[Februaryuri 2025] Puella Magi Madoka Magica

21 Feb, 2025

(base post on Februaryuri 2025 here!)

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika) (2011)

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Madoka Magica: Rebellion (Madoka Magika: Hangyaku no Monogatari) (2013)

by studio Shaft, directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and Yukihiro Miyamoto, written by Gen Urobuchi, and overall made by the creative team Magica Quartet¹

12 episodes

Summary

One night, Madoka Kaname has a dream.
In that dream, the world is ending.
In that dream, there is one single thing she can do to stop this: to make a pact with a small creature near her, and to become a magical girl.

In reality, Madoka Kaname is just a normal, shy and aimless middle school girl, who probably won't ever do anything special in her life. At least, that's what she thinks.
Except one day, a mysterious girl called Homura enrolls in her class. And Madoka knows that girl. She saw her in her dream - as a magical girl.

Soon, Madoka, along with her friend Sayaka, learn that magical girls do exist. They are rescued from the attack of a malevolent entity known as a Witch by one of these magical girls, Mami, who takes them under her wing. And they meet Kyubey, the strange creature Madoka saw, who suggests making them magical girls, for them to fight against Witches and defend humans.
In the process, Kyubey can also grant one thing they would wish for.

But then, why does Homura, who is indeed a magical girl too, seem to have a grudge against Kyubey? Why is she so hell-bent on not letting Madoka become a magical girl herself?
And what would Madoka use her wish for, anyway?

Comment

Aaaah, Madoka. It is probably the most well-known title of this Februaryuri list in anime circles at large. For better or for worse, it turned a lot of the magical girl genre really dark in its wake, hoping to emulate its success; and it spawned a sizeable amount of memes. It wasn't the first attempt at making dark magical girls series, but it has been highly successful, and in my opinion, for a reason.

Let's start at the beginning: it's hard to talk about anything without spoiling details, but don't get fooled by the cutesy promotional poster. You have to know that Madoka is dark under its magical girl exterior. Part of it sure feels like "what if we made this cute genre a bit more adult?"; but Madoka isn't torture porn or sheer horror. It's bleak, but to me at least that's much more than for shock value or cruelty - because Madoka weaves its story very cleverly with common themes of the magical girl genre: hope and despair.

Madoka features despair aplenty, and Witches are their prime embodiment. If they sometimes un-ground actual topics surrounding despair (suicide or natural disasters are shown as caused by Witches, which clearly simplifies them), they are still much more than an ethereal threat. They are deadly entities with strange, almost psychedelic aesthetics, and they go hand in hand with the growing depression and derealization several characters of Madoka go through. The girls of Madoka are stuck in an unfair system, and an uncaring society and environment, where they struggle alone against this exact despair - and it takes its toll.
One step at a time, always in well-executed ways, it gets from bad to worse.

In this predicament, which feels like a carefully crafted, slow descent into hell, Madoka keeps asking the same questions: what is worth fighting for? What is worth wishing for? What can we cling to?

Doing so, the series notably features a striking case of tragic yuri². Sure, in its original run (see the Extra section for the decidedly muddled message of the followup movie), the two characters are "very best friends" - it's even the title of the final episode. But Madoka still has one of the gayest this-shouldn't-count-as-subtext-at-this-point scenes I know, and if you're ready this kind of thing, it's really something. (The tragedy along the way is, too.)

But I think what I keep with Madoka the most is its final glimmer of hope. It's bittersweet, it hurts, it comes at a cost, after going through so much... But it also embodies so deeply some desperate, unshakeable belief that things can be a little less screwed up despite everything, that it brings tears to my eyes each and every time.

Overall, I don't know how to explain this, but Madoka's slight abstraction of despair as tangible, fightable entities, and of hope as something that can comfort you and help you stop hurting, is actually something that keeps me going in these bleak times. Its characters' struggles in their fictional world, less grounded than the oppression of minorities I am a part of, are oddly cathartic. Its anger and despair speak to me; and sometimes, when I remember it, its raw hope unexplainably pulls me through.

Extra

Before we get into the dicey topic of the followup movie, know first that Madoka yielded two recap movies, Beginnings and Eternal. I tried them recently, and prefer much more the slower, more detailed pace³ of the series' version - and also its slightly older aesthetic that the recap movies attempted to enhance. I do recommend the series as the prime way to experience Madoka's story, and simply not to watch the recap movies; but you do you. You can also look at the movies' specific opening (which is kinda gay), or read these two extremely detailed movie/series difference comparisons by a dedicated fan.

From the series also sprang an entire multimedia license, including several video games, a bunch of mangas telling alternate or complementary stories, a spinoff animated series (Magia Record) stemming from one of the video games... I did not dive into any of this, though, so I am not in the best position to tell you about it.

However, let us talk in more details about Madoka Magica: Rebellion - technically the third Madoka movie, but the only one that really counts - because boy do I have things to tell about that one.
Rebellion starts as an interesting mystery about how the events it depicts are related to the main series. As said mystery unfolds, it is an occasion to feature more direct and epic magical fights between the main cast for the thrill of it, and longer psychedelic and slightly creepy Witch-coded sequences, which are very much things you would expect of a follow-up movie. Still, it's also more directly violent, and more prone to some slight sexualization during magical girl transformation sequences.

But the most divisive element of Rebellion by far is its ending.
Part of it can be read as a rejection of the common narratives that one should heroically sacrifice themself to enact change, that the greater good should be more important than individual attachments. The original series, as much as I love it, plays into these themes, and to some extent the movie challenges those.

It just does that in possibly the worst way.

Indeed, Rebellion is a prime example of what queer villainy means. At the end of it, a character achieves a strictly better situation than the end of the series. But her motivation, sapphic love, finally crosses from subtext to text precisely as a way to justify her being the villain of the story. A whole sequence associates her admitting that love with her becoming tainted and possessive and almost cartoonishly evil; and what she achieves, once again a rejection of a hurtful system based on sacrifice, is framed as bad - as devilish, even, pit against a religiously-coded sacrifice - precisely because of this.

It hurts. To be honest, Rebellion makes me really, really angry.
There are interpretations and interesting things to analyse here still, to be clear. From that character's point of view, you can interpret a good part of Rebellion's story as the idea that in order to fight an unfair system that presents itself as good and unchangeable, the only option may be to brand oneself, to internalize oneself, as a villain.
But still. Queer love is greedy, the story says. Queer love corrupts, the story says. Fighting against a system for spaces where it gets to exist, fighting for change in ways other than martyrdom, is wrong and bad and inherently doomed.

Faced with these, I can only recommend you the same thing that was recommended to me: either not to watch it; or to watch it far from the series itself, for it not to directly sour its original ending, and ready for something anger-inducing and with lots of problems to unpack in its final 15 minutes.

This may be the perfect place to advertise the upcoming release of a fourth Madoka movie, Walpurgisnacht Rising, a sequel to Rebellion that should hopefully be coming this year. I don't know if it will be surrounded by as much discourse as Rebellion was when it released, but that sounds plausible. I also fear what it may tell; but it's been 12 years since Rebellion, and I keep hoping that somehow it may course-correct the latter's messages and themes.
Sometimes, despite everything, hope is what we keep clinging to.

#februaryuri 2025 #yuri