The page has grown big enough to start corrupting the wiki software. Confirmed and Jossed theories are here. Crossover theories are here. Meta theories are here.
Unconfirmed (for now)
Stuff that we haven't gotten an answer to yet, but may possibly get an answer to in the future.- As of the Wraith-Arc (which started in 2014), there is at least one confirmed example of a Magical Girl who doesn't make a contract with Kyubey. Homura, in the new Universe created after the main series, forms a soul gem without making a contract. That would definitely seem to support the idea that Kyubey's involvement at least isn't necessary, and that his role is more as a facilitator.
- Or no girl has had the magical power required to change an entire sentient species like that.
- This does NOT extend to Mind Rape.
- Alternately, Lies to Children don't really count as lies for him, and he's drastically simplifying his explanation because he isn't really sure how much a girl Madoka's age would be able to understand or how much she would be able to comprehend under the circumstances regardless. It would probably be difficult for him to explain anything if he had to be completely accurate, given how advanced his species presumably is compared to humanity. The fact that it's probably oversimplified (there's a good chance Madoka already knows about the second law of thermodynamics if she's taken any courses on physics) is a result of how poorly he understands the way that humans think.
- This troper doesn't think so. Madokami is special, because a series of specific events had to conspire to make her desire so powerful that the effect of its eventual energy surplus was able to rewrite the laws of the universe. No magical girl could be so powerful in and of herself. In the "old" (pre-Madokami) universe, the Law of Thermodynamics caused hope to become despair, and despair can overcome entropy, which is why the more desperate the wish, the more powerful the magical girl, and the more devastating the eventual Witch. I propose that magical girls and Witches are not gods; they are merely perpetual energy machines—because the Incubators have devised a way to make a girl's despair literally ENDLESS. The labyrinth created by a Witch is not a whole other universe, rather it's just an Ironic Hell (as theorized by an earlier troper); it's the way her despair manifests itself, creating more despair in the process, causing more magical girls to be born to fight that despair, who in turn become Witches themselves. It's a perfect system, until, of course, all that despair comes to a head and causes Earth's apocalypse, i.e: Walpurgis Night, when a bunch of Witches combine powers to destroy the world. But even though Earth is destroyed, the universe as a whole is better off, because the Walpurgis will never die, meaning that this perpetual entropy surplus machine will operate indefinitely. Being a god implies you can do whatever you like; magical girls and Witches are just inexhaustible balls of pure despair and not gods in any sense of the word.
- TL;DR: Labyrinths are essentially Reality Marbles, which aren't necessarily the mark of a god.
- Saki from Kazumi Magica may have also been involved in the same accident. Asunaro and Mikitihara may not be that far apart.
- And Kyuubey orchestrated the whole thing, knowing it would result in at least one new contract.
- Even with Madoka's wish; this didn't end. After all, Madoka's wish covered "every world."
- ALL previous Magical Girl Homuras also received Madoka's ribbon in every timeline; tying them to each other (and Homura to herselves). Each one remembers every previous (and later) timelines as well.
- For sanity's sake; when dealing with other humans; Homura keeps her perception and memories to the reality she's in at the time (thus she's a bit lonely when in "the real world"); but when gametime is on against Demons; she draws on the entire collective unconscious of every Homura. That's why Dark Angel Homura is basically a Physical God; she's all the Homuras in every parallel dimension. It's also why Dark Angel Homura is smiling. She's quite alien by human standards; but it's okay. She's not alone; she's fighting for the world her goddess loves; and they will be reunited. One day. (And what's time? She's ancient.)
- She's basically what would happen if Rika and Bernkastel had fused and took it a lot better.
- Okay, she didn't take it very well, but she's still better than Bernkastel.
- She's basically what would happen if Rika and Bernkastel had fused and took it a lot better.
- Also the same reason the the Anti-Spirals justifying themselves with preserving the universe is seen by spirals as jack shit.
- The Kyubey are to the universe what Fran Madaraki is to a single human life. Sweet dreams!
- Kyubey thinks Homura is bonkers; wishing for a dream memory to be filled doesn't make it true. But she's very strong so he goes along with this "I was a Magical Girl from a previous timeline" story because it's not disruptive. (The Kyubey would be far more curious if Homura was a magical girl who had NO RECORD of the Incubators ever turning her into one.)
- Somewhat confirmed by Rebellion: Homura is introduced as an acquaintance of Mami whose wish presumably had nothing to do with Madoka, although this exchange takes place while all the magical girls sans Sayaka and Nagisa were under the influence of Fake Memories, so it's debatable as to whether that was Homura's actual backstory in the new world.
- It's jossed in the manga, but the anime...
- Rather, she will not be able to use the "normal" route. She will have to either complete her Dharma of protecting the world Madoka loves by taking the Long Path to godhood; or else die doing so. (She's not going to be killed easily, though.)
- I like the idea of Homura taking the Long Path and in the meantime making the best world she can while she lives. Remember that Madokami tells Homura that they have to be separated for "just a little bit" and that they will "meet again someday". If Madokami is a true immortal unfettered by time, then any amount of time spent apart is "just a little bit" when you compare it to the rest of eternity. Homura is a very resourceful and willful girl. If she is immortal, it might take thousands of years for her to 1.) want to retire 2.) begin to feel so lonely that the thought of seeing Madoka again triggers a reset of her hope and despair levels 3.) finally realize that she must truly give into despair in order to meet Madokami. And then, yay, "a true miracle" happens as Homura overcomes despair to be with Madoka for the rest of ever.
- Partially jossed in Rebellion. Madoka did come to reunite with Homura, but Homura turned into a being more powerful than Madoka (basically Satan), and suppressed Madoka's powers/memory of being God.
- An interesting theory, but it doesn't seem to fit with the description of Kriemhild Gretchen who is stated to be somewhat of a Lotus-Eater Machine. Earth in the ending is certainly not a paradise, Madoka only made life slightly easier for Magical Girls.
- Why so serious?
- Considering that the girls in Puella Magi Kazumi Magica have referred to the Incubators as fairies...
- Seeing the witch cards. For example, Charlotte. Despite the fact that she is able to produce whatever dessert she wants, she is unable to create the cheese she loves the most.
- Similar to Madoka in timeline 4. Walpurgis is a magical girl strong enough to destroy her own homeworld. She has moved since to do the same here.
- Perhaps not extraterrestrial, but could be a magical girl from another country (which would be very powerful, but not enough to destroy a planet, allowing Madoka to be more powerful than she is; the girls didn't know said country was destroyed by a witch because they didn't know what a witch was at the time this happened. Might be too soon to theorize this sort of thing, taking in consideration the wake of recent catastrophies worldwide, but might be very plausible (that could be the reason they preferred to keep the broadcast on hold, to not affect sensibilities).
- Jossed by Word of God. Walpurgisnacht is a sort of amalgam of other Witches, hence its being named for a legendary Sabbath at the Brocken. An extraterrestrial witch does appear in one route of the portable game, but doesn't seem atypical in any other way.
- I think it is quite possible. That becase Kyuube didn't meet his energy goal. He granted Homura's wish in order for him to somehow increase Madoka's power and get more power from her. This would explain why Madoka seems to be getting stronger after each timeline. Of course, as we say, Hoist by His Own Petard.
- Madoka is absorbing Homura's grief, which is renewed with each reset.
- The fact that it increases her power is confirmed, Kyubey's intent unknown.
- It seems unlikely; Kyubee didn't seem to like Madoka's wish, tried to talk her out of it, and granted it anyway. One gets the impression that as far as he's concerned, the contract is already signed, and just waiting for the wish to go into effect.
- He could have been planning to boost her potential to such levels without necessarily expecting her to make a wish like this. However, this is still very unlikely because Kyubey doesn't seem to understand what the deal with Madoka is, not that Homura is a time-traveler, until late on into the anime. That makes it unlikely he could have planned everything.
- This being a deconstruction. There must be a reason plot-wise. Boys aren't offered the same thing as girls.
- Wasn't this confirmed? Kyubey stated that human females "in their second growth phase" were the most emotional creatures in the universe (paraphrased), and therefore the most useful to him. He wouldn't have any use of Puerorum Magi (Magical Boys).
- Strictly speaking, the most 'emotional creatures in the universe' would be people who suffer from chemical imbalances. Bipolar, anxiety, depression, mania... All those conditions would cause wildly fluctuating emotions, and can occur regardless of gender. The easier answer is, the magical girl genre is exclusively that. Shoujo only.
- Remeber that in episode 9 he said to Madoka that Humanity would eventually join their species?. Well in episode 10 he said in an alternate timeline that he didn't cared about humanity because it wasn't his problem?. This means that he is able to lie.
- "Humanity could join my species one day, don't you want the universe to still be around?" isn't turned into lying by "well, fulfilled my quota, fuck these guys". All he told Madoka was that humanity could become that advanced and that it would be in her interest to help contribute her energy. That doesn't mean he actually ever cared about humanity. And he didn't know in the fourth timeline that Madoka would be that powerful. You can't fairly compare statements from two different timelines.
- Not nesesarily. He used the argument of "humans may join us if you become a puella magi!" in timeline 5. Despite the fact that he knows that Madoka will become a witch strong enough to destroy this world.
- So? There's still no contradiction between his statements, just his usual omission of relevant facts. His initial offering was always an assertion of *possibility*:'Humanity COULD join us....' What Kyubey failed to mention was the *prob*ability of that statement being realized (i.e. near zero).
- First of all, if someone tells you that they can't lie, take the possibility of Blatant Lies first. Also, Kyubey would rather prefer being Metaphorically True because a modified truth is more believable and has more supporting evidence than a lie made from the ground up.
- Kyubey is called an extraterrestrial Incubator in Madoka Magica. The magical girls in Kazumi Magica refer to him (or at least the modified incubator body Jyubey) as a fairy and nobody anywhere bothers to correct this, which doesn't really give any serious contracting boost and if anything hurt recruitment in that city as a result of the magical girls there. Jyubey also lies (or at least does not have complete information and guessed wrong a lot), so there is not anything embedded in the individual Incubator that makes it not lie.
- At least in the dub, Kyubey has lied: after Sayaka turns into a witch, when Kyouko asks him whether there's a way to get Sayaka's soul gem back the way it was (and note that Kyouko didn't ask whether she, specifically, could do it, but whether there was a way to do it at all), his response is "if there is a way, I'm not aware of it." In the previous episode, Madoka asked whether she could turn Sayaka human again if she made a contract, and Kyubey answered that she could easily turn Sayaka human again, twist the fabric of the universe, and even become a god. If Kyubey knows that she could easily turn magical girl Sayaka human, he should also know that she could use her wish to turn the witch version of Sayaka human. And when she does go to make her wish in the last episode, he specifically tells her that any wish she makes will come true. He clearly knew that Madoka could use her wish to turn Sayaka back into either a magical girl or a human (or to do anything else she wanted), but he explicitly told Kyouko that he didn't know of ANY way to get Sayaka's soul gem back the way it was. Unless he somehow honestly believed that Madoka would be incapable of changing a witch back into a magical girl with her wish (but would not be incapable of changing a magical girl back into a human, warping reality, or becoming a god), he lied to Kyouko: there might not be a way for Kyouko to save Sayaka, but Kyubey is aware of a way that Sayaka could be saved.
At each iteration, Madoka gets a little more power, but events play out mostly the same. Eventually, though, Kyuubey notices how much power Madoka has and begins focusing much of his time getting her to contract with him, which pushes Homura further to just save (only) Madoka. However, she misses the entire point of what older Madoka was trying to accomplish; no matter how many "Madokas" will eventually fail, she'll keep trying until Madoka has enough power of her own, outside Kyuubey's influence, that she can somehow break through that Bad Future of a destroyed world and open a once-closed door to a happy one (per the OP and the ED).
Bonus points if Madoka gets enough power to blast a unified Grief Seed-powered Incubator out of existence so that this entire dreadful system is stopped, and magical girls are born from wholly original "magical girl" power. Or maybe I'm just wishing TTGL-style optimism comes into play.
