This trope forms the central core of the Puella Magi Madoka Magica franchise.
Main continuity
- Deconstructed for the original anime's Holy Quintet. Kyubey grants wishes in exchange for the wisher becoming a Magical Girl and fighting monsters for him. The problems that arise from the granting of the wish aren't exactly because of the wish itself, or from Kyubey — while he's not exactly trustworthy, he has no incentive to screw with peoples' wishes: when he says he can grant any wish, he means it, and he has no reason to influence what a Magical Girl wishes for, or to decide for her what she thinks fighting Witches for the rest of her life is worth. The problem is the person making the wish is almost never honest about what they really want. Those whose wishes are fully selfish end up regretting foregoing a unique opportunity to help others, while those who chose to help others forget that every selfless wish has a selfish motive behind it, which is by no means guaranteed to be fulfilled. In either case, the resultant regret sends a Magical Girl deeper into despair. This plays into Kyubey's plans since it means forcing the girls to realize that their pure dreams and wishes were never pure at all, and can only further divide them from the happiness they wanted after it's too late to change their minds. To go along with the show's treatment of entropy, and happiness and suffering balancing out to zero, the magical girls' wishes are an illustration: the amount of hope they create is equal to the pain they have to endure, but no matter what happens, they are the ones who have to endure the pain regardless of who gets the benefit of the hope. If there is an aesop in all of this, it is perhaps simply to be honest with your desires and aware of the sacrifices you're willing to make to see them fulfilled.Kyubey: You did accept the destiny of fighting witches, provided I grant one wish for you. That wish has come true, hasn't it?
- Kyubey later notes that making a wish that goes "beyond reason" is inherently a bad idea. Such a wish will distort reality and have disastrous consequences as a result. In such cases it is the wish itself which causes the disaster, not Kyubey.
- Mami's wish: She wished to live, but what she really wanted was to continue living with her friends and family the way she did before. Since she was dying she didn't have time to carefully choose the Exact Words. Since Kyubey has no real understanding of human morality, it's not surprising he didn't even consider the possibility that she might not want to live alone, so he did not save her parents from the car crash that he saved Mami from.
- Sayaka's wish: She wished for the boy she loved to get better; he did, and no bad consequences came from it, but what Sayaka didn't wish for was for him to fall in love with her, which was what she really wanted. It doesn't help that Sayaka also came to consider herself unworthy of him once she found out that magical girls are Liches by any other name, locking her in a hopeless situation of being unable to live without him yet also unwilling to confess her love to him. Kyoko pointed out that what she should have wished for was for him to never recover and become completely dependent on her.
- Kyoko's wish: She wished for people to understand her father's preaching. It backfired when he discovered the truth, driving him insane and leading him to kill his entire family apart from her; she likely only survived because she was unknowingly a "zombie". This is how she knows to tell Sayaka what she should have wished for: what Kyoko wanted was a better family life.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable: It turns out to be even worse than what the anime showed us. After learning about her wish, Kyoko's father makes an intentionally ridiculous sermon where he claims God doesn't exist and despair is the only thing that guides humans. Kyoko and her father are horrified when the parishioners start agreeing with it. It soon becomes clear that Kyoko's father has a Compelling Voice, which drives him over the Despair Event Horizon because he thinks it makes him like the devil. He then calls Kyoko a witch and all the parishioners join in.
- Homura's wish. She wanted to save Madoka, but what she wished for was to be able to go back in time and do it over, and become strong enough to protect her. She took several levels in badass and protected Madoka numerous times but repeatedly failed in saving her. Kyubey tells Madoka later that if Homura keeps trying, she'll eventually realize she can't save Madoka; being stronger than Madoka doesn't mean being stronger than Walpurgisnacht or Madoka's destiny. So, like Sayaka, she didn't wish for exactly what she wanted, which was to prevent Madoka from becoming a magical girl. (Because, at the time she made it, she didn't realize that was the only way to save her; she only came to that realization later, after the third timeline.) Also similar to Sayaka, this realization would result in Homura's degradation into a witch as well but by that time Madoka's wish rewrites the rules of the game (it helps that she has a lot of mulligans handy should Madoka become a witch or expire for any reason).
- The ending turns the situation on its head. Madoka makes a wish that balances both selfishness and selflessness and thus manages to lessen the tragedies of everyone else's wishes but avoids the despair that would have resulted if her wish did not specify a clause for herself that would guarantee her survival and happiness. It's bittersweet, in that the result is that erasing herself from mortal existence mean that only one person will ever be aware that she ever existed as a person, but what she gets out of it personally isn't just the salvation of all magical girls, it's also the knowledge that she is important and doing something very, very useful after spending the entire series being down on herself for not being able to do anything.
- Also averted for Original-Timeline Madoka. The wish didn't backfire on her, just because her wish was simple, straightforward, and relatively petty. In the Drama CD, she wished for a cat to be saved after being hit by a car, and there's no indication that anything related to that wish ever went wrong.
- The above could also be considered as a form of subtle foreshadowing: The first time around, Madoka made a wish and was satisfied with the result, so whatever grief she endured because of it wasn't compounded by disappointment the way other wishes are. In the finale, she does the exact same thing: she makes a wish that couldn't possibly let her down because it really is what she wants, without pretense. Madoka's wishes are the only purely selfish ones in the entire story, it's just that what she wants for herself is the happiness of all magical girls.
- Speaking of which, Kyubey had a wish of his own. He was desperate to get Madoka to make a wish because of the potential energy that she could unleash, and thus egged her on as best as he could to get Madoka at the point where her wish would give him what he wanted. So Madoka made her wish to be the most powerful Magical Girl in all of existence...but also prevented him from reaping the energy from every other magical girl throughout all of history and then her wish makes her fade out of existence, meaning he doesn't reap the benefits.
