Puella Magi Madoka Magica / Tropes A to F

This page covers tropes in Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Tropes A to F | Tropes G to M | Tropes N to S | Tropes T to Z

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#-A

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects:
  • The train tracks at the beginning of Episode 9 are obviously a flat CG surface.
  • Walpurgisnacht also uses copious amounts of it, though this was likely intentional, given Shaft's fondness for Medium Blending and especially for this series.
• 20 Minutes into the Future:
  • There isn't anything in terms of technology that isn't possible in this day and age, but things like motion-activated lamps, the architecture, and an extremely stylized (and somewhat unsafe) CD player◊ lend things a futuristic vibe.
  • The soul gems in the BD release.
  • While identifiable technology is fairly rare in the series, what does appear suggests the very near-future. In the battle with Walpurgisnacht, Homura used an M249 and some type-88 surface-to-ship missiles, and a car that looks similar to a 2010-2015 model year Prius (a more widespread car in Japan than in most countries where it's an import) appears on the highway before Sayaka and Kyouko's fight revealing the true nature of Soul Gems. Without more details, it's hard to know when exactly the series is set, but its futuristic appearance may reflect the impact of the Incubators more than the passage of time.
• Abominable Auditorium: The labyrinth of the witch Oktavia von Seckendorff is a concert hall with seating that goes all the way to the top of the domed ceiling and has a mirror image of itself under the floor. Like other labyrinths, the danger of the location is in its occupants; the violin music that the Holger familiars play can steal listeners' souls, and Oktavia herself attacks anyone who enters with a giant sword or summoned wooden wheels.
• The Abridged Series: Meduka Meguca: The Animation and Madoka Abridged among others
• Abstract Apotheosis: Madoka's wish turns her into the abstract concept of hope and also a kind of force of nature. This fulfills her wish to erase all witches (past, present, and future, including her own) from existence and preventing magical girls from becoming Witches— instead they fight a new sort of incarnation of humanity's evils, called Wraiths, and eventually die when they run out of magic, but are no longer consumed by despair and transformed into Witches. It's implied that Madoka is also waiting for them when they do die. In fact, this trope was originally named Becoming Hope, after this series.
• Accidental Pun: Mami Tomoe's name "Mami" means Mommy in Spanish and Romanian and some non-romantic languages like German. In American English, it may not be spelled "Mommy", but it definitely sounds like it. Considering her mentor role it fits her. On a slightly pervier note, her name's resemblance to the word "mammaries" has not gone unnoticed by the fanbase.
• Acid-Trip Dimension:
  • The Witchs' Realms look like the animators were drugged for these things because of the Art Shift and horrifyingly bizarre things there.
  • Implied by Homura's room which has floating objects and mirrors which respond to her mood.
• Actor Allusion: Eri Kitamura, previously the voice of Cure Berry, here plays Miki Sayaka, another blue-themed Magical Girl named Miki.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • The Drama CD "'Memories of You" is an expansion of the first part of the anime's tenth episode.
  • The Different Story manga begins with an adaptation of "Farewell Story", the anime's third Drama CD. This is acknowledged by the manga's author. The manga then segues into its own story from there.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: In order to justify its methods, Kyubey asks Sayaka how long she could hold out if she was impaled with a spear had her consciousness not been removed from her body and placed in a vessel. Then it demonstrates by pressing on the Soul Gem, and Sayaka is clutching her stomach and gasping on the floor in seconds.
• Alien Geometries: The barriers around the Witches, and the Witches themselves, are this. A great example is the first witch we see in Episode 2; it simultaneously is and isn't two-dimensional.
• All There in the Manual: The official website and supplemental materials make an interesting read for fans.
  • Technically the names of the witches appear in the episodes themselves (written in Cypher Language), but other things like the names of their familiars and their personality traits can only be found on the official website. In addition, this information includes witches that have not appeared themselves or only appeared in a Flashback. Fortunately, they are translated on this page (spoilers, obviously). Special note that the creators have left open the rest of The Unreveal to Wild Mass Guessing.
  • The black cat in the OP never appears in the show proper, but it is explained in the first Drama CD from DVD Volume 1. In the first timeline, Madoka became a magical girl to save the cat when it was hit by a car. She kept this a secret because she didn't want to be scolded for contracting for such a small reason.
  • The third Drama CD reveals Kyoko and Mami have a shared past which is only hinted at in the anime proper.
    • The Different Story devotes its entire first volume to adapting the third drama CD.
  • The concept art booklet in the sixth Blu-Ray volume reveals a character's name. Madoka's goddess form is called "Ultimate Madoka". The name is never spoken or written in the show. However, since fans have been using Fan Nickname (Godoka/Madokami/etc.) for it, this isn't a problem.
  • The You Are Not Alone guidebook includes or alludes to other Magical Girls' wishes.
• Alternate Character Reading: Invoked. The kanji used for "Mahou Shoujo" can be rewritten to reveal multiple key plot points. Similarly, "Puella Magi" has multiple meanings, which are also key plot points. All of these are explained in the anime proper and their respective tropes.
• Alternate Timeline: It is a Running Gag on the Puella Magi internet pages that you will see how many times is it now formatted like this in some kind of way. Detailed explanation:
  • Homura is capable of jumping back to a certain point and creating as many of these as she wishes. We know of at least five she's been in (the last being the "current" timeline), and parts of her end monologue in Episode 10 as well as some of the dialogue in 11 and 12 implies even more resets than shown onscreen. Official answer: "Approaching 100".
  • Madoka's wish in the final timeline changes all timelines ever as a side-effect of retro-actively destroying all witches.
  • Most of the sidestories are alternate timelines. For example, Different Story is set in a timeline where Mami survives the battle with Charlotte, while Oriko Magica has the titular character becoming a magical girl and interacting with the main characters for her own purposes.
• Always in Class One: Mami is briefly shown to be in class 3-A (in the manga).
• And the Adventure Continues: The series ends with witches being replaced with wraiths, so that Magical Girls still have something to fight. The very last scene shows Homura continuing to fight.
  • Averted in the manga adaptation, wherein after this, the final page has Ultimate Madoka taking Homura with her to the higher plane of existence to be with her for all eternity.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Kyubey reveals at the end of Episode 8 that witch is the later stage of a magical girl's existence. Magical girls can only delay the inevitable transformation of her soul by shoving The Corruption into limited-use Grief Seeds (which are incidentally fully-corrupted souls). The same episode also showed a magical girl's transformation into a witch.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: The magic system in the Puella Magi universe runs off this with Magical girls representing the angel side. The role of the devils falls on the witches that are fallen magical girls that feed on negative emotions as opposed to positive emotions. The role of the squid falls to the incubators, aliens that use the emotions of human as a source of energy, granting wishes to humans only to feed off their hope and despair.
• Angst: It's eventually revealed that Kyubey and the rest of his species have found a way to convert human emotions to energy. And who are the most emotional people in the universe? Why teenage girls of course! They have enough pent up angst to overcome the universal force of entropy and then some *rimshot*
• Angst Nuke: While it doesn't kill anyone, Sayaka's rather explosive transformation into a witch sends Kyoko and several objects around, including Sayaka's corpse, flying.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Ultimate Madoka in Episode 12 is the anthropomorphic personification of hope.
• Anyone Can Die: Mami dies in the third episode, with the ending credits theme changing to hammer in the true darker style of the series. Two episodes away from the series finale, three of the main characters have fallen. Only two remain... in this timeline. In the four shown timelines, Homura was the only main character alive following the battle against Walpurgisnacht.
• Anywhere but Their Lips: Madoka kisses the top of her own head at the end of her OP transformation sequence.
• Apocalypse How: Let's review the scale:
  • Walpurgisnacht will cause a Class 0 that leaves, at a minimum, Mitakihara in ruins.
  • Madoka's transformation into a witch in previous timelines is guaranteed to cause a Class 6.
  • Madoka's last wish and her subsequent transformation into a goddess causes a chain of destruction leading up to a Class X-5, although it's all part of her plan to fix things and rewrite reality in all timelines.
  • Kyubey and his race are actively trying to stall and/or prevent a very prolonged Class X-4 throughout the series.
• Apocalypse Maiden: Madoka. Although she was initially a normal human being and has no desire to destroy the world, Homura's constant rewriting of history means that in her current state, the entire world will be living on borrowed time if she makes a contract with Kyubey. Averted in the end of the series, but only through Loophole Abuse, since the Universe-consuming witch she becomes is destroyed by her before it can be created.
• Apocalypse Wow: Episode 12, but Ultimate Madoka saves the day... by causing another one.
• Arc Words: Walpurgisnacht is an ominous threat that Homura is preparing for in two week's time. It turns out to be the appearance of a super powerful witch.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Second episode, discussing wishes:
  Sayaka: Whoa! We could wish for treasure, or eternal youth, or a 108-course banquet!
  Madoka: Maybe that last one's a bit much...
• Artificial Script: The series contains a number of inscriptions made in not one but three different runic scripts, which had to be deciphered by the fans, who discovered that the runes were used to write sentences in German.
• Artistic Age: All of the girls look to be about 12 because of the cutesy art style, when they're really about 14 (with the exception of Mami, who is about 15 or 16, but looks the same age as the others).
• Artistic License – History: The cattle car housing the Nazis' captives in episode 12 was incredibly spacious in comparison to the ones that existed, which were usually packed so tightly passengers barely had room to stand.
• Art Shift: A witch and her barrier will employ one or the other because of their reality bending otherness.
  • The third episode stops borrowing from the Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei opening and starts borrowing from cute 1980s-style cartoons.
  • Episode 4 has a strange, flat, Louis Vuitton-esque design to the witches dimension. In the witches' TV screens, one can see the same art style used for the Maria†Holic ED.
  • Episode 5 features a realm that resembles an elementary school kid's drawings. Kyoko's explanation of her past is shown in a similar way.
  • Episode 7's realm is Deliberately Monochrome, looking like a shadow-play.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The characters were originally designed by Ume Aoki, being drawn in a very similar Puni Plush art style to her light-hearted Schoolgirl Series manga Hidamari Sketch. However, from Episode 3 onwards, it's made clear that this series is much darker and more tragic than the adorable character designs might suggest.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence
  • Madoka does this in the last episode by disconnecting herself from time to ensure witches never exist. In the process, she becomes something akin to a magical girl goddess. It is implied that all magical girls post-Madoka are also like this, with Ultimate Madoka guiding them to her own plane of existence after they die.
  • In the manga, Ultimate Madoka takes Homura to be with her forever some unspecified time afterwards.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: For starters, the school building is about 90% glass, with even the "classrooms" only having glass partitions as opposed to actual walls. The utter sterility of the city itself makes a nice contrast against both the characters and the bizarre world of the witches.
• Asshole Victim: In Episode 8, Sayaka encounters two rude misogynists on a train. The context implies that she killed them.
  • Word of God on this is more like Flip-Flop of God: Shinbo says she didn't, the manga author says she did, and Urobuchi says he intentionally left it ambiguous.
• Astral Checkerboard Decor: Many of the witches have this motif somewhere inside their barriers. The first few minutes of the opening episode is nothing but this. The end of the manga takes place in a dungeon with a checkered floor and acts as nice Book Ends.
• Athletically Challenged: When Homura first came to Madoka's school, she was very clumsy and bad at sports, due to having a heart condition. After going through a time loop of repeating the previous month numerous times and having to fight many witches, she became the best athlete in the class.
• Autocannibalism: After Kyubey is killed, something that looks just like him waltzes onto the scene and eats the corpse. Word of God says that he has many functioning bodies, all with one shared consciousness, so chances are he was recycling the protein or something. That, or he didn't want some random person to stumble across the dead Kyubey.
• Award-Bait Song
  • "and I'm home".
  • "Hikari Furu", a vocal version of "Sagitta Luminis" in the second movie is this even moreso.
• Awful Truth: Coincides with Wham Episodes, due to Kyubey's Exact Words policy.
  • Episode 6: Soul Gems are actually Soul Jars. The process of becoming a magical girl involves ripping out the soul and transforming it into a gem. The human bodies become empty shells animated by the Soul Gem; the two must remain in close proximity. In other words, "magical girl" is synonymous with "lich".
  • Episode 8: Witches are magical girls whose Soul Gems are sufficiently corrupted.
  • Episode 9: Kyubey's race has been using magical girls as an energy source since the beginning of human history. The energy released when one transforms into a witch overcomes entropy.
  • Episode 11: Madoka has incredible latent potential because of Homura's time resets. Each timeline is centered on Madoka, and all of those timelines have converged on her. This means that all of Homura's attempts to save her have made her into the most powerful magical girl ever and thus the most powerful witch.
• Ax-Crazy: Sayaka hacks a witch to pieces in Episode 7 and all the while laughing about how she doesn't feel any pain.