- About the relation between Madoka and the loops, you can add the fact that the dream she had in ep1 was in fact an alternate reality. Even if there is some differences between them, even the dialogs are the same, so there have to be a reason. It means that she is DIRECTLY and logically related to the loop. Somehow. Moreover, During most of the loops, she "dies" against the walpurgis and is not really that godlike against other witches. Well, okay, why not... Except that in a later loop, she is able to one-shot easily the walpurgis, alone. Right when she becomes a puella magi, without even knowing how to use her powers. Even if we assume that this one was also defeated in the earlier loops, Madoka and Homura being almost dead on the ground doesn't really fit with the "all-powerful Madoka one-shooting the walpurgis" supposed to be in the later ones.
- Or he might have discovered that Madoka IS the being he needs to hatch.
- Actually, it seems to be worse. He actually grants the wish they desire, and it destroys them more completely than a mere Literal Genie ever could.
- In other words, Jackass Genie.
- There's a reason everyone considers him as a Devil figure and The Deceiver.
- This thing gives me the vibes of Dung Beetle.
- Note that Kyubey and Mami very intentionally make sure that Homura never gets a chance to speak extensively with Madoka... even in safe places like at school.
- Considering that there are numerous quotes of Gothe's Faust in the second episode, this is actually not very far-fetched. Both works are about someone being approached by a cute animal which offers them a wish. The dog in Faust is the devil.
- Note that Homura pauses and refuses to answer when asked about her wish — leading credence to the idea that the "wish" stuff is a lie made up by Kyubey to tempt Madoka.
- It's heavily insinuated that the "Making a Selfless Wish is a BAD IDEA" thing is referring to Homura, who may have made a wish on someone else's behalf only for it to not work out.
- Observe episode 3, where in a flashback you can see Mami dying in a car wreck, with Kyubey happily jumping in to make her an offer she can't refuse.
- This happens again in episode 4. Kyubey shows up in front of Sayaka at just the moment Kamijou is at a high point of despair over his illness.
- Episode three has made me believe he's lying his ass off.
- On the other hand, the implications of Kyubey's evilness are so obvious it could be a Red Herring.
- Observe in Episode 5 when we see Kyubey empower Sayaka — he reaches into her and rips out her soul in order to make a gem out of it.
- It's getting kind of ridiculous as of episode 6, when we find out that Kyubey eats the grief seeds to dispose of them and that magical girls are effectively liches. He couldn't be any more obvious, even if he started dancing around yelling "I'M EVIL!".
- In Episode 7, Homura supports the idea that Kyubey isn't exactly evil. Rather, he has no concept of human morality and values. Whether or not this amounts to the same thing is up to you for now.
- So....episode 8 confirmed right?
- Not necessarily. He could be a third, neutral faction, like a natural (for the setting) force. Having said that, hell yes, he's evil.
- In episode 9, Kyubey explains his motivations, or at least what he claims his motivations are. Even assuming that he told the whole story (most likely not a safe assumption), it still means that at best he is essentially an Anti-Spiral.
- Episode 10 makes it worse. In episode 9, Kyuubey said "Sometime in the future you humans will leave this planet and join us, too. It wouldn't be nice if the universe was dying by that time, would it?". In episode 10? "...it won't take long before she's destroyed this planet. But well, that's not my problem. I gathered a lot more energy than our collection quota." In other words, what he said was basically Blatant Lies. Kyubey doesn't even care about humanity as whole, except in terms of how much energy we could provide. Definitely Lawful Evil.
- I'll echo one of the other WMG comments; Loop 4 Kyubey not really caring after he met his quota does not disprove his claim that humans can, not will, join Kyubey's race in space. They're exclusive things that he says in different timelines
- As quoted: "Koschei cannot be killed by conventional means targeting his body. His soul is hidden separate from his body inside a needle, which is in an egg, which is in a duck, which is in a hare, which is in an iron chest (sometimes the chest is crystal and/or gold), which is buried under a green oak tree, which is on the island of Buyan, in the ocean. As long as his soul is safe, he cannot die. If the chest is dug up and opened, the hare will bolt away. If it is killed, the duck will emerge and try to fly off. Anyone possessing the egg has Koschei in their power. He begins to weaken, becomes sick and immediately loses the use of his magic. If the egg is tossed about, he likewise is flung around against his will. If the egg or needle is broken (in some tales this must be done by specifically breaking it against Koschei's forehead), Koschei will die."
- This description sort of fits the Puella Magi as well
So Homura could legitimately kill that damned thing if she finds the right duck...the day is saved. (Or possibly doomed.)
- Another reason that supports this theory is how in Episode 9 Kyubey deliberately manipulates Kyouko to sacrifice herself, eliminating all the other Puella Magi and coercing Homura into a Xanatos Gambit: try and fight Walpurgis alone and lose, or have Madoka make a contract with Kyubey to help her win.
- This theory doesn't make any sense, because had Mami lived past Charlotte fight, Madoka would have made a contract with Kyubey right there and then.
- ...But it is possible that Charlotte and her world were warping the minds of Madoka and Mami at that time. I highly doubt it was a coincidence that they were talking about wishing for a cake inside of the world of a cake-obsessed witch, which meant that Madoka would had probably changed her mind once she left Charlotte's dimension and her mind was cleared of any external influences. Besides, don't pretend that we know Madoka better than Kyubey does, he stares into her soul after all. In fact, I starting to believe that...
This includes everything, and I mean everything, that has happened from episode 3 onwards.
However, in order to do this, he probably needed some kind of mind warping powers, and he may very well have them, but said powers probably only work on "normals" such as Kyousuke (possibly used in episode 4, to cause the event that led to Sayaka forming her contract with Kyubey, giving Kyoko a possible relation for Kyoko to sacrifice herself for.), Junko (possibly used in episode 6, when she gave the advice that led Madoka to throw away Sayaka's soul gem, giving Kyoko a reason to get closer to Sayaka, with the view of the two being close enough for Kyoko to sacrifice herself when the time came.) and Hitomi (possibly used in episode 7 when she told Sayaka about her planned confession, kick-starting Sayaka's transformation into a witch). However, that, combined with his mind reading of the mahou shoujo, is more than for him to influence everything that has happened so far. I'm not talking full-blown mind control, by the way, I'm thinking it's more along the lines of a subconscious voice which is egging the characters to say certain things.
- I'm really hoping he didn't plan Episode 12. I really hope.
- This troper says no. Kyubey does not understand human values, so how can he know with certainty how someone is going to react to a certain situation, especially when we're talking about tween girls? Incubators simply provide the energy needed for a young girl to manifest her greatest wish, which always leads to an amount of despair in surplus of the original energy provided to grant the wish, thus overcoming the Law of Thermodynamics. There's no reason for Kyubey to scheme; the effect of having our desires granted brings the despair on ourselves—we are our own worst enemies. This is a good argument for Kyubey is Evil, however.
- ;_;
- Unlikely given that in another timeline she was with Sayaka, Homura, and Madoka, and certainly still alive.
- It's certainly possible to be around other people and be all alone. Although being alone with other people is better than being alone by yourself.
- Apparently, this suggests that Kyubey is a Literal Genie.
- Wasn't it mentioned somewhere she regretted not saving her family as well, implying they were in the accident with her? She wouldn't have been dying alone if all that were true?
- If the information about witches it correct, it would have drained the life of people in the hospital. After observing the woman who attempted suicide in Episode 2, we can assume that this is plausible.
- A weird thought I just had. Witch familiars eat people and become a witch-clone. So what if human souls do something similar? According to Kyubey human spirits are annihilated upon death...supposing they disintegrate into little pieces, each waiting for a chance to be reborn? So a human day of judgement/afterlife is less a ressurection and more like a fungal bloom. Nice, but a bit creepy IMO.
- It explains her power and the opening henshin scene.
- Unlikely. With the unveiling of a time traveler, we may end up seeing a timeskipped future Madoka come back, however.
- Unlikely, but not directly contradicted.
- May or may not be the reason why Homura still looks the same, depending on how her time travel works and whether it just sends back her soul gem or the body with it (Since memories are stored in the soul here, it's probably not strictly necessary for the whole body to travel through time tho) Heck, could even explain the below.
Kyubey claims he can grant any wish, but it's really a matter of letting them grant their own wishes. Kyubey himself even admits that despite developing the technology that unlocks this potential from humans (Soul Gems), the Incubators are still unable to comprehend why Puella Magi and their Eldritch Abomination form can warp reality in the first place. Homura, who attempts to be a Nanoha-style brawler and whose Time Lord powers (which arguably allows for the most creativity, just ask anyone who watched Doctor Who) are restricted by her depression and the single duty/hope to protect Madoka, is the weakest of them; it's all about imagination.
- His full name is Incubator, so...
Note that it may not be the last witch fought, which I still believe will be the one from Madoka's dream.
- Kyuube says he can make Madoka a god, and Homura then says Madoka is self-sacrificing, i.e a Messianic Archetype. Magical girls prevent others from suffering, but they suffer themselves. which turns them into witches. Witches are the opposite of magical girls, causing suffering to others. If Madoka becomes a self-sacrificing god, then what would she become if she became a witch? What is the opposite of God? Oh, and in Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles a.k.a Kyubey was Satan. Funny how that works...
- Funny how you say that. He made her Christ...
Grief seeds collect darkness from the gems; if they collect enough darkness the witch is reborn; dark gems turn into seeds. As witches kill people, their seeds become more valuable -> by killing people witches purify themselves. Witches kill people by dumping their despair into them - killing them in order to purify itself. If a witch fully cleanses herself, she transforms into something else. QB for some reason does not want this, so he sets magical girls on them - they kill the witches, feed more darkness into their seeds and give them to QB. He later replants them and the witch is reborn.
- Second-tier WMG: If a cleansed witch transforms back into magical girl, Homura is one such transformed.
- Being surrounded by spiders while thinking about being outside. This could be seen as a representation of the nightmarish properties of the witches' dimension.
- Being attacked by a Sand Worm. This could be seen as a spoiler for episode 3 and Mami's death, which was caused by a sand worm-like witch called Charlotte.
- Having her body inflated. This could be seen as a (minor) spoiler for episode 4, where she is subjected to Body Horror
- Being carried away by crows. This could be seen as a spoiler for episode 6, where it is revealed that the soul of a mahou shoujo gets separated from its body, essentially leaving the body dead if the soul gem is more than 100 meters away, explaining why the crows are carrying her in the first place.
- Crashing into a lamppost while riding a broomstick. While the crashing isn't a spoiler, the very fact she is riding a broomstick in the first place could be seen as a spoiler for episode 8, where it is revealed that mahou shoujo turn into witches when they are older. The scene which shows Madoka in a Stripperiffic outfit that follows straight after that could be seen as a spoiler for the effects that The Corruption has on a mahou shoujo.
...and that's even not even take the rest of the OP into account. If this theory is true, then it is highly likely that the Madoka is Kuybey theory is also true, considering that she is seen with an older Madoka when making her transformation in the OP, but Kyubey is the one that she has to make physical contact with (going off Sayaka's contract formation sequence) in order to to transform in the anime itself.
- Actually, putting aside the fact that the opening scenes are very likely events that did happen in alternate timelines, the lyrics to both the OP and the ED are surprisingly relevant to the plot especially after watching episode 10. "I won’t forget the promise we made"? The very FIRST line of the OP. "When can I see again here the future that I lost?"!? "destroy one of the dreams of a world racing towards destruction"!? COME ON, PEOPLE, HOW WERE WE SO BLIND ABOUT THIS FACT!? AND THOSE ARE JUST A FEW OF THE MANY RELEVANT LINES IN THERE.
This is an alternate theory to the fusion dance theory.
In episode 12, we see Walpurgis Night in full view. It appears to be white, like Kyuubey, and its arms look suspiciously like the flaps of skin that come out from Kyuubey's ears. Supporting this theory, Walpurgis Night doesn't have a barrier, nor does it drop any grief seed. And despite being visible to the naked eye and capable of causing the End of the World, no normal human newscaster even noticed a WTF Eldritch Horror in the middle of the hurricane/earthquake.
Everyone refers to Walpurgis Night as the "strongest witch", of course, but this is probably only because Kyuubey said that it was, since the mahou shoujo can't prove otherwise. Of course Kyuubey doesn't lie outright, and this isn't a outright lie either. The Walpurgis Night probably attacks by using the grief seeds that Kyuubey has collected for it, thus making it the master of all witches and thus is Metaphorically True as the strongest witch and Kyuubey is infamous for his love of being Metaphorically True.
