[Asehpe]

Of course, opinions are legion, and it's OK to feel whatever you feel about a certain show, since your reaction to it is just as "legitimate" (a word I feel should always come in scare quotes... but that's a different topic) as anyone else's. Now, it may be that your opinion will evolve with time, and in reaction to the opinions of others; yet even your initial, gut feeling, relatively uninformed initial reaction is "legitimate". Which is why I see my reaction here more as sharing than as an attempt to convince others.

Personally, PMMM impressed me greatly as a masterpiece of Shakespearian proportions. I had no experience with animē (other than Spirited Away, I had watched nothing prior to Madoka Magica), and only a vague understanding of the Mahō Shōjo genre, via a few episodes of Sailor Moon that I watched by mistake.

I was, quite simply, blown away. After Madoka, I had to know more, and I started exploring the world of animē -- and I found so many other things that I enjoyed greatly, and that are now part of who I am. None of them, however, has had the same impact as Madoka on me.

Many have criticized the characters as 'sketchy' or 'archetypical' or 'unrelatable', especially Madoka herself, the 'sobbing coward' (a Shinji type?). Yet I personally find it so easy to see them as real people -- I wonder why that is? Why can I see Kyōko Sakura's hard life so clearly in almost every one of her gestures? Why can I see Sayaka Miki's courage and apparent strength (with an underlying serving of weakness and self-hatred) so clearly even in the way she laughs (completely different from Madoka's, Mami's, or Kyoko's -- has anyone else noticed how well their way of laughing fits their overall personality?)? Similarly, Mami's sense of comfort with inner loneliness seems to me so clear both in her demeanor, in her attempts to interest others (all those tea and cake magazines, her coyly saying 'only a few refreshments' to then treat her friends with cake and tea served with such elegance, everything suggests an attempt to seduce others into staying and helping her ease her loneliness)...

I could literally write an entire essay on the intricacies of every single character, as they are revealed by small things here and there. (What do Homura's hairflips make you all feel, for instance? How do they relate to who she is as a character?). I would love to analyze the witches' labyrinths, and how they relate to the wishes, powers, and other circumstances of the magical girls that gave rise to them. The sheer change in insects (from nice ones like butterflies in the first episodes to buzzing threatening ones around lampposts in episode 9...

There have been complaints about the fight scenes, as not 'sufficiently impressive'; comparisons to Nanoha were made. To me, however, the labyrinths and the fight scenes were metaphors for the characters' inner states of mind. The labyrinths were supposed to represent the despair of the ex-MG-now-witches who lived in them; their surreal motfis may not look martial enough, but when you think about the backstories they suggest, and when you see actual magical girls dying in combat, they become quite hellish to me. Not everything has to look like Apocalypse Now in order to convey the ordeals of battle.

But then again, this is just my own personal reaction; and how a show affects me has probably as much, if more, to say about me than about the show itself.

I will conclude by giving it a 10/10 (not because it doesn't have flaws -- the entropy thing is of course nonsensical, though you can kinda save it by saying Kyubey's people are so much more advanced than we are that they've discovered entropy does not work the way we think it does, so that exploiting the energy of Magical Girls would actually work... but still, meh -- but because these flaws subtract nothing from the overal literary value and impact of the work.

These five girls have become, as Mami said of Kyubey, dear friends of mine, and I have the feeling they will remain with me till the end of my life. Each has moved me in a different way (I'm particularly partial to Kyōko's sacrifice); by the end of the show (which I binge-watched in one single night), I had cried so much, I was surprised by the amount of water I was able to produce. That hadn't happened to me in many, many years.

But if you disagree... that's OK with me. I will only hope that you do also have a show that means to you as much as Madoka Magica has come to mean to me.