Yuri Vincit Omnia

SPOILER ALERT: Plot details for Madoka Magica and Steins;Gate.

Madoka Magica was an anime that I avoided for the longest time precisely because of its moe art style. I thought, initially, oh, this is just cutesy fanservice nonsense, but something inside just provoked me to check it out. After all, the hype isn’t always wrong. So I gave the first episode of Madoka Magica a watch……and I quit! The same, silly, moe stuff. I took a break. Then, by some stroke of madness, I was driven back. I just had to know, what was so good about this anime? And sure enough, I found out.

I can’t say that I’m an expert on the “magical girl” genre of anime, so I won’t be able to appreciate all the supposed subversions that Madoka Magica undertook. I had a general enough of an understanding of what magical girl was, however, to see that Madoka Magica was clearly trying to take things in a different direction. The only magical girl animes I was familiar with Cardcaptor Sakura, Tokyo Mew Mew, and Sailor Moon. These sorts of stories always start off with unassuming schoolgirls who receive magical powers to fight off monsters every week. They often change into colorful, sexy clothes in extravagant transformation sequences. In a word, magical girl stories are often feminized versions of Power Rangers, which is exactly why I had avoided these “magical girl” shows for so long. They were far too formulaic. None of them anything distinct or exciting for my taste.

Madoka Magica, on the other hand, caught my attention for a variety of reasons. The clearest being episode three, with Mami’s decapitation. For what seemed like girly fun for the first two episodes came to a screeching halt at the end of this one. It had the similar impact of watching Mayuri get shot to death in episode ten of Steins;Gate. Mami’s death sets up the melancholic tone for the rest of the series. Being a magical girl isn’t as fun as it appears on Sailor Moon, but a dangerous business. You can get killed, and further, with every wish, there is a consequence.

The show stars Madoka Kaname, a fourteen year old schoolgirl. In school, a new transfer student arrives, the brooding Homura Akemi. Monogatari fans will recognize Homura’s Japanese voice actress as Chiwa Saito who lends her cold, almost nasal voice to Hitagi Senjoughara. Madoka recognizes Homura from a nightmare she had had. Homura instantly seems nasty to her, and for no good reason, either. She eerily tells Madoka that if she loves her friends and family, then she won’t change herself.

Madoka and her tomboy friend, Sayaka Miki, who may have been inspired by Sailor Mercury, encounter the creature that set off a thousand plushies, Kyubey. He’s been wounded by Homura, who is looking rather cruel at the moment. Then, the girls are surrounded by Bizzaro Monty Python cartoons of flying scissors and mustachioed dandelions. Believe it or not, this is a witch, the enemy of the magical girls. They are saved by another, more experienced magical girl, the aforementioned blonde Mami Tomoe. She is shown here as having a great grasp on her craft, summoning multiple guns which fire off bright, yellow volleys. She makes a strong impression here so her death in episode three can be all the more shocking.

The affable, yet slightly taciturn alien known as Kyubey, is like the ideal cross between a cat and a rabbit. An irresistible mascot of cuteness. He comes to the girls, asking them if they want magical powers. There’s only one cost, you have to make a wish. Sounds like an amazing deal at first, but the ability to make a wish, any wish, can be just as dangerous as it is desirable.

The witches turn out to be the sources of suffering and depression in the world. Mami says that a great deal of the suicides and murders in the world are caused by them. Like the Dementors in Harry Potter, these malicious creatures feed off of grief and suck out happiness. The witches can only be fought off by magical girls. They are the world’s hope. The symbol of being a magical girl is manifested in the glowing Soul Gems, which can grow cloudy as the girls use their powers. Grief Seeds, which are the eggs that dead witches drop, absorb much of the cloudiness from the Soul Gems. The hunt for Grief Seeds to sustain their Soul Gems is what drives many magical girls into competition, even to the point of being enemies.

Mami’s death is enough to make Madoka pause in becoming a magical girl. Sayaka, however, has different thoughts. She’s in love with a boy named Kyouske, who was once a violin prodigy before an accident took away all feeling in his fingers. Sayaka visits him often in the hospital, and contemplates wishing to heal him. Her motives have less to do with altruism than with getting Kyouske to like her. She’ll make up for this moral gap by defending the city like Mami did. Kyubey warns her that magical girls like Mami are a rarity, and in time she’ll learn why.