Of course, Walpurgis Night would destroy the earth, which would go against Kyuubey's plans, or would it? As far as a remember Kyuubey only said that the witch that is born from defeating Walpurgis Night would destroy the earth. I can't remember him saying anything about Walpurgis Night itself destroying the earth. Not even once. Yet again, an example of Kyuubey choosing his words in such a manner as to trick the mahou shoujo to do his bidding.
Instead, the purpose of Walpurgis Night's existence is to cause enough death and destruction to make girls into mahou shoujo and speed up their progression into witches to help Kyuubey with his energy quota.
To address the final standing point, its appearance, it is possible that incubators have a system which is similar to how bees and ants work on Earth. Kyuubey is a worker-class incubator. His job is to gather resources (in this case, energy) to help keep his colony (or the universe) alive. Walpurgis Night is probably a warrior-class incubator. It's job is what I stated before, provide a tough opponent to the mahou shoujo so that they become witches quicker.
This is a mix of some theories presented here, and mashed up with some new ones, courtesy of a pic in the Puella Magi wiki, here◊.
Back in the real world, Puella Magi are not born from contracts with Kyubey, but rather, from a human experiencing a traumatic experience in her life. Witches are still created the usual way, however.
Madoka was a normal person, with a lot of dreams and aspirations, until she witnessed her entire family being brought to suicide by a witch. This event was the trauma that made her turn into a Puella Magi. Like in the series, her magical potential was enormous, practically godlike. With that power, Madoka created Kyubey so that others could help her fight witches if they wanted to do so, and gave power to her pet cat, Homura, to help her in battle.
However, although Madoka was full of determination, her life had suffered a very drastic, dramatic change. Nevertheless, out of a self-sacrificing sense of duty, she kept fighting and trying to make a better world for everyone. It was all in vain, however. No matter how much she tried, people she loved died or fell into despair and turned into witches. Ultimately, Madoka couldn't take it anymore, and her cries of despair ruptured the world as she turned into a witch herself.
After a long, terrible battle, Madoka, the ultimate witch, was subdued, but her friends didn't have the courage to kill her, or it was outright impossible to do so. Instead, they joined forces to seal her and themselves into a dream world where her inner self could live a happy life, free from the pain that being a Puella Magi involved. Kyubey and Homura were tasked with watching over the seal so that Madoka's physical body didn't escape into the real world.
However, Kyubey grew sick of the light-hearted slice of life going on in this world, and longed for the good ol' days in which he was by Madoka's side, killing witches and setting the world on fire, and ultimately decided that this dream world he had been told to watch over was nothing but a cowardly lie spun by Madoka's so-called friends to pull her away from her true life. And so, he tried to get Madoka to awaken and return to the real world.
Homura found out of Kyubey's betrayal and used her powers to reset the time stream of the dream world. This had the effect of everyone forgetting almost everything about their past lives and believing that the dream world was the real world all along. Some residual impulses remained, however... Among them, Kyubey's obsession with getting Madoka to 'awaken', Homu trying to stop Kyubey, and Madoka's depression in general. Should Homura ever fail to stop Kyubey, the ultimate witch will be unleashed on the real world, with catastrophical consequences for humanity.
Unfortunately, dreams are bound to end sooner or later, and so, Kyubey's victory is inevitable. It's not a matter of 'if', but of 'when'.
- See also: Pillar System Theory
- Seemingly subverted in episode 10, where Witch!Madoka brings about The End of the World as We Know It in an alternate timeline.
- She has a desire to create a perfect world, so whether this is Axe Crazy or not is up to you.
- Don't count this theory out just yet: Kriemhild Gretchen may be based off the Brocken Spectre. The Brocken was a mountain peak where Walpurgis Night (in both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust and German folklore) occurred. The Brocken Spectre is a magnified shadow. So it's possible that we've only seen the shadow, and that the witch is much smaller.
- Note that those monks in the end look pretty human. They're not the same witches though.
- Before episode 3, he claimed "We still haven't shown even a single scene with bloodshed!". Hints at how Kyubey being slashed viciously by Homura (albeit offscreen) in episode 1 doesn't count as blood being shed. Cue episode 8...Kyubey doesn't bleed. AT ALL.
- "Kyu" in "Kyubey" comes from "cute". He wasn't lying. In japanese the 'kyu' from Kyubey shares the same kana as both cute and incubator. The audience has a million to one chance of guessing the correct english word... but still...
- Kyubey isn't evil. He just has different moral standards.Being an alien and all, AND doing it for the greater good
The reason not even Kyubey knows his real purpose? It's so others can't learn about it as well, until it's too late.
- Mephistopheles doesn't fit the witches' Stellar Name Theme Naming, but Mephistophilia would.
- A puella magi's power level and abilities depend on the wish she made.
- As proved by episode 8, the characters are, to some vestigial degree, aware of the alternate timelines.
Given these two points, Kyubey knows what he needs to do: contract Madoka on Walpurgisnacht. Episode 10 demonstrates that whatever wishes she made at other times didn't make her powerful enough to be able to change the laws of nature. That one time she turns into a thundercloud-witch implies that she's likely still very strong, but not as strong as Kyubey keeps telling her she would be in the current timeline. Whatever wish Madoka made on Walpurgisnacht in the previous loop did make her powerful enough, however—and Kyubey can remember it happening. So this timeline, he'll try to do it again. We can only wait to see if he's successful or not...
From this, it seems rather likely that Kyuubey's shenanigans with Madoka are simply one big Batman Gambit to keep his real target, Homura, occupied until she becomes a witch. So long as she doesn't think about things too hard until that happens, she won't realise she's being played like a Stradivarius. Indeed, it's likely that Madoka is a) being singled out in the alternate timelines by Kyuubey to wind up in more and more optimal situations to improve her power, to maintain this illusion and b) only being thus singled out because she was Homura's close friend to begin with. Remember, in the original timeline, she was good, but not that significantly better than Mami. It's only since then that she's been portrayed as the magical girl Jesus - or rather, given what they become, the magical girl anti-Christ.
- It should be mentioned that Kuubey initially doesn't realize that Homura is from an alternate time line. However when he figures it out, he goes along with it for this reason. In fact, this is why he allowed her to travel back the first time; he wanted to make Madoka a witch.
Of course, this Walpurgis will be the worst of them all.
- For Kyoko, it could have been in iterations 1, 2, or 4.
- For Mami, it could have been in iteration 4. It's also possible it could have occurred in iteration 2.
- Her character development in the first three iterations wouldn't make sense if there's more, the 3rd leads directly to the fourth, and the fourth ends with the prologue. There's no room for any more
- What I had in mind was that some timelines could repeat and be very similar. So the room for more would be any timeline after the fourth. But since she is not the kind to sit and wait for something to change, even I thought it is more likely that there have been no more timelines than the opposite.
- In episode 11, QB says she has looped 'countless' times. He can probably count past five. When asked how many girls she's seen die, Homura herself says 'too many to count.' Any other timelines would likely fall between the fourth and fifth.
For example (just a possibility), maybe when a Witch dies, its residues reunite with other Witches' residues in some secluded area and start forming a special Grief Seed which cannot be detected by the Puella Magi due to its low activity level, until this "egg" is strong enough to hatch and give birth to the Walpurgis Night Witch.note
This Witch would not only create a huge amound of energy itself, it would also hugely reduce the number of Puella Magi (and probably turn many of them into Witches), so that more witches can reproduce. Slowly, more girls would be contracted to fight the newborn Witches, repeating the cycle.
Yes, you should have noticed what I've implied there: The Walpurgis Night has happened many times before. The devastating effects caused by this Witch are probably explained in the real world by a)Natural disasters note or b)Human causes (huge wars, genocide, etc.), AGAIN, as a WMG above mentioned.note
- It showed up at the same time when there were only two magical girls around and when there were five, though
- Yes, I noticed. But my point here was that there is some kind of "time limit" for the girls. If you don't die before this night, you will die during it anyway. The Witch wouldn't differentiate about how many there are left, it just appears at a certain time to do its ass-kicking job.
- Regardless of this theory's validity, there is nothing that says Kyouko's sister wasn't a magical girl. This might then be something that comes up in Oriko.
- At this point, the only way this theory is possible is if her wish was something like " Don't let Kyoko know I'm a magical girl".
- Not necessarily. she could have realized that his father insanity was caused by Kyoko, which in turn caused him to murder his wife and almost-murder her. She was able to make a wish to save herself(Like Mami) and left with a grudge against Kyoko
- If we assume that Elsa Maria was Catholic, then she can't be Kyoko's sister. Kyoko's father was a priest, and Catholic priests cannot marry.
- Kyoko's father was mentioned more or less outright to have been starting his own denomination, which could reasonably have allowed priests to marry whilst still holding on to many Catholic practices.
- A point: if Kyubey is to be believed, 'surpassing entropy' is the whole point of making Puella Magi and witches. Every time a prospective Peulla Magi makes a wish, they surpass entropy.
From this, what can we deduce? That Kyubey is laughing his ass at Homura and her puny attempts to save Madoka from her destiny as the ultimate witch that will generate energy without limits to stave off entropy forever. Everything that has happened in the series was all part of a plan that was set in motion when Homura got her time powers and Kyubey realized that she was his mithrill vein. From this point on, there are a few possible outcomes:
- Homura manages to defeat Walpurgis by herself. Since anyone who destroys Walpurgis is fated to turn into an even more powerful version of it, he still has an ultimate witch from which to obtain energy. Kyubey wins.
- Homura doesn't manage to defeat Walpurgis by herself and dies, and Madoka makes a contract with Kyubey. After Madoka turns into a witch, Kyubey obtains the ultimate source of energy. Kyubey wins.
- Homura doesn't manage to defeat Walpurgis and dies, and Madoka does not make a contract with him. Kyubey still has a consolation prize of not having anyone to stop him from continuing to harvest witches. Kyubey wins.
- Homura finds out that she has been being manipulated from the beginning, but finds no way to foil the plan. Homura dies or turns into a witch. Madoka makes a contract to try and save Homura. Madoka turns into a witch. Kyubey wins.
- Homura somehow finds out that she's being manipulated and finds a way to foil the plan. Kyubey loses. But finding out this would require of plot omniscience capabilities that Homura, simply put, doesn't have, or alternatively, a lot of luck. Therefore, this is very unlikely to occur. And even if she finds out of the manipulation, there are no guarantees that she can foil it in some way. And even if the plan is foiled, Kyubey could simply go look for suckers to farm elsewhere. The plan continues as intended. Kyubey wins.
- Homura resets the timeline again. But since everytime she presses the rewind button, everything turns out worse, she's just delaying the inevitable. In fact, it is possible that, through experiencing so many failures, Homura grows so resented that, in her obsession for saving Madoka, she doesn't notice that she reacts more coldly to her in every iteration, that she's hurting her. Now Madoka hates Homura. Homura falls into despair and turns into a witch, then Kyubey's plan continues as expected. Kyubey wins.
- Conclusion: This is all one epic Xanatos Gambit (it fits the definition) fated to bring a satisfactory result to Kyubey everytime, and Homura has no way to stop it. Game Over. Kyubey WINS.
- What would happen if Homura does a Kyoko and kills herself and the witch at the same time? I suppose that Kyubey will have to look for more suckers and hope that they become strong enough to get Madoka to sign a contract. Kyubey wins again, I suppose.
- That's pretty much the incubator plan, yeah. Even if they run out of witches and Puella Magi, well, in that case they can still find girls who are willing to make a wish. After all, a Puella Magi who can't purify their soul will transform into a witch... and the incubators get a benefit out of creating Puella Magi, and allowing witches to form. Preventing the witches from destroying humanity is in their interests, too, because no humanity means no more Puella Magi wishing and no more witches cursing.
- Unlikely since Roberta seems more like a Hard-Drinking Party Girl.
- Seen in episode 11, though I don't know if you can call that shrinking violet.
- Happy Madoka and Homura: Happy Ending.
- Sad Madoka: Bittersweet Ending.
- Madoka Crying: Downer Ending.
- Madoka in pain
- Kyubey-eyed Mami: Gainax Ending.
- Kyubey: Troll Ending
- Bittersweet Ending achieved.
