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Introduction

Puella Magi Madoka Magica can be read in any number of complementary and oft-contradictory ways, from the purely literal to the metaphorical-symbolical to the feminist to the economic and beyond. For me, however, the primary lens that I use to interpret the series is psychological--more specifically, depth psychology, which explores the nature of the unconscious mind and its various manifestations.

While depth psychology has its origins in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (whose work is directly referenced in the Rebellion sequel movie), as well as the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and their successors, and shares a common Germanic origin with many of Madoka Magica's other influences (most notably Goethe's Faust), I will diverge from these more established connections to focus here on a more modern and lesser-known branch of depth psychology--specifically, the holistic ecopsychology of Bill Plotkin, a self-described "psychologist gone wild". This is not because I think there is nothing to say about the impact of Freud, Jung, et al. on Madoka Magica, merely that this is the subset of depth psychology I am most personally familiar with, as well as a perspective that I have yet to see in fandom spaces outside my own works.

If a fundamental tenet of depth psychology is that human life is shaped by unconscious forces within themselves, holistic ecopsychology goes one step further and posits that humans are ultimately inseparable from our environment; not only do we shape our world, we are shaped by it in equal measure. The genius of Madoka Magica--what makes it such a powerful, insightful, and genuinely moving story--is that its fantastical worldbuilding allows both of these statements to be literally as well as metaphorically true in-universe. Thus, it is possible to simultaneously read the show as a series of individual psychological journeys analogous to those we may undergo in our own lives, as well as a wider societal commentary that would be more difficult in a so-called "realistic" setting where landscape and character are not so explicitly fused.

Although not specifically intended for media analysis, let alone a hyper-specific breakdown of a magical girl anime, Plotkin's nature-based framework of the human psyche maps with astonishing accuracy to the situations presented in Madoka Magica--all the more remarkable given that writer Gen Urubuchi and the production crew at SHAFT were almost certainly unaware of his work. In addition to providing a new and insightful lens with which to examine the themes of the original series, it also suggests one path the characters might take to heal the psychological traumas they've endured--a direction subsequent installments have toyed with but have yet to fully embrace.

The Wild Within

As its name suggests, ecopsychology stands at the intersection of ecology and psychology, encompassing the relationship between the human mind and the "more-than-human-world" in the words of ecophilosopher David Abram. Although the term "ecopsychology" itself is a relatively recent construction, the concept itself is far older--although Freud explores this concept in Civilization and Its Discontents, modern ecopsychology's central tenets echo those of traditional Indigenous cultures where humans are viewed as one part of a larger, synergistic whole that encompasses both human and non-human life as well as landscapes, ecosystems, and the universe as a whole.

On the surface, ecopsychology may seem like an odd choice for analysis of Madoka Magica given its hyper-urban setting in the futuristic (and architecturally impossible) city of Mitakihara, where the natural world is limited to a handful of beautiful but thoroughly domesticated background elements. Even as Madoka ventures into the darker and uglier parts of the city--construction sites, back allies, warehouses, rail yards, shipping ports, and other "wastelands" of the industrial "urban jungle"--she encounters little in the way of truly wild nature. Not only is the landscape completely human-dominated, it is also eerily empty, devoid of the weeds and wildlife that normally flourish in these settings in our own world.

This is not to say that nature plays no role in Madoka Magica; its presence (or lack thereof) subtly but firmly reinforces the dominant emotional atmosphere in every scene. Perhaps surprisingly, it is usually associated with happiness and safety--despite its sharp right angles and severe Modernist architecture, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of Madoka's house allow for plenty of natural light, and the building is centered around a picturesque enclosed courtyard where her father grows luscious out-of-season cherry tomatoes for the family breakfast. The path which Madoka and her friends take to school is flanked by a flowing stream and orderly rows of ornamental cherry trees with a vibrant green canopy--a bucolic, idyllic landscape where no monsters ever intrude.

Likewise, the grassy hillside by the river where Madoka and Sayaka retreat after school provides a much-needed respite, the wind turbines lazily turning in the breeze contrasting sharply with the oil and gas refineries downstream on the opposite banks. The contrast between sustainable energy and fossil fuel extraction foreshadows the other kind of energy in this show and the characters' different approaches to it; indeed, Kyubey's approach to harvesting grief seeds has much in common with Western industrial strip-mining compared to the replacement system ultimately born from Madoka's wish. Unfortunately for Sayaka, however, getting out and "touching grass" does little to solve the larger problem of the game rigged against her from the beginning--nature is healing, but it is by no means a panacea against larger systemic ills.

One exception to the general rule of nature as comforting and supportive is the repeated imagery of insects drawn to artificial lights--first to a lamp in the otherwise bare park where Mami confronts Homura, and then again at the equally sterile rail yard as Madoka searches for Sayaka. In both cases, it serves as a visual metaphor for natural systems out of balance, illustrating how magical girls are drawn to their grim fates even though they will ultimately be destroyed in the process. Instincts that have evolved over time to aid in survival of the species can backfire spectacularly when individuals--whether moths or magical girls--are confronted with technology outside of their worldview.

At the same time, magical girls are caught in a life and death struggle for survival, with Kyouko--who experienced severe food insecurity as a child--initially espousing a social Darwinist viewpoint of the strong "naturally" crushing the weak before she learns that magical girls are not at the top of the food chain, but are preyed on in turn by the alien Incubators. Kyubey directly cites the amoral cruelty of nature in his history lesson to Madoka in episode 11, comparing the Incubator-human relationship to that between humans and domestic livestock like cows, pigs, and chickens, arguing that it is ultimately in humanity's best interest for girls like Madoka to be consumed by the system. (It's a pity that Madoka's ascension means we never get to see her grapple with the ethics of meat consumption, especially given the challenges of vegetarianism in mainstream Japanese society and its Buddhist associations.) Mitakihara's pristine landscapes are only possible through the secret struggles and sacrifices of magical girls who die alone and forgotten in the shadows. Yet it's also important to remember that for every example of nature "red in tooth and claw", there's one of cooperation and partnership, allowing the characters to cherry-pick the ones that justify their actions and worldviews.

However, the most vivid examples of nature in the series are the witches' labyrinths, the surreal worlds born from their tortured psyches that serve as a lure and a trap to their victims. The Rose Garden Witch's minions--mustachioed cotton balls with butterfly wings for feet--tend to a stylized garden full of barbed wire rose vines; the witch herself is a grotesque oozing half-caterpillar and half-butterfly, stuck in a perpetual stasis. The Shadow Witch Elsa Maria transforms her body into a dark tree that impales Sayaka; the conglomerate witch Walpurgisnacht performs a similar trick with skyscrapers, their bare branches of these giant trees mirroring the numerous timelines to which Homura travels in search of victory. The true wilderness, the show suggests, is the human mind itself, envisioned as a nightmarish series of stop-motion landscapes filled with twisted reflections and shattered dreams. There's a reason we call it "human nature", after all--here be dragons, indeed!

If, as I've argued in previous essays, Madoka Magica uses its setting and animation to illustrate the core themes of deception and illusion and ratchet up tension and atmosphere, nowhere is this more true than the labyrinths, which reflect the distorted mind and personality of the witches who create them. Initially presented as abstract manifestations of "curses" born from humanity in general, witches are eventually revealed to be fallen magical girls whose unconscious minds have burst free from their containers to wreck havoc on the world that has wronged them via public psychosocial plays. (Tragically, not only are these cries for help invisible to those lacking an aptitude for magic, only a handful of the few who can perceive them recognize them for what they truly are, and most of them are unable to do much about it.) When it comes to labyrinths, these landscapes not only reflect characters, they are characters, which makes an ecopsychological reading especially fruitful for our purposes.

At the end of the original TV series, Homura abandons Mitakihara and strides off into an empty desert alone, presumably to find herself and/or the vanished Madoka on her journey. This is especially fitting as solitary vision quests are one way in which adolescents in many ecocentric cultures mark their initiation to true adulthood by venture out to face their inner demons, albeit usually not so literally as Homura battles the wraiths. Although the setting is not given--Urobuchi's script says only "not in Japan"--the specifics are irrelevant, as the landscape she occupies is meant to be more archetypal and fantastical than representative of a real place.

However, even here there is no escaping the city's influence--the unconscious landscape Homura's mind creates as she sleeps in Kyubey's rose-shaped tower in Rebellion is initially indistinguishable from the original. As she gradually uncovers the truth, the boundaries between inside and outside blur, with her surroundings reflecting her moods and thoughts and vice versa in a rapidly escalating feedback loop. By the film's end, the dichotomy between self and other is erased entirely when the contents of Homura's soul gem burst free to encompass the entire universe, and Mitakihara City rises phoenix-like from the ashes once again. With Homura's apotheosis, the ecopsychological claim that the human mind is not separate from the world is no longer solely a metaphor but simple embodied truth.

The Map and the Territory

Bill Plotkin is an American depth psychologist based in Colorado whose writing owes as much to his long career as a wilderness guide as to academia. Because his work is less well-known compared to others in the field, I will briefly summarize the argument he outlines in Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (New World Library 2013), before proceeding any further with my analysis. As Plotkin's terminology includes words and phrases that are often conflated with each other in casual speech, I have used capital letters to indicate when I am referring to his specific usage and lowercase for the looser and more common definitions.

In order to encompass the full depth and breadth of the human experience, Plotkin visualizes the psyche as a landscape that can be "mapped" in three dimensions; in keeping with many Indigenous traditions, different facets of the self are associated with different cardinal directions, seasons, and times of day. Not only does this allow us orient ourselves in both space and time, it provides yet another link to the natural world; what is inside and what is outside are not as separate as they initially appear.

At the center of the map is the Self, an integral whole with four aspects or facets representing core attributes of humanity: the Nurturing Generative Adult (North), the Wild Indigenous One (South), the Innocent/Sage (East), and the Muse/Beloved (West). Each one is simultaneously a unique part of each individual as well as a universal human experience capable of manifesting in a wide variety of archetypes; to what degree a given individual identifies or partakes of any given perspective depends on their personality, culture, and circumstances. As a bonus, the geographic framework allows Plotkin to pair opposites on a spectrum--each facet is both healed and strengthened by cultivating its opposite and complement.

These facets, which are available as potential at birth, develop from immature subpersonalities, or fragmented and reflexive behaviors that are capable of directing conscious action while gliding under the surface of awareness. (These go by other names in different schools of depth psychology, although they are perhaps best known as "complexes" in the Jungian tradition.) Although their strategies vary widely, the subpersonalities share a common goal: survival at any and all cost, regardless of the psychic toll. Because mainstream psychology and psychiatry are primarily concerned with treating disorders and dysfunction rather than manifesting wholeness, the subpersonalities are the element of depth psychology that most people are familiar with, despite representing only a small fraction of the full human experience.

At the same time, the human psyche can also be oriented on a vertical axis: with Spirit, or the drive for transcendence and oneness with the universe always seeking upward, and Soul, or the unique personal mysteries of the individual, dwelling within the depths. In the middle is the Ego, the seat of the Self and the conscious "I", which dwells in the "middleworld" of everyday life. An emotionally mature and healthy adult possesses conscious knowledge and awareness of all of these aspects of themselves in multiple dimensions, resulting in what Plotkin calls a "3-D Ego" that allows them to deliberately choose healthy and life-affirming actions instead of reacting impulsively at the whim of their subpersonalities.

Maturity is usually seen as a natural and inevitable consequence of life, but for Plotkin, it is a learned skill, determined as much by life experiences, culture, and individual choices than physical age once a person hits puberty. In ecocentric cultures, elders and initiated adults use culturally accepted frameworks or traditions to transition youth into the roles most suited for themselves, their society, and the more-than-human world which they inhabit. Few of these customs exist in more fragmented societies like the modern West, where individuals are usually left to fend for themselves as best they can.

Like other magical girl stories, Madoka Magica is fundamentally a coming-of-age story--or, in keeping with the show's Germanic influences, a "Bildungsroman"--in which the titular protagonist navigates the complex and often contradictory roles, responsibilities and privileges of adulthood and femininity. However, unlike in Plotkin's ecocentric societies, there is no established course for adulthood in Madoka's world; despite the support of her genuinely loving and well-intentioned parents, she must navigate this process almost entirely on her own.

This alienation from herself (and by extension, the natural world of which she is a part) is not unique to Madoka. One way or another, all of the magical girls in the original series experience it, something that Kyubey ruthlessly exploits for his own ends. His contracts offer a quick and easy route to self-actualization and purpose missing from ordinary life--but those who accept it trade a lifetime of gradual growth and change for a nightmarish existence of endless battle culminating in gruesome death instead of the maturity they sought.

Splitting the Soul

Conventional Western science and medicine are inherently empirical and reductionist in nature, built on the assumption that complex systems such as the human mind can be best understood through the breakdown and analysis of their parts. When applied to psychology, the reductionist view is epitomized by behaviorism (which arose as a response to the primarily non-experimental and subjective depth psychology of Freud, Jung, and their successors), a mechanistic view where human actions are controlled and directed by reflex, reinforcement, and conditioning. On the medical side, the heavily reductionist discipline of psychiatry treats symptoms and disorders instead of cultivating wholeness; problems within an individual are seen as solely reflective of the individual rather than indicative of sickness within their society or circumstances. In both disciplines, the reductionist approach has yielded valuable insights and treatments, but it also comes with fundamental limitations of its own.

Kyubey is the reductionist perspective taken to its (ahem) logical conclusion. Lacking the ability to comprehend emotions of any kind, he views humanity as a collection atomized individuals whose actions are guided solely by self-interest and convenience. He skillfully wields this knowledge to manipulate his targets, repeatedly dismissing any unexpected behavior from them as "illogical"--vexing, perhaps, but ultimately irrelevant. Because his knowledge is solely intellectual, there are few limits to Kyubey's behavior; his entire philosophy can be summed up by the iconic line from the first Jurassic Park movie: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should". Thus he has no qualms about tearing girls' souls from their bodies to form soul gems or keeping the full picture from them until it is too late to back out.

