Character · Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Madoka Kaname
An ordinary fourteen-year-old is offered any wish she can think of, and the one girl who understands the offer tells her to refuse it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Pink-haired girl offered a wish by a small creature
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Madoka Kaname has a happy home, decent friends and no problem worth the name, which is unusual for a lead in this genre and turns out to be the whole setup. When a talking creature offers her unlimited power in exchange for a contract, her difficulty is that she cannot think of anything to ask for. She wants to be useful to someone. That is not a wish, and the show knows it.
For most of the run she does not fight. She watches other girls take the bargain, watches what it costs them, and gets told by nearly everyone involved to stay out of it. A magical girl series whose title character spends ten episodes failing to transform is a strange structure to attempt, and the ending depends on it completely.
Shaft aired twelve episodes between January and April 2011, written by Gen Urobuchi, directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, with character designs by Ume Aoki and music by Yuki Kajiura. The witch sequences came from the art collective Gekidan Inu Curry, built out of cut paper and collage, so the monsters look like they wandered in from a different film. Three feature films followed.
Spelling MADOKA
Six letters, MADOKA, the given name; the family name Kaname is not what the tiles want. Her name is written in hiragana rather than kanji, though the word madoka is an old one meaning round, or a full circle, which the story ends up taking seriously. Three beats, ma-do-ka, no long vowels and nothing doubled. The letter that slips is the middle O.