B

• Back from the Dead: Specifically mentioned as something that Kyubey can't do. Unless it's Madoka making the wish as Madoka's wish in The Different Story brings Sayaka back to life after her transformation into a witch. Presumably, it takes place during one of the later timelines.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The opening is something that would fit perfectly on any typical Magical Girl show, with Shout Outs to Cardcaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon, and Pretty Cure. The ending has distorted music, is nearly completely devoid of color, has sombre lyrics^note  The song is Magia by the band Kalafina, and ends with Madoka floating in the fetal position in the eye socket of a giant skull. Prior to Episode 3, the anime avoids showing the ending and instead ran the credits along the conclusion of the episode and used the song for fight scenes. The bait and switch disappears when it becomes clear just whose perspective the opening song is from.
  • The Blu-rays for the first two episodes have an ending theme which plays this trope straight.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy
  • Madoka's Screw Yourself transformation sequence in the OP.
  • Seen during Kyoko's and Homura's transformation sequences.
  • Shows up in Episode 12, during the encounter between Homura and Madoka after the latter's ascension to law-of-naturehood.
• Barred from the Afterlife: A magical girl transformed into a witch is implied to be unable to properly pass on to whatever afterlife exists in this world. During the conversation in the Afterlife Antechamber in episode 12, Mami and Kyoko (who died when their Soul Gems were shattered) appear so they can talk to Madoka, while Sayaka (who became a witch and was subsequently killed by Kyoko) does not.
• Batman Gambit: Kyubey's modus operandi involves appearing to MG candidates when they are at their most vulnerable and least able to resist a miracle. Afterwards, he twists their motivations to ensure their fall into despair in order to harvest their energy. A specific example: Kyubey misleads Kyoko into believing there may be a way to make Sayaka human again, which leads to Kyoko's death and leaves Homura as the only magical girl left; since Homura can't possibly defeat Walpurgisnacht alone, Kyubey hopes this will force Madoka into making a contract.
• Batter Up!: On her first witch hunt alongside Mami, Sayaka brings along a baseball bat to compensate for a lack of magical girl powers.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: See here.
• Beach Episode: No, not in the anime itself but in the fourth Drama CD.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Cleopatra, Queen Himiko, Joan of Arc and Anne Frank were magical girls.
• Being Good Sucks:
  • This is Kyoko's motto and something she tries to convince Sayaka of. Magical Girls should only use their powers to benefit themselves because doing things for others will only make them miserable and even the person receiving the help may end up miserable too.
  • Sayaka's attempt at being a moral crusader backfires and the strain of fighting as a magical girl while not getting what she wanted causes her sanity to leak down the drain.
  • The ending also qualifies, as Madoka's tradeoff for saving magical girls from their inevitable fate was being erased from physical existence, and magical girls still eventually die—they just no longer corrupt into Witches (it's implied they go to some sort of Magical Girl heaven with Madoka).
• Berserk Button:
  • Kyoko doesn't like it when people waste food.
  • Don't mess with Madoka in any way or form if you want to stay on Homura's good side.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • Kyoko's Heroic Sacrifice, because she had no intention of transforming into a witch.
  • In Episode 10, after The Reveal in a previous timeline, Mami suffers a mental breakdown and tries to kill the other main characters and herself, following this logic. After the battle against Walpurgisnacht in the same timeline, Madoka asks Homura to Mercy Kill her before she turns into a witch.
• Big Bad: Walpurgisnacht is effectively the head witch, and will destroy the world if not stopped. However, it is the adorable but duplicitous and secretive little Weasel Mascot Kyubey who created her and the other witches. It doesn't tell the Magical Girls he creates certain key facts, including that Magical Girls are essentially liches, that the wishes they make with him frequently turn out badly for them because they're not wishing for the right things, that every Witch that the Magical Girls fight (aside from those born from familiars) was once a Magical Girl herself — and that they're ultimately doomed to become Witches themselves. Not only that, but he doesn't care one whit about humans as long as the universe itself continues to exist. Also played with, since while Kyubey does not directly oppose or antagonize the girls, it is the reason why the bad events of the show happen.
  • If you count Walpurgis Night as a character and not a force of nature then it becomes a Big Bad Ensemble, given its influence on the plot.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Homura frequently steps in to save someone; usually Madoka.
  • It's defied when Kyoko tries to step in for Sayaka but this girl refuses Kyoko's help, gets back up and defeats the witch she was fighting.
  • Sayaka pulls this off in Episode 4, saving Madoka from being torn apart by the witch's minions.
• Big Eater:
  • Kyoko rarely appears without some kind of snack food in hand. This is probably related to the fact that her family was too poor to afford enough food before Kyoko made her wish.
  • Madoka herself comes off as this in the 100 Questions.
  • A certain infamous dessert-based witch...
• Big Good: Due to her Cosmic Retcon, Madoka becomes the patron goddess of Magical Girls. She saves them from witching out, gives them hope, and is implied to take them to magical girl heaven.
• Big "NO!": In Episode 10, in the timeline shown just before the current one, Homura does this as she falls while Madoka makes the contract from the scene in the first episode.
• Bigger Is Better:
  • "Not enuff dakka, Mami? Try a bigga shoota!" Averted. The bigger gun doesn't hit the enemy's weak spot (its head), and it rushes out of its shell to engage her in melee.
  • Played straight with Walpurgisnacht: The second largest witch shown and infamous among magical girls for its power.
  • Both of Kriemhild Gretchen's forms are huge: the first time we see her, she's obscured by weather and distance, but she's mountainous in height and estimated to be able to destroy the world in a little over a week; the second time, she's big enough to envelop the planet.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The German graffiti in Episode 2 are quotes from Faust.
  • Homura's wall is decorated with a full transcription of "Das Hexen-Einmaleins" (Counting with witches basically), which reads like a nursery rhyme, but again originates from Goethe's Faust.
  • The Anthonies in Episode 1 chant a series of phrases in German.
  • "Tiro Finale" is Italian for "last shot". It was originally supposed to be "''Filo'' Finale".
  • Madoka's homework in Episode 6 is to translate the English nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle." To see her word processor giving a closely translated suggestion to the words "Hey diddle diddle" in Japanese is quite an amazing feat.
  • Graffiti on the wall shown right before Kyoko and Madoka enter Sayaka's Labyrinth says "Love Me Do".
  • As noted above, many of the songs in the soundtrack have Latin titles; the lyrics for a few of them are in Italian.
  • The reveal that witches are corrupted magical girls is potentially easier to guess if you speak Japanese, noting the spelling of "majo" and "mahou shoujo". Kyuubey even points this out after Sayaka transforms into a witch, in a line that might come off confusing for those who are only reading subtitles.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Walpurgisnacht has been defeated, there are no witches, there never will be, and there never have been, magical girls are carried off by Madokami to Magical Girl Heaven instead of turning into witches, Incubators are able to gather curse energy harmlessly, and both Kyoko and Mami return from death. Madoka is a goddess, and one day, she and Homura will be together again. On the bitter side, the magical girls fight wraiths (rather than witches), Sayaka is still dead (though at least this time it was while fighting wraiths alongside her friends), and Madoka has disappeared from normal existence, forgotten by all except Homura and Madoka's pre-verbal little brother.
  • In the manga, there's more sweetness. An unspecified period after Homura's battle with the wraiths, she is shown in Madoka's heaven, restored to her innocent and adorable self, to be with Madoka forever.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: The Incubators seem to operate in an extremely rational Hive Mind. They view emotions as a mental sickness, and do not consider not telling every part of the truth as lying. Simply put, their only concern is to offset the heat-death of the universe.