For something so critical to the plot, the actual mechanics of soul gem creation are remarkably underexplored, but the process appears to be roughly analogous to nuclear fission in that a huge quantity of emotional energy is released through the breaking of the bond between body and soul. (The comparison to nuclear power is especially striking given the aforementioned imagery of wind turbines and industrial refineries as well as Japan's complicated relationship with nuclear power in popular media and real life; compare also the release of energy when a human is severed from their daemon in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series). A certain fraction of this energy is used to reverse entropy to grant the new magical girl's wish, with the amount of energy available to her--and which determines the scale, scope, and effectiveness of her wish--is determined by her karmic destiny, or the impact she would have otherwise had upon the world, essentially trading an entire lifetime for a brief moment of glory.

The end result is that what was once a single entity is now two fragments, a physical body and a reified soul, capable of existing independently from each other. What was once sacred, profound, and immaterial is now an object that can be manipulated at will in what is simultaneously a triumph of empirical reductionism and a gross violation of the natural order.

Many Westerners who are fully immersed in mind-body dualism struggle to understand Sayaka's anguish when she learns the truth of what Kyubey has done to her. Leaving aside how Kyubey deliberately misled her (making a mockery of his later claim to value and honor consent), much of the dissonance is cultural--in keeping with Shinto and Buddhist beliefs, the Japanese generally view the soul as inseparable from the physical body, to the point where the word for "heart" (心 , kokoro) also means "mind" and "spirit"; emotions and logic are seen as ultimately arising from the same source. If body and soul are interconnected and interdependent, separating the two is fundamentally grotesque and unnatural--hence why Sayaka dubs herself a zombie piloting an animated corpse, a sentiment that many Japanese viewers likely share. In the Tart Magica spinoff manga, a young Jeanne d'Arc greets this same news with joy, deliriously happy to have proof of her immortal soul, the existence of which she had previously taken purely on faith--proving once again that context is everything.

As one might expect from a discipline named holistic ecopsychology--i.e., one that takes as a given that a complex system possesses inherent properties beyond those of its component parts--Kyubey's contract is an anathema in and of itself, even without taking his other shady business practices into account. Though it allows girls to have instant access to incredible powers without training or guidance, it does so at the cost of their fundamental wholeness. Instead of growing and changing over time, their soul remains fixed and crystallized for the rest of their existence--which, despite Kyubey's claims of possible immortality, are usually nasty, brutish, and short.

Though Kyubey tries to spin the disjunct between body and soul as a positive--correctly noting that it allows magical girls to dull the impact of pain in battle and thus survive injuries that would kill an ordinary person--this deliberate suppression of their emotions and sensations ultimately denies their core humanness. This is not a good thing, as Madoka correctly points out to Sayaka in the latter's fight against the Shadow Witch Elsa Maria; for better or worse, pain is an integral part of the human experience, a warning system designed to keep us from harm, and shutting it off can paradoxically cause more harm than good. At the same time, the reification of the soul makes magical girls uniquely vulnerable, as is vividly demonstrated when Kyubey uses Sayaka's soul gem to torture her, and they are instantly killed if their soul gem is shattered.

Although Homura repeatedly insists that she and her comrades are no longer human, I profoundly disagree: magical girls are not automata or zombies, but human beings who have been profoundly wounded by the traumas they've endured, including those inflicted by the contract itself; the separation of body and soul is inherently traumatic even if the magical girl in question is not consciously aware of what has happened to her. Based on the brief glimpses we are given of Homura and Sayaka's contracts, the process is also physically painful as well, with both girls clutching their chests and convulsing as their soul is yanked from their bodies (and which, in a nod to the dual nature of kokoro, appears to be located in their chests).

Contracts are traumatizing regardless of the circumstances leading up to the event, but given the human condition and the types of people that Kyubey targets, those circumstances are often traumatic in their own right; girls who are desperate are much more willing to cut a deal--and thus are easier targets--than girls who are happy and fulfilled. But as Madoka demonstrates, even girls who are materially satisfied aren't free from malaise, dissatisfaction, and uncertainty, all of which initially tempt her to make a contract.

Mami: The Loyal Soldier

Returning to Plotkin's framework now, the North facet of the Self is the Nurturing Generative Adult, who serves as caretaker, mentor, parent, teacher, and protector of life on all levels, whether individual, cultural, or ecological. These traits are frequently female-coded, but in keeping with the gender-neutral title, both men and women are equally capable of fully embodying this element in ways that may or may not accord with what is considered masculine or feminine within their society.

In an unusual twist for anime, where parental figures tend to be dead, deadbeats, or otherwise dysfunctional, both of Madoka's parents simultaneously exemplify the Nurturing Generative Adult in ways that defy gender stereotypes--her mother Junko is the energetic go-getting breadwinner while her father Tomohisa happily tends to domestic life. Both offer Madoka what comfort and guidance they can while being genuinely loving and supportive of her; they are one of the most emotionally mature and psychologically healthy couples I have ever encountered in media. The true strength of the North facet is heart-centric thinking, an entirely different animal from the reductionist logic of Kyubey and his ilk.

On the surface, Mami ("Mommy") is also the epitome of the Nurturing Generative Adult, a warm, maternal figure whose purpose and competence reminds Madoka strongly of her own mother. However, unlike Junko, Mami is not a mature adult, but a child who has been forced to grow up too fast due to intense personal trauma. In lieu of healthier strategies, she relies heavily on her corresponding North subpersonalities--what Plotkin calls "Loyal Soldiers"--to compensate, precisely because she is so skilled at embodying this particular facet of her Self.

"Loyal Soldiers" draw their name from shipwrecked Japanese soldiers during WWII, who survived alone or in small groups for years or even decades after the war's end thanks to their devotion to their military cause. Loyal Soldiers are the front line in what Plotkin calls the "war of childhood survival", terrified of abandonment and determined to keep the Self safe at any cost. Rather than encouraging growth or change (too risky!), they hunker down and keep the self small and acceptable to others through people-pleasing, conformity, codependency, enabling, perfectionism, and stereotypes.

Mami's Loyal Soldiers cast her as Rescuer who has dedicated her life to saving as many people as possible from witches and familiars. While saving lives is objectively positive, Mami uses her good deeds to justify her own survival and ease her guilt over her parents' deaths (further elaborated in heartbreaking scene from the PSP game). Just as magical girls need grief seeds from witches to survive, Mami is emotionally dependent on the witches to provide meaning and purpose to her life--without them, she is literally nothing, as is vividly demonstrated in a pivotal scene where she completely self-destructs upon learning the truth.

With Madoka and Sayaka--and in earlier timelines, Homura--Mami places herself in the role of teacher and superior, magnanimously offering them her wisdom and experience in exchange for their attention. It's not that she has nothing to offer them, merely that she is deeply invested in maintaining a certain level of power imbalance; she uses these roles to hide how she really feels--especially the deep abiding fears that she is worthless and no one will ever accept her for who she truly is. There is no one whom she accepts on equal terms, and in early episodes, she is notably antagonistic towards Homura, who is her rival for Madoka's attention as well as grief seeds.

For Mami, the "war of childhood survival" is more than a metaphor; she is also a literal soldier fighting alone in an endless shadow war, which is reflected in her European-inspired costume and her use of magical muskets. (In the Mitakihara Anti-Materials spinoff manga, Mami says her signature weapons were inspired by a story about a young soldier she read as a child.) Unlike Sayaka and Kyouko, she is not directly associated with one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, but if she was, it would likely be "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", whose nemesis, a goblin in a jack-in-the-box, closely resembles the Sweets Witch Charlotte who ultimately kills her.

Like the original loyal soldiers of World War II, Mami's identity as a magical girl is the psychological anchor that keeps her going no matter how miserable she feels; when this is ripped away from her, she completely falls apart. Even then, her last act is to turn her rifle on her beloved comrades, slaughtering witches right up to the very end. She never thinks to question Kyubey and his role in their entrapment, or fight the larger system--something that the heavily-Madoka inspired Yuki Yuna is a Hero (2014) rightly criticizes in their own take on this particular scene. Mami is so locked into her duty, she cannot imagine a life without it, only her own death, and this obsessive focus keeps her from imagining other possibilities.

Every human being experiences the Orphan archetype at moments of psychological abandonment, but Mami's Orphaning--the moment she instinctively wishes to survive a fatal car crash--occurs simultaneously with both her literal orphaning and the trauma of becoming a magical girl. She got exactly what she asked for, but it wasn't what she really wanted, and unlike Homura, there is no way she can go back and relive that critical moment over again. No wonder Mami clings so hard to her identity as a magical girl rather than untangle the dense knot of grief and suffering that completely transformed her life. No wonder she smiles and pretends everything is fine. She believes all her suffering is her fault--and on some level, she believes she deserves it, as punishment for what she views as her own selfishness.

Mami is also deeply invested in boundaries, formalities, rules, repetition, and appearances, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Perfectionism is a common technique Loyal Soldiers use to keep the Self bogged down and trapped tending to minutiae, and they are also ways in which she can control and influence others through appeals to authority and tradition.

The strategies of Mami's "Loyal Soldiers" are neither particularly sophisticated nor psychologically healthy, but they are effective: Mami survives on her own for at least two years prior to the start of the original TV series, which earns her veteran status among magical girls. Mami is isolated and miserable, but workaholism is a useful survival skill for magical girls; not only does she accomplish a lot, she looks great while doing it. Things could be worse--but they'll never get better as long as she remains stuck in the same pattern.

At the same time, Mami's ability to mask her emotions and stay optimistic and upbeat--to always "look on the bright side of life" and "keep up appearances"--likely keeps her from succumbing to despair and becoming a witch herself. Much emphasis is placed on the "alone" part in Mami's speech about suffering in solitude, but the fact that she can cry at all provides a healthy outlet for her frustrations instead of letting them bottle up and fester inside her. While tears are used to represent peak emotional despair for Sayaka and Homura, Mami's hyperfocus on her work likely insulates her from the corrosive emotional effects, allowing her to cry without succumbing to negativity--an effect no doubt amplified by the fact that her wish was to centered around her own survival.

Because her identity revolves around being the magical girl protector of Mitakihara, Mami is intensely place-focused and acutely aware of her territory, which, although vaguely defined in the TV series, appears to encompass the entirety of the city. Her knowledge of Mitakihara's geography is extensive, the result of two years of combing the city on foot in search of witches, whom she systematically tracks via reports of murder and suicide and by scouting areas with high or unexplained death rates. All this physical activity and time outdoors also probably contributes to her mental health, as both have been shown to have positive effects. Like Sayaka and the grassy hillside, it isn't enough to solve her problems, but there's no question every little bit helps.

When Mami invites Madoka to join her in a codependent relationship as a magical girl duo, the timid Madoka agrees, only to watch in horror as Mami is gruesomely murdered by the Sweets Witch Charlotte--a young child who is revealed in the supplementary materials to have sold her own soul for cake, just as Mami impulsively encouraged Madoka to do a few moments earlier. In an ironic twist, Mami's last act is to provide nourishment for Charlotte, who views her victim as "cheese"--i.e., parental love and support--in a nightmarish version of the same codependent relationships Mami tried to embody with others.

For all of Mami's competence in the original TV series, her psychological insecurities not only hold her back, they lead directly to her death in multiple timelines. Rebellion offers us a glimpse of a happier Mami who serves as a strong and compassionate leader for the Holy Quintet and a loving caretaker to a transformed Charlotte--as well as one who demonstrates what her "peak form" entails in a jaw-dropping gun battle with Homura when her Mama Bear instincts are roused. Just imagine what she could do if she was ever allowed to fully grow up!

Kyouko: The Escapist

The East facet of the Self is the Innocent/Sage, the part of us that is both spontaneous and serene, content to live fully in the moment and appreciate the joy--or find the joke--in whatever befalls us. It also manifests as the Sacred Fool and the Trickster, two archetypes that appear again and again in sacred and comic stories across cultures.

In conventional magical girl stories, the role of a wise guide who frequently doubles as comic relief is usually played by the mascot character, the cute stuffed animal-like creature whose appearance signals our heroine's entrance to the world of magic. Initially, Kyubey appears to take on this role, only for us to realize with mounting horror that his lack of emotions means he neither understands nor sympathizes with the human condition; he has no true wisdom to offer, only suffering and death. He does, however, do a spectacular job as a Trickster in spite of having no sense of humor whatsoever.

A better example of the Innocent/Sage is Madoka's younger brother Tatsuya, who demonstrates that "out the mouth of babes" comes truth in the final episode of the series. Even after everyone else has forgotten Madoka's existence, Tatsuya remembers her, sketching a stick figure version of his older sister in her magical girl costume in the dirt. In the audio commentary for the TV series DVDs, Urobuchi remarks that young children can often see thing what others miss because they don't know they can't, but that he thought Tatsuya would likely forget Madoka when he grew up. However, because the series ends well before that point, fans are free to interpret this scene and its implications however they would like.

Alternately, we might consider Madoka's teacher Kazuko Saotome as another example of the Innocent/Sage. While her rants about her love life and the best way to cook eggs are played for laughs, they reinforce the deeper truths underlying the series. This trend continues in Rebellion, where her increasingly unhinged monologue about the forthcoming apocalypse foreshadows the end of the world inside Homura's labyrinth.

The Innocent/Sage also encompasses the human yearning for divinity, eternity, and enlightenment--the realm of the "upperworld", with which it has a natural affinity and connection. However, the natural human desire for transcendence also can also lead directly to distraction, avoidance, and disassociation--the hallmarks of the East subpersonalities, the Escapists and the Addicts.

Our first glimpse of Kyouko Sakura is of her mouth as she chomps down on a snack. This is fitting, as Kyouko's life has been irrevocably shaped by her relationship to food and it symbolizes the greed and aggression she embraces as a way of life as much as her spiky ponytail or her toothy fanged smile. However, what initially appears as a simple character quirk is eventually revealed to have its origins in the same childhood trauma that led her to become a magical girl in the first place.

Food is central to Kyouko's life and identity, and she is rarely depicted without it in hand; her scenes are dominated by her appetite in a way that is both unusual and refreshing for female characters. The way she casually scarfs down treats in the middle of battle reflects not only her physical prowess, but her willingness to sacrifice human lives to obtain more grief seeds--both of which she believes are necessary for her continued survival.

At the same time, food is Kyouko's primary method for connecting with others--when she reaches out to Sayaka, it is with a basket of apples (which Sayaka rudely tosses away, much to Kyouko's ire). She exchanges a box of pocky to cement an alliance of convenience with Homura, and a stick of Umaibo to Madoka, who treats this unexpected gift with puzzlement but respect. In an especially emotional confrontation with Kyubey, Kyouko angrily tears at a chicken wing with her teeth, venting her frustration and desperation through her consumption.

