. But there's comparatively complicated mechanics and chemical reactions involved in working explosives and firearms; Homura knows how to operate them and build some minor ones, but that doesn't mean she understands them well enough to enchant them without potentially screwing it up and sabotaging the weapon somehow - and unpredictable sabotage is the last thing you want with explosives. You also have to consider that, while all magical girls are implied to be able to to enchant objects, it doesn't follow that all of them can do it equally well — Mami, Kyouko, and Madoka might just have a better natural talent for it than Homura and Sayaka do. Homura doesn't bother trying to learn how because to her, it's easier to just steal more and more weapons than to spend extra time and magic enchanting what she has when she doesn't even know if the extra effort will pay off. It's also possible that it ties into another fundamental aspect of Homura's magic, the reason she has to steal firearms in the first place: she doesn't have offensive magic, besides the weak energy bullets she deploys against Kyuubey in episode 1, and if that's the best magical attack she can do after almost 100 loops then I'm not confident she can do any better. Remember, magic runs off of emotion, spirit, and symbolism, not logic — it's very possible that any enhancement magic Homura tries stops working right when she tries to use it for obviously offensive purposes.
    • From a pragmatic standpoint, it would be wasteful. Homura uses normal firearms, so enchanting the weapon probably wouldn't have any real effect. Enchanting the ammunition might be helpful, but that would require using magic to reinforce every individual bullet/shell in advance. If I had to guess, I'd assume that she'd tried it in the past and dismissed it as inefficient when she realized that killing witches with normal weapons was faster and less damaging to her soul gem. She does use magic with that fuel truck and missile launchers, though, maybe her item enchantment is just less flashy than the others?
• What are the significance of the diamond shapes on Homura's magical girl outfit? Her Soul Gem is diamond-shaped, she has a diamond pattern running down her boots, the front and back of her dress are cut in half-diamond shapes, etc.
  • All the girls get a "shape" associated with them and their Soul Gem (Madoka's teardrop, Sayaka's crescent, etc.), but if you're asking why Homura's is a diamond/rhombus, there are a variety of things it could mean. Hers is the only one of the five not to involve any sort of curvature, sticking to straight lines and angles, which fundamental sets her apart from the others. It implies her rigidity - both in the sense of her unflappability and seeming invincibility (having survived 100ish timelines), and in the sense of her inability to move on from her current state of affairs. A diamond (the gem, this time, not the shape) can symbolize strength and value accrued through pressure, which is a pretty good symbol from the strength Homura gained from all the shit she went through, as well as how Madoka became more and more special to her the more she suffered throughout the timelines. The term "diamond" evoking gemstones in the first place could also imply Homura being the closest to/knowing the most about the truth of Soul Gems and the magical girl system, although that's grasping at straws. If you wanted to stretch it even further, the lines of diamonds on her outfits work as an abstraction of her old braids.
• Junko mentions in episode 11 that she feels Madoka is holding something back from her, but she hasn't come to talk to her about it. What makes this weird is that she saw Madoka break down crying in episode 3 and heard Madoka say how much better the breakfast tasted when you were alive to eat it. Then there's Madoka mentioning that 'one of her friends is in a lot of trouble' where she asked Junko for advice. And THEN Madoka's friend Sayaka dies in circumstances that are suspicious at best. Why does Junko seem to forget the things Madoka did say by episode 11? And why on Earth would she let Madoka - a 14 year old - go out into the storm in Episode 11, especially when Madoka is refusing to tell her what the situation is?
