Character · Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Sayaka Miki
She spends her one wish, the wish that could have bought her anything in the world, on somebody else's hand.
In Otakana the clue reads: Girl who wishes for a violinist's hands
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Sayaka Miki is loud, decent, quick to anger and quicker to volunteer. The boy she has visited in hospital for years is a violinist whose arm no longer works, so when a creature offers her a miracle she spends it on him without much hesitation. It works. His hand is healed. The rest of the series concerns what she actually agreed to in exchange for that.
She fights with a sabre and takes hits she has no need to take, because her magic closes the wounds afterwards, and she reads this as an advantage rather than a warning. Her idea of the job is straightforwardly heroic: witches hurt people, she can stop them, so payment and self-preservation are beside the point. The series declines to be gentle with that position.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica works because every deal sounds reasonable at the moment it is struck. Gen Urobuchi wrote each wish to be sympathetic and hers is the most sympathetic of them, which is exactly why it lands the way it does. Shaft aired twelve episodes in 2011, and somewhere around the fifth a magical girl show had turned into something audiences argued about for years.
Spelling SAYAKA
Six letters, SAYAKA, and the given name is what the puzzle wants; Miki is the family name. Three A's, at the second, fourth and sixth positions, alternating with S, Y and K, so the row is a strict consonant-vowel pattern across three beats: sa-ya-ka. The Y counts as a consonant here. The usual miss is SAYAKO, which swaps in a final vowel that never appears.