Puella Magi Madoka Magica deconstructs common magical girl anime tropes by presenting a darker and more complex narrative. In this series, magical girls are doomed to become witches and fall into despair, unlike other works where they happily fight evil. The show follows Madoka and Sayaka as they are approached by Incubator to make a wish in exchange for magical powers. However, Honoka warns them not to trust Incubator. Through the girls' struggles, it shows that being a magical girl often does not have a happy ending. Ultimately, Madoka's selfless wish changes the system by erasing all witches from existence, though she disappears from her old life in the process.

1. The Real Magical Girls
The Puella Magi Madoka Magica series introduces a complexity to the genre of shojo by
deconstructing themes in the typical magical girl works, such as the Faustian bargain, by taking
the archetype of the magical girl and putting her in an environment where she does not fit. In
this series, in the end, no matter how much good the magical girl does by fighting witches, it
only makes her fall deeper into despair. This is in contrast to the manga of most magical girl
works where they fight evil and are happy in the end. This difference in Puella Magi Madoka
Magica causes the watcher to wonder whether or not the Faustian Bargain made between the
girls and the Incubator is worth it. It also brings up the thought that sometimes what you read
about in books is very far from reality. Puella Magi Madoka Magica brings complexity to the
magical girl subgenre by introducing themes and concepts that are not typical of the magical girl
series.
In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, all magical girls are doomed to become witches in order
to put more energy into the universe. This fact changes the game and blurs the line between hero
and enemy because if the heroes are doomed to eventually become the enemy, it makes one
wonder what it really means to be a magical girl. In most works, magical girls are portrayed as
happy and enthusiastic about being a magical girl, while here we see the girls in another light.
They are in a different situation or environment where they are magical girls out of desperation
to escape something in their lives. As they fight and witness the deaths of their friends, they fall
further and further into despair as opposed to being happy like in many other films in the magical
girl genre.

2. Puella Magi Madoka Magica follows two middle school girls, Sayaka and Madoka, who
are approached by an alien creature named, Kyube or “Incubator.” Incubator wants the two girls
to make a contract with him in order to become magical girls in exchange for a wish he will
grant them. The character Honora, however, wants them to not make the contract and warns
them that Incubator is not to be trusted. Another magical girl character, named Mami, however,
encourages them to make the contract. It is through the trials and tribulations that the girls in
Puella Magi Madoka Magica go through that ultimately show the viewer that it is not your
typical shojo work.
The shojo is a genre of Japanese animation that primarily depicts young pre-adolescent
girls that channel sexual energy into consuming kawaii things. The Puella Magi Madoka Magica
series is a deconstructive response to the sub-genre of shojo called magical girl anime. This is
proven by the fact it takes multiple different tropes from other magical girl anime and portrays
them in a way that causes the watcher to ask questions that they would not normally ask. In
Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this often takes the form of dark spins on themes typically found
in magical girl anime, such as the transformation object, which is common in most anime
magical girl series. In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this transformation object is the soul gem,
which tricks them into having their soul removed from their body. The soul gem is what literally
carries their soul. The key theme of any deconstruction is that it makes the user ask questions
that they would not normally ask and in the case of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, much of what
allows for these girls to fall into this deep stage of despair is their lack of questions and them
making the assumption that this magical girl life that they are entering would be the same as in a
typical anime in the magical girl genre. When they asked Incubator why he removed the soul
from their body and put it into a soul gem he simply responded, “You didn't ask. It's easier if you

3. don't know. Mami never even found out about it.” He goes on to say, “Kyubey: Why do you
humans place so much value on housing your souls inside your bodies? It's a complete mystery
to me.” ( Magica Quartet, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 02.) This is proof that because they
allowed themselves to be lead blindly, they trusted in Incubator based on their expectations from
manga, and because they thought that Mami and Incubator were telling the truth through there
lack of questions, they are warning and teaching the viewers to not be so blind and to not trust
everything that they see and are told. Viewers are being warned not to end up in the same
position as the characters in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The violation of Incubator taking
Sayaka's soul from her body eventually lead her into despair because after accepting the
transformation object, she was essentially a zombie and could save the person she loved. Sayaka
had to give him up to another girl who was able to provide him with what he needed.
Another deconstruction is Incubator, who is a play on the trope of the animal creature
who grants the powers, and in most cases, can be trusted. In this case, however, Incubator is not
to be trusted because it is revealed that he is emotionless and also is able to be deceitful without
feeling bad about it. He does not care about the magical girls and actually wonders why they
even care about seeing people dying as proven by his quote here, “You have no idea how much
difficulty we go through trying to understand your human values. Presently there are six billion,
eight hundred million of you, and you're increasing in number by a hundred every four minutes!
What's the huge fuss over the death of each and every single creature?” (Magica Quartet, Puella
Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 03) This causes the watcher to ask questions that you would not
normally have to ask when watching a magical girl film such as, “At what cost does this power
come?” and “Who are the witches that we are fighting?” Incubator is not a character who
engenders trust. Instead, he is a source of doubt. The girls fall into despair after they realize that