Of course, the anime has said that such a thing is impossible, which is why this WMG must be taken together with the next WMG
- Although this is unconfirmed, we can say the amnesia and outfit have nothing to do with this.
- Confirmed! Kazumi's friends were so traumatized by Kazumi (Real name Michiru Kazusa) turning into a witch that they made a "doll" stuffed with dead witches to replace her- In fact, this Kazumi is the thirteenth one.
Derived from the line in Episode 9 where Kyubey says "Someday, you humans will join us" or something along those lines.
- Oh god, the Incubators are Toclafane!
- There's also the fact that Sayaka seems to temporarily turn into Oktavia when she seemingly kills the two mysogynistic assholes on the train (or at least seems to bleed into the Mind Screw of some of a Witch's power), yet later she is sitting on the bench at the train station when Kyouko finds her, utterly despondent but not yet Oktavia.
- From a different troper: Details for how may be specific to each girl's circumstances and likely requires a very close relationship between the girl and anyone that may be critical in "bringing her back from the brink" - not necessarily Pseudo-Romantic Friendship levels, but at least someone whom the Witch would be able to let down her defenses and accept that "this person in front of me is not a threat and wants to help." However, given that: 1) Witches are running chiefly on emotion and are usually not being rational (and Sayaka is moreover rather headstrong), 2) the one who would be most able to reach out is often the same one who is at the root of the conflict (and therefore would elicit hostile reactions - Hitomi would pretty much have to be willing to face death), and 3) the difficulty in finding someone to be the one to reach out (other magical girls are often suspicious and not prone to cooperation on such a deep level, non-magical girls may be skeptical and will be very vulnerable), any such endeavour probably won't have odds better than the lottery. And even if Kyubey were to ever somehow calculate that successfully bringing this particular Witch back would be beneficial entropy-wise in the long run, the amount of time and effort needed to find someone that might be able to pull it off (and therefore not spent on making contracts/cultivating Witches/harvesting energy)note plus the risk of losing so many potential Witches via dead magical girls (including any potential future ones, e.g. Hitomi) would most likely be too much to bet on the line. TL;DR - It might be possible, but the odds of pulling it off are so remote even in the best case scenario it's not worthwhile for Kyubey to find out.
- With Rebellion, may we call this one confirmed to some extent vis a vis Homulily? Or do the circumstances of the ending ruin that?
- Oh, and her power is punching people in the stomach.
- Now, first off, in the episode where Homura is discussing Walpurgis with Kyoko, Kyoko doesn't seem to know when, where, or even if Walpurgis will appear in the city. This leads to...
- Point 2. We don't ever hear anything about any city-leveling earthquakes (ahem) happening progressively closer to Mitakihara, which makes me think that...
- Walpurgis will just appear out of nowhere over the city. And the two powers that I know that allow for that are teleportation and time-travel.
- If it is time-travel, this would make the Homura is Walpurgis WMG even more likely.
As a corollary, this is the reason why Kyuubey devours "used up" Grief Seeds. If a roving witch stumbles across a nearly-revived Grief Seed, it could easily get a new ally. Two (or more) witches working together might be enough to quickly defeat a magical girl, and Kyuubey has some interest in keeping magical girls alive so they can become witches themselves. And if the "Walpurgis Night is a Fusion Dance of witches" theory is true, then you probably want to keep the witches seperated. Unlesss you're trying to use Walpurgis to get someone to contract...
If this theory is true, there's a bit of Fridge Horror: Who here thinks that Homura gives her Grief Seeds to Kyuubey? Anyone? It's highly doubtful she does so. Meaning she probably keeps a stockpile of Grief Seeds somewhere. They're probably kept in her Hammerspace shield, but it's also possible they can be removed somehow. And if she keeps her seeds somewhere else? We only need a witch to stumble across it, and then...Why hello, Charlotte!
- Implied by the witch card but not directly confirmed.
For maximum effect, there will probably be a Meaningful Echo. "Destroy, destroy, destroy it all!"
The use of energy – energy cannot be created or destroyed (first law of thermodynamics). It does however get turned into heat (second law of thermodynamics), so eventually all usable energy will become heat, and no energy input will result until some kind of energy output (from the heat) happens.
What Kyubey is doing is saving the universe from this, not loss of energy altogether. Thus with all the witchery and magic Kyubey is creating usable energy, i.e. adding to the total amount of energy to the universe. This leads to usable energy plus the energy converted to heat.
The result? Said created usable energy will also be converted to heat, as he gains more usable energy that will also eventually become heat. The mass accumulation of energy that eventually becomes heat gathers together and eventually there will be enough heat to burn up the universe and everything in it, or at least make it an unlivable place to be in.
Thus, Kyubey’s part of a mass effort to destroy the universe. Whether this is intentional or not...
- That's. . .what Kyubey was talking about when he was referring to the heat death of the univers- in episode 10 he actually refers to it by name, as entropy.
- Word of God has said that Kyousuke was a guitarist rather than a violinist in that timeline, so that would explain the guitar motif and make this theory unlikely.
- Alternatively, Walpurgis Night occurs naturally, but Kyuubey is going to use his stored Grief Seeds to increase this particular Walpurgis Night's power, in order to force Madoka into becoming an even stronger magical girl and subsequently release even more energy when she becomes a witch. Of course, this might backfire...
- So, it wasn't obvious from the start? Not to mention that Mami had, well, big milk producers.
- Bonus points if we're lead to believe this is the case only to have it averted at the last minute, or when she does wake up for real, that she lives in a "regular" world like ours (i.e. not quite as futuristic).
- Double bonus troll points if she wakes up, realizes everything was a fabrication and Madoka (Magica) wasn't real, and then hangs herself.
- Then there was the Gainax Ending in Episode 12, in which Madoka recreates the universe several times so this wish is entirely possible to happen.
- Jossed for this timeline, unsure about the previous.
Perhaps, related to the "Madoka will become a True Magical Girl" theory, "Puella Magi", or "girl of the mage", is Madoka's True Magical Girl name. (Just one suggestion.) This will have the side effect of forcing all of the wiki writers and fansubbers to change all of the instances.
Keeping in mind Episode 12, it may be the name of Madoka's Goddess Form.
- Hell, depending on how narrow the wish was interpreted, he may simply move on to Puer Magi.
- Keep in mind that her wish was retroactive. If that was the case, the Incubators would have to move pretty slowly not to have figured it out within the last 5000 or so years.
- He gets it from Demons now. Anyone can become a Demon Slave (Word of God says they suck humans in and enslave them) (called "Witches" in Puella Magi Kazumi Magica) when they get too much Despair; except for Magical Girls; who die when they reach the Despair Threshold.
- Until there's a girl who wishes that they could erase demons before they became such. Then, there'll be Madoka to erase the witches, the other girl to erase the demons. And Kyubey will have to, somehow, work his way around it.
- Keep in mind though that Demon Slaves can return to their human forms, unlike witches (e.g. Kazumi chapter 2). So the universe is definitely a lot better.
- Kazumi Magica is actually very likely to take place before or during the anime, where are you getting this stuff from?
- He gets it from Demons now. Anyone can become a Demon Slave (Word of God says they suck humans in and enslave them) (called "Witches" in Puella Magi Kazumi Magica) when they get too much Despair; except for Magical Girls; who die when they reach the Despair Threshold.
- Found support for this (obviously has spoilers): This cut of the ending◊ has a relation to Hecate, who is a witch, and The Hydra, which has multiple heads, both Greek mythology. Combine the two together, and you have the picture of heavy Symbolism.
- Perhaps, at the end of the universe, someone wished for a way to reverse entropy, kicking off the biggest Vicious Cycle of all time.
- "Even worse than they are"? Not particularly difficult. What if the Incubators' power had originally been in the hands of humans?
Madoka wanted to be one of those fulfilling heroine-magical-girls, so she drew herself that way in her notebook and thus came out looking exactly like that. Homura wanted to be the bold, brave protector, and thus her outfit has many straight lines and sharp angles, giving a sense of don't-mess-with-me. Kyouko wanted people to listen to her father, and her outfit gives the feel of an aristocratic messenger. Mami's can't be defined since nobody knows what her desires besides
- Madoka had a dream of Timeline 4. There's nothing to say that she couldn't have somehow remembered her magical girl outfit subconsciously too.
- Urobuchi said a potential Season 2 would probably be just a Slice of Life story without any real plot, but then again he's also a lying liar who lies.
- Actually it was Shinbo who said that. Still, a Madoka-less Madoka Magica seems likely, unless the scene with all the magical girls was Foreshadowing.
- Although, by that time, we would be following the real driver of the storyline.
- Actually it was Shinbo who said that. Still, a Madoka-less Madoka Magica seems likely, unless the scene with all the magical girls was Foreshadowing.
2) Homura is inside a demon's barrier and Madoka still has a connection to her.
- This scene is depicted as taking place in a Black★Rock Shooter/Tartarus-like dungeon with checkerboard floors in the manga.
3) Mami and Kyouko may or may not be dead.
4) Some mixture thereof of the facts of the last three points.
But instead of becoming a witch, she'll manifest it as a Guardian Entity. Oh yeah, we're getting Stands.
- This also relates to the above WMG (Gainax Ending Sequel Hook). See that for more information.
- It is true that she planned for her diary to be published in the hopes she could become famous. (She also had dreams to go to Hollywood, I think, though I think it's unrelated.) Perhaps her fighting witches was what caused her to get caught...
- The world war 2 must have an end, so it's natural planning to have the diary published if she or her family have any chance of surviving it.
- I actually thought Homura's black wings in the end were actually "Madoka." Since Madoka is formless now, and only a concept in theory, so they depicted her as a pair of wings surrounding Homura, protecting and embracing her, as if saying that she has her back and is supporting her. This also explains the "ganbatte" Homura hears from Madoka. The ending scene shows their reunion which Madoka promised and reinforces the scene of English text shown right after the ending song: That as long as you remember her, you are never alone. And I don't think the wings look evil. It's black with sparkles (kind of like pictures of space and galaxies), like their bodies when Madoka and Homura hugged and parted in space. It has flowers, like the rose on Madoka's bow, and if you look closely, there are depictions of wheels (both spinning wheels and tire wheels), which are symbolic of time (i.e. Madoka is time itself, existing at all points in time).
It seems like a depressing enough scenario to be possible, and in a show like this it seems unlikely that it would mention Jeanne d'Arc and not Gilles de Rais.
- Also, Madoka's Wish gave her power to "erase every witch." In addition, by erasing her physical existence from the equation, this also had to balance out on the other end as well; making Walpurgis vulnerable.
- Given how long-term the heat death of the Universe would be (context, in about 100 Trillion years, star formation will end), if QB's race thinks long-term at all; they should know this. You do not slaughter the entire herd of cattle without leaving breeding stock.
- Addendum: QB did know this, and encouraged Madoka and Homura to make the decisions they did in order to create a renewable system.
- ...Are you saying he planned it all? Damn...
- Addendum: QB did know this, and encouraged Madoka and Homura to make the decisions they did in order to create a renewable system.
- How does he keep track of the timelines? He reads Homura's mind and realizes the changes each time.
- His wide eyes at Madoka's Wish isn't an Oh, Crap! moment. He's excited he's getting his goal achieved.
- His "lol witches would be awesome" in the new timeline are to let Homura continue to think he's a defanged monster; instead of someone who got what he wanted; thus he can farm despair from the demons through her.
- Just as planned...
- His wide eyes at Madoka's Wish isn't an Oh, Crap! moment. He's excited he's getting his goal achieved.
- Except we see Goddess Madoka purifying the Magical Girls who are about to witchify, and she's smiling. This would require Kyubey being able to manipulate her wish into even fooling her, and nothing implies that level of control over the wishes.
- Oh, that bit's fine. The issue is what happens after Homura/Madoka's conversation. Besides, we know that witches can do some pretty screwed up things while thinking they're helping people. Remember Kriemhild Gretchen?
- Jossed: Rebellion heavily implies that while the witches did exist outside the universe, they all collectively had a Heel–Face Turn offscreen, due to them entrusting Sayaka and Nagisa with an army of familiars that they use to fight Homulilly during The War Sequence, and if the ending is anything to go by, Kyubey definitely didn't win.