• Black and White Magic: Magical girls are powered by wishes and in Ultimate Madoka's universe, hope, while witches are powered by curses. Guess how witches are created.
• Black Box: Magic is impossible to figure out even to Kyubey and the race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens he comes from, but it seems to work and he doesn't mind that it's a black box that involves the suicidal grief and monstrous transformations of adolescent girls.
• Black Comedy:
  • The official franchise pokes a lot of fun making fun of Mami for losing her head. For instance:
    • When about to air Episode 3, an official broadcast tweet said something along the lines of "This episode features Mami - keep your heads on!".
    • Aniplex of USA got in on the fun as well when they uploaded Mami's voice actress' interview.
    • In Madoka Online's summary about the game, where you can design your Magical girl, Mami is wearing an accessory of Charlotte biting her head, as she says "It sorta feels like the dice decide your fate, huh?"◊. We know the dice didn't roll in her favor.
    • In the game, the staff released Mami's^note the rarest and strongest type of card Tiro Finale card. The card's image? Mami about to be mogu mogu'd by Charlotte◊.
    • Speaking of merchandise, we have this gem◊ of a USB drive.
  • invoked In a meta-example overlapping with Misaimed Marketing, we have this promotional wishboard. Either the ones behind this idea were oblivious to what making a wish with Kyubey entails, or they really do have a warped sense of humor.
  • In another meta-example concerning the producers, the animation team briefly cracked some jokes about Walpurgisnacht showing up early on their twitter and chat feeds about the Tsunami that hit Tokyo hours after Episode 10 aired.
• Black Speech: Shown when the art shifts and the witches come out to add a verbal ''otherness' to the images.
• Bland-Name Product: Kyoko offers Homura some Rocky ^note  which is also an actual product but clearly represents Pocky in Malaysia◊. The Dog Drug Reinforcement dancing game she's playing in the same scene is another one.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Defied by Kyubey since he considers himself above lying.
  • Gen Urobuchi lies a lot.
• Blessed with Suck: A magical girl will have any wish of theirs granted in addition to Magical Girl powers that they can use for any purpose they want. However there are a few things in the fine print Kyubey doesn't mention. Like having to experience despair equal to the happiness gained from that wish, and spending the rest of their life as a lich fighting witches and possibly becoming a witch themselves.
  • Cursed with Awesome: This is the final fate of magical girls in Madoka's reconstructed universe. A wish is granted to the girls at the cost of fighting the wraiths until the girls exhaust their soul gems and die. However, as long as they keep fighting the wraiths, their soul gems keep replenishing — so it's very much a willpower thing. Finally, when they wear out at last, Madoka appears to guide them to Magical Girl Heaven.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Mami, Homura, and Kyoko, respectively, are the three veteran Magical Girls, contrasting with newcomers Madoka and Sayaka's more improbable hair colors. They are the only main magical girls who still exist in the rewritten universe.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Where the anime avoids depicting gore, the manga revels in it. Gory Discretion Shots are frequently averted. Blood is added to scenes that didn't originally have it, and characters are drawn with Nightmare Face expressions that give Higurashi: When They Cry a run for its money.
  • Here's a comparison of Sayaka's fight with Elsa Maria in the TV and BD version (spoiler warning). The BD version adds more blood to the scene.
  • The BD release keeps better consistency with Kyoko's injuries during her fight with Oktavia.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Kyubey discusses this trope with the magical girls and Madoka. He says he's an alien gathering energy to stave off entropy. It just so happens that having teenage girls turning into Eldritch Abominations is a very efficient way to do so, and he doesn't understand how anyone who knows the whole story could object to The Plan. When Madoka asks him how he could have been doing this for so long and never even try to understand the girls' feelings, his response is that if his people could understand human emotions they wouldn't have needed humans at all.
  • Kyubey reveals that his species, the Incubators, are incapable of emotion and seem to function as a single, very rational Hive Mind. He says that the Incubators consider emotions to be a mental illness and were utterly baffled by the existence of humans, believing that a society in which every individual has emotions would be incapable of functioning. Just as Madoka (and the viewer) cannot understand Kyubey's coldheartedness and total lack of concern for any of the girls under his care (and indeed, the entire human race), Kyubey and the rest of the Incubators can't understand humanity's emotional nature and concern for individuals..
  • His consistent reply to the girls' protests, "I don't understand what you mean," has become a Memetic Mutation associated with him in Japan.
  • In the epilogue, he's still this, but his race's best chance to work on things in the new paradigm is to work very closely and openly with the magical girls. He even warns them up front that they will fade away when they run out of magic.
  Gen Urobuchi: There is no malicious intent in him, but his moral values are fundamentally different from those of humans.
• Body Horror: Episode 4 features a witch that kills its victims by stretching them until they tear apart. The effect is exaggerated by the art style used for it.
• Bolivian Army Ending:
  • In the anime, Homura's final fate is uncertain; it could be that she's gained new superpowers, or she's going to Heaven as soon as the series is over or both. Averted in the manga, when Madoka does indeed take her to Heaven, where they'll be together forever, along with Sayaka.
  • It is possible that Homura in the anime had split into two separate people. The anime depicts two versions of her: one with Madoka's bow defeating large Mooks and another with symbolism showcasing her badass purple wings. Word of God, so far, has not given a confirmation on the ending. See the WMG page for speculation.
  • Different Story ends in this way, with Madoka, Sayaka, and Homura getting ready to fight Walpurgisnacht. However, readers who have already seen the anime know that the result of the battle is a Foregone Conclusion.
• Book Ends: The very beginning and the very end of the series are set to the sound of a projector running, and then the sound of it abruptly shutting off. There are several within the story, as well:
  • Madoka's mother chooses a pair of ribbons for her in the first episode, which she wears throughout the rest of the series. Near the end, Homura tries to give one of them back to Madoka's mother; she doesn't take it because she's too old to pull off that look, but says that if she had a daughter, she'd make her wear it.
  • Kyoko announces her intent to kill Sayaka in her first appearance, and they both try to kill each other in their first encounter. Eventually, they become somewhat friendly. After Sayaka becomes a witch, Kyoko kills herself and Sayaka simultaneously.
  • The first time Homura sees Madoka about to go and sacrifice herself, she tells "Miss Kaname-!". The final time this happens, she yells "MADOKA-!" instead. Both incidents also feature Homura being ripped from her forcibly; first by not having Magical Girl powers, second by a rewrite of the universe itself.
  • In the first episode, Sayaka teases Madoka about acting like an anime character. In the last episode, Madoka has been erased from existence, but her kid brother Tatsuya is seen drawing her as an Imaginary Friend. When Homura seems to recognize the drawing, Madoka's mother asks Homura if Madoka is an anime character.
  • In the first episode, before the opening credits, Homura is fighting alone against overwhelming odds, in an alternate timeline. In the last episode, after the closing credits, Homura is again fighting alone against overwhelming odds. The difference is that Homura is smiling in the final fight, because she knows that Goddess!Madoka is watching over her.
• Boss Subtitles: Every witch has one written in Cypher Language.
• Bowdlerize: In the original Japanese, when Kyoko is revealing her past to Sayaka, she says that her family was inadvertently destroyed by her prayer. In the English dubs and subtitles, she says "wish" instead of "prayer".
• Bread and Circuses: A "stable but not always comfortable status quo" version. Kyubey provides wishes so magical girls will fight for his goals and enable him to collect the energy generated by their despair. This trope is almost taken literally with Sayaka's witch realm, which is represented as an operatic cinema/three-ring circus.
• Break the Cutie: A list:
  • Madoka, who over the course of the series is forced to suffer through the deaths of Mami, Sayaka and Kyoko, on top of learning how the system works.