Sayaka’s philosophy of justice gets a foil in the form of Kyoko Sakura, a red-haired, spunky magical girl, with a snack always in her mouth. She sees Sayaka as naive, and to this extent, even Homura agrees. Kyoko resembles how most magical girls behave. She willingly allows familiars to evolve into witches by letting them devour a few innocent people. She does this because only witches can produce Grief Seeds, which are necessary to sustaining their Soul Gems. Sayaka, blinded by her morals, refuses to accept Kyoko’s viewpoint, and they clash, physically and otherwise.

Kyoko tries to convince Sayaka that good intentions can lead to terrible results. She speaks of her father, who was a Catholic preacher who believed the world could be saved with a new religion. He was excommunicated for such blasphemy, and their family went into poverty. Kyoko wished to Kyubey that the people would listen to her father’s sermons, but when his father learned that Kyoko had become a magical girl, he branded her, of all things, a witch. This turned him mad, eventually slaughtering his whole family in a murder-suicide. Kyoko tells Sayaka that if you wish for hope, you will suffer an equal amount of despair.

Sayaka refuses to give up her ideals, but like Kyoko, she does so over time. When Sayaka’s friend Hitomi confesses that she also is in love with Kyouske and will tell him as much. Sayaka, despite her feelings for him, doesn’t stop her. She doesn’t even feel fit to love him, with her magical body now an immortal shell. Her wish was worthless. Sayaka later admits to Madoka that she almost regretted saving Hitomi from a witch one night. This shouldn’t surprise us because her wish, after all, was a selfish one.

Sayaka, however, doubles down on her idealism. Stopping “familiars” from taking peoples’ souls, which also stops them from becoming “witches”. As such, they do not drop Grief Seeds, which clear up the Soul Gems. This only helps to further reinforce Sayaka’s negative thoughts. We see through her that the role of “magical girl” is more slavery than heroism. Bound by contract, they must tirelessly fight witch after witch, either alone or in brute competition. The only thing that still gives her any meaning are the people who she saves, but what sort of people are these? Sayaka hears some men make sexist slurs on a train, and starts to question if such people are worth risking her life for. Sayaka regrets becoming a “magical girl” in the first place, and her Soul Gem filled with despair, turning her into a witch.

Such transformations are not only eventual, but necessary. Kyubey lectures Madoka about the scientific concept of “entropy”. I won’t bother to fact check Kyubey’s accuracy here, because this is a fantasy story for goodness sake. So for all intensive purposes, “entropy” is a phenomenon that states when energy changes occur, some of that energy gets lost. The universe at large runs by this law, and as a result, is gradually eating itself into emptiness. Kyubey and those of his kind, sought out a means of expending energy outside of the laws of thermodynamics. Finding such a means would conserve the energy of the universe and sustain it longer. Kyubey’s race eventually found a way to turn emotions into raw energy. Humans are best for these purposes, since they’re not only emotional, but populate at rates high enough to produce plenty of energy.

Why girls? Well, the wealth of the energy depends on the fluctuation between the emotions. Teenage girls, going through puberty and all that, have greater fluctuations than any other human, particularly towards depression. There’s a cold methodology behind Kyubey’s rationale, but his race is incapable of understanding any emotion. The ultimate Machiavellian. Madoka protests Kyubey’s treatment of magical girls, but he replies that his race treats them with more respect than humans do to livestock. Was it really becoming a “magical girl” that made our characters less human, or were such flaws in their character latent from the start?