Kyouko's dependency on food and her use of it for emotional regulation is reminiscent of many forms of eating disorders, one form of psychological escape that serves to temporarily numb and suppress stress and emotional pain. No doubt the disconnect between a magical girl's body and soul helps her to either tune out the unpleasant side effects of gorging herself on so much junk food or avoid them entirely.

Kyouko is a master of escapism, and food is just one way in which these tendencies manifest. Unlike Mami, who embraced codependency and workaholism as coping mechanisms and who playacts at the roles and responsibilities of adulthood, Kyouko's world revolves solely around herself and her own pleasure, and she embraces a permanent adolescence. (It is not a coincidence the Jungians dub this archetype the puella aeterna, or "eternal girl", which parallels the puella magi of the show's title.) Instead of attending school or combing the streets for witches every waking moment, she spends the bulk of her time in the arcade getting perfect scores on Dog Drug Revolution. While avoiding her problems in this fashion is psychologically unhealthy, it is also life-saving, keeping her from being overcome with despair and transforming into a witch.

In keeping with her renouncement of adulthood, all Kyouko's on-screen vices are those of a child--sugary sweets, petty theft, truancy, and delinquency. While she has no qualms about letting familiars eat ordinary people so she can harvest more grief seeds, the deaths that she causes are primarily through inaction rather than deliberate malice. Nor does she embrace illegal drugs--a much stronger societal taboo in Japan than in the U.S.--gambling, or sex, all of which are common forms of addiction among adults.

Notably, Kyouko appears to have no interest in alcohol, which Madoka's mother (jokingly?) claims is a privilege of adults needed to deaden the pain and suffering that comes along with maturity. Unlike Madoka, who looks forward to one day drinking with her mother when she is finally of age, Kyouko's aversion likely stems from her own father's descent into alcoholism when he learned the truth about magical girls, which in turn led directly to the murder-suicide of the Sakura family. Given that alcoholism runs in families, it also suggests that Kyouko inherited her escapist tendencies from her father, who also fled from reality when confronted with unpleasant truths that were too much to bear; even after his death, Kyouko is still repeating those same behaviors herself.

As with Mami, Kyouko is strongly place-based, although in her case, her emotional center is the ruined Sakura family church in the neighboring city of Kazamino, to which she takes Sayaka on pilgrimage. On a narrative level, Kyouko's role is that of an outsider; her attachment to Mitakihara is neither sentimental or personal, but strictly business. She desires the territory not for itself, but for the resources she can harvest from it.

Ironically, many people in the throes of their Escapists and Addicts throw themselves into spirituality (the primary occupation of the corresponding East facet of the self, the Innocent/Sage) to avoid confronting their issues, but Kyouko, who grew up in a religious family, scrupulously avoids it because it is so deeply intertwined with her trauma. Having inadvertently created a "cult of personality" centered around her adored father, Kyouko rejects the Christian god in favor of following her own whims and trusting only herself. She presents her materialism and cynicism as wisdom, but they are only her own personal forms of evasion.

Kyouko is perceptive and clever, but her blind spots are real and often self-imposed. Shaken by the reveal that her soul gems is actually her soul and thus her father's claim that she sold herself to the devil was true after all, she nonetheless skates lightly over her own pain, using laughter and jokes as one more way of dismissing and diminishing her legitimate fears and anxieties. Even as she reveals her past to Sayaka, Kyouko is careful to frame her story in very specific ways to justify her current way of life. Furthermore, her younger self and her family appear as puppets in this retelling, allowing her to psychically distance herself from the action.

Like Mami, Kyouko is literally as well as metaphorically an orphan, although in her case, it happens some time after she becomes a magical girl instead of simultaneously with it. However, as with Mami, the deaths of Kyouko's parents and younger sister are tied to her wish, and Kyouko blames herself even though it was not directly her fault. Where Mami fails through inaction, Kyouko fails through action--her wish was for her father's sake, ultimately destroying them both. While Mami yearns for connection, Kyouko aggressively pushes people away--spelled out in painful detail in The Different Story spinoff manga where she and Mami are close friends until the Sakura family dies.

While Mami channels her regrets into being a Rescuer, the orphaned Kyouko embodies the classic Orphan strategy of rebelling against society by skipping school, playing games in the arcade, and stealing money and junk food, all of which simultaneously reinforce her addictions and escapism. (Plotkin notes that the Rebel subpersonality is particularly common in those suffering from poverty, something that separates Kyouko from her more materially well-off comrades). As a Rebel and a Rogue, Kyouko takes pride in her defiance and her refusal to play by the rules, proudly declaring herself to be the top dog and the top of the totem pole; love her or loathe her, it's impossible to deny she's got charisma and chutzpah to burn.

But as we also saw with Mami, Kyouko's delicate equilibrium is disrupted when she enters the story and discovers that she was never the top of the food pyramid after all. Instead of her strength and prowess making her special, she's no different from any other magical girl taken advantage of by Kyubey. However, instead of breaking under this revelation like Mami--or her father--Kyouko abandons her escapism and faces the truth head-on. She ultimately rebels against Kyubey's system by sacrificing her soul gem to die with Sayaka's witch Oktavia von Seckendorff in one heroic last stand--the same altruism she derided when we first met her.

In those quiet moments with Madoka before the battle against Oktavia, Kyouko is the happiest we've ever seen her. She's finally found what she's willing to fight for--and, more importantly, to die for. Ironically, Kyouko's character growth and the resulting maturity is ultimately what kills her--if she had remained the same person she was before she met Sayaka, she would likely have survived. But, as Kyouko understands all too well, such a life would be hollow and empty; she's learned from her relationship with Sayaka that there are more important things that her own pleasure--or even her survival.

Kyouko's initial bravado hides both her insecurities and her fear of darkness, death, and the unknown. Her final descent into Oktavia von Seckendorff's labyrinth demonstrates true courage as well as desperation--and in the darkness, she finds healing as well as death. In a moment simultaneously triumphant and tragic, her childhood faith returns--not only does she pray God for relief, her hands are clasped in prayer as the fire descends, consuming her and Sayaka just like the flames that took out her family and her father's church. Like the Christian saints and the storybook heroes she admired as a child, Kyouko died a martyr's death and was content with it.

As with Mami and her Loyal Soldiers, the fact that Kyouko is so dependent on her Eastern subpersonalities indicates that she is strong in the corresponding facet of the self, the Innocent/Sage. Indeed, Kyouko, when she's not in the throes of her addictions, is easily the wisest and most perceptive of the main cast, and her comments on that last expedition with Madoka are genuinely moving and insightful. Not only does Homura enlists her help in Rebellion on a journey to the borders of their world, Kyouko is visibly unsurprised when Kyubey reveals he is capable of human speech; she is vivacious, easy-going, and fun, with an endearing playfulness buoyed by a strong partnership with Sayaka. For a few minutes, we have a glimpse of what Kyouko's life might have been, had she been spared from the childhood traumas she endured--or been able to transcend and heal from them.

Homura: The Wounded Child

The South facet of the Self is what Plotkin calls the Wild Indigenous One--the part of us that is fully at home in our bodies and the more-than-human world we inhabit. Regardless of our genetic or cultural heritage, the ability to deeply empathize and commune with nature and our physical selves--what is often termed "biophilia" or "ecological empathy"--is an innate part of our humanity, one that is viciously suppressed in Western society precisely because it is so threatening to materialistic, capitalistic, and imperialistic systems that underlie it.

The Wild Indigenous One is also threatening to Kyubey's magical girl system in that it is the part of us that fully experiences all emotions without judgement or shame, recognizing them as both a full somatic experience and an important learning experience that allows us to grow. It is the ultimate antithesis of Incubator logic and philosophy, a power they are fundamentally incapable of understanding or respecting. Contrary to the Incubator assertion that emotions are mental illness, emotions are what make us human--and grief and pain are just as much a part of that experience as love and joy.

Fortunately for Kyubey, however, most people in Western societies do not know how to process or assimilate their emotions in a healthy way, leaving them ripe for exploitation. They are at the mercy of their South subpersonalities, which embody negative feelings and lash out instinctively and impulsively in knee-jerk reactivity at the slightest provocation. These "Wounded Children" are simultaneously the perpetrators of these immature, emotion-based strategies and their victims, even as they struggle to fulfill the basic needs for survival--especially the emotional ones.

All of the magical girls in Madoka Magica are wounded in one way or another, but there is no question that Homura is the most wounded of them all. Unlike Mami and Kyouko, who at least had loving families up to their early teens, Homura drops fully formed into the narrative with very few details about her life prior to her arrival in Mitakihara City. The only thing we know for certain is that she previously attended "a private Catholic school in Tokyo", a phrase which is used in anime as a shorthand for 'orphanage', and suggests a sheltered and structured religious upbringing rife with bullying and mental health issues.

However, it gets worse: given the structure of social services in Japan, Homura's presence in an orphanage would not necessarily mean that she has no living family, merely that what family she has either refused to take her in and/or has forbidden anyone from adopting her, thus forcing her into permanent legal limbo until she turns eighteen. Regardless of the details, however, Homura is and has always been abandoned, isolated and alone; whatever relationships she might have had in the past were either superficial or unsupportive to the point where Madoka was the first person who was genuinely kind to her. This is why Homura latches on so strongly to her and centers her entire life around keeping Madoka happy and safe, because that kindness made such a strong impression on her.

Initially, Homura is a Conformist, who struggles to fit in at her new school and fails miserably thanks to her shyness and a heart condition that leaves her physically weak and clumsy even after she leaves the hospital. She is also a Victim whom Madoka and Mami rescue from a witch, introduces her to the world of magic and deepens her connection to Madoka. At the same time, Homura chafes against her own powerlessness, and after Madoka dies fighting Walpurgisnacht, Homura wishes go back in time and re-do that pivotal first meeting--but as Madoka's Rescuer, rather than her companion or equal. This vow is reinforced a few timelines later when Homura promises the dying Madoka that she will save her from becoming a magical girl before delivering the coup de grâce. Of all the wounds Homura suffers in her long and traumatic life, this one is the most traumatic of all, the one that she will return to again in Rebellion as the ultimate proof of her own worthlessness.

To cope with the immense psychological shock of mercy-killing the most important person in her life, Homura fully embraces the role of a Rescuer to the point where, like Mami, it becomes her entire identity. While Mami wants to save as many people as possible to make up for the ones she couldn't, Homura dedicates herself to saving one person in particular and repeats the same month over and over again to "get it right", even as her world narrows in response to her single-minded focus. This does not mean that Homura has stopped caring about other people--left to her own devices, Homura is remarkably protective of the other girls and she truly regrets not being able to save them--merely that given a choice between Madoka and everyone else (including herself), she chooses Madoka every time, no matter what the personal cost. Even in the moment in the final battle against Walpurgisnacht where she nearly gives up in despair, Homura frames it as not wanting to make things worse for Madoka by increasing her karmic destiny and thus making her even more of a target for Kyubey.

As we saw earlier with Mami, Homura's Rescuing does have its benefits, but it also comes with the hidden agenda of assuaging Homura's intense self-hatred and fear of abandonment. It offers her a purpose, to the point where she admits it's "the only thing left to guide me" (which is repeated as the title of the penultimate episode for further emphasis). If Mami has no purpose outside of saving people from witches, Homura has no purpose outside of saving Madoka, and cannot imagine anything outside the "endless maze" in which she has entrapped herself. Homura's loops are the manifestation of what the Freudians call repetition compulsion, in which she repeats the same series of traumatic events over and over with no end in sight.

Not only do Homura's efforts fail to keep Madoka physically safe, over time they push her further and further into the role of Victim that Homura has forsaken, until the confident bubbly magical girl is rendered shy, uncertain, and helpless. Paradoxically, however, it is those same loops that increase Madoka's karmic destiny to the point where she has both the knowledge and awareness of the cruelties of the magical girl system and the power to change it forever. Thus, Kyubey is defeated in a tag-team effort in which Madoka finally acknowledges Homura's feelings--only to disappear from the world forever as the inevitable consequence of her wish. This is turn directly leads to Rebellion, in which Homura restores Madoka to a normal human life--but one where Homura is the knowing experienced one who "rescues" the timid transfer student from a group of nosy classmates. The world has been remade, but the same dysfunctional patterns are in play, inevitably leading to conflict. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Having fully embraced the role of Loyal Soldier like Mami in regards to Madoka, it's perhaps not surprising that Homura's primary weapons are firearms, or that her magical girl costume resembles a school uniform, which in turn was originally derived from European naval uniforms. Though they are originally presented as antagonists and narrative, Homura and Mami are ultimately revealed to be not so different from each other on many levels, which makes their repeated conflicts and failure to emotionally connect all the more tragic. This tension makes perfect sense from a depth psychology perspective, as the North and South facets of the Self are paired opposites, representing two different but complementary strategies for engaging with the world, and each contains the seeds for healing the other. Perhaps this is why Homura and Mami keep their distance from each other--they are aware of this possibility on a subconscious level and thus avoid having to face any difficult or unpleasant truths.

Like Mami, Homura buries herself in her work, which saves her from becoming a witch even as it's terrible for her long-term mental and emotional health. However, unlike Mami, who still allows herself to cry, Homura deliberately numbs herself, presenting a cold an unemotional facade to the world that doesn't let up even in private. This kind of emotional suppression is her way of coping with her trauma--a survival strategy that, like Mami's devotion to her duty and Kyouko's escapism, keeps her alive and fighting in the endless war she's engaged in. By denying her own pain, Homura is able to keep going indefinitely, but she also denies her humanity, and becomes more and more Kyubey-like, much to the dismay and consternation of the other characters who do not understand where she is coming from.

As a side effect, Homura suffers intense and profound depression, which, in Plotkin's view, is hardly surprising under the circumstances:

For me, the most precise definition of depression is a bad case of suppressed emotions, emotions that have been managed instead of being felt, digested, understood, assimilated, and acted upon in a way that preserves and improves our relationships. When a person is depressed in this way, she has a significant backload of undigested feelings piled up behind an inner dam, blocking the natural flow of her psyche and her life. If this blockage becomes severe or prolonged, her physical and psychological vitality will grind to a halt. She'll become 'sluggish', 'vegetative', and quite possibly suicidal. ... What the depressed person needs is to feel more, not less.