4. they have been tricked through their blindness and belief that Incubator was a character that was
trustworthy and that he cared about them and their well being. Incubator is a deconstruction of
the magical mentor trope in magical girl anime that causes us to question the motives of these
types of characters who we have been trained to blindly believe are trustworthy, based on other
magical girl anime, which portray them purely as a force for good.
Magical girl anime is a subgenre of the Shojo that has prepubescent girls who are granted
magical powers in order to fight evil. According to Kumiko Saito, a professor of modern
Japanese literature at Clemson University, magical girl anime is a genre that allows young
unmarried girls to resist the gender roles placed on them in a male-dominated society. Unlike
many of the female characters in the Western world, those in the shojo genre are much more
active and at times are seen taking on strong roles that many may traditionally think of as male.
This counters the stereotypes that are frequently placed on Japanese women who are often seen
as modest and silent. [1]
The transformation from magical girl to witch can be seen as a transformation into
adulthood. Incubator himself said it best when he said that because they would one day become
witches it seemed fitting to call them Maho Shojo. [2] Incubator can be seen as the Incubator that
powers the patriarchal society, turning shojo that channels their sexual desire into cute things, but
are still the object of male desire, into a woman who has lost her innocence and has to deal with
a world that has gender standards and forces one to conform in order to live a normal life. The
idea of a woman in much Japanese folklore is often portrayed as evil, even the myth of witches
being evil can be seen as a way to demonize women with power as being a threat to the
patriarchy. [7] Witches and magical girls are both exclusively female as Incubator told them that
his species targeted adolescent girls because they experience emotions much more powerfully

5. than any other species. [7] In addition, Incubator says that his species is responsible for all
human innovation and that they guided our evolution even going as far as to say we would still
be using rocks and twigs if it weren't for him. [6] He further mentions that many female leaders
in history where magical girls. This seems to imply that for a female to be great would require
them to be given some sort of power as opposed to just being great on their own. This seems
like it is very much in line with gender stereotypes that women are emotional and unstable.
However, this in a lot of ways seems at odds with other gender roles in the film such as
Madoka's mother who is a very powerful businesswoman who is the breadwinner of her
household while the father is a stay at home dad. [7] However, seeks to counter folklore when
we find out that the witches are actually not all that evil, but rather hurting inside. [6]
A big underlying theme in Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the Faustian Bargain, which
is a deal in which one exchanges their soul in return for something that is not nearly as great as
they have given. In the series, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the girls give up their souls in
exchange for a wish being granted. The origins of this bargain actually have a lot of parallels
with the show itself. A philosopher, named Faust, was tired of living in a world with so many
religious beliefs as opposed to knowledge and belief in natural sciences. He felt out of place and
because of that, he became depressed. When going home he ran into a poodle that transformed
into a demon and agreed to grant him a wish for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure in
exchange for his soul. This draws a direct comparison between Faust and Madoka. Madoka, like
Faust, was unhappy. In her case, she was unhappy about being in a world that demands
usefulness, especially in the collectivist social structure of Japan, while she felt like she had no
real use. [6] When presented with the opportunity to be a magical girl by Incubator, who can be
directly compared to the poodle demon of the tale of Faust, this instantly gave her a feeling of

6. potential purpose, not unlike Faust with his gain of unlimited knowledge. This longing to be
useful is what caused her to gain such a strong desire to become a magical girl. Similar to Faust,
Madoka did not really have a bad life. She just was not happy and neither of them saw material
happiness as the most important thing in life. The issue is that with wishes they never really
come out the way that they are meant to because the person wishing for them is rarely ever is
wishing for what they actually want. This element of, be careful what you wish for, is an added
element that is not typical of other magical girl works. This different element causes the person
who is watching to question the cost of the wishes that the characters are making. Their wishes
cause them to fall into despair due to the fact that they often wish for selfish things. [6]
Often it seems that wishes are made to help others when in actuality, they are being made
for selfish reasons. For example, Sayaka's wish to heal the person she loved was not for his
benefit, but for hers in the hopes that it would make him love her and bring her happiness.
However, ultimately, it ended up hurting her because once he was healed, he actually left the
hospital so fast that she did not even know he had gone. He did not run to her as she had hoped,
instead, he abandoned her. She found that he started dating her friend instead of being with her
and fell into despair. Following this incident, she went crazy and stopped using her grief seeds,
which are gained after defeating a witch and used by magical girls to purify their souls. This
caused her soul to turn black. Her last words were simply, “I’m such an idiot.” Kyoko even
comments saying that she should have broken his legs and made him depend on her if she really
wanted to be with him. Here is a typical example of the unhappy magical girl portrayed in
Puella Magi Madoka Magica. [6]
Even in Mami’s case her wish was to save herself as opposed to saving her parents, who
were in a car crash. As a result, she lives life in loneliness having no family and no friends,

