More Take-Home Lessons from Madoka Magica

This time from The Final Message of Madoka Magica

 I feel that the final message Madoka is offering is that although there will always be negativity and tragedy in this world, even a single act of hope can seem like a miracle.

 I liked the fact that Madoka did not wish for despair to disappear, as some would suggest that she should have. It is a balance thing. In order to have hope, one must suffer or have some form of despair. To have courage, one must experience fear. To love, one must also feel hate and indifference. That is the nature of balance... Madoka is smart enough (or Buddhist enough) to know the effect that her wish can have.


I also loved how this makes Madoka the precursor to all the magical girls we know in anime — without Madoka, there would be no Sakura Kinomoto, no Pretty Cures, no Sailor Moons, etc. More than a world reset, this was in some ways a genre reset, and a pretty brilliant one at that.


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Onto my main point, for all the theorizing about the ending from bloggers all over, genre comparisons, claims for deconstructionism, religious references, and general fandom fervor digging out every cipher and mystery in the series, everyone seems to be confused as to why Homura at the end of the series is one of the few to remember Madoka.*


I believe it is in the fourth episode that Homura herself says that, Mahou Shoujo who die in a witch's realm are forever missing persons, lost and forgotten to the rest of humanity. Madoka is adamant that she will never forget Mami, to which Homura replies that is the happiest thing a Mahou Shoujo can hope for, and that she is fiercely jealous. Madoka, in a crazy instance of foreshadowing, instantly and without hesitation extends this to Homura as well.


Homura's wish, as vaguely as I have gathered, is something along the lines of protecting Madoka. Protecting her image and her memory, I would argue, is the only thing left for Homura to do once Madoka makes her wish at the end of the series. More detail once I've actually watched the episodes.


*I read somewhere that her brother apparently remembers her too, and her mother has a vague sense of "if I had a daughter..."; parallel world theories aside,^ 


^I'm not quite ready to call whether Homura's time travelling resulted in parallel worlds or merely rewound time. If the former is true then, barring a cross-dimension spanning level of omnipotence granted Madoka, the series is only truly "solved" [ie Madoka's wish only comes true] in one branching of the universe. Such branching, however, could possibly resolve the seeming paradox that is the breadth of power granted Madoka by Kyuubei.), 


Omake From TV Tropes:

Fun fact: priority one for someone with an interest in extending the life of the universe would be shutting off all the stars, which throw away vast amounts of energy just to light up dust and dead rock.