The solution to Homura's depression is allowing herself to grieve, but the cruel irony is that in becoming a magical girl, what she needs to do to heal will transform her into a monster. Instead of feeling her grief, Homura weaponizes it, using it as fuel to drive her.

Like Kyouko, Homura is radicalized by the loss of her loved ones, but instead of rebelling against society at large, Homura rebels by systematically hunting down and slaughtering Kyubey before he can make contact with Madoka and urging her not to contract. Later, of course, in a movie titled Rebellion, she goes on to tackle the reformed magical girl system, literally tearing apart the Law of Cycles with her bare hands and rebuilding the world.

Narratively speaking, Homura is even more of an outsider than Kyouko, but although she is not native to Mitakihara or the general area, it's clear that the city is the most important place in the world to her, to the point where she recreates it perfectly within her own soul gem in Rebellion. While she does not espouse the typical magical girl's behavior in terms of physical territory, there's no question that Mitakihara as a location has left a profound impact on Homura's psyche, vividly demonstrated when the borders of her labyrinth --and therefore the world--literally end at the city limits. However, the TV series ending where Homura is alone in the desert suggests that her attachment to the city stems from the fact that Madoka lived there--without her, there is no compelling reason for Homura to remain, as is evidence by her cryptic promise to Kyouko that she will leave the city after the upcoming battle against Walpurgisnacht.

Homura's consistent reliance on her South subpersonalities is an indication that she is correspondingly strong in the South facet and the ability to feel and process emotions. When she finally breaks down and exposes years of pent-up trauma to Madoka during an emotional breakdown in her apartment, it is this emotional connection that inspires Madoka to change the magical girl system and end Homura's suffering--which, in an ironic twist, also deprives Homura of the very person for whom she'd been fighting for so long.

Sayaka and Madoka: Burnout and Self-Sacrifice

Personality-wise, Sayaka and Madoka are quite different, but they are united by their shared background: they are both comfortably well-off with parents who care for them (although we don't see Sayaka's interactions with her parents the way we do with Madoka's family). Neither of them are are the kind of girls who need miracles to fix their lives, something Sayaka notes with a remarkable degree of self-awareness in episode 4.

On the one hand, this is genuinely a good thing. On the other hand, they have never been exposed to the literal and metaphorical Orphaning that Mami, Kyouko, and Homura have suffered, and thus have never had to develop any survival strategies (however dysfunctional) for coping with life on their own. Thus, they are completely unprepared for the intense stress of life as a magical girl, and die soon afterwards in every timeline we witness. While Mami, Kyouko, and Homura have been magical girls for an extended period of time (at least two years for Mami, and likely significantly longer than that for Homura depending on how many loops you think she experienced), Madoka and Sayaka crash and burn almost instantly, like the insects drawn to the electric lights that we see in multiple shots across the series. In an ironic twist, all of their material advantages abruptly become a handicap they are unable to overcome; both of them try to emulate the unhealthy behavior patterns embodied by the others (especially Mami) but are unable to achieve that same level of stability, which ultimately leads to their deaths.

Burnout is usually defined as a long-term exhaustion, but such is the stress of life as magical girl that one week is the equivalent of several years, especially given they are still just kids. In all other respects, the burnout Sayaka experiences as her hopes and ideals are slowly crushed will be sadly familiar to careworkers of any kind. In less than a month, she is nearly beaten to death by Kyouko (even if her incredibly strong healing powers means her ego bears the brunt of the damage), tortured by Kyubey, loses confidence in herself with the damning revelations that her body has been forever altered, watches the crush for whom she sacrificed everything date someone else, and pushes herself to her limits while starving herself of the magic she needs to live. The only surprise is that she manages to last as long as she does before finally collapsing.

Sayaka takes Mami's workaholism to extremes so that we see just how unhealthy these behaviors truly are. She denies herself the support network of Madoka, Kyouko, and Homura out of pride and a determination to "go it alone" like her idol, not realizing the cripplingly lonely Mami would have seized these connections with both hands if she could. Sayaka's Loyal Soldiers--manifesting as both Inner Critics and perpetually self-sacrificing Pseudo-Warriors--drive her to the edge in record time.

Because of the feedback loop between soul gem deterioration and mental health, any decline in one area results in a decline in the other, reinforcing Sayaka's increasingly downward spiral. Believing herself to have already died when her contract severed her body from her soul, she sees no problem with working until she drops. But the death that ultimately comes for her is not the one she had in mind--and, furthermore, erases all of the "good" her sacrifices have wrought by releasing a powerful new witch into the world. Sayaka's tragic decline and fall is entropy in action.

Madoka's martyrdom, although more subtle than Sayaka's, is no less deadly. Throughout the series, Madoka struggles with her sense of self-worth; she values herself only as much as she is able to help others. She yearns to be like her mother, Mami, Homura, and Sayaka--smart, successful, confident, and capable--without valuing the traits she does have--loyalty, empathy, kindness, and compassion. This combination means she throws herself into danger again and again, and her capacity for self-sacrifice gets her killed in every timeline, whether at Walpurgisnacht's hands, becoming a witch herself, or sacrificing her one remaining grief seed to heal Homura so her friend can go back in time and save her in a different timeline.

Homura's critique of this behavior after she prevents Madoka from contracting in episode 8 may sound harsh, but ultimately Homura is right: Madoka does not value herself, and this, in turn, hurts Homura terribly in their increasingly one-sided codependent relationship across multiple timelines. Unlike Homura, Madoka cannot shut down her emotions; she feels everything that she and others experience, and it is this very compassion and empathy that leads her to her final wish to eliminate witches forever.

At the same time, Homura's loops have turned Madoka into a perpetual Victim whom Homura must rescue over and over again (and yet which is somehow never enough to actually save her). Homura's pleas for Madoka to accept her life and remain who she is sounds encouraging on the surface--until you realize that it also means Madoka must remain passively on the sidelines forever without being able to offer anything in return; her peaceful and seemingly perfect life come at the cost of her own autonomy and agency.

Being the Victim is not much fun, so it's only natural that Madoka chafes at this role, just as Homura originally did. The paradox is that everything Homura does to keep Madoka in her place--and therefore "safe"--only makes Madoka more determined to contract so she can finally become powerful enough to rescue other people for once instead of being dependent on someone else to save her. As with so many of Madoka Magca's moral and ethical dilemmas, neither one is completely wrong and neither one is completely right, and so the cycle continues.

While Madoka's ascension as the Law of Cycles ultimately saves magical girls from their terrible fate, it also condemns her to an eternity alone and unconnected, something Homura also rightly protests as an equally terrible fate. (This is ironic coming from Homura, who has few such connections herself, but all the more poignant because Madoka is first and foremost among them.) This issue is revisited in much stronger terms in Rebellion in Homura's motives and actions to free Madoka and from the Law, as well as one striking sequence where the goddess's arm is covered with self-harm scars from wrist to shoulder. Taken together, the meaning is clear: Madoka's wish was a triumph, yes, but it was a pyrrhic victory and a martyrdom, a replay of her old patterns on a cosmic scale from which Homura is determined to rescue her.

Ultimately, the only solution is to abandon the Rescuer/Victim dichotomy entirely, which means both girls will have to accept that their lives have intrinsic value no matter what while simultaneously allowing each other the freedom to grow, change, and make mistakes. This paradox is encapsulated in a wry saying by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, "Each of you is perfect the way you are...and you can use a little improvement." Until then, however, they will continue to keep going round and round and trade off roles ad infinitum.

Witches: Shadows of the Muse/Beloved

The West facet of the Self is what Plotkin calls the Muse/Beloved, our innate love of the mysteries of the underworld and the fruitful darkness found there. It is the part of us that frequently embodies our opposite--what the Jungians call anima or animus. As with its opposite and complement, the Innocent/Sage, the Muse/Beloved is inherently paradoxical, a 'both/and' rather than 'either/or', although the East is enamored of eternity and enlightenment and the West is focused on romantic love, death, and transience.

The primary power of the Muse/Beloved is deep imagination and the ability to create new worlds within our own minds, those of others, and the world at large. The Muse/Beloved is the wellspring of creativity and inspiration emerging from the fertile dark of our unconscious, our guide into the deepest depths of ourselves. They are guides to the underworld who serve as mirror to the Ego, represented in art and literature as either an identical twin and/or the Ego's opposite, particularly in terms of gender.

As with the East facet of the Self, the goal of the West subpersonalities is to keep us safe, but while the Escapists use distraction and evasion, the West subpersonalities rely wholly on repression, or burying these elements deep in our psyche so we are no longer consciously aware of them. These are our Shadow Selves, perhaps best known in the Jungian and Freudian senses, but defined somewhat differently here.

Unlike Wounded Children, which are cast out but remain well within our awareness, our Shadows have been so thoroughly forgotten that we no longer identify with them. Our Shadows are everything we don't know about ourselves--"unknown unknowns", per Donald Rumsfeld. As Plotkin explains, "The Shadow is what our psyches repress (render unconscious), not what our Egos suppress (consciously hide from others). ...This is difficult to accept and digest--that there are aspects or parts of ourselves we don't really know and that are completely at odds with who we think we are."

Not every Shadow is a negative trait, or even a socially unacceptable one. The Shadow may also include positive traits that have been discarded by the other subpersonalities in the war of childhood survival--what determines its placement in Shadow is not whether it is objectively good or bad, but whether the person in question believes it exists within them. For example, given Madoka's repeated statements that she has no special talents, it's highly likely that much of her Shadow is a "Golden", containing all the ambition and drive and purpose she admires in others but she cannot see within herself. That said, the nature of Madoka's worldbuilding means that we only see negative Shadows (or at least their negative effects) which makes narrative sense as the raw, ugly, and monstrous elements make for more frightening and compelling conflict.

Initially, witches are presented as the shadow selves of humanity in general, born from unspecified "curses" that have accumulated to the point of conscious manifestation. They are the inevitable byproduct of the dark side of human nature, whether through the Jungian collective unconscious or the principles of traditional Japanese animism, which holds that spirits exist in all things and are capable of growing in power or sentience when infused with human energy and attention to the point of causing illness and misfortune.

Witches also provide a convenient diegetic explanation for the large numbers of suicides in modern Japan, which is one of the highest in the world. Instead of addressing the wider systemic issues around community, employment, access to mental health care, the stigma surrounding treatment, and relationship to the natural world, humanity is preyed upon by supernatural beings that only adolescent girls can stop. Dealing with witches is not only a more immediate solution, it requires nothing in the way of large-scale structural changes or collective action. However, this apparent "quick fix" is in reality only an illusion--no matter how many witches are defeated, new ones always arise to replace them.

In addition to being humanity's shadows, witches are shadowy creatures both literally--they are never seen in broad daylight, only dusk or dark--and metaphorically, lurking in the broken or industrial no-man's-lands throughout the city. Witches simultaneously inhabit liminal spaces while being even more liminal spaces themselves--they dwell within labyrinths, idiosyncratic and unstable pocket dimensions where the normal rules of reality no longer apply, their elements jumbled together in a nightmarish melange.

Witches' labyrinths frequently reflect the area where they were "born", and geography plays an important role in their formation. Although mobile, witches are inherently location-sensitive, to the point where Mami is able to track their presence by tracking murders, suicides, and car accidents, as well as specific neighborhoods like the red-light district. However, the opposite is also true: witches tend to congregate in areas like hospitals that are full of human suffering, thus forming a nasty feedback loop if left unchecked. "Which came first? The witch or her environment?" is a question that Madoka Magica is initially content to leave unanswered.

All of this, while true, is not the full story, of course. Eventually, Witches are revealed to be the Shadow Selves of magical girls both literally and metaphorically, each one originally born from a single human soul. Just as ordinary human beings are not consciously aware of the existence of their Shadow (whose existence can only be inferred by tracking the distortions it causes), magical girls are not consciously aware of the witch that dwells within their soul gem. However,humans are only capable of repression up to a certain point--eventually, the psyche will have to metaphorically "let off steam" by having the Shadow control and "act out" without us being consciously aware of what is happening.

This is what befalls Sayaka in that pivotal train scene in Episode 8: so much pressure builds up that she "blacks out"--represented by crackling static in waves beginning at her soul gem before covering her entire body--before the scene abruptly cuts away. What happens between then and when we next see Sayaka alone on a train platform is left to the audience's imagination, and it's entirely possible Sayaka doesn't know for certain, either. All that we know is that for a moment, Sayaka wasn't herself, and this does not bode well for the future.

Unfortunately for Sayaka, however, this temporary possession is not enough to save her. Exhausted, demoralized, and pushed to her limits, having denied herself the support and nourishment she needs, Sayaka succumbs to her despair and becomes a witch.

Earlier I discussed how Kyubey's contract severs the connection between body and soul, creating a dichotomy out of what was once unified wholeness. It also takes advantage of the structure of the human soul (the "Self", in Plotkin's terminology) by reifying the Shadow along with the rest of the Self as a nascent unborn witch--the chick in the egg, to use Kyubey's metaphor from Rebellion, or, alternately, a parasitic 'evil' twin. Now a tangible, physical existence, the Shadow is much more dangerous, capable of both temporary and permanent possession of the Self, the latter of which shatters the soul's container (the fixed boundaries of the soul gem itself) and releases the witch.

Splitting the soul from the body also causes incredible psychic damage because human emotions now come with an additional polarity that make them "positive" or "negative" depending on whether they darken a magical girl's soul gem. Although it is never stated outright in the original TV series that positive emotions can cleanse a magical girl's soul gem--only grief seeds--it is a logical conclusion to draw given that emotions tend to reinforce each other in recursive feedback loops and are the primary source of a magical girl's power. Regardless of the mechanics, however, the point remains: huge swathes of a magical girl's emotions--and by extension, the human experience--are now outright toxic to her, hastening the deterioration of her soul gem as much or more than the use of magic.

Grief in Madoka Magica is sticky and dense, represented as dark ooze akin to radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission in both appearance and its ability to create monsters via mutation at extremely high levels or through repeated exposure. Grief is naturally attracted to itself, thus explaining why grief seeds can be used to purify magical girls' soul gems. Instead of processing these unpleasant emotions, they can be siphoned off, but only up to a point--introducing too much grief into a grief seed will cause it to "hatch" again, releasing the witch once more into the world.