- It's an endless cycle. The world prior to Madoka's reboot was actually created by another Puella Magi who made a similar wish to change an even worse universe into a slightly better one. Ditto for the one before it as well. This is actually a part of the Incubator's race plan: since they can only temporarely stop the heat death using powers they don't even completely understand, they are harvesting Puella Magi until one of them get's strong enough under the current system and decides to change it, in the hopes that under the newer system, one new Puella Magi might be able to just pull off a "Stop the Heat Death" wish and write a "perfect" universe. However, even they do not know about this plan, either because it's been lost in the many reboots, because it's the master plan of someone higher up, or simply because they don't know it... but hey, unexpected side effect.
- All the non-grimdark Magical Girl universes come from this, actually.
- So in the future some other magical girl will become a Groundhog Peggy Sue in order to stop her friend from dying or vanishing. This will cause her friend to become as powerful as Madoka was, and her eventual reality-altering wish will be to create a way for vanished magical girls to come back. Presto-chango: We have a Belated Happy Ending as Madoka and Sayaka come back in the rewritten world.
- Director Shinbo stated that he believed this in an interview.
- Cancer. It's semi-confirmed by the medicine bottles and the "Operating" sign in the dreamworld.
- Nope. Homura's heart condition stops affecting her as soon as she becomes a magical girl because it doesn't need to beat anymore. She starts out weak and anemic because of atrophy, not a heart condition. The healing doesn't restore a person to their natural state as much as it restores their bodies to complete, whole wellness.
Tl; dr: Walpurgisnight is a recurring event, and therefore more of a force of nature than a simple Witch. If all Walpurgisnachts are the Witch form of the same Puella Magi, it could be that Walpurgisnacht cannot be defeated, and simply comes out periodically to "feed". It is the fate of all Puellae Magi who die, no matter how, between two Walpurgisnights to become part of Walpurgisacht, while their souls go to Puella Magi Purgatory. Only if/when Walpurgisnacht is defeated note , would the souls of the Puella Magi be free to travel on to whatever afterlife existed before Madoka reset the universe.
- Either that, or Kyubey wrote the letters knowing Hitomi would fall in love with Sayaka's love interest, which would lead to Sayaka's becoming a witch and killing Kyoko after he doesn't return the feelings?
- This troper thinks that Kyuubey could never come up with that kind of scheme. It would require a perfect knowledge of how human feelings affect our actions, and Kyuubey's race is baffled by the concept.
- Perhaps she knew about the circumstances when it got too full of despair and hoped it would taken elsewhere for the sake of her family? But if she had the power, why didn't she just break out?
- And abandon her family?
- Alternately, what made her turn into a witch were the deaths of her mother and sister at the camp. This idea came from the fanfic A History of Magic, where it nearly happened, but Madoka intervened.
- Perhaps this is also related to being killed by the dessert witch?
- Perhaps they're all virtually Christians?
- The Mitakihara Junior High uniform looks very much like a Catholic School uniform, and Homura mentions having gone to a Catholic school in episode one. It's very possible that Christianity spread through Japan much more thoroughly in the world of PMMM than in our world, perhaps through some wish. (Maybe even Kyoko's...)
- Mitakihara's chief religion is Kyoko's father's cult.
- Likewise this could apply to Homura. Homura said she attended a Christian School in Tokyo before coming to Mitakihara.
- It also applies for Goddess Madoka's theme, "Sagitta Luminis", where the lyrics of the prayer "Agnus Dei" fits in easily. This of course, emphasizes Madoka's purpose and universal mercy. "Lamb of God, who takes away the sins fo the world, have mercy on Us. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, Grant us peace".
- Word of God said she didn't kill anyone in the anime.
- Roberta lives inside a birdcage. What do the classrooms in the girls' school look like? The birdcage can also symbolize the loneliness Kazuko experiences due to her constant rejections.
- Pretty much every time Kazuko is shown in the classroom, she is almost comically furious at dates of hers who treat her in ways she feels are derogatory. Now look at this part of Roberta's description: She continuously stamps her feet inside her cage, directing her rage at those who do not respond to her.
- Roberta is also associated with alcohol. In Episode 11, we see Kazuko and Madoka's mother in a bar together. The familiar manner they have and the sensitive topics they discuss clearly show them to be good friends, and since Madoka's mom almost always has some sort of liquor with her, it's not improbable to assume the two of them are or have been drinking buddies. In addition, alcohol is typically something adults consume on dates - dates like the ones that cause Kazuko so much stress.
- Roberta's familiar, Gotz, is described as such: These birds that swarm together are idiotic men. Even though they are total good-for-nothings, they try to attract her attention by swarming around her feet and attempting to woo her. They are nothing more than an object of disgust to the witch. If a witch tries using her barrier to live out her fantasies; as seen by Octavia's concert hall, Gertrud's garden, and Charlotte's world of sweets; it fits that the emotional, easily angered Kazuko would get a kick out of reducing the men who rejected her to meaningless idiots who clamor for her affection. She is disgusted by them for disrespecting her.
- Finally, we have a production note describing Roberta: A witch who lived for a long time as a magical girl. She is weak, as she was no longer a girl when she became a witch (mid-20s to 30s?). The form she takes in her barrier is how she would've turned out in the future (around 40s). What she desires is life. Enjoys alcohol and books. Kazuko is no girl, she likes liquor, as a teacher she is obviously going to like books, and all she wants is a life with a man who can appreciate her.
- The biggest problem with this theory is that Kazuko is probably not a magical girl in the "current" timeline, which can possibly be handwaved by Homura's game with the Timey-Wimey Ball.
- In an actual WMG, while Komachi and Claire may in fact be Elly/Kirsten and Elsa Maria, Elise might not have anything to do with Walpurgisnacht despite having physical similarities (and I can't think of who Hiyori could be at all).
- On the other hand, Hammerspace can come with the Time Master package. TARDIS anyone?
- Madoka's magical potential was so great that it qualified her to see Walpurgis even before she used it.
- Kyuubey allowed her to see Walpurgis, possibly to encourage her to become a Magical Girl.
- She couldn't actually see Walpurgis, but she had been told about it, and when she saw Homura getting smacked around and buildings thrown at her, she knew what was responsible.
- Actually, we know the reason, and it's none of the above; Kyubey allows girls he intends to contract see himself and Witches, just like he helps transmit their telepathic messages.
- Despite Homura's resetting the timelines fragments of the previous timelines remain locked in Madoka's subconscious hence her de ja vu in episode 8.
- Madoka became more powerful with each iteration of the time loop because she was the sole cause of Homura reversing time. However, whenever Madoka died or became a witch, it was usually because of Walpurgis, making it the indirect cause of Homura reversing time. Thus, Walpurgis also became more powerful each time, going from two ordinary Magical Girls being able to defeat it to an extremely experienced Magical Girl with tons of firepower giving it her all being unable to scratch it. The hyper-charged Madoka was the only one who could have possibly stopped it.
- Walpurgis Night is immune to all non-magical damage, and none of Homura's weapons are magical. She was only ever able to defeat it with Madoka's help.
- Walpurgis Night is a Puzzle Boss that can't die until it has been damaged by at least two Magical Girls — Mami and Madoka in the original timeline, and Homura and Madoka in most of the others.
- In the Final Fantasy series, there's a type of recurring monster called a Tonberry, which usually has a special attack that does damage based on the number of monsters the target has killed. Walpurgis might have a similar ability: rather than dealing more damage based on the number of witches her opponent has killed, though, I think it might be that her strength is tied to the number of Magical Girls/witches her opponent has seen die in their life, rather than the number they've directly killed. Going by the five timelines we've actually seen:
- Timeline 1: Mami dies against Walpurgis, and Madoka wins with a suicide attack. Since this is before Homura started those time loops, Madoka would only be as strong as a normal Magical Girl, so why would she, who's only been at it for less than a month, be able to succeed even at the cost of her life where Mami, a powerful veteran with years of experience, could not? The answer: Mami's seen a lot more witches die, of course.
- Timeline 2: Madoka would have seen the same number of witches/MGs die as the previous timeline, but she's able to survive here because Homura is with her, along with the magical power boost from the first timeline. Homura gets through this battle more or less fine.
- Timeline 3: Madoka would have seen the same number of witches/MGs die, again, with a couple of additions because of the Sayaka/Kyouko bit. Homura now has a few timelines of deaths under her belt. Even with Madoka's time loop power boost, both girls are completely drained in the aftermath of the battle and can't even sit up.
- Timeline 4: Homura's seen even more deaths by this point, especially if she really did take out every single with in this timeline by herself. Despite several timelines' worth of experience, though, she doesn't manage to inflict much damage and gets taken out of the fight fairly easily. Madoka proceeds to win in one attack (while this could simply be a result of her insane power from all the connected timelines, it's also possible that this was helped by the fact that the Madoka of this timeline was unaware of Magical Girls and witches until right then, and so Walpurgis had little power against her and little defense against her already overwhelming attack). Afterwards, Homura is still able to get up and walk away, though.
- Current timeline: As always, Homura's seen even more death. This time, we can see quite clearly that Walpurgis is almost completely unfazed by Homura's attacks, and Homura herself ends up beaten, bloody, and with her leg pinned under rubble, giving in to despair without having landed a single effective blow.
- It's not a perfect fit, I know, since Madoka's successes can easily be attributed to Homura's timehax unwittingly supercharging her magical potential, but it does offer an explanation of why even an experienced Magical Girl like Mami wasn't able to do much, and also why Homura seems to be doing worse in every timeline, even though she should be getting stronger every time.
- Metaphorically True. When you take too much drugs, you become dependent on it, and when you decide to suddenly abstain from it, you suffer decay and loss of energy. Entropy.
- Unfortunately for him Madokami, who was supposed to be today's special, screwed his dining system, forcing him to eat either horrible-tasting alternative energy resources or slightly less horrible-tasting demons for the rest of eternity.
- Alternatively, the Madokamistic system is less potent, but with less devastating withdrawal symptoms. Perhaps similar to your daily cup of coffee or nicotine gum replacing cocaine and tobacco.
- Jossed: Charlotte doesn't have any time powers whatsoever, meaning that she couldn't have appeared before Kyouko, and Charlotte has also already been confirmed to be Nagisa.
- Alternate theory, ganked from A History of Magic: They're Kremhild Gretchen's familiars.
Homura's time travel powers aren't Mental Time Travel - she just sends her soul gem back. Since her soul gem is her true self and contains her consciousness and powers, it's essentially the same as Mental Time Travel while keeping her contract valid. She travels back to the 16th on the day she's going to be discharged from the hospital, ending up in the hands of her former body.
Normally, this body is just hardware, but there's already a consciousness in that body... no matter, though, because Homura's stronger than her former self and can just hijack the body. In theory, her soul gem being over 100 metres from her body wouldn't result in death-like symptoms, as her old self would regain control.
Possibly not valid in the Godoka timeline because of her new powers, though.
- http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Speculah:Pillar_System_Theory
- Once upon a time no longer, the "Real World" collapsed. The result was a void in which even "time" and "space" couldn't exist as concepts, and the only existences that persisted were souls. Some souls were stronger than others; their dreams and desires imposed themselves on the nonsubstance of the void, and became bubbles of newborn "reality." These bubbles were called Labyrinths, and their creators were called Witches.
- If sufficient despair/entropy is absorbed and put back into a localized singularity (you know, like black holes) it could theoretically create a Big Bang, hence Madoka's potential enhanced by Homuhomu piling up multiple fate lines (and thus desperation) unto her.
The Incubators evolved into an emotionless Hive Mind Singularity in an attempt to preserve the remains of their civilization from such a completely insane affront to all sense of reality, while enhancing their collective intelligence enough to know just a subatomically minuscule fragment of its composition, only for them to discover that every single scientifically-based methodology in the universe is woefully insufficient to stop it.... except for a certain form of phlebotinum on which they themselves can't even comprehend why harnessing this process into an Industrialized Evil works anyway out of all possible things. The necessity for tormented girls' souls to be sacrificed to it in order to stave it off? Same thing as to why the Dark Eldar sacrifice tortured souls to Chaos (another name for Entropy) so that it does not eat them alive instead.
Fits in with how a Cosmic Horror Story will always have its hierarchy of abominations to be Always Bigger And More Inconceivably Insane Fishes.