7. simply doomed to fight witches. In addition, due to the selfishness of the wish in Kyoko's case,
she never asked her dad if having people understand his unorthodox teachings was what he
wanted or if that is what would make him happy and as a result made him miserable. The truth is
that there is no such thing as a selfless wish even if a wish seems as though it is selfless there is
still selfish motivation underlying the wish that is being made.
The most selfless wish seen in Puella Magi Madoka Magica is Madoka's wish. She said,
"I wish to erase all witches from existence before they're even born. [6] Every witch in the
universe, from the past and the future, with my own hands." This wish is the most selfless
because it causes Madoka to no longer exist in the same time-space of any of her friends and
family. [6] She has no way to contact anyone for all of eternity but she saved every girl who had
ever become a witch and every girl that could ever become a witch in the future. [6] This
effectively changes the law of cycles and saves all magical girls. However, in causing this reset
to happen, she was whisked away into a different universe and unable to return or communicate
with her friends for eternity. Interestingly enough, doing this did not cause her or other magical
girls to become human again or reset time to when they never made a contract. [6] The wish just
changed them from fighting witches to fighting demons that are manifestations of negative
feelings and emotions. Additionally, instead of them becoming witches, their soul gems went
back to normal right after they became black enough for them to become witches. This to me
represents the fact that even with a happy ending, not everyone is happy and the situation is not
always going to be ideal. In the end, the girls have still lost their childhood they are unable to
forge their own identities. They are doomed to fight and be in despair. Also, Madoka is now
unable to ever go back to her old life and see her family and friends. She instead takes on
everyone’s despair similar to how in the Christian religion Jesus takes on everyone's sins. [6]

8. Additionally, it is revealed that the first wish Madoka ever made was to save a cat, which
is also completely selfless. Because her wishes are truly selfless, they do not cause her sadness
or despair and she does not yearn for more than what she wishes for. She gets exactly what she
wanted. It is perhaps this that makes Madoka such a powerful character and the only one to break
the cycle because she is the only character who is pure and is acting with a pure heart. She
understands the sacrifice that she is making and decides to sacrifice herself for her friends and
the magical girls who she had not met, but may have developed a kinship with through hearing
their stories. [6]
The difference in the case of Madoka is that she does not feel self-fulfilled but she really
has a very happy life and she has everything she wants. There is a really good parallel between
Madoka and Buddha to be made because before Buddha became the Buddha he was King
Siddhartha who gave up a world of luxury and one without need or worries in the world for a
world of suffering and grime in order to better understand how the rest of the world lives and
reach enlightenment, which he eventually did as the Buddha. I believe this does parallel very
well with Madoka who left her comfortable home life in order to explore the world of suffering
that a magical girl must go through, but when she sacrificed herself in order to save every
magical girl she became in herself a God that was able to help others overcome their suffering,
similar to what the teachings of the Buddha were supposed to do. One difference in Madoka is
that, unlike many of the other girls, she was already quite happy and content with her own, so
she initially did not know what to wish for. This plays back into the Faustian bargain because it
shows that for most people in the story that the granting of a wish does not outweigh what has
been given. This is a very common trope that transcends the Shojo genre, but is also seen in other
TV shows and even surfaces into the real world.

9. In addition, in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the girls are physically chained to their lives
as a magical girl. This is seen in the fact if they are a certain distance away from their soul gem,
they will die. Here, the transformation object, which was once an object of liberation and
freedom that allowed the magical girls to transform into their liberated magical forms, has been
changed into an object that is used to imprison the magical girls of this series. This element takes
a liberating object from the magical girl genre and turns it into something that reminds them of
the violation that has been committed on their body and also a reminder that they will one day
fall into despair if they do not purify their souls regularly.
The character Mami, in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, also helps to deconstruct typical
themes seen in Magical Girl works. She is the main influence who makes Madoka and Sayaka
want to become magical girls. Mami became a magical girl out of desperation when she was in a
car crash. She simply said, “Help me,” to Kyubey, who saved her life. Mami is a very lonely
character because everyone else she knows was killed. This loneliness is a source of sadness.
Her life was stripped from her before it even had a chance to begin because she was plunged into
the life of a magical girl where she had to fight in order to survive, leaving no time to make
friends, fall in love, or even figure out who she actually was as a person. She was also selfish as
she continued to encourage Madoka and Sayaka to become magical girls even though she knew
that it was not a happy life to live and that it was highly dangerous. Mami continued to
romanticize the magical girl’s life, even going as far as to take them with her into witches
labyrinth, where they could be killed, in order to make friends, out of her desperate need to not
be lonely. Through all of this, although she was lonely, she was actually still very happy because
she did not know anything about Incubator’s tricks up until the time she died. When she met
Madoka and finally had a friend, that sadness was finally expelled from her heart right until the