- It's All There in the Manual, but it's Played Straight for the magical girl who would become Charlotte. She wished to be able to share one last cheesecake with her dying mother, and that's exactly what she got: a single cheesecake, and her mother immediately died before they would have the opportunity to get another cake to share. It leads her to wonder if she should have just wished for her mother to get better. Considering the circumstances under which her Grief Seed was found, Charlotte may have been a Magical Girl for a span of minutes. It has been confirmed that she was a small child at the time and never fought a single witch.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion is less explicit about it, but the story is still based around this trope. Because of one character's desire for everyone to be together, they all get trapped in her giant witch labyrinth. The other characters inadvertently imply that they wanted this, too, so she decides to give them what they want... by becoming a demon and brainwashing everyone, especially Madoka. The instigator herself isn't happy with this, because she can't even be Madoka's friend anymore; but she feels it's necessary for everyone else to be happy, even though they probably wouldn't be if they remembered everything.
- Hitomi's wish: Although not a magical girl, she gets her wish to be Kyousuke's girlfriend... but she loses one of her best friends and strains her relationship with the other. Also, it's confirmed that Kyousuke is a pretty terrible boyfriend to her in Rebellion.
Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story
- Tsuruno wished for her family to win the lottery so they could save their failing Chinese restaurant. Unfortunately, her mother and grandmother took the money and ran away to a pleasure cruise. Tsuruno tries to be the strongest magical girl because it's all she has left.
- Momoko's wish was for the courage to confess to the boy she liked. Unfortunately, someone else confessed before she did. Momoko's courage, and the fact that her wish affected herself and not him, presumably keeps her from suffering like Sayaka did.
- Manaka has a downplayed version of this: she has no problem with her wish on the surface as it did let her father's cooking be appreciated by more people. However what she wanted was for this to cause Walnut's to be busier, instead she got her father more work essentially catering at events instead of bringing more people into their restaurant. She learned to live with the results though.
- Rika's wish was for her best friend, who she had feelings for, would love her. The fact this was tantamount to brainwashing very quickly became evident to Rika, turning her dream into a nightmare she eventually put right by breaking up with her and pairing her friend back with her boyfriend.
- Averted for Tsumugi. She made her wish for the sake of knowing how she could be of more help to Manaka by her own hands, allowing her to give Manaka more thoughtful critiques to refine her cooking skills. That way she's not blindly hyping Manaka's food and is being a legitimate help to her.
- Mikoto's wish: Her father always spent all the family expenses for his own benefit; as a result, she'd often turn down invitations from friends due to them costing money, alienating her from them. As a result, she wished for her father to leave their home, but then it's her mother who picked up said habits and abandoned Mikoto, making her miserable.
- San's wish: She wished that Mitsuzuka festival remains, as it's on the verge of being obsolete due to its danger surrounding fire safety. However, her wording didn't say that it'd remain forever, making the festival being shut down again the year after. San tries to put on a brave face, but immediately breaks down sobbing right after.
- Sunao's wish: She wished for her parents to stop worrying about her. They started worrying about the fact that she's a magical girl now instead.
- Mitsune's wish: She wants to be a shut-in forever, and while her parents stop urging her to go outside, later on as she uses her Doppel too much and becomes partially paralyzed, making her have no choice but to stay at home. Sometime after Arc 2, however, her legs were healed thanks to the power of the Usawa.
- Asahi's wish: During Asahi's rebellious phase, her grandfather became more strict towards her, which to her was him being controling and possessive, thus she wished for him to stop interfering. While the wish was granted, it's because her grandfather became depressed, fell ill and passed away some time later. Her Doppel summoning line has her apologising to her grandfather, reflecting her regrets.
- Sae's wish: After the family whose child she was tutoring discovered her impoverished background and that she only accepted the job for money (which she desperately needed to keep her family afloat) and proceeded to fire her, she immediately wished that everyone at school believed she was from a respectable family. While this stopped the immediate problem of losing a key source of income, it didn't serve as a long-term fix for her family's financial issues. Not only that, Sae's close friendships at school only happened because her friends knew her background, and changing that prevented those friendships from forming. The silver lining is that two of these friends happened to also be Magical Girls, so she was able to form new friendships with them based on that commonality.
Other spinoffs
- Puella Magi Kazumi Magica, a spinoff of Madoka Magica, surprisingly averts this for the most part. Most of the central characters used their wishes to either wish for small things that weren't as likely to go awry (Saki wishing for a flower she was keeping to bloom forever in memory of her dead sister) or to support their dreams and desires rather than having them granted outright (aspiring novelist Umika wishes to meet an editor who would recognize her talents rather than just wishing to be a successful novelist). It turns out that their attitude is taken from their leader, Michiru; rather than wish to cure her grandmother's terminal illness, she wishes to spend whatever time her grandmother has left together, because she knows simply curing the illness wouldn't be respecting her grandmother's lifestyle.
- However, one particular example does play it straight and goes awry very, very badly. As a child, Niko accidentally shot some of her friends when they were playing around with a gun. She wished to create a copy of herself who had no memory of the incident. Said copy goes insane with anger when she uncovers the truth about her origins and ends up becoming the Big Bad of the series.
- Mostly averted in Puella Magi Suzune Magica. The girls usually make rather selfish wishes and largely avoid the penalties of selfless wishes. The drama really comes from more what the girls do with their powers and status as magical girls rather than the wishes themselves: for example, Arisa comes to heavily regret becoming a magical girl after learning the awful truth, but doesn't think much of the actual wish she made. Haruka plays the trope straight, though, as her wish to erase her sister really comes back to bite her during the story; notably, though, it's a very selfish wish instead of a selfless one.