The girls give these "used" grief seeds to Kyubey to be safely disposed of, little realizing that the so-called "waste products" are actually the desired harvest. Since Incubators cannot feel emotions, they are in no danger from the exposure to human grief, which they use as fuel to reverse entropy--which, depending on your level of cynicism regarding their motives, could be anywhere from preventing the heat death of the universe to feeding themselves.

As a magical girl's opposite and counterpart, witches draw strength from these negative emotions as well as the use of magic itself, which is fundamentally a creative act, and thus naturally falls into their domain as they are stunted versions of the Muse/Beloved. The magical girl remains unaware of the witch, but the witch is always there until at last their roles reverse, and the witch dominates completely.

Like Kyubey's original division of body and soul, this final transition from hope to despair produces huge quantities of energy akin to a nuclear bomb blast. Since hope and despair appear to be equally powerful in the show's mythos, it's unclear where exactly this energy comes from. I suspect the power we observe was always there within the soul gem; it is simply no longer contained by it. However, given that emotional energy can also be generated ex nihilo in defiance of the laws of physics, it is also possible that it springs into existence at that moment as the witch's first creative act as a free entity.

As a magical girl's relationship with the physical body has already been severed, the witch immediately casts it aside like a withered husk. Although she is the magical girl's Shadow given physical form, the witch deliberately does not identify as the being she once was, and takes on a new name, appearance, and personality. Conveniently, this help to obscure the relationship between magical girls and witches until the audience personally witnesses Sayaka's transformation; it would give the game away too soon if the witches were too obviously human in the beginning.

However, since becoming a witch is essentially a kind of death, it also makes intuitive sense that it would require abandonment of the physical body--which was already "corpse-like" to begin with thanks to Kyubey's contract. In this sense, magical girls were always monstrous, but once they become witches, they've finally stopped pretending and embraced it.

Instead of a physical body, witches have labyrinths, which manifest as a series of elaborate and confusing identical passageways. Labyrinths have a deep and frequently sacred history and significance in Western myth, religion, and art across multiple cultures, the most famous being the one in ancient Crete housing the Minotaur, a monstrous man-bull who devoured anyone who entered its lair until finally defeated by the hero Theseus. (In the PMMM version of this tale, the Minotaur was likely a witch defeated not by Theseus, but his accomplice Ariadne, now a magical girl armed with equally magical thread). In the original Japanese, labyrinths are known as 結界, kekkai, or "magical barriers", a Buddhist term composed of the characters for "binding/connecting" and "world", which contains similar geographic and religious meanings.

Although the contents and structure of the labyrinth varies greatly from witch to witch, doors and doorways are a recurring visual motif. These are simultaneously a protective measure against intruders and a way for the witch to block off or compartmentalize unpleasant thoughts and memories via the well-documented "Doorway Effect"", in which moving from one location to another triggers forgetfulness or confusion.

Labyrinths in Madoka Magica serve as a protective enclosure for witches formed as an extension of their bodies, not unlike how the shells of snails and oysters are secreted by these organisms to shield their soft and tender innards from the elements. Labyrinths are thus simultaneously a location/place and the witch herself; any appearance of separation between them is an illusion. This is one reason why the labyrinths disappear when the witch herself is defeated, as it was a magical effect she was generating with--for the lack of a better term--her life essence, just as the costume and other magical creations of a magical girl vanish when that girl dies.

(The parallels between magical girls and witches here suggest that magical girls ought to be able to create labyrinth-like areas themselves, but either do not know that they can or choose not to. Some viewers have argued that the uncanny appearance of Homura's apartment or the comforts of Mami's appartment in the Blu-Ray version, are evidence of this ability, while others remain unconvinced.)

As the Muse/Beloved is the creative force within the Self, it's only natural that distorted and stunted version that is the witch would generate a unique landscape that reflects the Ego that created it. However, because the witch herself has yet to accept or move beyond the trauma(s) that led to her current state, the world she creates is inherently limited and recursive, an unstable whirlwind of negative emotions that unconsciously repeats the same events and patterns that birthed her. Each witch's eccentricities, which were once seen as nonsensical, now reflect her tragic past; the person she once was (and on some level, still is) is reflected in her very being.

Witches may be powerful, but ultimately they are victims of their own emotions, something that Sayaka notes in Rebellion when she grimly notes that witches, although they appear frightening, are actually the "most hurt". The labyrinth is as much a prison for the witch as a shelter, one that they can never escape because they always carry it with them. In the words of Marlowe's Mephistopheles, "This is hell, nor am I out of it".

If witches only tormented themselves, that would be one thing, but they actively draw ordinary human beings to them and manipulate them into committing murder and/or suicide so they can feed off both their life energy and their despair. They are attempting to fill the hunger and emptiness inside them the only way they know how--by inflicting it on other people--in a vivid example of how trauma and abuse are perpetuated from person to person in ordinary human life. Only magical girls, who are all potential witches themselves, are capable of resisting them, precisely because their powers ultimately stem from the same source--the creative human imagination.

Since the Muse/Beloved serves as the Self's psychopomp, or guide to the underworld, it makes intuitive sense that witches would also be drawn to taking others there as well. However, witches are so twisted and distorted by their own pain that they have lost sight of the true purpose of such a journey--to bring the participants back to the everyday life of the middleworld, armed with new insights about themselves and their life purpose. Instead, they drag people down into the depths to die for real.

Although it is not immediately obvious in the TV series, the supplementary materials make it clear that witches possess unique personalities and temperaments, with some being more timid or aggressive than others. While they possess at least a rudimentary degree of intelligence, they are apparently incapable of coherent speech, and thus cannot be reasoned or bargained with; their aforementioned habits of preying on ordinary people also means they cannot be left alone. The only possible response is violence; in the words of the King James Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).

Witches are solitary creatures, existing in their own private domains and rarely cross paths with their own kind. When they do, the encounter usually ends with retreat or one devouring the other; there is no such thing as comaraderie and companionship for witches, only a Darwinian impulse to eat or be eaten. Although her origins are shrouded in mystery, Walpurgisnacht, the massive witch that destroys Mitakihara in multiple timelines, is one such conglomerate witch, though it is unclear to what extent the individuals that compromise her retain their original identities or have been subsumed by the dominant personality and appearance.

Kyubey's contract is a grotesque parody of the adolescent initiation into adulthood, but as it turns out, the perpetual adolescence of magical girls is only the initial stage before their maturation into witches (魔女 majou, or "magical women", as Kyubey emphasizes at the end of Episode 8). Witches are simultaneously the culmination of a magical girl's life and its ending point; growing up now essentially equals death. Although magical girls are theoretically capable of living forever, the cost of that existence is they must cannibalize their own kind, benefiting from human suffering in the process. In this sense, magical girls and witches are not so different after all--compare also to fairy tales where witches preserve their youth and beauty by devouring human flesh and blood.

Although witches cannot form meaningful relationships with others, this does not stop them from reproducing via familiars, semi-independent manifestations that can grow up to form identical copies of the witch with their own grief seeds if they feed on enough emotional energy. As the witch is the distorted, stunted form of the Muse/Beloved, the familiars are formed from her desire to create and grow, now twisted to darker ends. Just as each artistic creation ("brainchild") bears the stamp of its creator and outlive them, so is it with the familiars; what was metaphorical in ordinary human life has once again become literal.

In addition to obscuring the witches' origins, which a simple 1:1 ratio of witches to magical girls would make blindingly obvious, the ability to get multiple souls' worth of emotional energy from a single human life and that are theoretically capable of perpetuating indefinitely, is a tremendous boon to Kyubey. (An obvious parallel in real life are immortalized cell lines, many of which are cancerous in nature, and are capable of contaminating many normal cell lines used in biomedical research.) Kyouko's strategy of allowing familiars to proliferate and become witches not only mirrors Kyubey's approach, it's also the logical precursor to the "farming" and "domestication" of witches in the later Magia Record mobile game.

However, while the witch retains her ability to create, her creativity is limited: she can only recreate herself (and thereby her trauma) over and over again in a desperate and futile attempt to relive it. Everything that was once hidden is now revealed, and yet in another example of the cruelty of Kyubey's system, that revelation precludes the possibility of healing.

Witches take on a wide variety of forms depending on their circumstances and thus are not always represented as the literal shadows of their magical girl selves. However, it's striking that Madoka's witch, Kriemhild Gretchen, is a shadow version of Madoka, greatly enlarged in size due to her incredible powers as well as one of the basic principles of shadow puppets (the closer an object is to a light source, the larger it appears). H.N. Elly (aka Kirsten) the Box Witch also briefly appears as a pigtailed silhouette inside a computer monitor, and the Shadow Witch Elsa Maria is exactly what her name suggests. Because the witch is not only foil to her magical girl self but her opponent--and because the creators are clever enough to avoid tipping their hands too early--these shadowy forms appear later in the series and grow more and more human-like as their secrets are gradually revealed.

Witches, like the Shadows that spawned them, cannot be killed; when defeated, they condense back into a grief seed, the inverted counterpart of the soul gem from which they originally emerged. (The outline of Sayaka's grief seed is clearly visible for a split second when her soul gem explodes at the tail end of Episode 8, and it can also be seen in this sketch from the official PMMM artbook.) This mirroring is also reflected in their respective names, as the Puella Magi Wiki entry notes:

[S]oul gem and grief seed are not English translations of Japanese words, but the actual English words spoken in the anime. Therefore, it's possible that it was intentionally chosen, and not merely coincidental, for the initials of grief seed (GS) to be the reverse of soul gem (SG). If so, it would appropriately reflect the role reversal that occurs when magical girls turn into witches.

Whereas soul gems are round and easy to hold, grief seeds are spiky, balancing upright on a single needle-like point. While soul gems resemble colorful Fabergé eggs wrapped in gold, grief seeds are uniformly black with delicate silver filigree. However, each grief seed bears several identifying features tracing it back to its original form, including the icon at the top of the seed in the shape of the soul gem when in magical girl form, which is identical to the one atop the soul gem in egg form. Soul gems in ring form are emblazoned with witch runes spelling out the magical girl's name, thus further cementing the connection.

However, when exposed to sufficient quantities of negative energy, witches will "hatch" once more. Thus, defeated witches are merely dormant as opposed to truly dead; they cannot be liberated, only contained. This is perhaps the cruelest element of Kyubey's many cruelties--the fact that witches are technically still alive when they are used as a power source by the Incubators, just like European witches were historically burned at the stake. How's that for nightmare fuel?

Witches cannot exist without magical girls; magical girls cannot exist without witches. Witches are the other, yes, but they are also the self, horribly transfigured and unfamiliar--they are everything that magical girls believe they are not and who dwell within them. The two are forever tied together in codependent relationship from hell, a vicious cycle with no way out that mirrors the intrapersonal struggles that each magical girl undergoes before their transformation. Magical girls make their contracts because they yearn to grow up, but the only form of adulthood and maturity possible horribly warped by suffering and despair. It seems that Homura is right, and the only way to win at Kyubey's game is not to play.

Well, not quite. Madoka uses her contract to destroy Kyubey's system from the inside, vowing to erase each witch before it is born with her own hands--including her own. This is vastly preferable to unchecked suffering that preceded it, while still allowing magical girls the autonomy to make their own choices, but, as Homura points out in the opening for Rebellion, becoming a magical girl is still fundamentally a death sentence, swapping out an eternity in hell for oblivion.

Wraiths: A Pale Imitation of the Original

At the end of the original series, witches are replaced by the wraiths, pale identical giants in Buddhist robes with pixelated faces that moan like zombies in lieu of intelligible speech. Wraiths produce a white fog referred to as "miasma", and when defeated, drop large numbers of tiny "grief cubes" that magical girls use to purify their soul gems in lieu of grief seeds. Since magical girls are defined by their struggles in battle, the universe appears to have created them ex nihilo for them to fight to place the witches--or perhaps they truly are the amalgamations of anonymous grief and suffering as witches were originally believed to be.

However, in an unexpected development for many fans, both Rebellion and the numerous manga spin-offs focus almost exclusively on witches with very little focus or mention of wraiths. This is unsurprising given that the primary appeal of witches as antagonists is their individuality and passion, character traits that the wraiths lack by design.

The wraiths are the polar opposite of witches in all respect: instead of a single powerful female entity with a unique aesthetic, the wraiths are a horde of faceless drones, fundamentally empty NPCs generated by the system for magical girls to mow down without remorse. (The lack of personhood is built into their Japanese name: 魔獣 , majuu, or "magical beasts" unlike the 魔女 majou, or "magical women" that are witches.) Is it really so remarkable that the franchise balks in favor of the much more charismatic and compelling (and tragic) witches? How could the wraiths ever possibly compare?

Out of all the many PMMM manga spin-offs, only the appropriately named "Wraith Arc" series engages with the wraiths in any meaningful sense. Even here, it attempts to spice things up by establishing four different categories of wraiths based on Buddhist themes. Post-canon fanfics involving wraiths tend to employ similar worldbuilding to liven up the plot for similar reasons--after all, it gets boring if every battle hits precisely the same beats.

However, despite these attempts at even rudimentary differentiation and categorization, the wraiths in Wraith Arc receive relatively little attention compared to those who take on appearances and abilities of established characters, including four out of five members of the Holy Quintet and Mami's deceased parents. Furthermore, although the girls defeat a host of normal wraiths early on, the bulk of their time is spent hunting for an abnormal "mutant wraith" who is eventually revealed to be a proto-witch born from Homura's memories and magic. Even in the so-called Wraith Arc that allegedly centers them, wraiths cannot compete with their predecessors and must be continually transformed into other beings in order to make them interesting and memorable opponents.

Though the trailer for the forthcoming Walpurgis no Kaiten film does feature the wraiths--conveniently labeled as such in English, Japanese, and German because they now look very different from their original design. Instead of a group of anonymous individuals, they are depicted as a massive blob that appears to have fused together, bearing a multiplicity of mouths. Given that the title name-drops the franchise's most famous witch--a conglomeration of them to boot--this suggests that the wraiths are only a temporary stepping stone before the witches return in earnest, not unlike the Nightmares in Rebellion.

Despite ostensibly erasing witches forever in the TV series ending, subsequent installments seem hell-bent on returning them to the narrative via plot devices like Kyubey's isolation field in Rebellion which prevents the Law of Cycles from accessing Homura's deteriorating soul gem, as well as whatever allows Walpurgisnacht to return in the as-yet-unreleased sequel. Perhaps Homura and Madoka were right when they pondered becoming witches together and destroying everything--witches will be with us right up to the very end.