10. story killed her by having the witch, Charlet, bite her head off. This can be seen as the part of the
show where it is revealed that there is no space for naive happiness. When Mami died along died
the comfort of a mother the rest of the girls felt. Here, we definitely do not see the happy ending
that is usually seen in most magical girl anime
The unhappiness of the film is also shown by the fact that after the death of Mami the
ending theme of the film is replaced by Magia a dark song was written by the group Kalafina.
This can be seen as the true first episode of the series because after the twist of Mami's death the
show begins to reveal the way in which Puella Magi Madoka Magica is actually a
deconstruction by showing us that not everything is what it seems. The song has lyrics like, “If I
can move forward without hesitation, then it's fine if my heart gets broken. I want a spell that can
stand up to the sadness always in front of my eyes.” This also speaks to the dark theme that these
girls now have to go through life watching their friends die in front of their eyes. One of the
biggest ways that this film is a deconstruction is because it shows the viewer what a world where
middle school girls who fight witches would be like. The program shows that in innocent
children, watching their friends die and fighting evil would eventually drive them mad and
corrupt their souls.
Becoming a magical girl essentially becomes the future for these girls. Instead of forging
their own identities, they are chained to their fate as magical girls. In other magical girl anime,
there is a common theme seen in which the girls question themselves as to whether or not they
have made the right decision in becoming magical girls. Usually, they come to the conclusion
that because they are fighting against evil for the greater good, they are doing the right thing.
However, in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this is not the case, the magical girls do not reach
this conclusion so easily and constantly question their decision. The magical girls, according to

11. Mami in episode one, fight each other more than they do witches in order to survive. The reason
this is such a big deal is that it deconstructs the idea that just because they are doing good, it does
not help them to disregard the fact that seeing death and being resigned to the reality that they
have now essentially given up their chance to create their own identity and become who they
truly are is difficult. This is not a fairy tale, these girls are doomed to fight and survive. These
girls are not happy in the end like the magical girls in other manga.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica is not a typical magical girl work. In this manga, we see
intricate themes and concepts that often contrast those that are in typical magical girl works.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica depicts characters that have realistic thoughts, emotions, and
struggles and who do not have happy endings, like those in typical magical girl stories. Also, it
differs in that it makes social commentary, alluding to the strength of women and their position
in society. In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, we see female characters who are fierce and able to
rise above the chains placed on them by Incubator. In the end, Madoka does what no magical girl
in history has been able to do and is able to out-think the Incubators.

12. References
1 Saito, K. (2014). “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the
Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society,” p. 162.
2 Saito, K. (2014). “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the
Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society,” p. 145.
3 GREENWOOD, FORREST. "The Girl at the End of Time: Temporality,
(P)remediation, and Narrative Freedom in Puella Magi Madoka Magica." Mechademia 10,
(January 2015): 195-207. Art & Architecture Source, EBSCOhost (accessed May 14, 2018)

13. 4 Cleto, Sara; Bahl, Erin K. 2016. "Becoming the Labyrinth: Negotiating Magical
Space and Identity in Puella Magi Madoka Magica." Humanities 5, no. 2: 20.
5 Shen, Lien Fan. “The Dark, Twisted Magical Girls: Shōjo Heroines in Puella Magi
Madoka Magica.” Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture (2014).
6 Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) Directed by Akiyuki Shinbo [TV] Aniplex
7. Cleto, Sara (2016) ‘Becoming the Labyrinth: Negotiating Magical Space and Identity
in Puella Magi Madoka Magica’ Humanities 5(20)
8 Davis, Amy (2007) Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Changing Representations of
Women in Disney's Feature Animation 1937-2001, Indiana University Press
9 Ellis, Bill (2016) ‘The Fairy-telling Craft of Princess Tutu: Metacommentary and the
Folkloresque’ The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World. Edited by
Michael Dylan Foster, and Jeffrey A. Tolbert. Utah State University Press pp. 221–40
10 Fan Shen, Lien (2014) “The Dark Twisted Magical Girls: Shōjo Heroines in Puella
Magi Madoka Magica” Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture, edited by
Norma Jones, Rowman & Littlefield, pp.177-188