The fact that only girls going through puberty are chosen is also interesting. In his book Beautiful Fighting Girl, psychiatrist Saito Tamaki writes, “Rather than a beautiful fighting girl work, Tezuka Osamu’s Marvelous Melmo ( Fushigi na Merumo), broadcast the same year, was intended for sex education. The scene in which a young girl eats a piece of magical candy and transforms is a superb demonstration of the underlying meaning of the trope of transformation. That’s right: transformation is none other than accelerated maturation” (95–96). While this is only Tamaki’s speculation, and Marvelous Melmo probably had little influence on the magical girl genre, I think that this example hits a nerve. There are few indicators of growth better than sex, and in magical girl anime, the heroines are often nude while transforming. So to put it another way, all of these girls are essentially forced into briefly becoming adults when confronting their enemies. This may have been unconscious on part of previous animators, as many tropes are, but Madoka Magica is certainly aware of this fact. Much like Gundam or Evangelion, our protagonists are child soldiers, and the effects of this run deep. Kyoko stops Sayaka with a heavy heart. By giving the lethal blow, Kyoko puts an end to the idealism that Sayaka represented. Kyoko’s last act is a kiss on her Soul Gem before it bursts into a thousand pieces, killing them both. Sayaka may not have found much love in life, but finds some, with Kyoko, in death.

Madoka Magica’s best episode is its tenth one. It opens differently than the others, with a shy, bespectacled Homura entering a new school. What’s more, she’s a magical girl, along with Mami and Madoka. They all become friends but Homura is hesitant to make a wish. When the witch Walpurgisnacht comes, Madoka and Mami are both killed. Homura, devastated by this killing, makes a contract with Kyubey. Her wish is to redo her meeting with Madoka, and thereby, prevent this outcome. So she is given the ability of time manipulation, and can briefly stop the flow of time as well as go backwards in time. We go over Homura’s tireless trips through the timelines to save Madoka, with each attempt ending in failure. This is not the story of Madoka learning about the magical girls, but the story of Homura trying to save the girl she loves. If you go through Madoka Magica a second time, be sure to pay attention to Homura’s dialogue. Upon a first viewing, it just sounds like cynical advice from a seasoned magical girl, but after hearing them again, we realize that Homura’s lamenting her terrible position. She’s seen Mami murder Kyoko in fit of hopelessness, something only she can remember, while others can blissfully forget.

This is yet another similarity that Madoka Magica shares with Steins;Gate. After Mayuri gets shot and killed in episode ten of Steins;Gate, the main character, Okabe Rintaro, resolves to save her by going back in time. Like Madoka Magica, this also results in a feeling of helplessness, but has more episodes to flesh it out. I also think that the time loop resolves itself better in Steins;Gate, relying more on strategy, whereas Madoka Magica’s resolution relies more on emotion. That said, these divergences make sense, considering that Steins;Gate is more a science-fiction show. Moreover, because Homura time traveled so often for Madoka, she has fixated the many timelines to her, thus giving her more power. A shaky reasoning, perhaps, but it works for an anime as feelings-driven as this one.

“Far and behind the weakest link is Madoka herself, who experiences little character development until the series’ end. She basically spends most of the series being told what to do, force-fed backstory, and crying when bad things happen to her friends. In a series like Sailor Moon, you can clearly the evolution of its lead Usagi Tsukino from a hapless crybaby to a tough, determined magical girl by the end of the first season. In comparison, Madoka barely changes at all. It’s not until nearly the end of the series that she finally stands on her own two feet and decides to take matters into her own hands.”

For the most part, I really agree with him here. Madoka’s character isn’t very compelling for most of the show, and the low number of episodes didn’t help much to develop her, but Madoka’s hesitation still made a lot of sense to me. Mami’s gruesome death and Sayaka’s descent into madness must have frightened her, and Kyubey’s revelations only made the offer look worse with every episode. Madoka also lacked the passion to make such a wish. She had no one, but with Homura in her life, now that has changed. She wishes to defeat all the witches; past, present, and future, to save all magical girls from their dreaded fate. She becomes hope itself. Madoka’s demand is so powerful that she turns into a goddess, existing on a plane outside of the world’s timeline. She defeats the witches, freeing the magical girls of their burdens. Of course, Madoka’s sacrifice did not erase suffering from the world completely. Instead of witches, the magical girls must fight wraiths, but their situation has improved. They’ll no longer devolve into monsters.

The battle between hope and sorrow is one which we must all deal with day by day. The show isn’t telling us that the battle will always be easy, but that it is a battle worth waging. When Homura fights now, she wears Madoka’s red ribbon, and I think we should too.

Bibliography

Tamaki, Saito. Translated by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Beautiful Fighting Girl. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2011. 95–96.

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