  • Kyosuke is revealed to have been on the fence for some time, since his injuries meant he would never be able to play the violin again. Until Sayaka uses her wish to heal him.
  • Sayaka becomes a magical girl for Kyosuke's sake, only to find out the truth about soul gems and discover that Hitomi also has feelings for Kyosuke. She falls into despair, and eventually becomes a witch.
  • Homura was originally a very shy girl from an alternate timeline, who befriends Madoka and Mami after they save her from a witch. After the two magical girls die fighting Walpurgisnacht, Homura wishes to go back in time and protect Madoka, hoping to save her. Instead, she's forced to watch all of her friends die or become witches in each of the four iterations we have seen her experience. The series offers what appears to be a fifth iteration, however, in Episode 11, Kyubey remarks that Homura has gone through this cycle countless times and it is still not looking any better.
  • Mami gets her turn with The Different Story as it spells out what was hinted at in the TV series; Survivor Guilt, turf wars, falling out with her students, etc.
• Breather Episode: Episode 5 is much lighter in tone compared to the previous two episodes, which dealt with Mami's death (Episode 3) and the effect it has on the characters (Episode 4).
• Brick Joke: You'll be wondering where the Deconstruction elements are laid in, but it will take about two and a half episodes for it to be noticed. That is within itself a Brick Joke, created by the fanbase. No surprise when Episode 10 comes around do the elements of other Episodes suddenly become very familiar, for good reason. This list of Brick Jokes/Call Backs from earlier Episodes may be spoileriffic if read under the right context, so beware of potential spoilers.
  • Episode 1 in its entirety is a Brick Joke: almost everything that happens has some important relation to the plot later on.
    • The opening Credits Running Sequence has black-and-white Astral Checkerboard Decor, which looks extremely out of place when compared to other episodes. Later Episodes showcase the Witches with Astral Checkerboard Decor. Episode 10 shows that Madoka became a Witch in several timelines.
    • The second sequence shows Homura fighting off against a powerful floating...thing. Homura in later Episodes tells Madoka that something powerful is coming soon. Episode 10 reveals that the Witch from Episode 1 was actually Timeline 4 Walpurgisnacht.
    • A seemingly out-of-place sequence shows Madoka looking in several directions, and then randomly waking up, which looks like a Shout-Out to Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. Episode 4 introduces Kyouko, whose VA was was previously a part of the same show. The Anthonies shown throughout the series also look like a direct rip from the opening sequence of SZS as well. Apparently, every single Magical Girl really is in despair because of the Deal with the Devil.
    • Madoka asks her mom about her ribbons. She wonders if her ribbons will make her look cool and stand out above the crowd at school. The final episode has Madoka giving Homura her ribbons. Then, Homura meets Madoka's mother (or at least, the woman who was Madoka's mother when Madoka still existed as a person), who remarks that the ribbons look uncannily like something she would make her daughter wear, if she had one.
    • The entire introduction sequence for Homura at school has her doing incredible stunts and then proceeding along a walkway to the nurse's office with Madoka, the designated class nurse. Strangely, Homura is breaking down along the way while Madoka gives heartfelt encouragement. The first few minutes of Episode 10 has this whole sequence replicated but with reversed positions and Homura being the exact inverse she was in the current timeline. In particular, the dramatic shot of Homura turning on her heel (literally) to face Madoka appears again in episode 10, with their roles reversed.
    • Kyubey is running from Homura in the air shaft in the mall, with the intent to kill him. Kyubey, at this point in time, looks extremely hurt and defenseless, while Homura already looks like an Anti-Hero. She was doing it to try to prevent Kyubey from making a contract with Madoka, knowing what would happen if she didn't. In the Drama CD, Madoka used her wish to save a cat from death, with Homura appalled for such an innocent wish. In Episode 10, Madoka is shown to be a very kind and caring person.
    • Episode 1's Witch has copious amounts of flowers and scissors stylized like a "secret garden" Eldritch Location, but Mami defeats this Witch. Episode 3 has Level Ate, complete with knives and cakes. Episode 3 was also the episode that had the Off with Her Head! with Mami. There's also a taboo about cutting off the heads of flowers.
  • Episode 2:
    • Mami Tomoe's name is stylized in a strange way on the plaque at the apartment she lives in. Her name is written like "巴マミ", and "Tomoe" is also the same nameinvoked of a famous female samurai named Tomoe Gozen. Her name turns into a Visual Pun when her head gets chomped off. This is also a reference to Tomoe Gozen, who was a One Woman Army who defeated thousands of enemies and returned with the head of one of the enemies.
    • Mami talks about the role of the Magical Girl, but there's a lot of unexplained questions, like how the Witches are formed at all. It does not help that Mami's VA is the same as an infamous Exposition Fairy. When Kyubey talks in Episode 7 about how their souls aren't attached to their bodies, he adds that Mami had never known about this before her death. Ironically, when she did know about the truth in one timeline, she had gone mad and killed Kyoko in the process.
    • Mami also explains that the Soul Gem is formed as proof of a contract with Kyubey. Eventually we learn that it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The Soul Gem literally contains the magical girl's soul, to help them with pain tolerance, as Kyubey demonstrates with Sayaka Miki.
    • In one part Sayaka asks something along the lines of "How are witches different from magical girls?", apparently not by much.
    • Remember the teacup Mami summoned after defeating Gertrud in Episode 2? It reappears in Episode 3 after Homura blows up Charlotte, the witch that ate Mami. It's broken. Also, Homura said that "this is the fate of a magical girl", while it shows what's left of Mami (blood and a broken teacup) and a Grief Seed.
    • There is a seemingly innocuous shot of Mami◊ sitting like a Proper Lady with her hands folded neatly in her lap. The glass tabletop shows a reflection of Mami's head, which is framed in such a way that it looks like she's holding her head in her lap. Guess what happens in the next episode.
  • Episode 3: Before Mami arrives at the room that has Charlotte, she says that to celebrate Madoka becoming a magical girl, they should eat cake. In Episode 12, when Madoka is in the meta-world talking with Mami and Kyoko, Mami is serving her cake - right before she becomes a magical girl.)
  • Episode 6: Madoka asks how to deal with Sayaka, who keeps fighting for what she thinks is right, but the more effort she puts into it, the worse things turn out for her. Madoka's mother suggests to do the wrong thing to snap her out of it. During Episode 8, Homura threatens to kill Sayaka Miki if she keeps troubling Madoka with her self-destructive behavior. The look on Sayaka's face shows that doing that got her attention. If saving Sayaka was Homura's true intentions, then it might have worked if Kyouko didn't pull a Big Damn Heroes moment by restraining Homura.
  • Episode 10: The OP itself turns out to be a Brick Joke when it's shown at the end of the episode instead of the beginning, to reveal that the entire song had always been from Homura's point of view, not Madoka's. This wasn't exactly obvious before, since shots of Madoka take up about 99% of the OP; but the 10th episode is all about Homura, and the OP's lyrics are practically a plot summary. Like This
• Bright Is Not Good: A Talking Animal, colored white and pink? How dangerous could it be?
• Broad Strokes:
  • The author of the Madoka Magica manga has stated that the anime and manga are based on the same scenario, but has implied that the manga could be very different down the road. This is completely false; the manga is based on the exact same script as the anime, and is simply a Bloodier and Gorier Compressed Adaptation. The closest it gets to diverging from the anime is the addition of a short, highly ambiguous, epilogue.
  • Kazumi Magica appeared to be this in the first three chapters, but the fourth chapter ultimately explained most of the inconsistencies. On the other hand, the Soul Gems and Grief Seeds look different until the third chapter, where they suddenly look like the ones in the anime. This was fixed in the collected edition.
• Broken Bird: Every Magical Girl who lives long enough will despair, become bitter, and otherwise broken.
• Butterfly of Doom: Episode 10: The incident where Madoka saved Homura from a witch snowballed over the course of several timeline resets and eventually results in a Cosmic Retcon.