- It gets worse. Think that because Madokami-sama sacrificed herself we are finally saved from such unholy terror? Yes, Entropy seems to have slowed down its role in Reality for a bit while relatively less-entropic Daemons seem to have compensated for its role on the world.... because Madokami's divine immortal potential has provided for it an all-you-can-eat buffet of energy, and in exchange for our Salvation it is Her that is being eaten alive slowly and painfully instead, at every point in space and time, with no way to undo or escape, as long as the mere concept of Existence itself continues to exist, forever and ever.
- And that eldritch horror is, of all things, You.....
- The Eldritch Horror is Gen Urobuchi's Tragedy Syndrome, described in Quotes. A sacrifice of Madokami is needed to satiate the syndrome's hunger.
- (From the messageboards) Amelia Earhart manifested herself as the Bermuda Triangle (or one of several other "vortex zones" throughout the world). The crew of the MV Joyita may have fallen into one of them (especially since Amelia disappeared in the Pacific, not the Atlantic). In keeping with Gratuitous German Theme Naming of the Witches, let's call her form "Ehrhardt".
- Marilyn Monroe committed suicide after she vainly tried to seduce John F. Kennedy. About a year after her death, she formed a barrier around Dealey Plaza in Dallas which not only murdered Kennedy but also generated images of multiple suspects (Oswald, the guys behind the grassy knoll, the tramps, etc.), hence the lingering mystery.
- She was also probably behind the "Kennedy Curse" (Robert Kennedy's assassin Sirhan Sirhan claimed he was in a sort of "trancelike state" when he shot Bobby.)
- Roberta may be her Witch form.
- Janis Joplin murdered Jimi Hendrix (who was 27 at the time) in a fit of despair in her last month of life, much like Sayaka possibly murdered those two misogynists on the train. After becoming a Witch herself (at age 27), she began the 27-year curse which of course later took Jim Morrison (who was a possible one-night stand lover of hers) and later Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
- One of Osama bin Laden's wives. She was already "weakened" and developed a dislike for the West as a child in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and wished for the Soviets to be removed from her country. Osama "picked her up" if you will while a mujahideen "freedom fighter". His horrific abuse of her (remember, this guy used some of his wives as Human Shields) coupled with fundamentalist zealotry pushed her over the edge sometime before 2001. As a Witch she eventually kissed him...I think you can tell where this is going.
- With Haiti's Woobielicious history of slavery, dictatorial rule, genocide and horrific poverty, it proved a very fertile target for the Incubators. Add Hollywood Voodoo to that and, many years later, you get the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which may have been brought on by Walpurgisnacht herself like Japan's quake a year later. Hurricane Katrina may have had similar origins, as Louisiana has a somewhat similar history (and many slaves from there and Haiti were probably bounced between the two while both were still French colonies).
- You know who else died on Walpurgis Night?
- No wonder Walpurgis Night was so powerful: she was born from a massive reservoir of complete misery and hell.
- You know who else was the centre of repeated time travel and failed murder attempts?
- Theory: Walpurgis Nacht got supercharged to insane levels when the World Wars came to sacrifice people by the hundred millions to create a massive reservoir of miserable souls in just a short amount of time, which unlike other apocalypses like the Black Death was entirely caused by the energy of human rage (perhaps with a heaping help from possible Nazi Alchemy experiments, and of course how the opportunistic Incubators took this as a time to contract war victims such as Anne Frank, most of whom are so desperate they couldn't think of simply ending the war and made selfish wishes, or they can't stop it because the World Wars is so full of misery only a Madoka-scale wish can undo it). On April 30, aka Walpurgis Night and the day Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Walpurgisnacht reached critical mass when it assimilated the soul of Hitler who contained extreme amounts of rage that rivals the energy of a Magical Girl (for the Despair Event Horizon part, just see Der Untergang), enabling it to transform into something capable of singlehandedly bringing the Apocalypse (well at least it slept until Madoka got the contract). Also, according to Word of God, Walpurgis wants to turn the world into a stage. Hitler had such a massive fond of Richard Wagner's epic operas that he probably imagined himself to be in it, seeing his Downfall as Götterdämmerung.
- Or Hitler was simply just a victim of a suicide-inducing kiss courtesy of Walpurgisnacht.
- From Poison Oak Epileptic Trees: Nazi Germany was all Germany's Witch form.
- Its loss in World War I, the crushing debts of the Versailles Treaty, and the resulting Humiliation Conga, followed by the Depression pushed the whole country beyond the Despair Event Horizon and turned it into a nihilistic, murderous monster knowing only destruction.
Considering the Gratuitous German Theme Naming of the Witches, the Faust allusions, the occult symbolism all around Nazi Germany, how it met its absolute despair and Downfall on April 30 (known in Nazi occultism as Walpurgisnacht), the Holocaust parallels, and the obvious fact that All Germans Are Nazis, and you know this one is true. - Germany's original wish was to achieve national unity after centuries of existence as a collection of weak, squabbling kingdoms and principalities which often served as Western Europe's playthings, which it obviously got under Otto von Bismarck. Unfortunately, Bismarck's militaristic "blood and iron" policy and Imperial Germany's territorial wars through the late 19th century only gave them the stereotype of a might-makes-right quasi-barbarian state, hence all the dehumanizing baby-eating propaganda of them as shown on the Unfortunate Implications main page. Thus Germany's Witch form came to embody just this.
- Its loss in World War I, the crushing debts of the Versailles Treaty, and the resulting Humiliation Conga, followed by the Depression pushed the whole country beyond the Despair Event Horizon and turned it into a nihilistic, murderous monster knowing only destruction.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act is the same mechanism on why people who tried to stop both Walpurgis Night and/or Nazis through Time Travel (such as Homura) only end up failing and making things go From Bad to Worse.
- Adolf Hitler was in fact a Puella Magi. All he wished for was the unification and prosperity of Germany, for Germany to become the supreme leader of Europe... but that drove him into insanity and create the most genocidal empire of all time. This was especially painful with how Hitler's actions drove to despair a fellow Puella, Anne Frank. When he committed suicide on April 30, Walpurgis Night, all the suffering, hatred, despair and misery of World War II and The Holocaust accumulated inside him and twisted to become his own Wagnerian theatrical world, the most powerful Witch of all: Walpurgisnacht. Still, Hitler's wish did come true: nowadays Germany is one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, and the leader of the European Union.
- Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher both saw some witches and their barriers early in their lives and were inflicted with both inspiration and insanity, leading to their fame as eccentric artists. Tell me that their art don't look like it came from Witches' barriers.
- Witches also influenced most of 20th century art and literature, from the weird styles of the Dada to the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft to the general weirdness of modern physics in general (General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics might be borrowed from Incubator science, and Incubator meddling did encourage human advancement)
- Speaking of Lovecraft, the Salem Witch Trials of course created Witches rather than destroyed them. H.P. encountered some of them, and the Cthulhu Mythos and all the rest were the result. He may even have encountered an Incubator or just witnessed it being behind all the Eldritch Horrors, hence Nyarlathotep. (Fictional Arkham, Massachusetts is after all not far from real-life Salem.)
- Speaking of Witch Trials, the Inquisition's Witch hunt (along with the crapsack Grimdark environment of the Middle Ages in general) contributed to a massive rise in Witches, which increased in further superstitious paranoia (yup, they inspired the extremely morbid images of Hell such as those presented by Dante Alighieri) and/or may have probably contributed to such things like the Black Death (perhaps caused by an equivalent of Walpurgisnacht) and the Renaissance (well Incubator meddling contributes to human advancement). Perhaps this is related to how Joan of Arc is a Magical Girl.
- The cursed Indian Burial Ground in Pet Sematary is the barrier of a Witch who was an Native American woman. She contracted with an Incubator after her child died of smallpox introduced by the arriving colonists, and wished for her child to return from the dead. The resulting zombies are her familiars, and the Wendigo that Louis Creed sees in the woods is her Witch form.
- It should be noted that Gen Urobuchi has cited Stephen King as one of his main influences.
- Room 1408 of New York's Dolphin Hotel was formed when a poor Irish immigrant wished her children could rise above her impoverished situation. One of her sons did...by starting a real estate development agency that eventually bought out her property to build the hotel. And now of course one of the rooms on the 13th floor (labeled as the 14th) is her barrier, and guests have a tendency to "check out" without ever leaving.
- The historical figure known as Jesus Christ was in fact a Puella Magi.
- Jesus' original wish was to save the Israelites from the oppression of the Roman Empire, and convert the Romans to the light of the Israelite God. Unfortunately, he was betrayed by his own people, and handed over to the Romans to be crucified. On the Cross he cried out how God had forsaken him, and fell into despair, manifesting his Witch form as the menace of humanity: Satan. Still, his wish did come true: the Israelite religion soon came to dominate the Roman Empire, and this is what we now know as Christianity, the world's largest religion.
- Improbable, for the simple reason that the Romans weren't oppressing the Jews, not during Jesus' lifetime: Mark Anthony had demanded excessive taxes from the Judaean protectorate but that ended after Augustus defeated him, and while the Romans started taxing directly once Judaea became a province they were careful to not cause oppression and get the province in full rebellion, even removing Pilate for being too heavy handed in suppressing a Samaritan revolt (Roman attitude was usually "So what?"). While the tax collectors often demanded more money than they were supposed to (hence the Bible repeatedly referring to them as the lowest of the low), during Jesus' lifetime independentists were seen as misguided at best, with breaks between Jews and Romans only starting when Caligula tried to have his statue placed in the Temple (something the Roman legate opposed fearing a revolt), and Roman oppression started only when Nero installed the oppressive Gessius Florus as procurator of Judaea and refused to remove him (directly leading to the First Jewish–Roman War).
- Israel gaining independence had always been a theme in the Bible, the Roman Empire was just one of the latest to subjugate it. The Book of Revelation was anti-Roman propaganda work that compared Rome (the seven-headed beast) with Babylon, and even the number "666" for the Antichrist was after the gematria interpretation of the name Nero Caesar. One of the reasons why Jesus appealed to believers before is that he, as the promised Messiah, was to lead Israel to independence, that the Jewish faith shall dominate the world, not just for Jews but for Gentiles as well. But turned out He was too much of a pacifist, while the Pharisees were in league with the Roman government. Thus he was betrayed, crucified, and ultimately witched out. Still, like Jesus wished, Judaism did dominate the world... it's called Christianity.
- Jesus' original wish was to save the Israelites from the oppression of the Roman Empire, and convert the Romans to the light of the Israelite God. Unfortunately, he was betrayed by his own people, and handed over to the Romans to be crucified. On the Cross he cried out how God had forsaken him, and fell into despair, manifesting his Witch form as the menace of humanity: Satan. Still, his wish did come true: the Israelite religion soon came to dominate the Roman Empire, and this is what we now know as Christianity, the world's largest religion.
The idea of extending the lifespan of the universe sounds good. But if the universe itself has a natural life cycle (like a gigantic cell), then what the incubators were doing was staving off apoptosis by artificially inducing telomeres to keep the universe itself long lived. Unfortunately, the Incubators failed to realize (or just didn't care about) was the fact that this would also turn it into a cosmic cancer, which could metastasize and infect other universes. What happened was that other universes made subtle changes so that the corruption would stay contained away from their universe, but didn't expect Madoka to turn it into a symbiotic system.
He is the witch of creation with a calculating nature. It is his job to maintain the existence of witches by forming contracts with mortal girls to turn them into magical girls, the child form of witches. As essentially the queen ant of all witchdom, he takes this responsibility very seriously, and comes up with any number of plans to ensure witches will always populate the world. This means he's either a Mother of a Thousand Young or a Monster Progenitor; personally, I'm leaning towards the latter.
Kyubey is likely the absolutely most powerful witch ever even compared to Gretchen; like Walpurgisnacht, he doesn't have a barrier, but unlike her, he's so strong he doesn't have to impose barrier-like qualities on the world around him in order to maintain his existence (except maybe enough for him to teleport around like he did in episode 9). That's not to say he doesn't have a barrier; he has one, but he is in full control of how, when, and for how long it manifests. What we see in episode 11 is in fact Kyubey temporarily forming his barrier around Madoka. Hell, he may even have been powerful enough to shield himself from Madoka's Cosmic Retcon, allowing him to continue existing while every other witch got picked up.