Striving for Wholeness

Having established that witches can neither be killed nor permanently erased nor left to roam freely, what then is to be done with them? Fortunately, depth psychology not only offers a satisfying solution, it is one that is fully supported by the series' worldbuilding, although it has yet to fulfill its full potential there.

From a depth psychology perspective, the Shadow is an inherent part of the human psyche; we cannot eradicate it without also destroying ourselves. Like it or not, the Shadow is us, which is why it is so commonly depicted as a twin or double of the Self, wearing the same face beneath the monstrous facade. Thus the key to dealing with Shadow is not to fight it or run away, but to face it head on, let it speak, and accept, acknowledge, and assimilate whatever it has to say into our consciousness so the unknown becomes known and moves from the darkness into the light. Only then can we finally be fully healed--and fully whole.

This is not easy, by the way. It is difficult and frequently dangerous work, one that requires tremendous courage and emotional maturity (and with it, a corresponding relationship with the other facets of the Self). Facing the Shadow means confronting our blind spots, and learning to see what we have always overlooked, all the more fraught because there is simply no way to know what we will find before we begin. The Shadow cannot be reasoned or dealt with in the abstract, it can only be fully, experientially engaged without holding anything back--a daunting task for anyone, especially one who lacks a grounded and stable relationship with their Self to begin.

(This is one reason why Kyubey targets adolescent girls rather than adult women, precisely because the former are far more likely to lack the skills and experience for this work. They have not yet figured out who they truly are and their place in the world, which makes them more vulnerable both to Kyubey's initial offer and subsequent possession by their Shadows. Despite Kyubey's claim that adolescent girls are inherently more emotional that adolescent boys or adults of any gender, it's certainly convenient that he focuses his attention on those who are both the most vulnerable and the least valued in their society.)

At the same time, however, Shadow work is key to fulfilling our full human potential, as it holds not only the parts of ourselves that we need to reclaim, but also our greater mythopoetic gifts and purposes that will help us fulfill our life's purpose. The Shadow contains those gifts and abilities that the immature Self is not able to bear, holding them in trust for the mature and more fully developed Self when they are ready to receive them. This deeper level of Shadow work is intimately connected to a strong foundation in the West facet of the Self and the Dark Muse-Beloved, the psychopomp who guides us on these inner journeys and in the original initiation into true emotional adulthood. (In Greek myth, this descent into the underworld is known as katabasis, and whether metaphorical or literal, has the power to transform us completely.) This is one reason why Madoka Magica so frequently conflates the Shadow and the Muse/Beloved into the single figure of the witch--she is simultaneously all that is reviled and unknown in the darkness and a tremendous well of creative power waiting to be drawn on.

The opening for the original TV series depicts a naked Madoka embracing her equally naked double--her Muse/Beloved--who spins the original in a dance as her magical girl costumes appears before kissing her forehead and vanishing. In keeping with the associations of long, unbound hair and power, the Muse/Beloved's hair is significantly longer than Madoka's, although nowhere near as long as Madoka's in her goddess form. The double is simultaneously the creative force behind Madoka's magic and an intimate partner, making this a near-perfect example of the archetype. Many of the magical girl transformations in Rebellion also feature a multiplicity of selves, often in darkened, shadow-like silhouettes, and this motif appears in many of the transformation sequences in the Magia Record mobile game. In the Wraith Arc spin-off manga, the embodiment of Homura's magic takes on Homura's appearance as well.

More ominously, in The Different Story spin-off manga, Mami Tomoe is visited by a younger version of herself who attempts to persuade her into becoming a witch as her soul gem darkens. Although this character is never directly named here, she is likely the human form of Mami's canonical witch Candeloro from the PSP game. In this scene, Candeloro correctly rejects Mami's desire to "be the very picture of a perfect magical girl" and instead urges her build an ideal fantasy world where she can have tea parties with her friends forever instead of fighting. Candeloro embodies all of the "childish things" that Mami has cast aside in the name of duty and obligation; she is simultaneously a trap Mami must avoid at all costs and the lost piece of herself that she didn't even know was missing. Ironically, in order to fully mature, move beyond her trauma, Mami must embrace her abandoned child self, but she does not know how to do it without losing herself in the process. Ultimately, she is interrupted and saved by Kyouko before transforming into a witch, but tragically kills herself after she abandons her fight because she cannot bear to kill witches anymore nor risk becoming one herself.

The witch is the mature form of the magical girl, not only in the sense that she is what magical girls eventually become, but because she holds the key to true adulthood within herself (which, as we saw in Mami's case, can paradoxically involve embracing childhood). Across time periods and cultures, some form of katabasis is the key component of the initiation from childhood to adulthood; the initiation that Kyubey offers through his contract is a mockery of the real thing. He preys on his victims' desire for adulthood and their ignorance of how to achieve it on their own in order to trap them for his own ends.

For me, the most profound horror of Kyubey's system is that it hijacks the natural human process for maturity and individuation so that each magical girl is cannibalized from the inside out by the very powers she was unable to unlock because they were divided and pitted against each other in the process. Much has been said about how Kyubey's system pits magical girls against each other, forcing them to fight instead of banding together for support, but the same conflict also plays out within each girl's psyche as well. The real villains of Madoka Magica aren't the witches inside them, but the emotionless unfeeling Incubators who benefit from their suffering and death.

Given all this, is Homura right after all? Is becoming a magical girl truly a death sentence with no way out other than the oblivion offered through the Law of Cycles? Not so fast.

Because the assimilation of Shadow is a natural part of human psychic growth and maturation, it is theoretically possible for a magical girl to accomplish it, although it requires very specific circumstances in order to happen. Although Kyubey is aware of the possibility, he does not appear to take it too seriously, claiming only that he's never known it to happen when Kyouko asks him about it.

That said, there's no question that it is technically possible for someone with sufficient karmic destiny to transform a magical girl back to an ordinary person or return a witch to her magical girl self. However, such a wish would only be a restoration of the status quo ante, not a true inner healing that would prevent the beneficiary of that wish from becoming a witch again in the future. That would be an entirely different wish, one that most girls probably wouldn't think to ask for--they might be able to address the symptoms, but not the root cause.

In order for a magical girl to assimilate her Shadow, she has to first be aware of its existence. This is yet another reason why Kyubey is so cagey about the origins of witches--if magical girls knew about them beforehand, they might be able to do something about them, which in turn would impact the Incubator's bottom line. However, it seems that most girls do not discover the truth before becoming witches themselves, at which point their relationship abruptly reverses--the magical girl's original consciousness becomes the witch's Shadow, trapped in her own psyche, unable to do anything but watch helplessly from the inside as the tragedy unfolds (assuming she remains conscious at all). To put it mildly, this is not a favorable position from which to attempt soul unification and healing, which is challenging even at the best of times.

Assimilating one's Shadow is first and foremost internal work that can only be accomplished by the Ego in--outsiders might be able to guide the process or offer advice, but this kind of work cannot be done to someone from the outside. This is why Kyouko and Madoka fail in their attempt to bring Sayaka back to herself in Episode 9--the only person whom can truly heal Sayaka once she's reached this point is Sayaka herself.

Furthermore, both Kyouko and Madoka are intimately tied to Sayaka's despair--even though they are important to Sayaka, they cannot serve as mentors or guides precisely because of the tangled nature of these relationships. In real life, this is why therapists are accredited professionals with the requisite skills, training, and distance to be effective at their job rather than close friends or family members--it's much easier to look at the situation objectively and avoid falling into any habitual unhealthy behavior patterns.

Assuming that the magical girl has the knowledge of her Shadow's existence and the will, courage, and/or desperation to carry it out, she must descend into the depths of her soul and confront the witch directly. Given that the most successful magical girls in the original TV series have all developed robust subpersonalities as coping mechanisms for the all the pain they've consciously endured, this will not be an easy process--it runs counter to the rules that have governed their survival for so long, and to shed them is a kind of death in and of itself.

Although magical girls are skilled at fighting witches, this meeting with their own witch cannot be won through violence or brute strength. Instead, they must face everything they hate abou themselves, everything they've buried and repressed, everything that's hurt them, and experience all of it fully and completely and come to terms with it. Only then can they make peace with their Shadows and heal the schism within their own souls--and in so doing, become neither magical girls nor witches, but mature human beings, singular and whole. What was once corrosive poison to them is now revealed as the source of their strength; what was torn asunder is now reunited at last.

Because each witch in the TV series is introduced by name (written out in specially coded runes so it is invisible to the audience and understandable only to the audience with effort), it is highly likely that this process involves not only the magical girl recognizing the witch as a part of her, but calling her specifically by name. Names, especially true ones, have incredible power in myth and literature, and in many cultures, initiated youth are given a secret name for use on sacred occasions or among intimates and/or a new name to mark their transition and rebirth into their new lives as adults. On a metaphorical level, being able to name one's experiences for what they are is an important step in healing on a psychological level.

As I've said before, this is not easy for ordinary people in real life, especially in cultures lacking rules, rituals, and guidelines for these experiences. While the initiation into adulthood is a finite experience that only happens once, it is only the first step of the journey. Emotional maturity is not a fixed, static state and the depths of the soul are infinite--no matter how much we learn about ourselves, there will always be more to discover. These initial encounters with the Shadow and the Muse/Beloved are only the beginning of a lifelong partnership, not its culmination or end. And although these explorations of Self and Soul are profoundly healing and transformative, the bulk of the work remains slow and gradual over time rather than instantaneous. One single revelatory experience, however profound, does not erase a lifetime of trauma overnight. (As I like to put it, "introductions mark the beginning of a relationship, not its end".)

As difficult as this process is in real life, it is far worse for magical girls, who are working under the extreme handicap of not being able to fully experience the full range of their emotions lest they be literally consumed by the very part of of them they most need to connect with. It is made even more challenging by the fragmented and piecemeal nature of magical girl society, where there are no wise elders to guide them through this process--even "experienced" veterans like Mami are still emotionally children themselves. Outside of a handful of exceptions in the spin-off manga (Perenelle and Isabeau in Tart Magica, Tsubaki in Suzune Magica), there are no "adult" magical girls at all; even in the Magia Record mobile game, the oldest characters are in their late teens or early twenties at most.

This is not a coincidence, by the way--the association between magical girls and adolescence is a running theme throughout the entire mahou shoujo genre. The primary difference between Madoka Magica and earlier or lighter works is that the lack of "magical women" in-universe is the result of attrition in the line of duty vs. retirement, marriage, motherhood, or some combination thereof. This bias can also be seen in Kyubey's insistence that adolescent girls are fundamentally more emotional--and therefore, more powerful--than adults, which Magia Record makes more explicit with its claim that surviving magical girls lose their powers as they age. The dirty secret is that maturity comes with its own powers, one that society would rather channel into carefully defined feminine roles of wives and mothers rather than acknowledge as a force in its own right, but this is rarely depicted in media partly because it is not deemed profitable and partly because it challenges both societal mores and the imagination.

Rebellion: Imperfect Solutions

Rebellion picks up where the TV series left off by exploring several different ways in which magical girls can experience emotional wholeness, or at least begin to work towards it. These build off the depth psychology concepts touched on thus far, while also introducing new and more complex elements.

The first way is through the cultivation of relationships with others that mirror the inner relationship with the Self, effectively projecting that same intrapersonal dynamic onto interpersonal ones. Because Rebellion is a visual medium focused primarily on Homura's interiority, this is easiest and fastest way to demonstrate the other girls' emotional states, aided and abetted by Urobuchi's fascination with dualities and of characters finding their emotional fulfilment with their narrative opposites. The tiny and interconnected cast means that any pairing can yield important insights and serve as narrative foils, but the primary relationships we are meant to focus on are Madoka and Homura, Kyouko and Sayaka, and Mami and Nagisa, the latter of whom who we previously knew as the witch Charlotte who devoured Mami alive in the original TV series.

While the other pairings maintain more or less their original dynamics in spite of their different circumstances and varying degrees of memory loss, Rebellion flips Mami and Nagisa's relationship from that of virtual strangers (despite the incredible, albeit one-sided intimacy of predator and prey) to found family. Mami's loneliness and emotional neediness are eased through her relationship with Nagisa in her doll form, Bebe ("Baby"); her caretaking skills find an appropriate outlet as Bebe's surrogate mother, lovingly detailed by the photos on the walls of her apartment of the two of them reading together and Bebe's scribbled crayon portrait of Mami. The two are opposites in every way, and yet they both benefit from the relationship--Mami freely admits she's happier than she's ever been, and Nagisa-as-Bebe revels in the "cheese" (i.e., love) and attention she craves. Not only does Mami fight at "peak form" to rescue Bebe when Homura kidnaps her, she accepts Nagisa's subsequent explanations with remarkable aplomb over Kyubey's instead of turning on her friends like she did in the TV series, because she knows and trusts Bebe deeply.

However, while human beings are social animals who need strong relationships with others (something which Rebellion argues is the cruelest cost of Madoka's fusion with the Law of Cycles) and that all of the characters are more psychological stable together than apart, it's equally true that interpersonal relationships are no substitute for healthy relationships with ourselves and can rapidly become toxic and co-dependent when taken to extremes. Thus, Mami's devotion to Nagisa in the outer world does not mean that she can neglect her relationship to the various facets of her Self in her inner world, who, as we have seen, often take the form of a young child. The same is equally true for the other characters, especially Homura, whose deep feelings with Madoka do not preclude her deep self-loathing.

Rebellion also gives a tantalizing glimpse of what happens to those magical girls who have been taken by the Law of Cycles, and thus have technically "died" in the outer world. These include Sayaka, Nagisa, and many of the witches from the original TV series, whose familiars and paraphernalia (which, as mentioned earlier, are also a part of them), who appear briefly during the battle against Homulilly's army.

Earlier, I spoke of the Law "erasing" witches from existence, but that is not quite accurate--although they have disappeared from the everyday world, witches are not destroyed, they are transferred into the custody of the Law of Cycles. In this sense, Madokami functions exactly like a living grief seed by absorbing grief and despair into herself, except that her capacity is infinite and inexhaustible, stretching across space, time, and dimensions. In addition to the parallels with Kanon Bodhisattva and the Virgin Mary, Madokami also evokes the Buddhist personification of the Perfection of Wisdom, or prajna paramita, one hymn to which reads in part, "Unstained, the entire world cannot stain her. She is a source of light and from everyone in the triple world she removes darkness." Madokami is both the result of a miracle and a miracle in and of herself; she is a purifying force representing the power of emotions to make "something out of nothing" and reverse entropy. Not only is her entire existence a paradox, let us not forget that she also contains her own witch within herself, although the nature of their relationship remains unclear. She is magical girl and witch at once while transcending them both, as was the goal for Shadow assimilation; however, in so doing she is no longer a solely a human being but an abstract concept.