C

• Calling Your Attacks: Mami calls out the name of her final attack when she's fighting witches.
• The Cameo: Volume 3 of The Different Story contains the brief appearance of Michiru Kazusa◊ from Puella Magi Kazumi Magica, referencing an event that occurred in the latter's backstory.
• Canis Latinicus: Though the song titles are real Latin, the lyrics to songs such as "Sis puella magica!" and "Credens justitam" are not. The lyrics are gibberish that Kajiura writes according to what sounds pleasant, matches the melody, and is easy to sing.
• Can't Catch Up: Sayaka is the weakest Magical Girl shown. Even in the best-possible-timeline ending, she still dies, despite being partnered with Kyoko and Mami. She's also the only one who has a Despair Event Horizon to reach because the object of her wish is still alive to die for, one way or the other; the others have already lost theirs.
• Can't Take Criticism: It is implied that Isabel the Artist Witch was once a magical girl who didn't like criticism. Like what her card description says, "In order to defeat this Witch, remember to bring a critic."
• Cassandra Truth: Kazuko warns her students against upcoming dangers in the plot. But since she phrases them in the form of a midlife crisis, nobody listens. Her scenes are framed as unrelated comic relief so the viewer is also prone to brushing her off.
• Cast from Lifespan:
  • Using magic of any kind dims soul gems. When it's completely dark, the magical girl turns into a witch.
  • In the new universe, this is even more true — when the soul gem runs out of power, Ultimate Madoka takes the despair — and the soul gem — away to the afterlife.
• Censor Steam: Madoka and Homura in Madoka's dimension "beyond reality". The disk sets use Barbie Doll Anatomy instead.
• Central Theme:
  • Is there truly such a thing as a Selfless Wish, or is everyone Secretly Selfish? Is there a way to benefit others as well as yourself at the same time?
  • Be Careful What You Wish For ! -don't rush into things without thinking.
• Cessation of Existence:
  • In the anime, Kyubey implies this is what happens to human souls after their receptacle is destroyed. Madoka's "omnipotent" potential, Kyubey's own ability to be reborn, the witches cloning themselves via familiars, and Homura coming from an alternate timeline render this less than certain.
  • In the manga, it's averted: Kyōko and Sayaka are shown together in the afterlife after their death.
• Cheeky Mouth: On occasion. Madoka◊ displays a very wide one during the first episode, when she's talking about her dream.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The long haired Madoka from the OP. Also, before the last two episodes aired, the website was redesigned to have a picture of Madoka with a pair of wings. Madoka gets both in the final episode.
    • The same OP scene, with a short-haired girl and long-haired girl snuggling while nude in a weird zero-gravity sparkly realm, is very much like the "space hugs" scene from the final episode.
  • Homura's original art featured her as the one with a bow. Then there was the later illustration of her and Madoka holding the bow together in what looked like a disguised spoiler for the last battle. They left guns outside the Fourth Wall. In the epilogue, Homura is shown using a modified version of Madoka's bow instead of her time-stopping powers. Which makes sense, as in the new reality there was no Madoka to sacrifice herself and gain time powers for.
• Chekhovs Gun Man: Homura sets the timelines in motion that strengthens Madoka to become the most powerful Magical Girl.
• The Chosen Many: Aside from the main characters, it is shown that there are other Magical Girls all around the world.
• Chromatic Arrangement:
  • For the main Power Trio, we have Madoka, Sayaka, and Hitomi. This represents the Red-Blue-Green.
  • For the second Power Trio, we have Madoka, Sayaka, and Mami. This represents the Red-Blue-Yellow.
• Clothing Damage: Madoka's uniform slowly shreds off doing the ending.
• Color-Coded Characters: Each of the main girls has her own colour theme.
  • Madoka: Pink.
  • Sayaka: Blue.
  • Mami: Yellow.
  • Kyoko: Red.
  • Homura: Purple.
• Combat Pragmatist: Homura. The justification is explained on the character page.
• Combat Tentacles: Gertrud has this attack, as does Elsa Maria.
• Cool Big Sis: Mami. The idea is exploited in that she admits to Madoka that she was anything but cool and collected during fights (being a middle-schooler fighting to the death regularly against otherworldly abominations), and she simply put on the appearance of the cool big sister/mentor role to endear herself to her younger companions and hide her fears from both them and herself.
• The Corruption: When a magical girl experiences negative emotions (especially despair and angst), their soul gem darkens. Eventually, such emotions turn them into witches.
• Cosmic Horror Story: We have mortals fighting eldritch abominations only to eventually fall to despair, go insane, and become abominations themselves. There is also a race of Starfish Aliens who operate on Blue-and-Orange Morality and consider the human race and Earth ultimately inconsequential in the greater scheme of things.
• Costume Porn: The magical girls have beautiful battle outfits.
• Covers Always Lie: Played with. Official artwork for the series constantly shows Madoka in full Magical Girl attire. She doesn't make the contract until the final episode. However, she became a magical girl in the previous four timelines Homura has experienced. Aside from that, the bow and arrow Homura is shown with in one piece of official artwork is actually the weaponry one of the alternate-timeline Madoka uses. Homura doesn't touch it until the very end.
  • More generally, the cover was deliberately designed to give the impression it is a low-budget clone of shows like Sailor Moon when it is anything but.
• Crapsaccharine World: Technology has advanced and is ubiquitous, there's no visible pollution, and everything's shiny and white. However...The only reason human society has advanced this far is because of the intervention of the Incubators and the suffering of countless magical girls since the beginning of human history. Without them, humans would still be living in caves. Also there's still disease, domestic abuse, murder, organised crime, a need for a military response, and witches that can destroy whole cities or even the whole world.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: Madoka and co form one in one of the timelines. though even if they didn't, they'd still count as "backed, individual members", given they fight witches exclusively.
• Credits Running Sequence: A silhouette of Madoka running into darkness.
  • Revealed in episode 10 to be Foreshadowing Madoka embracing her destiny to stop the Walpurgisnacht and change the world. The shadows that drift by as she are the images of her friends who have died up to that point. The only shadow that moves is the only other one of them left alive, Homura, who reaches out to her because she's trying to save her from this fate.
• Cryptic Background Reference: Mami states that witches cause all sorts of bad things to happen with their mere presence, but we're only shown two attempted suicides. Walpurgisnacht's true nature and name are also never divulged, even in the manual. The muggles can only see her as a 'supercell' storm.
• Cryptic Conversation: Justified. The last time Homura tried to explain everything, none of the girls in timeline 3 believed her until Sayaka became the witch Oktavia. Immediately after Oktavia's defeat, Mami suffered a breakdown and murdered Kyoko which forced Madoka to kill her.
  • Even more frightening, she thought it through enough that her first move was to restrain the one teammate that had time-control powers before attempting to kill everyone.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In one timeline (specifically, the one that the opening sequence from the first episode is from), Madoka becomes a magical girl and defeats Walpurgisnacht in one shot. She becomes a witch immediately after and with enough power to destroy the world within ten days.
• Curtain Call: At the end, a picture appears showing the silhouettes of the five Magical Girls in the show with the magical girl forms of all the witches fought in the anime.
• Curtains Match the Window:
  • All the Magical Girls have matching hair, eye and even costume colors; Madoka (pink), Sayaka (blue), Mami (yellow), Kyoko (red)... except Homura who has black hair, purple eyes and a purple costume. However, a lot of official art tends to color her purple for all three.
  • Averted for Madoka in the final episode where she gains amber eyes and a white dress in her Ultimate Madoka form, but her hair is still pink.
• Cute Is Evil:
  • Kyubey. His full name is Incubator, as in the incubator of the witches that magical girls fight and eventually become themselves, if their soul gems are completely corrupted. It's also only a syllable and a half away from "Incubus", continuing the Faustian theme...
  • Charlotte, which looks and acts like something from a goofy kid's cartoon, in a setting that is anything but even before Mood Whiplash sets in. This and speculations regarding what led to her fixation on cheese inspired enough sympathy for Charlotte within certain elements of the fandom such that some began to think that she would have made a good pet/friend/adopted-family for Mami while a handful of others outright crackshipped the two of them together.
• Cyberpunk:
  • While it primarily uses magic rather than technology^note even though technology itself is still pretty advanced, and the city is much cleaner than in usual works, the show's hints at transhumanism and, to a lesser extent, Kyubey's mottos and personality could feel right at home in a Cyberpunk series.
  • Homura's character in particular feels like a typical Cyberpunk protagonist.
• Cypher Language: The runes. They are not just a substitution cypher, they are also in German. See the Analysis page for the translations. The wiki is filled to the brim with the translations.