It's quite likely he was even the very first witch on Earth. The ability to be Invisible to Normals is shared by all witches and familiars as well as Kyubey; theoretically, if a witch wanted to appear before humans, she damn well could, it's just more convenient not to so they can kiss them. Kyubey, however, is such a powerful and old witch, as well as the "mother" of them all in some form or another, that he can not only make himself visible to any mortal of his choice, but force all other witches to appear to those people as well whether they like it or not. Like other WMGs above, his "eating" Grief Seeds is actually a form of storage for them to be transported elsewhere and start anew.
As to the Starfish Alien and entropy story, he's either making it up as part of his plans for more witches or he actually believes that's the truth for some reason. Maybe it has something to do with his wish...?
Madoka didn't specifically wish to be able to travel through time, and we know Kyubey is pretty insistent on reading the fine print. So the only way she could remove MGs' growing despair was to remove their AT Fields. Of course, that also necessitated removing everyone else's (including her own), so all of humanity got [[stroke:Tanged]] Morning Rescued. And of course it was just so much easier to suck energy out of a sea of orange soup than out of sentient beings.
So Congratulations, Madoka! Now if you would be so kind, please join Unit 01 forever drifting through space rather than leaving an eight-mile-tall rotting corpse for Shinji and Asuka to clean up.
- Remember that Madoka is practically the Spiritual Successor to Evangelion. Knowing Urobutcher's penchant for From Bad to Worse, this will probably be the ending of the upcoming movies. Anyone got a shotgun?
- She knew Homura would be behind on school work but wouldn't know how much, and so decided to make her feel even more out of place by giving her college-level math problems. Little did she know that after traveling through so many loops, Homura knows how to do the math (or at the very least, memorized the answers). Kazuko's tendency to do this might be one reason why she keeps getting fired from her teaching jobs.
- We know from Sayaka's contracting scene that one does not need to verbalize one's wish. While Madoka was making her huge Earth-Shattering Kaboom wish, she thought back to Mami's sacrifice and wished she could see her one last time. She thought of Kyoko's insistence that Madoka didn't need to become a magical girl and wished for her forgiveness. She thought of the life she was giving up and wanted to have something to remember it by. And she still really wanted that cake. All of these other wishes come true in the scene in Mami's apartment.
- By the same token, the Greedy could be another Witch, or perhaps an earlier form of Charlotte.
Considering that they have conquered personal death, I believe that the Incubators are concerned solely with their own survival and consider any atrocity justifiable in order to maintain it. This only makes them evil from the perspective of their victims... wouldn't we do the exact same thing in their position?
Perhaps when a magical girl is killed within a barrier, her soul is also kept and consumed into that witch or one of its familiars. Then, when the witch had gathered enough souls (or perhaps when the familiar killed enough people to become a full witch), a Walpurgisnacht forms.
- You could get more specific and say it's not just her "proximity" to Madoka, but the fact that she plays such an important role in Madoka being willing to make a contract. Madoka would calmly and willingly give her life for Sayaka's. Of course, it's a bit tautological to say "If Sayaka became a magical girl, Madoka would contract to save her, so Sayaka had the potential to be a magical girl." But causality and that mysterious "potential" have always been weird in this series. Maybe Sayaka would have gotten into danger as a human anyway, or it's more about her effect on Madoka's attitude and philosophy. Some dubiously canonical novels and such talk about Madoka feeling indebted to Sayaka and wanting to become the kind of person who could pay her back. Hitomi's important to Madoka, but probably not nearly as important to Sayaka. There are probably few situations in which Hitomi could influence Madoka's willingness to contract and what wish she would make, especially since it's possible Hitomi is the kind of person who would inevitably turn Kyubey down, no matter what. This got a bit rambly, so to summarize my addition to this WMG: Maybe Sayaka gained her potential not just by her proximity to Madoka, but by her influence over Madoka.
- Was Homura aware that her actions and timeloops were the cause of all the carnage? I'm pretty sure that it was that realization in the final loop which sent her close to the Despair Event Horizon. Before that, Homura probably wasn't trying to "screw the world" - not intentionally, anyway.
Madoka and Mami were capable of taking Walpurgis down by themselves in the first, unaltered timeline. Mami was a veteran, sure, but she and Madoka were both fairly average in terms of magical potential; there's no way the two of them could match the sheer destructive power that Homura dishes out when she takes Walpurgis on alone, and yet Walpurgis doesn't even flinch, and she tearfully begs to know why.
It's because Walpurgis is also at the center of Madoka's karmic destiny; Madoka's defeat in the battle against Walpurgis in the original timeline is what made Homura a magical girl in the first place. Every time Madoka becomes a witch and Homura negates the timeline, that curse energy feeds back into Walpurgis the same way that Madoka's magic potential feeds back into her in the next loop.
- Adolf Hitler probably is one of said Puer Magi, who lived through and created a major influence of mass despair and misery in history (enough to power another Alternate Universe) and "died" (I mean witched out) on the day of Walpurgisnacht (fitting because Hitler viewed his life as a bombastic Wagnerian theatre, and Walpurgisnacht represents reality turning into theatrics). This is the reason for Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act because Hitler/Walpurgisnacht will accumulate ever more power from Homura, The Doctor and other countless time travel assassins that plan to kill him.
- Or a pre-op FtM transexual could've met with an incubator. His contract wish was to get the right body.
Someone rewrote the universe like Madoka did once before. In that previous universe, the Incubators could only promise magical girls that the one they loved would love them back if they made the contract. But, instead of the magical girls becoming witches, whoever they named as their beloved would have to bear the curse generated by the wish and become a magical boy/monster (upholding the Beauty and the Beast story, rather than Sayaka's mermaid) that the magical girls would eventually have to kill (and probably be killed by) them.
One magical girl found out how the system worked, and rather than refuse to make a contract and let thousands of girls wish their crushes into the bodies of beasts, she simply named herself her own beloved and became the first Witch. The resulting energy disruption shattered the universe and forced it to reorder itself into the witch-system universe.
Eventually, there'll be a Magical Girl who finds out what Kyubey's race is doing, why, and how, before he approaches her for a contract. She'll come to the conclusion that the Incubators are using human girls to further an agenda that humanity will probably not survive long enough to see fulfilled, and when she decides to make a wish and join the fight against the wraiths, she'll wish for every planet in the universe to have its own magical girl, forcing the Incubators to share equally in the burden of battle; in the process, the Incubator Planet becomes Planet Mau, and Kyubey becomes Artemis.
The current model of the universe suggests that long-term trillion-year normal thermodynamic entropy is not what will ultimately do us in, but something else in a shorter amount of time. In real life, what is Dark Energy? The force which powers the exponential expansion of the very fabric of space itself. Gravity, Higgs Bosons and Dark Matter hold everything together, in direct competition with Dark Energy which is more abundant in the universe and has the characteristic of tearing everything apart (Metaphorically True that it's "acceleration of Entropy").
As space expands, the size that an organized structure can be, without being torn to selfsame strings, gets smaller. This effect can actually be seen in our universe already, in grand scale. After one gets past the supercluster level of galaxy "groupings" there is no further structure. (In the recent past/relatively close to us, the further out you look, the older the light traveling it is, the younger the universe was, the bigger structures could be.) Now, because of the universe expanding, gravity will slowly weaken as objects become too far apart to strongly interact.
Stars work by establishing an equilibrium between gravity and energy output. The heat of fusion keeps them from collapsing into black holes or neutron stars, the gravity keeps them from exploding outwards due to fusion pressure. Basically, a star is a giant explosion that's been running for billions of years. Produce more energy, and what happens? A red giant. Shut off the fusion (due to the creation of iron and heavy metals), and what happens? A supernova. Exploring this further, the amount of energy a star outputs is directly proportional to its size: big stars burn and are consumed by entropy faster. Also, stars with hot cores are big. Our sun, of medium size, will last another five billion years. Sirius, a hugely massive incredibly bright star will die in the next several million. Dark Energy will eventually shut off hydrogen fusion in massive stars, switching them to helium fusion early, making them premature, and consequently freakishly entropic red giants, eventually destroying them outright or creating premature Black Holes.
Eventually, far in the future, yet long before the heat death becomes a problem, Dark Energy will dissolve every form of matter and spread across the entire universe, never stopping, never faltering, never fading. People and dogs and planets and stars (Black Holes are not an exception due to Hawking Radiation) will become molecular dust. And that molecular dust will become atoms and the atoms will become nothing. Every electron, every proton, and antimatter, and hadron, and quark, and Higgs Boson, and all of every single subatomic particle, shall be reduced into a complete vacuum. And that Dark Energy will break through the rifts of space and time, and will continue to spread and permeate and strain throughout every single corner of the fabric of Creation, until every dimension, every parallel, the very Continuum of Space and Time Itself shall be torn apart.
Therefore, Dark Energy = CLASS Z DESTRUCTION. OF REALITY. ITSELF. And the real force behind Kyubey being Metaphorically True about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Puellae Magi never violated Equivalent Exchange. When Incubators talk about "harvesting energy", they refer to how they discovered that the Psychic Powers of a rare class of specialized modified humans can attract Dark Energy in the quantum level. What the Puella Magi experimental technology actually does, that which looks like Reality-warping Magic to us laypeople, is condensing, assimilating and manipulating Dark Energy for their own utility; it's Metaphorically True this process is "harvesting energy". The Puella Magi's "magical" ability to manipulate mass itself to perform physics defying stunts (such as Mami's Matter Replicator ability to create unlimited musket works) is technically fuelled and facilitated behind the scenes by Dark Energy (and hereby doesn't really violate Einstein's E=MC2 Equivalent Exchange), with the psionics of the Puella as the operating software for the whole control mechanism. Some specialist Puella Magi individuals, if they wish to, have a limited ability to consume a lot of Dark Energy to manipulate and fold Space-Time itself in a manner similar to how some theoretical warp drives can work ("Time Lord" Homura, who sacrificed Matter Replicator abilities in exchange to be a Time Master) and therefore carries an additional potential to modify and heal the spatial-temporal-dimensional damage caused by runaway Dark Energy.
This allows the Incubators, and any client civilizations affiliated with them, an indirect way to control this cancerous force for their own benefit instead of letting it accelerate entropy and kill the universe. The amount of Dark Energy the Puella absorbs is psionically represented by the level of Depression she possesses.Combining the Puella Magi's capabilities with "Lich" technology, by extracting and exposing to open space the Puella Magi's primary Psionic software (or "soul" in layman's terms), accelerates their absorption and control of Dark Energy from the environment and increases the efficiency of the process.
The Incubators are yet to provide a complete unified theory for the affinity between negative emotions, psychic abilities, Quantum Mechanics, Dark Energy etc., and why enslaving psychic females is the only thing that works most efficiently for the meantime while other more "logical" and "scientific" and "mechanical" methods such as Antimatter or FTL or Black Holes fail or add to the entropy; but hey, it works anyway for now, and for an Incubator, if the system ain't broke, don't fix it.
The symptoms of emo-behaviour, Clinical Depression, Mind Rape and/or Insanity are simply side-effects caused by all that alien Dark Energy screwing with your fragile human psychology. When a Puella Magi falls into insanity and overloads herself with too much Dark Energy radiation, the result is the exponentially accelerated mutation of the Conversion Factor, eventually giving birth to a Dark Matter-based mutant lifeform capable of using Dark Energy to warp Space itself and create its own dimensional barrier; the "Witch".
Witches' dimensional barriers, their own "space-time continuum" and "Big Bangs" so to speak, are a reverse counterpart of uncontrolled Dark Energy's random spacetime destruction. Witches are technically only limited by their own closed-minded thinking. As an additional bonus, the Incubators (and allied spacefaring civilizations) can "harvest" the Witches as batteries to manufacture Dark Matter and more of their sufficiently advanced technology (some of which has the side-effect of excreting some energy back to ambient dark energy and restarting the cycle of Equivalent Exchange. Now I can't get out of my head the idea of little girls being used in a plan to manufacture cheap unobtainium to power FTL and make nanomachines for Kyubey's bodies).