Because each magical girl and her witch are one being with two different forms, they both are absorbed by the Law simultaneously. This means that they both co-exist under the auspices of the Law, although what this means in practice is more complicated, with Rebellion offering several different examples of what this might look like.

As a general rule, Sayaka and her witch form Oktavia appear as two separate but linked entities. This "split personality" allows Sayaka to fight on her own and have emotional moments with Kyouko while Oktavia clashes directly with Homulilly. The same thing happens at the end of the film when Sayaka confronts Homura directly and Oktavia manifests behind her, only to be sealed away while Sayaka remains.

Meanwhile, Nagisa does the complete opposite: she fully embodies her witch Charlotte in both doll and worm forms, appearing as witch or magical girl instead of both at the same time. In an iconic moment that lives rent-free in my brain, she pulls Charlotte's clown mask over her face while in magical girl form and becomes a hybrid being instead of splitting the way Sayaka does with Oktavia in that same scene. It's not clear exactly why Nagisa has chosen this method, but it does suggest she is more comfortable with appearing as a witch in certain contexts compared to Sayaka, and it illustrates yet another way in which their philosophies radically diverge.

Regardless of the details, both girls appear to be fully comfortable with their witch forms, and rely on them in battle instead of struggling against themselves. Sayaka in particular has matured tremendously, expressing far more emotional nuance than she ever did in the TV series. Not only is she able to poke fun at herself over her former crush on Kyousuke, she is deeply sympathetic to Homulilly's plight even as the witch's struggles exasperate her (although not she's not mature enough to resist taunting Homura and showing off some of her new abilities after rescuing her from Mami). She is now capable of accepting her regrets without being consumed by them--and, better yet, actually doing something about them by confessing her feelings to Kyouko. Although we don't get to see Nagisa in human form in the original TV series in order to compare the two, the same is likely true for her as well.

The problem is that Sayaka and Nagisa's maturity and self-acceptance comes at a tremendous cost. Though they have not ceased to exist, they are also technically dead, and can no longer live in the ordinary world; depending on your interpretation of Madoka Magica's cosmology, they are angels, ghosts, or both at the same time. Though this fate is infinitely preferable to an eternity as a witch, both Nagisa and Sayaka accept the task of accompanying Madokami into Homura's labyrinth in order to experience all that they cannot have in "heaven". For Sayaka, she gets to see Kyouko one more time and fight side-by-side in a way she never could in life; for Nagisa, it's a chance to eat "cheese" one more time (both literally and metaphorically) and have a loving relationship with Mami that she couldn't have with her own mother.

Initiation into adulthood--or any life transition--requires the metaphorical death of the old self and rebirth into a new identity, but the mercy offered by the Law of Cycles is a literal one. While it's good that Nagisa and Sayaka were finally able to make peace with themselves, it doesn't change the fact that they paid for it with their lives. This is vividly illustrated in the scene where Sayaka summon Oktavia to battle, in which she appears as a shadowy silhouette animated in the same style as the Shadow Witch Elsa Maria from the TV series, who stabs herself in the heart, releasing an ocean of black blood from which Oktavia rises, while Nagisa is ground up in a blender and re-made in a candy mold. Though they may have attained the self-knowledge in the underworld necessary for their initiation into adulthood, their tragedy is that they must remain there forever instead of returning to the every day world they originally came from.

Because the Law of Cycles contains all the witches it has absorbed within itself, all of the witches from the original series are also present, although we only see their familiars and paraphernalia, which are technically extensions of their own bodies. Sayaka is able to summon "rental" versions of these familiars to challenge Homulilly's army, which take on attributes of her own witch (e.g, the cotton-ball servants of the Rose Witch Gertrud now have rainbow mermaid tails like Oktavia instead of their usual butterfly wings for feet). Interestingly, Walpurgisnacht's elephant-drawn chariot is repurposed as a vehicle for Sayaka and Nagisa, further cementing the parallels between a witch born from a conglomeration of witches and the Law of Cycles (itself a conglomeration of witches, albeit in a much more benign form).

At the end of the film, both Sayaka and Nagisa are pulled into the resurrected Mikitahara after Homura separates Madoka from the Law of Cycles, though how much of this was intentional on Homura's part is deliberately left ambiguous. Witches and magical girls are capable of co-existing in this new reality, as is evident when Sayaka summons Oktavia to fight the self-declared "devil" Homura--but, in an ironic and fitting twist, her return to mortal existence comes at the price of losing her memories of who she once was. Nagisa, however, embraces her new status, laughing and spinning with glee at her restoration instead of challenging Homura; the brief appearance of one of Charlotte's familiars immediately prior to this suggests that she does retain her memories and abilities and simply chooses not to use them. Under the Law of Cycles, the price of self-knowledge is death; under the "Devil" (who has a deep and intimate understanding of witches herself), it is collusion by inaction. It's unclear to what extent this is true for the other witches previously under the auspices of the Law, but the brief glimpse we get of the Rose Witch Gertrud's Anthonies suggests that they are present in some capacity as well.

However, the primary focus of Rebellion is the journey through Homura's psyche in which the "world" around her is eventually revealed to be inside her own soul gem--and thus, an extension of herself. As she physically explores the city, she learns more about herself, and this knowledge in turn transforms the landscape around her, which grows increasingly more surreal until it finally breaks down completely. Unbeknownst to herself (at least at first), Homura has been forcibly sent on exactly the kind of deep soul journey to confront her Shadow that I described earlier. Unsurprisingly, she discovers it wears her own face--vividly foreshadowed in an early scene by the hordes of zombie-like townsfolk wearing hand-drawn masks with Homura's face on them.

Ironically, Homura's jailer Kyubey is also her mentor on this journey, guiding her in a twisted parody of the mascot-figure/magical girl relationship. Unable to resist the temptation to monologue, Kyubey unhesitatingly spells out exactly what is happening to her in copious detail. (This is only possible because this version of Kyubey has no first-hand memories of witches and is trying to reverse-engineer one based on Homura's account; it's an open question whether the Kyubey of the TV series would have been so forthcoming.) Such is Kyubey's arrogance and overconfidence that it never occurs to him Homura might defy him or that he has unwittingly handed her the knowledge she needs to make to her escape until it is too late.

While every other witch in the series thus far has formed outward, with their soul gem unable to contain the immense pressure and bursting open, Homura's labyrinth forms internally in her still-intact soul gem. This is entirely Kyubey's fault, the deliberate result of his experiment to isolate her gem from the Law of Cycles; such a thing simply could not have happened under the normal rules of the old system or the new one without his deliberate interference. It's unclear how much of the unique properties of Homura's labyrinth are due to growing internally and how much of the "self-sufficient" nature of her witch (i.e., feeding on her own despair instead of those of others; inviting ordinary people inside but not harming them) is due to her own personality and experiences, but either way, it works in her favor--because Homura is so focused on herself, she is able to experience epiphanies that other witches never could, which ultimately prove to be the key to her liberation.

Thus, the basic requirements for Shadow assimilation I outlined earlier have been met: Homura is fully aware of what is happening to her as it is happening and even accelerates the process. Furthermore, unlike every magical girl in Madoka's new universe (not to mention Kyubey), she knows exactly what being a witch entails because she's seen them and fought them herself. She also has strong incentives not to call on the Law of Cycles for help--partly because of her habitual refusal to rely on others, but also because doing so will endanger Madoka. Thus, Homura has no choice to face her witch head-on, and in doing so, willingly chooses to become her. This is far more dangerous than the usual method of Shadow assimilation (acknowledging the Shadow as part of the greater Self while remaining identified with that Self), precisely because Homura loses herself in the process.

All of this comes to a head (literally!) inside Homulilly's skull, in which Homura revisits her most traumatic memory--the time she murdered her best friend. In the original scene in the TV series, it is not raining, but here the falling rain mirrors both Homura's tears and the blurring and spotting of film on a projector; memory is malleable, and this scene is not meant so much as an accuate representation of what actually happened, but how Homura feels about it. Homura simultaneously experiences this memory as her younger, more innocent "Moemura" self, weeping over Madoka's prone body, and as her older, more jaded "Coolmura" self, standing over her and bearing witness. However, instead of comforting her younger self, or offering her mercy, forgiveness, or compassion--what she needs to do in order to heal--Homura points a gun at herself and looks away. She is disgusted by what she sees as her own weakness and believes she must extinguish this miserable, weeping wretch within herself. (Recall from earlier that Homura's primary coping mechanism for dealing with trauma is emotional numbness; what was previously metaphorical is now once again literally enacted.) At the same time, "Coolmura" is also targeting another Homura, now envisioned as a vaguely girl-shaped purple blob with a single giant eye for a face, who is the witch, the magical girl, and the Wounded Child in one.

This scene is intercut with Homura's conversation (real or imagined) with Madoka, who reassures her that "Homura will always be Homura, no matter what" and appears as a giant arm covered with self-harm scars that reaches out to her and offers her comfort and support she cannot offer herself. The purple blob Homura weeps and confesses her "sins" (i.e., her deepest feelings and desires), and we see that she is holding Madoka's hand--the real Madoka who has been in the labyrinth with her this whole time, not the goddess version of her.

What happens next is inspired by Madoka, but is not Madoka's own doing. Homura recalls her purpose and creates her own miracle, born from her desire to see Madoka one more time: "And if I had to go so far as to betray that wish... Yes, I knew I could shoulder any sin. No matter what I became, I knew I'd be fine with it. As long as I could have you by my side."

With this admission, Homura emerges from the blob of purple goo as the bow-wielding Homura from the TV series ending, identical to the physical body that sleeps in the world outside. Together, she and Madoka break the Incubator's seal and everything returns to "normal". Mami places Homura's still intact soul gem--now colored a weird mixture of black and blue with spider-like red veins instead of the usual healthy purple--and waits for the Law of Cycles to take Homura away. For the first time in the movie, Homura wakes up... and in a classic PMMM twist, the audience realizes that what we thought we were looking at was something completely different.

Homura has fully embraced her Shadow, but instead of acknowledging and forgiving herself in the process (i.e., assimilating her Shadow in an emotionally healthy way), she has chosen to identify solely as the "Evil" side of herself, the ruthless part that would break any and every rule to achieve her goals. This is not the unconscious kind of Shadow possession I discussed earlier with Sayaka, but a deliberate choice, a chosen role and what Plotkin would call conscious archetypal possession--"enacting a potential that exists in all human psyches but that is rarely embodied in one's culture and community". In so doing, Homura has moved beyond the magical girl-witch dichotomy and gained tremendous powers as a result

Now possessing both the power and the opportunity to keep Madoka by her side, Homura does just that. Instead of surrendering to the Law of Cycles and going gentle into that good night, she seizes the goddess's hands and tears the human Madoka from her, just as Kyubey originally did with his isolation field. In that moment, rainbow shadows emerge from her soul gem and their true color is revealed--not the color of curses, but the color of love. Given that the domain of the Muse/Beloved (and by extension, the witch) includes romantic love, it could hardly be anything else.

As with the healthy form of Shadow assimilation, Homura has united what Kyubey has split asunder so that what once served as a poison to her (pain and despair) is now the source of her power. She does this not by acknowledging her own human wholeness as a person who is capable of both good and bad, but by complete identification with her dark side. As she later explains to Kyubey in her own monologue, her weaknesses, and failures and suffering--and her ruthlessness--are all proof of her love for Madoka, so that "even pain is dear to me".

The contents of Homura's soul gem spill forth and cover the entire universe, erasing any distinction for between the world and herself. The catch is that even though her labyrinth is infinite, it is still a prison--just as witches cannot escape their own hells because they carry them wherever they go, the same is true for Homura, except there's no longer anywhere to escape to. "This is hell, nor am I out of it" is even more appropriate for a self-proclaimed Devil than it was for the witches.

Within her newly expanded labyrinth, Homura's power is absolute and her imagination is law. Thus, she can kick aside her own thread of fate (represented by the pink spool that briefly appears as she floats in the void), and shatter her own soul gem, which was only a crutch and illusion like the one she destroyed upon learning she was a witch. The symbolic representation of herself and her powers is the so-called "Dark Orb", which bears the name Homulilly rather than Homura like her original soul gem ring--further proof of how strongly Homura now identifies with her Shadow self.

Now we see why witches are free in the resurrected Mitakihara--which is simultaneously a world full of witches, a world created by a witch, and a witch who is the world, all in one. As the master of her labyrinth, Homura has created a world to suit herself--but the world is not stable because Homura herself is not stable, and the two are one and the same. It is also fundamentally a static world, in which the characters are forced into the same static roles they have previously occupied and are not permitted to grow or change beyond them--and thus require Homura's constant vigilance (represented by the giant rotating eyeball circling the city in a literal panopticon) and active interference (suppressing Madoka and Sayaka's memories and identities) in order to maintain.

I want to be clear that though Homura herself identifies as a monster, I do not believe that she is one. Homura is a traumatized fourteen-year-old girl whose life has been a living hell; when forcibly imprisoned inside her own psyche, she accomplishes what very few people in real life would be able to do with no training or guidance, only the same raw determination that kept her going for so long in her loops. The closest thing she has to a mentor in this work is Kyubey, an alien who cannot understand human emotions and considers them to be a mental illness in and of themselves, and actively roots for her destruction.

Not only that, what Homura accomplishes in Rebellion is completely unprecedented in-universe. There was no way the Incubator could have possibly predicted what would happen because the chain of events that led up to that moment were so complicated and unlikely, spanning across multiple timelines. It was a tremendous achievement and a genuine triumph. It was also woefully incomplete--one stepping stone on her journey rather than its culmination. But if Homura had somehow managed to reconcile with herself Rebellion instead of side-stepping the issue, a single revelation, no matter how incredible, cannot heal decades of trauma overnight; it would merely be the first step in the work of a lifetime.