D

• Dark Reprise: "Magia", the ending song of the series, made its appearance in the first scene of the first episode. There, the song is slowed down to give it a much darker atmosphere than it already had. This turned out to be a production error as all of the music in the first episode was slowed down and it was back to its normal speed and pitch in later airings.
  • "She is a Witch", the song that plays in the menu of the DVD/Blu-Ray of the first and second movies, is a Dark Reprise of "Sagitta Luminous". Fitting, considering where and when you hear both.
• Darker and Edgier: Expect no less from the author of Saya no Uta to take magical girls and create a show that makes you want to scream and sob. The finale makes things Lighter and Softer but Magical Girl death still occurs and the wraiths are still scary.
• Darkest Hour: Episode 11 Walpurgisnacht has endured an army's worth of firepower from the lone Homura, who has finally given up hope of her "Groundhog Day" Loop ever saving Madoka, who steps up to make her wish...
• Dark Magical Girl: Homura starts the main narrative as a stoic and antagonistic Magical Girl opposing our friendly protagonist, Madoka. The truth is closer to a inversion as she was on Madoka's side from the start as her Mysterious Protector and began the story as her shy friend.
• The Day the Music Lied:
  • Episode 3's battle scene starts with standard battle fare when the fight with Charlotte starts, but it immediately switches to grim dark once Caterpillar!Charlotte appears.
  • The music in the scene near the end of Episode 8. See Musicalis Interruptus in the next section.
  • The opening theme song is sung by Homura in the post-Episode 12 world. The lyrics and symbolism make perfect sense once you realize this.
• Dead Person Conversation: When Madoka was on her way toward goddess-hood, she met Kyoko and Mami in... somewhere suspiciously similar to Mami's apartment. Chat and cakes were had. Sayaka isn't there because she didn't die: she became a Witch and her soul was destroyed. After Ultimate Madoka rewrites the universe she is revived/never died/etc and the two have a last conversation at Kyosuke's recital before leaving for the new magical girls' heaven.
• Deal with the Devil: The Puella Magi universe turns the standard Magical Girl contract with the Mentor Mascot into one of these. Kyubey will make any one wish you have come true in exchange for turning you into a Magical Girl Warrior who has to fight Witches. By accepting the contract, the girl becomes a Lich, with her Soul Gem becoming her Soul Jar, and she will eventually become one of the very monsters she's fighting because of her wish backfiring in ways that drive her to despair combined with the way magic works serving to corrupt her Soul Gem. All of this happens so Kyubey can collect the energy generated by the arc from hope to despair and use it to stave off entropy.
• Death by Origin Story: Mami's parents died in the process of her becoming a magical girl, while Kyoko's lasted long enough to (along with her sister) become a collective Cynicism Catalyst.
• Deceptively Cute Critter: The Incubators take the form of ridiculously adorable weasel/cat/fox-things, the better to appeal to the girls that they target with their contracts to become Magical Girls. Their agenda for the girls, unfortunately, is anything but benign: every magical girl they create is doomed to become a witch, and to be killed by other magical girls who are in turn doomed to become witches, all to try to prevent the heat death of the universe.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Specifically, this series deconstructs the power of heart often used in Magical Girl anime. The show does this by drawing attention to the fact that the power of what the girls wish for (the desires of their heart) are never as pure and noble as many shows often assume they would be (these are young girls after all and Humans Are Flawed). Tragedy ensues because of their often selfish and unclear desires. The ending, however, reconstructs the power of heart in that a wish made for all the right reasons can essentially become the most powerful force to ever exist.
• Decoy Protagonist: This trope gets played with all over the place. Despite being the title character, Madoka has little effect on the plot, and is mostly an observer. Sayaka does become a magical girl, and she has a personality much more commonly associated with protagonists, except that becoming a magical girl is actually her Start of Darkness. Then episode 10 comes along and we find out that in many ways, this is Homura's story. And in the finale, Madoka does become the hero, selflessly erasing herself from existence to change the world.
• Demon Slaying: The new magical girl system against the wraiths. Whether they're demons or undead is up for debate.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The Latin title reads as this, but it's subverted in that there's an alternate, more accurate translation (based on Gratuitous Latin): Girl of the Sorcerer: Magician Madoka. Furthermore, "Puella" literally means "a young girl" but it's derived from "Puerulus", which means "a young slave". Going in a sillier direction, though, the official full title is Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica: Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which can be interpreted as Magical Girl Magical Madoka: Magical Girl Magical Madoka.
• Deranged Animation: For example, the Anthonies'◊ South Park-ish appearance (read: reminiscent of that series' cutout style), as well as how it doesn't match the art style of the other characters, is already bad enough for them to deserve to be the page image for the show's Nightmare Fuel page, but their laggy animation really drives the point home.
• Design Student's Orgasm:
  • The witches' mazes. The first witch, Gertrud, is a gardener, so the maze is covered in roses and thorns, with floating scissors and butterfly- and puffball-themed familiars. The second, Charlotte, has a maze made of cake and sweets with syringes and bottled body parts everywhere. Charlotte herself looks like a children's cartoon from the 80s.
  • A certain aspect of Charlotte itself takes heavy inspiration, too, from Takeshi Murakami's Superflat artwork.
  • As noted below, if you're into architecture, this is the series for you.
• Despair Event Horizon: For magical girls, this is more than a metaphor: it's a literal point of no return that has tangible consequences.
  • Sayaka starts heading towards it when Kamijo hits it, gets really close when Hitomi confesses that she wants to ask Kyosuke out (going Ax-Crazy in the process), and passes it in Episode 8, turning into a witch. In Episode 12, however, she's "purified" by Madoka's wish, which gives her a more peaceful death.
  • In Episode 10, Mami from one of the previous timelines snaps and tries to kill the other magical girls when she finds out about the Awful Truth. She murders Kyoko and took aim at Homura but Madoka killed her before she could fire.
  • Homura becomes so desensitized due to her past failures that she becomes a Knight Templar for Madoka's survival. Kyubey notes that the only thing keeping her away from the edge is her belief that she can hit the Reset Button and try again. If she wavered for a moment, her soul gem would instantly corrupt.
  • Kyoko appears to have crossed it by the time she's introduced, and the incident where she's supposed to have crossed it is shown in graphic detail in Episode 7, but it turns out that she had simply been straddling the line all along and ultimately comes back from it just in time to have to do a Heroic Sacrifice to stop Sayaka's vigilante killing spree against both the scum of the Earth and the magical girls that are trying to stop her.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Madoka listens to "Connect", the opening theme, at the record store in the mall in Episode 1. Episode 6 also features Kyoko dancing to a techno version of the song on a DDR stand-in.
• Died Happily Ever After: This is the only way a magical girl can have a happy ending of any sort and Madoka had to make a reality changing wish to make it possible. Each magical girl in the series has one of these: Sayaka disappears and she is taken into the Law of Cycles by Madoka. Homura rejoins Madoka there in the manga but the anime only implies it. Mami and Kyoko are slated to go out this way, too, eventually.
• Disguised Horror Story: The show initially appears to be, and was marketed as, just another cutesy Magical Girl Warrior series, to the point that the creators actively tried to hide the involvement of Gen Urobuchi (a writer famous for his grim and depressing stories) until the show's true, macabre nature became an open secret and Mr. Urobochi becomes credited in trailers. In the series, a Ridiculously Cute Weasel Mascot or whatever offers to make a deal to grant a young girl's wish and give her powers beyond imagination in return for fighting evil entities and saving the world. But the protagonists are fighting Witches that look like Eldritch Abominations and can Mind Rape innocent people until they're Driven to Suicide. Then one of them rips the head off one of the girls on camera, traumatizing the others, and from then on the show becomes a Genre Deconstruction that displays just how psychologically damaging their job actually is. And that's even before we learn that this Weasel Mascot is keeping some horrible secrets about being a Magical Girl from the girls.
• Distant Finale: The last pages of the manga occur some unspecified time after the last scene in the anime.
• Divided We Fall: The magical girls are not working together. In fact, there are reasons for them to not work together, because they're competing for the same resource (the witches' grief seeds). At the same time, the girls are clearly inclined to help one another, and yet are also unwilling to accept the others' help. The results are sadly unfortunate.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: As is evident by statements elsewhere on this site as well as in Fanon, many viewers see Kyubey as reminiscent of a human trafficker who lures young girls into child porn or prostitution.
  • Then there's the people who feel that the show demonstrates the girls' plight as them being given something to want for whilst making them feel bad for wanting it, pushing them into doing work until they're unable to work anymore and then kicking them while they're down in a cycle that creates more girls to do the work. Or, as Youtube Sul Matul put it: 'There is no ethical consumption under Kyubey.'
• Doing In the Wizard and Doing in the Scientist: Kyubey is a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, not a magical creature, and he wants to prevent the universe's heat death by breaking the second law of thermodynamics. However, he does this by performing genuine miracles and drawing out real magical potential in human girls so he can collect energy generated by emotions; none of these are governed by thermodynamics or any kind of science and that's why they suit Kyubey's purpose.
• Doomed by Canon: Any spinoff depicting a previous timeline is doomed to end either in the world's destruction or Madoka's death, since the cycle isn't broken until the final timeline in the anime.
• Downer Beginning: The curtain rises with Kaname Madoka dreaming of a mysterious black-haired magical girl battling giant falling pieces of buildings in a grey, war-torn world.
• Dramatic Irony: Sayaka blames Homura for Mami's death, on the grounds that she didn't enter the fight until Mami was killed in order to take the witch for herself. However, both the audience and Madoka know that Mami cast a binding spell on Homura before the battle, meaning that she couldn't step in until the spell was broken by Mami's death.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Madoka's dream at the beginning of Episode 1. Inverted, as Episode 10 reveals the dream(?) depicts a scene from another timeline, the predecessor.
• Dream Intro: The first episode begins with a scene involving Madoka running through a surreal building to see a girl fighting a monster that has destroyed a whole city, and a strange creature who tells her she can stop the destruction by becoming a magical girl. She then wakes up, but is surprised to meet the girl from her dream at school that day. Ultimately, it's revealed that it wasn't an ordinary dream but a memory of the previous timeline.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • People affected by the witches, who radiate despair. Mami says that all the unexplained suicides are caused by witches. In Episode 4, they form a suicide pact.
  • Kyoko's father killed himself when he found out about her wish.
  • Mami, in Episode 10, as a result of discovering the Awful Truth about becoming a witch. She was also going to take down everyone else, but Madoka stops her after Kyoko's death.
  • Mami at the end of The Different Story manga, where she simply can't cope with living as a magical girl anymore. Homura even references Mami's breakdown in Episode 10 of the anime by warning Kyoko that this is part of Mami's nature. Once she finds out the truth about the origin of witches, she is likely to commit suicide.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: It is inverted and played straight at the beginning and end of a magical girl's tenure.
  • The Inversion: Kyubey will grant a single wish, any wish, of a chosen girl in exchange for a contract to be a Magical Girl as payment-up-front. The cost of that one reward is a lifetime of battles against witches and familiars.
  • The straight version: no matter how hard and long a magical girl fights, her efforts will never be recognized, never known, and she is most likely to die alone.
  Homura: ...there's no gratitude.
• Due to the Dead: Sayaka's funeral at the start of Episode 11, and after Madoka takes her to Heaven in the current timeline, it's implied she gets a token funeral shortly afterward.
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: Magical girls get this after their Soul Gem is taken away from them, due to being effectively dead.
• DVD Bonus Content: The DVD/Blu-Ray releases have soundtracks and audio dramas - at least two of the dramas can be considered canon, and reveal important backstory information.
• Dwindling Party: Some of the cast members get killed off as the series goes on, and in some cases, more than once.
• Dying Alone: Kyoko performs a Heroic Sacrifice to kill Oktavia so that Sayaka doesn't have to die alone.
• Dying as Yourself: What Ultimate Madoka does for every magical girl that has ever, or will ever, exist. By taking them off to heaven with her, she prevents them from turning into witches and allows them to fade away instead.
• Dying Deal Upgrade: Mami Tomoe's backstory involves her being caught in a fatal car accident. In her dying moments, Kyubey appears before her to allow her to make a wish to survive in exchange for becoming a magical girl.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Kyoko's death is a You Shall Not Pass! combined with a big explosion and a Revolutionary Girl Utena reference.