As a last resort just in case, they also deliberately planned the creation of the godlike Kriemhild Gretchen (now reformed and renamed as Madokami/Ultimate Madoka/Madoka Jesus), for she shall assimilate a lot of Dark Energy into her tormented soul as like the Forsaken child of Omelas, and also use it to create a new Heaven. This shall provide the Incubators (and surviving civilizations immune to its psychological effects) a new Big Bang for a more stable pocket universe to live in, even when that stability and protection from Dark Energy is by a metaphorically crucified Forsaken Child. (It's also the ultimate Eternal Poison Oak And I Must Scream Downer Ending for poor unfortunate Madoka.)
Metaphorically True that the enemy is "Entropy", the happiness of a few cute Puellae shall be the destruction. of reality. itself. The limiting factor is time itself, and though the Incubators torture Puellae by force-feeding them Dark Energy, they do it to save the entire fucking universe and many more important intergalactic civilizations from such a form of Omnicidal Force much more eldritch and alien than themselves. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Q.E.D.
- Or maybe I just ranted this or copied this from Mass Effect 3's original script about "Dark Energy" (which was now thrown out), while reducing the Puella Magi concept from A Wizard Did It to something like biotics, all to slightly redo Madoka Magica's fail attempt to switch from Faustian fantasy to Science Fiction (and because all the dark energy technobabble makes a better Willing Suspension of Disbelief rather than disputing thermodynamics in the face), and to return the fundamental theme of Equivalent Exchange back into the Madokaverse. Also, after all, in a meta sense Kyubey's "kick physics to the curb" fail goes contrary to the Equivalent Exchange, Omelas and Messianic themes of this anime (in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, a single forsaken child has to absorb the misery of the rest of Omelas' inhabitants, and of course you can expect that Jesus or Madoka and friends also act like said forsaken child but on a far cosmic scale).
You can then see why Time Travel is significant to the entire process of entropy-defiance working: it counters the Entropic Arrow of Time. For example, when run in reverse, broken glasses spontaneously reassemble, smoke goes down a chimney, wood "unburns", cooling the environment and ice "unmelts" warming the environment. No physical laws are broken in the reverse movie except the second law of thermodynamics, the law in which entropy is defined.
Now you know why Kyubey said "Your wish has surpassed entropy" to Homura after becoming a Time Lord. It was the key to solving the problem of the end of the universe once and for all. The Incubators are somehow incapable of Time Travel by themselves without wasting more additional energy to entropy, hence the necessity for wishes because it's the most energy-cheap one for now. All Puellae and Witches have the potential of reversing the Arrow of Time and using the disorder of the environment itself to fuel their powers, but for the root Entropy problem itself to be solved, somebody needs to make a Time Travel wish and specialize for it. The rest of the Puella Magi and the collection of Grief seeds? All merely parts of the plan for the Incubators to fuse together multiple witches and create an entity powerful enough to provoke somebody into making a Time Travel wish (Word of God confirmed Walpurgis as a Fusion Dance of Witches). The rest of the mages who died during Walpurgisnacht were too stupid to conceptualize a time travel wish, instead conceptualizing a wish they can enjoy in the present.
The Incubators also prey on girls plagued by too much regrets and guilt, gambling that maybe, just maybe, one of them will be making a Time Travel wish to reverse their regrets. This is why using Homura was instrumental; she is a Shrinking Violet who regrets everything, especially letting Madoka die during Walpurgisnacht. Homura also indirectly used her Endless Recursion of Time to accidentally force Madoka to accumulate a singularity of pure energy, e.g. a God, hereby repeatedly "reversing" the entropic arrow of time back to the Big Bang singularity. After Madokami's ascension, not everything went according to plan; but then again, Madokami makes her contribution in reversing entropy by time-traveling at every point in space and time as a companion/witch-annihilator/bearer of despair/god for every Magical Girl ever.
TL;DR: Only Time Travel can solve the death of the universe, and Kyubey promoting Homura from regretful Shrinking Violet to Badass Time Lord were all Just as Planned.
Eve's tribe passed the story down through generations as a warning against dealing with the Incubators, and the tale was eventually absorbed into the Abrahamic religions. But as time passed, the story was heavily altered, as details was lost in time through retelling upon retelling. Eventually the Incubator in the tale became Lucifer and the soul gem (and by extension the knowledge of magic) that Eve was offered became the Fruit of Knowledge. The part with Lilith became especially mucky, eventually falling completely out of the Christian canon, but survived, in some fashion, as Jewish folklore.
- This can also mean, we're all descended from a Magical Girl. But as hope and despair balance out to zero, and this inevitably transforms Magical Girls into Witches, so must humanity as a whole inherit the same curse: mental illnesses, wars, suffering and hatred. Of all Earth's species, Humans are the most intelligent, yet also the cruelest. This is the basis for Original Sin.
- This explains why in the manga, we see Kyoko and Sayaka happy in the afterlife; and as fallen shade familiars in the same timeline; Walpurgisnacht had absorbed them from a different timeline.
- Confirmed.
When multiple Grief Seeds are fused (either because a Magical Girl attempted to create a Grief Seed that will clean her Soul Gem forever, because a Puella Magi handles them carelessly, because a Witch stumble on them, or whatever the cause), an incredibly strong Witch is born. If not stopped in time, this Witch will become so powerful her mere appearance will cause immense devastation, and is thus named Walpurgisnacht after the first witch with this characteristic.
The Incubators usually stop them before they can become that powerful, and thus risk to become unstoppable and then destroy the world (thus stopping the production of much needed energy), but sometime they don't find out in time or allow this to happen for their own reasons (possibly because Magical Girls have been too efficient and there's not enough Witches around).
Sometimes, the means the Incubators use to stop a forming Walpurgisnacht are extreme. One of these was to cause cloudy weather over Kokura on August 9, 1945, thus causing the atomic bomber to be diverted over Nagasaki and destroy the city, and a Walpurgisnacht with it.
- Based on early production notes it sounds like Charlotte was a girl who wanted her favorite cheese cake. Meanwhile her mother, friend, or other significant other, was sick in the hospital, hence the medical theme in her labyrinth. Her "selfish" wish of getting a cake for her self over curing her mother's terrible disease drove her into despair.
- A resurrected Magical Girl can summon her witch via Summon Magic, as seen in Rebellion. In Homura's Univeral Barrier, the Law of Cycles isn't...gone, but it is different. Magical Girl's will have more access to their Witch selves. We'll see Candeloro and Ophelia.
- There will also be an All Your Powers Combined event that results in Walpurgis Night. The question is...whose side, and can they control THAT?
- From the original series and the first two movies, we know that Homura suffered through countless loops of the same month. It was a miracle she didn't give up to desperation earlier, but what if it wasn't only thanks to her will, but also with the help of substances? It's not like she couldn't have easy access to them with her time-stopping power (we are speaking of a girl who robbed the Yakuza), and her experience makes heavy use of antidepressants not unlikely. At the end of the series / second movie, she was out of her addiction but over time, she fell back into it. By the time she was near death and closed by the Icubators in their barrier, she was in a state that made her extreme actions at the end of Rebellion less surprising than they seem at first. Just look at her face: she's now a junkie who has completely lost touch with reality and thinks her action are good no matter what, even if judging from how her familiars act, there's still a part of her that knows it's wrong.
- As we saw at the end of the movie, Homura caused another rewrite of reality, creating a world where Madoka, Sayaka and Nagisa are alive and well, but has not total control over it. Eventually, Mami and Kyouko will uncover the truth; however, realizing that restoring the old status quo would mean losing Nagisa and Sayaka, although reluctantly they'll accept Homura's reality and will, for a time, collaborate with her.
- Mami probably had a European mother and a Japanese father. Maybe both of Mami's parents were Europeans. How about their names? They just changed their names into something that's more Japanese. Mami probably got her taste for tea from her European, most likely English, mother.
- Plus, Mami's blonde. We all know that Europeans tend to have blonde hair in Anime. Mami's eyes ain't blue because she has Japanese ancestry. Then, Mami's European-ish magical girl outfit may reflect her keeping in touch with her European heritage and the memories of her deceased parents.
- This wouldn't make much sense. Kyubey isn't a literal genie.
- Jossed by her spinoff manga: it was "To have the Power to Bring light to France".
Albertine was a very young girl, perhaps 5 or 6, when she contracted. Her parents were very harsh, to the point of being abusive, and would punish her severely for telling a lie, even about the smallest things. She would always run and hide whenever they were angry, hence her witch form's enjoyment of hide-and-seek. Her wish was to be able to hide from her parents or go to a place where they couldn't find her (or something to that effect). Her magical girl form gave her the ability to conceal herself and create fun spaces where she could play without fear of being discovered. But since all she did was run and hide, she did not get into fights with any witches, and eventually the loneliness of always playing by herself got to be too much, causing her to become a witch herself. Alternatively, because of her young age and inexperience with fighting, she was mortally wounded in her first battle with a witch, and the despair of dying caused her to witch out.
The only one with the potential to reduce Walpurgisnacht to a Grief Seed is Madoka in her most powerful (pre-Godoka) magical girl form, but of course that's a Pyrrhic Victory as she has to use up all her magic to do so and then turn into the even bigger, even more unkillable, planet-devouring Kriemhild Gretchen. Madoka becoming a goddess and Ret-Gone-ing Walpurgisnacht out of existence and absorbing her into the Law of Cycles was the only way to defeat her for good. (For the purpose of this theory, Madoka Magica Portable does not count [in which it is possible to defeat Walpurgisnacht and retrieve her Grief Seed]).
When Roberta was a teenager, she had strict parents who never allowed her to do anything fun or hang out with classmates or friends. (Her witch form is an Ironic Hell because she escaped the “cage” that was her strict household, only to fall into a different “cage” later on — namely, an addiction to drugs and alcohol.) When she was a young adult, she made a wish to be free from the strict life she had once led. So, elated by her newfound freedom, she overcompensated. She started going to wild parties, drinking lots of alcohol, and having sex with boys. (As a magical girl, her weapons were Molotov cocktails.) She had also been plain-looking in her childhood, but had grown up to become quite beautiful and attracted a lot of male attention, which she greatly enjoyed. Unfortunately, she did not know how to do these things in moderation. She had not yet learned self-restraint, and was enjoying these things way too much because nobody had taught her about the possible negative consequences of overdoing them.
Eventually, the consequences caught up with her. Perhaps she fell pregnant from unprotected sex or got into a drunken car crash. Something that made her realize the partying lifestyle wasn't as glamorous as it first seemed. But by this time, she had become addicted to it. Addicted to all the things that helped her forget about her own deeper insecurities — partying, alcohol (and possibly hard drugs), and sex. At first she had been so happy that she had finally become beautiful and that men found her attractive (maybe as a teenager, she had self-image issues and/or was bullied for her looks), but came to realize that none of her partners ever saw her as more than a glorified blow-up doll. Secretly, she hated herself for her addiction, but she couldn’t stop.
But, one day, Roberta met a man who seemed like everything she had ever dreamed of. He acted so gentlemanly and kind towards her. She instantly fell in love with him and they started a relationship. He said to her he’d never met a girl like her before. She was so happy that she started to get her life back on track, and even made steps toward kicking her addictions...but somehow, she found out he’d had many other girlfriends before her. He had told all of these other girls the same beautiful, romantic things he had told her, only to quickly lose interest in them and move on, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind him. In despair, she asked him if it was true, and he laughed at her and told her that she was naive for being fooled by his sweet words. He said, “Did you really think I meant all of those things I said? Who could ever love a mess of a person like you?” Filled with rage and grief, she killed him, fell into the Despair Event Horizon and transformed into a witch.
Something that often comes up in robot stories is the idea of the robot body being like a computer monitor with the actual brain elsewhere. If you've played Virtue's Last Reward you know what I'm talking about. At some point I wondered if this is how Kyubey came back in a new body (he can make extras) and everything else just fell into place. Lack of emotion, difficulty understanding others and unwillingness to learn, single-minded focus on a single task, and most importantly, Creative Sterility. His race has been gathering energy using the same methods for what is implied to be eons and it gets rendered obsolete by a pair of random high-school girls. This also suggests his claim that without his race humans would be "living naked in caves" isn't true; he thinks it is because he or his race are projecting their own lack of innovation.
Since having your consciousness outside your body is exactly how Soul Gems work, it's possible the Incubators and Magical Girls operate the same way but the Incubators get better tech with a far longer range. This also implies Kyubey has access to technology that could have prevented at least one death but chose not to use it.
All I need is for you to make a contract.