Homura did what she had to do to survive, and by subsuming her identity completely into her own darkness, she succeeded even when the odds were stacked against her. However, as I explained earlier, psychologically effective strategies do not necessarily mean healthy ones; there's no question that the route Homura chose saved her from a terrible fate, but it did not and could not heal her. Rebellion ends with Homura's apparent victory, but it's ultimately a hollow one; the war of childhood survival is not yet over and will never be over because Homura is still hiding from her full Self instead of accepting it:

It's important to keep in mind, when you first uncover an element of your Sinister Shadow, this does not reveal you are socially unacceptable, immature, sinful, loathsome, villainous, black hearted, or demonic, and that you must immediately repent, reform, or change yourself in order to eliminate or suppress your negative qualities. (Well, at least it doesn't necessarily mean this, and even if it does, this is not the primary meaning.)

Homura is not interested in suppressing her negative qualities anymore--she would rather embody them--but the same principle applies: though she might identify as demonic, that is not the same as actually being demonic, though the demonic side of her holds incredible resources and abilities that she needs to incorporate into her psyche.

However, this is not a substitute for healing in and of itself--and in fact, serves as a kind of running away from her full Self in all its complexity. Acknowledging and accepting her humanity in all its aspects is difficult and painful--it's so much easier to consciously embrace the role of the Devil instead. This way, when she's "bad" she deserves the ire and scorn of her friends who will recognize her for what she truly is. Recall that Homura's familiars include the Clara Dolls, a gang of children whose primary function is to mock, torment, and bully her--Homura is merely replicating this particular aspect of her inner life (which in turn might reflect her early childhood) into her relationships with others rather than break the pattern entirely.

The Devil is evil, yes, but also sexy, powerful, and mysterious--things that Homura has rarely, if ever felt, in her life up to this point. Is there any wonder she's enjoying the experience, even though it also makes her miserable? (Especially if it makes her miserable, given that she's well-practiced in feeding on her own pain and anguish, and those feelings are intimately associated with love for her.)

While I wouldn't call it healthy, Homura's situation is far better than the numbness and emotional shutdown she experienced in the TV series--her delight as she dances alone in the moonlight in the post-credits scene is completely genuine. In a very real sense, Homura is more in touch with herself than she's ever been, but she still has a lot of inner work to do to be fully whole. The primary difference between the TV series ending and Rebellion's is that the stakes are a hell of a lot higher (heh), and Homura's psychodrama is now set to play out on a grand stage with the rest of the cast as witnesses and participants.

Thus, from a depth psychology perspective, it's not surprising that they key visual for the Walpurgis no Kaiten sequel movie so prominently features two Homuras facing off against each other. Homura may have reached a temporary detente with her Shadow (let's call it a devil's bargain), but as with any role, the longer she embodies it, the more likely it is to take on a life of its own and escape her control. Given the profound influence of Friedrich "Gott is Tot!" Nietzsche on Rebellion, it suggests Walpurgis no Kaiten might well be following another famous maxim: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Remember when I said Shadow work was inherently dangerous? This is why--especially in a labyrinth where the rules of reality are governed by Homura herself, meaning that her Shadow has access to the exact same powers she does, and none of the scruples.

Once again, the series appears to be returning to the motif of witch-as-double we explored earlier. Having vanquished all her external enemies, Homura's conquest appears to be complete, but one opponent remains and once again, it wears her face. Being a part of her, it cannot be destroyed without destroying herself, and the struggle will inevitably continue until she assimilates her Shadow or it consumes her.

Magia Record: An Alternate Path

The spinoff Magia Record mobile game is set in an alternate universe in which Madokami has refrained from exercising her powers over witches, and is thus a separate continuity from the main storyline in the TV series and continued in Rebellion. Coupled with a staggeringly large number of characters, the game's premise and its expanded worldbuilding allow for some interesting innovations and developments from a depth psychology perspective that are not possible in the original series.

Magia Record introduces Mitama Yakumo, originally a NPC who serves as shopkeeper who was later made playable and given an extended backstory. Because the nature of her powers makes it challenging for her to fight witches, she prefers to take a support role, trading her services to other magical girls in exchange for grief seeds.

As a "Coordinator", her primary power is "Adjustment", or the ability to alter magical girls' soul gems. Between this and her status as one of the oldest magical girls in the game, she is both mentor and therapist to most of the characters. Her job requires deep personal trust, as she literally holds their souls in her hands and can see into their memory. Most of her clients naturally wish to unlock their hidden powers to become stronger, although they may also ask for cosmetic changes to their outfits--not as frivolous as it initially appears given how their costumes reflect their personalities. Notably, Mitama learned to Adjust from an older girl who serves as her own mentor; she and the other Coordinators thus form a loose network and and even work together on occasion. Mitama's role necessitates cooperation and interaction with other magical girls, and she serves as an important hub in the fledgling magical girl society in Kamihama City.

In a classic example of the "wounded healer" archetype, Mitama's abilities stem from her own deep personal trauma: she wished to bring ruin upon the city in which she lived, which gifted her with an incredibly destructive magic which, paradoxically, is useless for destroying witches, but can also be used to shape and influence human souls. (In the anime adaptation, Mitama is deeply impacted by the despair and darkness she observes within other girls' souls and shields herself as best she can to avoid empathic contagion, which in turn comes with its own mental health issues.) Mitama has thus taken her wound and transformed it into something positive, using it as both inspiration and fuel for her life's work.

As on might expect from people associated with the Westerly work of self-exploration as a profession, Coordinators are also associated with the magician archetype; Mitama's own magical costume is a feminine interpretation of the classic stage magician and her primary weapon is a cloth fused with magic that she uses to make things disappear. Her witch's name is Totentanz (German for "Dance of the Dead", aka the dance macabre), harkening back to her original wish to bring destruction and death upon everyone.

Previously, we saw how the Shadow, the Muse/Beloved, and the witch were portrayed as mirror images of the magical girl, but Magia Record makes that connection even more explicit with the introduction of the Doppel, whose name is an obvious reference to the German word Doppelgänger ("double-walker"). Although the concept of a sinister, unsettling, or mysterious alternate self can be found across many cultures--particularly as an omen of death or misfortune--the word itself dates to a 1796 novel by the German author Jean Paul, thus placing it solidly in Madoka Magica's German Romantic lineage.

Doppelgangers are a frequent motif in fantasy, suspense, and horror, used to explore the nature of self and identity. A recurring theme is the double supplanting the original and taking over their life, leaving the original an outcast in the process. Particularly in Gothic novels, the doppelganger represents the original's evil or repressed Shadow Self, which may be represented in their personality, appearance, or both. Sometimes individuals and their doppelgangers share a telepathic or empathetic connection that allows them to perceive and feel each other's actions directly. Depending on the work, they might be the result of time travel, cloning, parallel universes, or the supernatural, or their origins may be deliberately left unexplained.

Doppels in Magia Record function as a more controlled form of the temporary Shadow possession that Sayaka undergoes during the train scene in Episode 8 of the original TV series. Thanks to a special barrier around the city of Kamihama known as the Automatic Purification System, instead of permanently turning into a witch when a girl's soul gem turns black, the system uses that energy to force the witch to exist as a separate but connected entity, whose powers can be directed and controlled to some extent by the magical girl. Depending on the context, this "connection" may be physical as well, with the Doppel emerging from some part of the magical girl's body, such as her hands or head. The magical girl can use this Doppel to fight, drawing on the strong powers she would normally have to become a witch in order to use.

As a bonus, the release of the Doppel completely purifies and cleanses the soul gem, thus serving as a "release valve" in a way that Sayaka's temporary possession did not. Any excess energy is released directly to Kyubey, thus giving the Incubators an incentive not to meddle with the system. It's not a coincidence that the Automatic Purification System was constructed through the combined efforts of multiple magical girls, many of whom spent a great deal of time quizzing Kyubey and workshopping their wishes in order to mimic and duplicate his powers.

Doppels are powerful, but they are not without risks--in the game, each summoning triggers a confrontation between the magical girl and the witch, with the witch attempting to take control. In the anime adaptation, excess Doppel use can result in the user being permanently stuck in their Doppel form--although unlike becoming a witch, this process is technically reversible by a Coordinator and regular Adjustment sessions can help prevent this from happening in the first place. Doppels that have seized control are also capable of making labyrinths, and may revert back to normal if defeated.

With Doppels, the power of the witch is somewhat tamed, but it would be a mistake to call it truly domesticated, as it is prone to flare-ups and possessions even when carefully used. There's no doubt that Doppels are a tremendous improvement over becoming permanently becoming a witch or being completely erased from existence, but they are manifestly not the same thing as assimilation of Shadow or a healthy relationship with the Self. Although they are a part of the magical girl and a potent source of power, Doppels are used more like tools than partners, and maintain a separate identity and appearance.

However, although it is not common, it is technically possible in the game for a magical girl and her witch to form a single hybrid entity known as a Doppel Version, where the magical girl takes on certain aspects of the Doppel's appearance while remaining awake and in control. This is a fairly recent development, but one that I am watching with great interest, as it is the closest I have yet seen to a genuine and healthy relationship between a magical girl and her witch.

Unfortunately, because Magia Record takes place in an alternate continuity, little if any of these innovations carry over to the main series. However, the game provides genuine proof that the only way to save everyone is for multiple girls to work together to create a system where no one is excessively burdened and magical girls have a chance to grow and mature and develop a better relationship with their respective witches instead of being prematurely devoured by them.

Conclusion

Although I suspect that both Plotkin and the creators of Madoka Magica would be surprised by my juxtaposition of their respective works, there's no question in my mind that the combination is a fitting one despite not necessarily being a reading intended by either party. While the series itself is not explicitly nature-focused, the unique melding of character and landscape in its worldbuilding via the witch's labyrinths means that an ecologically focused approach to depth psychology is both an apt and illuminating one.

From this perspective, Kyubey's magical girl system hijacks the natural human process of emotional and spiritual maturation and splits what should be whole into parts, dividing body and soul as well as pitting the witch (simultaneously the Muse/Beloved, or creative power of the Self, and the Shadow, or its unconscious repressed elements) against the magical girl (the Ego, consisting of whatever facets of Self she is able to draw on). Although it has yet to be fully realized in canon, depth psychology tells us that the ultimate solution to both the characters' individual traumas and the larger problem of witches is the assimilation of the Shadow into the Self, and hints of what this might look like have appeared in the follow-ups to the original TV series in multiple guises. As a bonus, it also explains why witches are the heart and soul of the franchise, and why they will always return in some fashion or another even after they were ostensibly erased.

Based on the final product, it's clear that while Gen Urobuchi, Genkidan Inu Curry, and the production team behind Madoka Magica may not have had Plotkin's work specifically in mind, they were nonetheless are strongly versed in the West facet of the Self based on their ability to convincingly and creatively map its many facets within the story that they created together. While I cannot speak for everyone, Urobuchi, at least, has gone on the record about his own journey to the underworld and its subsequent influence on his creative life:

For me if I consider the “hidden history” in my life which had the impact of causing influence in my creation, I remember when I was 24 I got sick and almost died. I contracted some epidemic and had fever. It got so dangerous that if the treatment had been delayed I could have died. What I could not forget is the feeling I had when I was in recuperation. Although I did not suffer grave wounds or anything like that, well, I felt that I was in a way erased from the society then. I could not get away from the feeling that I was just like a dead man. What I felt during that time is very much alive even now in my works.

...By spending several months living like a dead man, I feel that I obtained something like the “eyesight of the dead”. It was unmistakably a precious experience when I could let my imagination to wander free regarding my death.

Like the characters within his stories, Urobuchi found immense creative power in his katabasis; his skillful use of the concepts and archetypes of depth psychology has its origins in direct experience. Storytelling is an especially powerful medium to express these deep truths of the Self because each story is analogous to the Self, with each character a different facet of a single narrative whole. By making his story a fantastical one, Urobuchi is able to vividly and effectively convey these insights in ways that one wedded to a more conventionally "realistic" style could not.

At the same time, the genius of art is that it rarely, if ever, means one thing and one thing only--much to the consternation of those who, like the Incubators, would rather have everything be clearly and explicitly spelled out with no nuance or ambiguity. This plasticity is one reason behind Madoka Magica's widespread appeal across drastically different demographics is because it is capable of holding multiple meanings and readings at once, all of which are internally consistent within themselves if not each other. Furthermore, any attempt to analyze a work reveals as much about the critic as it does the work itself; though I believe that my reading is amply supported by the text and it resonates with my own perspective and experiences, I cannot make any claims regarding its absolute truth beyond that.

If you think my account in this essay is complicated, convoluted, and contradictory--well, so is the Self, and the West facet in particular. This is one reason why the early schools of depth psychology were eventually supplanted and superseded by the behaviorists and more empirically reductionist schools--not because depth psychology had nothing to offer, but because those insights were so highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable that they were difficult to generalize or replicate on a broad scale. It is easier and more straightforward to break a complex system into its component parts than it is to understand it in situ where it is both interconnected and interdependent with the world around it. As I've said before, reductionism can be a useful tool--but it is also one that can lead to truly horrifying results, as is vividly demonstrated by the Incubators time and time again.

No matter what the Incubators might claim, true "objectivity" is a myth; that they believe in it so fervently is proof of their own arrogance and myopia. They are incapable of acknowledging or accepting that, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it, "the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of". For all its darkness, Madoka Magica ultimately sides with the human heart and spirit, not emotionless logic; thus, the Incubators are foiled again and again and lack the capacity to understand how or why.

Madoka's solution to the problem of witches was a partial one at best in that it allows magical girls to make peace with their witches at the cost of their own lives. Homura's innovative and unexpected solution to the problem of her own witch represents an improvement in some respects, but neglects to address the real business of healing and wholeness within herself and others and is thus inevitably doomed to failure. It remains to be seen if whatever arises out of the ashes in Walpurgis no Kaiten will be any more successful--perhaps the third time will finally get it "right".

Whatever the final ending, however, it will likely involve both Homura and Madoka accepting and loving themselves as much as each other, acknowledging and accepting their witches instead of being consumed by them, and becoming equal and willing partners who will once again remake the universe through the combined power of their mutual wish. In this ideal and as-yet-hypothetical world, every magical girl will have the opportunity to live a full and satisfying life as emotionally mature and whole human beings that has thus far been denied to them, while still being able to exercise their creative powers in tangible ways. The road to this ending may be long and convoluted, doubling and looping back on itself again and again, but I trust that we will get there eventually--and if not, that's what fanfiction is for.