E

• Earn Your Happy Ending: The series' Bittersweet Ending would not have been possible without Madoka and Homura's sacrifices.
• Easter Egg: There's a ton of content in the series that is easy to miss at first, such as Freeze Frame Bonuses, hidden phrases in a Cypher Language, and more information about witches on the official website.
• Eating the Enemy: This ended up becoming the center point of the Wham Episode that was episode 3. Mami was such an accomplished Magical Girl that she wound up fighting very recklessly against the witch Charlotte. This becomes her undoing as just when it seems she won, the witch takes on a monstrous worm-like form and bites her head off and then eats the rest of the body soon after. It's very unsettling, even with the Gory Discretion Shot.
• Eldritch Abomination: The witches are bizzare creatures that warp the space around them into a personal labyrinth and can drive muggles to despair and insanity.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The barrier that surrounds each witch disregards every law of science and houses dangerous familiars.
  • Homura's Apartment: Word of God is that "the white walls, floating texts, and clockworks are all a holographic projection superimposed on a more mundane setting. At the same time, there is the suggestion that Homura's residence was intentionally drawn to resemble a witch's barrier."
• Emotion Eater: Kyubey's true purpose. They're able to turn emotions into surplus energy that violates the second law of thermodynamics in order to save the universe.
• Emotional Powers: Magic is fueled by emotional energy and gradually expends it. Likewise, negative emotions cause magical ability to diminish. A combination of the two nearly inevitably causes the magical girl to transform into a witch.
• Emotions vs. Stoicism: This is a running argument throughout the series.
  • Kyubey's arguments make a lot of sense, but only from a coldly logical, utilitarian standpoint; the girls' counter-arguments always run along the lines of "But it's so horrible."
  • Most of the girls (Sayaka especially) are hindered by their emotions, and are regularly rescued by the more stoic Homura, who advises them to control their emotions. The one girl who did not heed her advice, Mami, was quickly met with a gruesome death. When Homura does lose control of her emotions, it's a sign that things have really gone bad.
• Empathic Environment:
  • The barrier seems to work this way. When Madoka says that she will become a magical girl and fight alongside Mami (who, at this point, is bitter from all the fighting but hides it well), medicine capsules fall from above and then warm, fuzzy-looking wispballs float from below.
  • Episode 8 has Madoka and Sayaka at a bus stop in the rain. The rain gets more intense to match Sayaka getting more riled up.
• The End Is Nigh: This is what Walpurgisnacht will entail according to Homura. She's right. Walpurgisnacht can wipe out a town in one night and the only times it was ever defeated was by Madoka, who then corrupted into a witch more powerful than her, that, according to Kyubey, would destroy the planet in a matter of days. It remains debatable whether Walpurgisnacht itself would be a global threat if not stopped.
• Enemy Exchange Program: Zigzagged as it's not done to an actively hostile party but a neutral, non-allied one. Due to the lack of offensive potential of her magic, Homura steals all sorts of weaponry (and even vehicles) from Japan's Armed Forces and Yakuza to use against the witches. She's commonly seen with pistols and assault rifles, but if the necessity arises, she pulls out grenades, machine guns, rocket launchers, and even tanks from her Bag of Holding.
• Enhanced on DVD: The DVD/Blu-Ray releases have fixed up a large number of low-quality shots, added additional details to the backgrounds, and fixed one lingering question — The witch in the Episode 1 prologue was re-drawn to look like the witch in Episodes 11 and 12.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: Most of the Magical Girls who made a wish with Kyubey thinks of this when they make a wish: they wished for someone to prosper so that they will somehow benefit from it. The common source of despair in this series is that they often don't get those benefits in the end.
• Environmental Symbolism: Due to the classrooms looking like cages, there has been speculation by fans that the school (lots of glass, generally futuristic) was based on Justice Center Leoben, an Austrian prison with a similar design.

• Equivalent Exchange:
  • The hope spread by magical girls is equally counteracted by the despair in their everyday lives, eventually turning them into the very witches they fight against. This is on purpose. However, the system Kyubey presents does not balance out, since he claims the "good" energy himself to "prevent the Entropic Heat Death of the Universe".
  • One of the things Kyubey doesn't tell the magical girls is that the hope generated by a wish is spread out to everyone that hope touches, but the equivalent amount of despair is shouldered only by the one who makes the wish. Others may suffer in the wake of a wish, like Kyoko's family, but that baseline equivalent despair is always going to go right back into the Soul Gem that made it. That's what Kyubey is counting on for the energy. Interestingly, it's possible that the implication that Equivalent Exchange is being strictly enforced (or is inherent to the process) may well just be a masterful piece of misdirection on Kyubey's part. The real reason they meet despair proportional to the hope they bring is because it lets him double-dip—he profits from ANY sufficiently strong emotional swings.
  • At the end of the last episode, Madoka's final wish destroys this aspect of magical girl life, by removing all witches before they're created, and ensuring that magical girls do not meet with despair in the very end. Even this wish is shown to eventually release enough despair to destroy the universe... only for Madoka to appear and destroy that witch. Basically, Madoka uses her wish to annihilate that form of Equivalent Exchange itself.
• Essence Drop: A defeated Witch leaves behind a Grief Seed, which a magical girl can then pick up and use to refill her lost mana and thus restore the brightness of her Soul Gem — That's what they're led to believe. What they actually do is transfer The Corruption that they had accumulated from the Soul Gem into the Grief Seed, thus delaying their eventual fate of transforming into Witches themselves.
• Evolving Attack: Madoka's finisher attack goes from a simple supercharged, pink energy arrow to an elaborated pattern that rains several pink arrows from the sky. When first used, it's implied she needs several of them to beat Walpurgisnatch. As Homura's repetitions of the timeline increase Madoka's potential, by the Final Battle she can finish said witch with only one shot. After becoming a Deity of Human Origin, Madoka can launch it at a planetary scale — she uses it to cleanse the corruption of every and each magical girl who ever existed.
• Evolving Credits:
  • If you watch closely, you can see the OP change slightly from episode◊ to episode◊. The final image of Episode 10's outro is changed from just Sayaka, Madoka, and Mami. This time Kyoko and Homura◊ are in the picture, too.
  • Each ending progressively becomes darker.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • Souls are literally inside the Soul Gem. This is even more literal if one considers that the Japanese word for "crystal" is also used to mean manifestations in general; a "soul gem" would be a "materialized soul".
  • As stated by Kyubey, young growing females are called girls. So what do we call the girls that will grow up into a witch? Magical girls, of course!
    • Even more exact in Japanese where the words for 'witch' and 'magical girl' can just as easily be read as 'magical woman' and 'young witch' respectively.
• Exact Words: Kyubey is never untruthful, he merely leaves out information that people entering the contract would want to know thus reinforcing his Faustian Deal-type operation.
• Expy:
  • Mami has the same hair style as Kanaria, both with flower accessories.
  • Madoka's Magical Girl dress (as shown in promo artwork and the OP) is similar to Sakura's, including the frills.
  • Thanks to Ume Aoki's Signature Style, many of the characters bear a resemblance to those from Hidamari Sketch. Madoka is pink Yuno, Sayaka is swordsman Nori, Madoka's mom Junko is the office-version of the landlady, and Mami has the same voice actress as Miyako.
  • Considering the results of the whole Magical Girl deal, Kyubey looks and act a lot like Koyemshi or The Millennium Earl.
  • An Aloof Dark-Haired Girl girl who is determined to protect the timid main character and doesn't give a damn about the lives of others... Where have we seen someone like that? Did we mention that she's going through an endless loop until she gets it right?
    • Homura resembles Natsuki Kuga, another magical girl who specializes in firearms and caught in a battle that might pit her against her friends.
  • Homura's Mental Time Travel ability, and her unshakable determination on saving Madoka from her death? Oh, that's a certain Mad Scientist's ability and goal too.
  • Past!Homura is similar to Miranda from D.Gray-Man. Clumsy, shy, nervous, no self-esteem, determined despite herself, comes into her power when she realises she wants to protect someone, and controls time using a disc on her arm.
  • Kyoko resembles a younger and more modest Yoko from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and has a similar name. She also bears more than a passing resemblance to Shana in both appearance and personality.
  • Kyoko is similar to Asuka with red hair and costume, abrasive personality, introduction about one-third into the series, wielding a spear and a dead family. It's not too hard to see the connection there. Her father ending his life by hanging himself is a bit too similar to Asuka's mother (who's name as it happens, was Kyoko).
  • Kyoko's powers and magical girl niche are very reminiscent of Kaitou Saint Tail (trickster-thief with a definite Christian overlay, plus the ponytail). St. Tail's rival/love interest was, Asuka Jr.
• Eye Colour Change: Madoka's eyes change from pink to gold after becoming a magical girl and essentially becoming a god in the penultimate timeline.

