"Dark" magical girl series Madoka Magica is the successor to Sailor Moon, not a subversion
Though mostly viewed as a grim "deconstruction" of magical girl tropes, the series has much more in common with its predecessors than genre skeptics realize.
When Puella Magi Madoka Magica ended exactly 15 years ago today in a burst of cosmic, Kubrickian grandeur, it birthed a new world: One where people would still be arguing about the series—and the concept of “dark magical girl shows”—a decade and a half later. Written by Gen Urobuchi, a novelist and screenwriter known for brutally killing off his characters, the series draws heavily on Faust, Christian symbolism, utilitarianism critiques, and, of course, other magical girl series, as the middle-schooler Madoka Kaname finds out that becoming a Sailor Moon-style ally of justice isn’t a gift but a curse. Its uncanny turns are sold by studio Shaft at its most evocative and weird, with a mixed-media approach that combines 2D animation with an unsettling stop-motion world of patchwork-cloth creations, all set to Yuki Kajiura’s unsettling score. In just about every respect, the show is tremendous.
But like most works that subvert tropes, it’s had a bit of an unfortunate effect. Instead of acting as a gateway into the magical girl genre,a good chunk of its audience views it as “fixing” these stories by replacing pink frills with grimdark suffering. Not only does this miss that other shows in the space had already explored similarly grave topics, but it also flattens a series that is about much more than misery. Madoka Magica is literally about hope, as represented by its unbreakable protagonist, whose courage reflects the classic picture of a magical girl. At its core, the series isn’t saying anything fundamentally different from the rest of the genre—it’s still about how young girls deserve to be treated with respect—it’s just saying it in a different way.
To be fair to the fans who missed the point, the many imitator series that came after Madoka mostly got it wrong, too. A long lineup of “dark magical girl” shows took Madoka Magica as a challenge to be as bleak and cynical as possible (like Magical Girl Site, for instance). Much of the audience and other creators’ misreading comes down to the fact that, especially outside of Japan, Madoka Magica attracted an audience that didn’t know much about the magical girl genre beforehand (or more specifically, thetype of magical girl series popularized in the ’90s). When Naoko Takeuchi’s manga Sailor Moon debutedin 1991, it took the existing magical girl sub-genre, which was slice-of-life-oriented, and combined it with action tokusatsu flourishes, envisioning its heroines as crimefighters like those in Kamen Rider or Super Sentai (which is what Power Rangers is based on). Basically, the Sailors were an all-girl superhero team who embraced fashion and style while still being very good at punching bad guys in the face. As the series caught on in Japan and eventually in the United States, many other stories took inspiration from its specific mish-mash, leading to the tropes we associate with the space, like involved transformation scenes and magic-fueled fight scenes.
Before it aired, Madoka Magica leaned into this “standard” image of a magical girl show, with its pink, fluorescent title font and seemingly bubbly aesthetic. This was an intentional misdirection on the part of director Akiyuki Shinbo and others on the production team, withUrobuchi pretending he had turned over a new leaf and was going to write a more family-friendly story this time around. Of course, not everyone bought this attempt at misdirection, and even before the third episode’s infamous brutal twist, where the main characters’ mentor figure, Mami, is killed during a fight, attentive viewers would have noticed that something was off.
In this world, young girls can sign a deal with the cutesy mascot Kyubey, gaining any wish in exchange for becoming a magical girl who is duty-bound to fight malicious spirits called Witches. It’s obvious upfront that this is a Faustian bargain; the artifacts that allow the girls to transform into magical girls are literally called soul gems. However, the specifics get worse. It turns out that Kyubey is actually an alien whose entire mission is to cause these magical girls suffering to harvest their negative emotional energy in a desperate attempt to stop the heat death of the universe. When a magical girl’s suffering reaches its climax, their soul gem shatters, and they transform into a Witch, prolonging the cycle of suffering as their good deeds are karmically undone by the wrathful monster they become. It’s undeniably bleak, and when combined with other details, like the avant-garde visuals and the show’s shorter-than-average 12-episode run, there’s no avoiding that Puella Magi Madoka Magica has a different aura than many of its peers.
But the widespread view that it was the first “dark” magical girl show is flat-out incorrect. Seven years earlier, Madoka Magica’s director, Akiyuki Shinbo, helmed Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which tackled child abuse and other social issues. Princess Tutu drew on the limb-chopping details of macabre fairy tales. One of the medium’s great classics, Revolutionary Girl Utena, directly confronts topics that are arguably heavier than anything in Madoka, such as incest and grooming. The genre is no stranger to hefty subject matter, and Sailor Moon, the progenitor of modern magical girl series, didn’t shy away from tragedy and suffering. That show’s ending is remarkably similar to Madoka’s, as most of the Sailors literally die to create a new world where they don’t remember each other.
Beyond these kinds of misnomers, many Madoka Magica fans’ dismissal and casual misogyny toward traditional magical girl shows isn’t fundamentally supported by this series itself. While the world Madoka and her friends face is cynical and cruel, with Kyubey treating young girls as disposable objects to be sacrificed for a “greater good,” Urobuchi’s script rejects this premise by highlighting these girls’ complexities and dignity. Sayaka confronts two Andrew Tate fans spouting women-hating drivel, while Madoka’s idyllic family sees her mom as the primary breadwinner; Madoka’s dad is a supportive stay-at-home husband.
Most crucially, while Kyubey’s system exploits girls at their most vulnerable, offering them dreams before sapping their vitality and casting them aside, Madoka remains unbroken. The series’ defining element isn’t that it’s “grim,” but that it takes a classical magical girl protagonist and has her face this callousness head-on. As she resolves to save her comrades from their fate, Madoka plainly states the show’s thesis: “If someone says it’s wrong to have hope, I’ll tell them they’re wrong every time.” She’s a magical girl in her purest form, brave, strong, and kind. Puella Magi Madoka Magica carries on the magical girl tradition by acknowledging young girls and the hardships they face. It would be nice if the show’s fans did the same.
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