[Madoka Ending Spoilers] Witches and Magical Girls: Western and Eastern Fantasy Tropes in Madoka Magica
The depiction of magical girls in Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (2011), particularly their relationship to the monstrous “witches”, has raised a lot of interest among the fandom. These heroines and the malicious demons have a symbiotic, ouroboros-like relationship; witches become fodder for the magical girls’ power, and magical girls “grow up” to become witches themselves. On the surface this seems to be a Nietzschean sort of warning: He who fights monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. However, I would like to posit here that the magical girl-witch relationship is meant to reflect an oxymoron present in fantasy literature overall.
Madoka writer Gen Urobuchi is, if nothing else, familiar with Western folklore and modern genre fantasy. Many of his works involve familiar shapes from Western fantasy: his 2001 Vampirdzhija Vjedogonia is an outrageous, Dracula-esque vampire tale; 2006’s Fate/zero includes legendary figures from Arthurian myth and the Fenian Cycle; his most famous work pre-Madoka, Saya no Uta, borrows heavily from H.P. Lovecraft’s horror-fantasy world. At the same time, writing for visual novel company Nitroplus (which specializes in hentai projects) Urobuchi is doubtless aware of his otaku audience and the anime tropes that they feed upon. In his works he blends the sensibilities of both Japanese and Western fantasy, and in works like Madoka, he confronts the contradictions that arise between them.
The magical girl, the “apprentice witch”, has been a staple of anime since the 70s, and she is especially familiar to the viewers to whom Madoka is pitched— adult viewers who grew up with Kiki’s Delivery Service and Sailor Moon and Pretty Sammy. The character of the magical girl is a familiar, friendly one. Magical girls are well-meaning, loveable and endearing. They may not have grown into their magic yet, but they are learning, and all they want to do is help people with their powers. In them, all the goodness and sweetness and enthusiasm of childhood (especially girlhood) takes form as “magic”, bringing hope and happiness to all who witness it.
That is the Japanese model. In Western fantasy, the idea is different. There are no “magical girls”, only witches. And we all know what witches are like. Terry Pratchett, in one of his speeches on fantasy tropes, says:
Let’s talk about wizards and witches. There is a tendency to talk of them in one breath, as though they were simply different sexual labels for the same job. It isn’t true. In the fantasy world there is no such thing as a male witch. … There certainly isn’t such a thing as a female wizard.
Sorceress? Just a better class of witch. Enchantress? Just a witch with good legs. The fantasy world, in fact, is overdue for a visit from the Equal Opportunities people because, in the fantasy world, magic done by women is usually of poor quality, third-rate, negative stuff, while the wizards are usually cerebral, clever, powerful, and wise.
Pratchett cites the fantasies of Le Guin, Tolkien and the Arthurian Legend in order to demonstrate this “poor quality, third-rate, negative” sort of magic. Just as magical girls like Card Captor Sakura and Sally the Witch reflect the intrinsic goodness of girlhood by portraying magic as sugar and spice and everything nice, according to Pratchett, Morgan le Fay and her treacherous, sexual magic reflect all that her authors considered “dangerous” about women, about femininity. The canon of Western fairytales, the Grimm-Lang-Disney tradition, is full of witches whose magic is alluring and deceptive, nefarious. (Consider Hansel and Gretel, for instance.) Female magic in the Western tradition is “cheap and nasty”, to quote Pratchett again, contrasting the good magic of wise male wizards.
And so if you are Gen Urobuchi, a Japanese writer working within Western fantasy traditions, you will run across the oxymoron of female magic. The youthful “magical girls” of Japanese fantasy employ a magic that is positive and productive, while the adult “witches” of Western fantasy have a magic that is destructive and dangerous. If one attempts to merge the two canons, then it will appear that female magic decays with age, or something like that. And so in Madoka, Urobuchi expresses the model formed by the merging of Japanese and Western fantasy: magic is good as long as you are young, but once you grow up, it makes you a wicked witch.
This dichotomy, more than any other force in the series, is the villain of Madoka Magica. It hurts the girls, forcing them to lose sight of their dreams and run from their futures. And this dichotomy is what Madoka battles against in the end; in fact, she challenges even its most basic tenets in the casting of “magical girls” = “good”, “witches” = “bad”, as in the famous shot of her gently stroking an Anthony on the head. She believes that the magic of the witches is valuable and important, as is that of magical girls — and she herself is simultaneously the ultimate magical girl and the ultimate witch, reconciling the two identities at the same time.
In this way, Madoka Magica is not a critique or deconstruction of magical girls or indeed of women in general, but of the contradictory attitudes leveled at female characters in the genre of fantasy literature.
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