F

• Failure Is the Only Option: Homura's refusal to accept this trope is why she repeatedly goes back in time to save Madoka. Word of God says the total number of loops "approaches 100".
• The Fair Folk: Some witches behave like this. Gertrud is focused on her roses; while Charlotte is fixated on cheese and will be caught off-guard if one throws her some. It's also a tantalizing irony for Charlotte: despite being able to make candies out of nothing, she can't create cheese.
  • Kazumi Magica refers to contract-making creatures like Kyubey as fairies.
• Fairytale Motifs: Sayaka's storyline has parallels to the non-Disneyfied The Little Mermaid. Girl has affection for a high status boy and wants to be with him so she makes a Deal with the Devil that causes her great pain. She's offered relief but refuses it, and because of this, she dies. Ultimately, she goes to heaven.
• Fanservice:
  • The nude transformation scene with two Madokas in the OP.
  • Kyoko and Homura each get one Transformation Sequence each with Barbie Doll Anatomy.
  • Madoka and Homura's nude forms in the space between realities in the final episode; made more explicit in the BDs.
  • The movies lengthen and enhance the transformation sequences (complete with lots of Male Gaze added in) but tone down the nudity in the above example by giving Madoka and Homura ethereal dresses.
  • There is also a lot of subtle or blink-and-you'll-miss it Male Gaze shots. Some of the many slow pans over the girls also qualify.
• Fast-Forward to Reunion: Homura and Madoka because the latter is now The Reaper.
• Fatal Flaw: Common in most of the main cast.
  • Madoka: Her selflessness. Kyubey often attempts to manipulate her into contracting by exploiting her desire to help others at her expense, and would have succeeded multiple times over in the final timeline if it weren't for Homura's interference.
  • Sayaka: Her self-righteousness. Some would say it's her naivete, but what dooms her is her unwillingness to listen to Homura or Kyoko since she sees them as evil. Even after finding out about the nature of the Soul Gems, if she had been willing to accept their help, she could have survived.
  • Homura: Her unwillingness to work and communicate with others based off of her past experiences.
  • Even Kyubey can be said to have one flaw that contributes to his downfall: greed. Usually, he doesn't let anyone he wants to contract with know anything relevant about the whole "magical girl" system until it's too late. He didn't need Madoka to continue harvesting humans for energy, but he continues to attempt to contract with Madoka even after she's made aware of the whole system (by Kyubey himself, no less). If he had just left her alone, he would have been untouchable.
• Fate Worse than Death: Any girl who becomes a Magical Girl must continue to kill witches or else they'll become one as well. (Until Madoka figures out how to Take a Third Option.)
• Faustian Rebellion:
  • Up until the last episode, Homura's time-manipulation powers were the only factor capable of catching Kyubey off guard.
  • Madoka's wish in Episode 12 coupled this with Cosmic Retcon to change Kyubey's system to favor the magical girls instead of him.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Type 1, and is consistent throughout the entire series, including Kazumi Magica and Oriko Magica. It can be considered a Mythology Gag (although a very Nightmarish one) for the series due to Mami doing this in Episode 3 and getting her head chomped off in the process. Every time a character performs this trope, something bad happens directly next to it.
• Field of Blades: Queen of Dakka, do you have enough rockets?◊ Naturally, this too would be subject to fan videos comparing Homura to Archer.
  • Mami is capable of creating a field of rifles.
• The Film of the Series: The anime has been adapted into three movies, the first two being recaps of the show, and the third expanding the plot after the anime's ending.
• Finger-Twitching Revival: Inverted by Sayaka. Her entire body twitched except her fingers.
• Five-Girl Band: Played with as the magical girls are more likely to fight each other than work together. However there is at least one time line where they formed The Team and that team would be as follows
  • The Leader: Mami, the Cool Big Sis and veteran.
  • The Lancer: Kyoko is also a veteran but a Jerkass that prefers to work alone and fights up close to contrast Mami's rifles.
  • The Big Girl: Sayaka the knight. She's the one fighting up close.
  • The Smart Girl: Homura still Moemura at this point has to be creative with her powers to be effective and knows the most about Magical Girl life because of the loops.
  • The Heart: Madoka, who also doubled as The Heroine. She kills Mami to keep her from killing the others and gives Moemura her final grief seed at the end.
• Flash Step: One application of Homura's power looks very similar to this because no one is aware that she's using Time Stands Still to mimick Super-Speed.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The witches' names, such as Charlotte. The exceptions would be ones like Walpurgisnacht.
• Food Chain of Evil: Magical girls need Grief Seeds, which witches leave behind upon death, while familiars don't. Familiars need to eat (figuratively or literally) weak people to grow into full-blown witches. Kyoko wholeheartedly embraces the necessary philosophy of it. If the magical girl doesn't get grief seeds? They become a witch.
• Forced Euthanasia: "I Won't Rely on Anyone Anymore" reveals that in one timeline, Homura Akemi tried to warn the other girls about Kyubey's true nature and that Magical Girls turn into Witches, but no one believed her until Sayaka turned into a Witch. After Homura is forced to Mercy Kill Sayaka, the girls only have a brief moment to mourn the latter before Mami decides to kill the other girls and herself so they won't share Sayaka's fate. She succeeds in killing Kyoko and forces Madoka to kill her before she can do the same to Homura, leaving the poor girl broken and in tears.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: "Magia" by Kalafina plays during fight scenes and Madoka's dream at the beginning of the first episode. It's also the regular ending song.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Episode 2, when Mami is sitting seiza at her table, the way she places her hands in her lap and the reflection of the glass makes it look like she's holding her head.
  • Madoka asking her mother what she would wish for. Her mother talks about what she would change about her job, like getting two crappy co-workers fired and forcing the current CEO to retire. Madoka asks why she doesn't just wish to be CEO, and her mother's answer is that it never occurred to her. Her mother is making the same mistake all magical girls make with their wishes. She's wishing to remove obstacles to her goal rather than wishing to succeed in her goal because she never thought it was an option. It foreshadows Madoka's wish and her reasons for making it.
  • In Episode 3, Homura confronts Mami about Madoka becoming a Magical Girl, and in response, Mami accuses Homura of being scared of Madoka's incredible magical potential. Homura doesn't have a rebuttal. It looks like Mami won the confrontation, but it's very telling that Homura is standing on a staircase above Mami. Guess what happens later in the episode. Mami earns herself a gruesome death by having her head chewed off because she refused Homura's help against the witch Charlotte (and instead tied Homura up so she couldn't help), and Homura is forced to clean up her mess.
  • In the form of a Freeze-Frame Bonus when Mami and Madoka enter Charlotte's maze: "Caution" with a row of decapitated bodies on crosses.
  • Kyoko appears in the opening credits long before making her first appearance in an episode proper.
  • When Mami fights the first witch, in retrospect, you can see how careful she is, attacking from only long range, and attacking the weak spot. When she fights Charlotte, she bashes the witch with her gun, shoots it at point-blank range, jumps recklessly into close range, freezes when she got surprised...
  • In Episode 4, paying close attention to the contents of Elly's monitors reveals they seem to be telling the story of an unknown magical girl, presumably Elly herself.
  • During a brief moment in Episode 7, when Kyoko and Sayaka are in the church, an angel appears to come out of Sayaka's shadow and stab Kyoko's shadow with a sword. It's a Red Herring because what happened was different.
  • Episode 7. The witch-like Art Shift in Kyoko's flashback is foreshadowing the final fate of most magical girls, before the revelation...
  • In the new ending that starts in Episode 3, we see the five main characters as Madoka walks towards the light. Four of them are looking forward or has their head up straight, but Sayaka's head is downcast. Sayaka is the one to give into despair and become a witch, revealing the final fate of all magical girls who lose hope.
  • The conversation between Madoka, Sayaka, and Hitomi about Homura in Episode 1. In Episode 10 we find all of it is relevant, even Sayaka's throwaway joke about "Is this moe?"
  • Meta example: "Puella Magi" was initially thought to be a botched mistranslation of "magical girl". It means "girl of the mage"
  • The bow that Homura carries in the initial concept art is finally seen in the last episode; she's using it because Madoka herself has ascended to a higher plane of existence.
  • According to the website, Madoka's witch form wishes to make a perfect world free of suffering. When Madoka finally makes a wish, it isn't far off.
  • When Madoka talks to Kyubey in the park in Episode 8, there's a shot of the water from a fountain as it passes by a crescent moon, which looks like either a bow-and-arrow, or a comet. The bow-and-arrow is Madoka's weapon as a magical girl; the comet shape can be seen on Kriemhild Gretchen's grief seed.
  • There's one present throughout the series until the Reveal. Note that Kyubey always seems far more interested in steering the conversation to making people in Magical Girls rather than protecting the innocent or getting Magical Girls to work together.
  • When Madoka draws examples of her future possible costumes, she draws herself with black eyes, rather like various soulless beings in stories like Coraline.
  • In the first of the films, when Sayaka saves Madoka a clip of Oktavia von Seckendorff's theme is slipped into the music.
  • A less obvious one: When Homura transfers into Madoka's class and is being shown by her to the nurse's office, Homura walks in front of her, not behind. This is because Homura has repeated this moment multiple times while trying to save Madoka, to the point that she knows the path by heart and can instead lead Madoka.
  • When Madoka and Homura meet just as Madoka has ascended, the presence of the Anthony suggests that every part of a Magical Girl (Girl, Witch and Familiars) ascends. It foreshadows Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion and both Sayaka and Nagisa's control over their witches and the familiar army they bring with them.
• Forgotten First Meeting: The third drama CD, which takes place before the anime, reveals that Kyoko saved Madoka and Sayaka from a witch. They exchange dialogue, but it's never face to face, so Madoka and Sayaka never see who's talking to them.
• The Four Loves:
  • Becoming a Magical Girl automatically detaches the girl from their loved ones but all girls have Phileo love (friendship) as a main motivation.
  • Madoka almost became a magical girl (thus accepting a Deal with the Devil) to rescue her friend. In the last episode she demonstrates Agape love in her wish to rewrite the laws of the universe so no magical girl will have to suffer turning into a witch by absorbing all of their despair.
  • Sayaka Miki became a Magical Girl because she wanted Eros (romantic) love. Not getting it drove her to a Face–Heel Turn.
  • Mami Tomoe despised being alone, and wished Phileo love from Madoka and Storge love from Sayaka. Shortly after getting the former, she died.
  • Kyoko's sacrifice in Episode 9 for Sayaka's sake could be Agape love. It's fitting considering the worldview she originally lived by and was brought up in.
  • Episode 10 reveals that Phileo love is Homura's initial motivation for everything she does. Over the course of the show it matures into agape.
• Freak Out: Poor Mami in the third timeline. When she's confronted with Awful Truth about Soul Gems and Grief Seeds she murders her fellow magical girls to prevent them from becoming witches.
• Frills of Justice: All of the magical girls have some form of this; Mami's hat, Madoka's ribbon etc. In the movie trilogy, Sayaka gets a new hairpin when she transforms.
• Friends Turned Romantic Rivals: Hitomi starts off as an out of focus good friend of Miki and Madoka. However, after she realises that Miki has feelings for Kyousuke, she quietly sits her down to sadly tell her that she likes Kyousuke, too. Neither can stop shake their feelings for him, and though Miki eventually feels forced to step back and let them be happy together, her jealousy and depression also keep her from ever being friends with Hitomi again.
• From Bad to Worse: An extended series of revelations about how much it sucks to be a Magical Girl; first it shows the risk of death, then it reveals that they're undead anyway, then it reveals that even if you make it through all that you're inevitably going to become one of the mindless, monstrously destructive witches you were fighting anyway, and this is all by design.
• Frozen Face: Kyubey's face in the anime is always frozen in an intense stare, and his mouth never moves since he talks telepathically. There are exceptions but they are rare and limited to the early part of the series. This makes him extremely creepy to look at face to face. However, this is averted in the manga, where Kyubey uses normal facial expressions. Usually. Sweet dreams.

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