Reviews Anime / Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Enthralling Magical Girl/Horror series

I came into this series after reading a lot of dramatic reviews for it, and while I was more or less on the fence, I stuck with it and by the fourth episode, I was hooked. The series is extremely dark and dreary, not because it's a deconstruction(I could make a case for it being just as much of a reconstruction), but because it's a horror story. You could write an entire book on the symbolism, the deconstructive aspects, the reconstructive ones, the parallels to Faust, and all that fun stuff, but even without any of that, at its heart, what we have is a legitimately enthralling horror story about girls being lured into a dark, deadly game from which death is the most merciful escape. It doesn't deconstruct the genre, but rather takes the defining points and creates an entirely new premise out of them.

The characters are all as likable as they are distinct, the monsters are horrifying, and the art and action are breathtakingly beautiful. Even knowing beforehand what was going to happen, the story never let go of me, and I followed it eagerly, actually becoming depressed that it was over. The series did a great job of making me care for these characters and I desperately wanted to know what would become of them. It paints the game as hopeless, but always keeps a window open, letting us wonder, hope, that there might be a way out. Rather than succumb to Darkness Induced Audience Apathy, it made all the characters sympathetic, and wrenched my heart as they met their various fates, both good and bad. I can attest that nothing I have ever read or viewed has ever, by its own merits, made me cry as hard as I did when I finished this series.

While this series might take a certain taste to truly appreciate, it remains enthralling and heartwrenching even beneath the layers upon layers of symbolism, speculation and narrative analysis.