  • She let Madoka go out because she decided to trust her. You don't have to like her decision or agree with it or consider it good parenting or think it's sane, but it's what we're given by the text. As far as forgetting the things Madoka said before, well, she hasn't. The things Madoka says are why Junko is concerned by episode 11. But she doesn't have a lot to go off of. It's obvious to us, the viewer, that Madoka being happy to be alive is a reference to her friend being dead, but all Junko would be able to extrapolate from that statement is that Madoka is going through some sort of existential crisis - alarming, but not necessarily related to a murder or a suicide. Similarly, Madoka and Junko have an open enough relationship that Madoka has probably gone to her about her personal problems before, so 'one of her friends is in a lot of trouble' isn't anything special, doesn't have to mean anything supernatural or illegal, and has no real reason to stick out to Junko. (Again, WE have the context to connect these two episodes-apart statements as being part of Madoka's magical girl baggage, but Junko doesn't have reason to assume they're related.) Then, when Sayaka dies, Junko has a few puzzle pieces: crying Madoka, Madoka grateful to be alive, Madoka's friend in crisis, and Sayaka dead. But all Junko would really able to suss from that is that Sayaka was involved in something dangerous that Madoka knew about, which is exactly the conclusion she comes to. But she couldn't really do anything about it that she hadn't already done.
• Before Madoka and Sayaka go to Heaven, Madoka implies Sayaka had a choice whether or not to become a magical girl in the new universe. How does that work? Madoka just wished to erase all wishes, rather than be able to undo other girls' contracts, so why does the script imply Sayaka could have undone her wish?
  • 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.
  • 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 guarantee 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 despair, 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 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 [School Days Nice Boat]] situation where both sides thought it was funny(which is kind of rare)?
  • It's a meme. The Morning Rescue thing caught on because the actual Morning Rescue commercial was so absurd in comparison to the show that everyone who watched it had more or less the same reaction. If anyone's responsible for the Morning Rescue meme, it's Morning Rescue.
• 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
• Is it familiars or minions? The Wikia mentions them as minion in their cards while in series they are familiars.
  • In the video game spinoff, Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story these creatures are also referred to as "familiars" by characters while the memorias, the cards used to power up your magical girls in the game, refers to them as "minions". So maybe in-universe they are only known as familiars while in meta they could be alternatively and officially referred to as minions.
• So maybe this is the wrong place to ask but if there's a right place I couldn't find it. What was that thing about Urobuchi saying the show was about girls being punished for their hubris? The part about terrorists was a mistranslation I think but did he say the first part? I have a few more on-topic questions but I need to get this sorted out first and foremost.
• Perhaps a franchise-wide headscratcher due to Ultimate Madoka, but how does any of the history work the way we know it because of the Law of Cycles? Magical girls don't turn into witches anymore, which means that a lot of the spin-off series likely don't happen. Kazumi Magica probably doesn't happen at all anymore because Kazumi is a clone of a girl that turned into a witch, and with the magical girls knowing what becomes of them now, the Pleiades Saints likely deal with the original girl's death much better. And what about Tart Magica? It's the story of Jeanne D'arc, but with magical girls, but the wish means Isabeau never turned into a witch-incubator-hybird, so she wasn't a threat so large that Cube searched for a girl like Tart to defeat her, nor will Tart go perform a Heroic Sacrifice to prevent her own witch from erupting from her Soul Gem. At least the latter would cause a huge change to the known history.
  • In general, it seems like wraith attacks often happen at the same times and places that witch attacks/familiar did in the old timelines, based on Sayaka fighting wraiths in the same train station where she despaired. So this would probably keep history in general fairly close to what it was. Magical girls witching out would be retocnned into magical girls disappearing in battle against wraiths, which has the same basic outcome (magical girl gone, new enemy that another magical girl has to kill, about the same number of civilians surviving vs dying). Only niche cases like Mami had their fates change, which makes sense for her, because Charlotte killed her with an unusual ability that no wraith would have. As far as the very magical girl system-specific stories, yes, the events of Kazumi are pretty much erased. I haven't read all of Tart, but I do know that Isabeau was a rare case who directly asked Cube for a lot of information about the witch system in advance, which is how she chose her wish. It's possible that the changes to the magical girl system led her to make a different wish or different choices that still made her a big enough threat to warrant Liz's actions even without witch powers. Alternatively, it's possible that Lapin's wish changed from "return her to how she was" to "bring her back from the Law of Cycles," which could have caused her to revive with her witch powers, leading to events turning out much the same.

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