Sakura Kyoko is one of my favorite characters in the show, if not
the favorite (It's hard to choose between her and Madoka). Shame that she hasn't received too much attention around these parts, I hope that some of the future episodes will remedy that. She's fun when she's being more of a playful antagonist (I've watched the DDR scene about twenty times
), and delightfully loathsome, depraved, and morally bankrupt whenever she's being more serious of a villainess. She's one of the more genuinely intimidating and sometimes outright creepy characters I've come across in an anime, Gen does a good job infusing her with a lot of flair and style.
I'm also curious about what her backstory is - people don't become quite that fucked up without a reason. I think that maybe Kyoko, Homura, and Mami all represent the emotional toll that being a magical girl can take on a person's psyche; they're all damaged, just in different ways. Homura's kinda dead emotionally, Mami had a disassociated serenity about her, and Kyoko's an angry, deranged psychopath. Madoka is the pure, normal girl right now, and Sayaka represents the middle ground - she's a mahou shoujo, but hasn't been in the business long enough to suffer as much trauma as the three veterans, and emotionally still probably has more in common with Madoka than the fucked-up-in-the-head trio (Though episode six demonstrated clearly enough that she's heading for a breakdown herself). Anyway, I kind of went off on a tangent there, but I hope that Kyoko's backstory will be explored at some point. I've wondered if maybe Kyoko knows from personal experience about the 'wishing for someone else' thing that's been advised against. She might have just heard through the mahou shoujo grapevine, of course, but the scene with Kyoko and Sayaka outside Kamijou's apartment does make me wonder if things aren't that simple.