WTF Madoka Magica! Episode 1: Tomatoes, Fried Egg, and a Fire Extinguisher

The Story They Didn’t Tell You..

This is an inaccurate retelling series for people in a hurry. For an introduction, see this post.

 

The Breakdown:

Trippyness Rating: 1/5  ?

You haven’t even left your couch.

Cuteness Rating: 4/5 ????

This episode lays it on thick.

Instances of Food: ? ??

Food appears in three scenes.

 

Introduction: Prologue In Heaven

The episode starts in the middle of something we don’t understand (this is a theme.)

Enter Madoka Kaname, running through a psychedelic checkerboard music video for early 2000’s rock band, Evanescence. She exits through a door to find herself atop a floating dead tree in the center of a dead city tornado.

Madoka sees Goth Girl fighting a building.

Other buildings float by, bearing witness like bystanders amidst fiery explosions from some unknown source.

Madoka says, “this isn’t right” and Creepy Cat says “no shit.”

Creepy Cat tells Madoka she can change the future to save Goth Girl (or something,) provided she agrees to a contract to become a magical girl.

Madoka is.. conflicted?

Just kidding, it was all a dream. Or was it? Spoiler: it wasn’t.

 

Cut to tomatoes.

 

 

Act I: Madoka is So Normal and Average

 

Madoka’s world feels decidedly normal and cute compared with the first scene. She has a cute baby brother, emotionally available father, and a vampire for a mother.

Not really. But Mother does scream like a feral cat when her skin is exposed to the sun.

This is never explained, forcing us to assume: vampire.

Like a normal mother, however, she still finds the time for a tandem teeth-brushing sesh with Madoka, while creepily quizzing her about her schoolgirl friends’ romantic relationships and applying paint by number makeup (seriously.)

So normal and average.

“Boys who don’t even have the guts to confess their love in person are no good.” she says jealously when finding out Hitomi “got another love letter.” She then says “I give it a year” about some other preteen relationship that she deems to be “in the critical stage.”

In the end, she exclaims, “I look fabulous!” And then tells her daughter “There’s no such thing as too flashy. A girl can’t afford to get teased because she looks sloppy.”

That settles it.

She is a vampire if by vampire we mean a functioning alcoholic.

 

Act II: Frightening Goth Girl is too Cool for Fried Egg School

Madoka meets up with her friends, Blue-hair and Green-hair to share her mother’s “wisdom,” to which they all listen intently while accusing Madoka of hoarding the secrets to being beautiful and popular (by not using them to become beautiful or popular.)

Blue hair is particularly distressed. She molests Madoka while calling her a “bad girl” and tells her she won’t let the boys have her because she wants her for herself. (This is true.)

In following the theme of a normal schoolgirl, Madoka attends a school with classes in cages and a lesson plan that emphasizes the correct way to fry an egg (for marital reasons.) This is articulated by a shrill in a miniskirt.

Homura Akemi, the frightening goth girl, is new in class. Madoka gets a hard-on despite her resting bitch face.

Wait a minute, is this the girl from her dream??

Homura asks Madoka to the nurse’s office and then creepily walks in front of her the whole way while threatening her life and the lives of her friends and family.

Despite all this, Madoka could not be more turned on.

This, of course, stresses Blue-hair out to the point of collapse, “I hope she doesn’t think that acting like a weird transfer student is cool?!”

This is such a game changer. Blue-hair knows she can’t possibly compete. 

In a final desperate attempt to lock Madoka down, Blue-hair invites her to the music store after school, but it’s too late.

Frightening Goth Girl is in Madoka’s head.

 

Act III: Crazy Blue-Hair throws the Fire Extinguisher

Madoka follows Creepy Cat’s voice out of the store and into a psychotic break where she engages in a fantasy with Frightening Goth Girl’s high-heeled boots.

Luckily Crazy Blue-Hair shows up with a fire extinguisher which she uses to shoot Homura before throwing it at her murderously for no obvious reason (except that maybe she is psychic.)

This is when it gets real.. or should we say “surreal,” as the screen goes fucking nuts.

Madoka and Crazy Blue-Hair are accosted by giant cotton balls with handlebar mustaches in CG psychedelia.

Apparently, when translated, they’re chatting away about cutting Crazy Blue-Hair and Madoka up to present to someone called Gertrud.

Luckily the two schoolgirls are saved by what appears to be an Oktoberfest beer girl with WMDs.

Madoka and Blue-Hair are confused when Oktoberfest tells them to call her Mommy (sic) and offers Homura the kill shot.

Everyone laughs in unison as the credits roll, leaving us to assume everyone high-fives and sobers up in the end.

Of course, that isn’t what happens.

Frightening Goth Girl retreats. Mommy claims inexplicably that she was “just passing by” (the closed down part of the mall undergoing renovations) and Creepy Cat offers a suspicious contract to the girls to become “Magical Girls.”

Nobody explains anything and the episode ends.

 

Zoe’s Notes (Age 5)

(Like many, we initially thought this was a kids’ show..)

• The dad cuts the tomatoes because he needs to eat.
• The black magic girl is mad because Madoka said lots of things.
• Blue-hair is mad because she missed her candies (Right.. her “candies.”)
• The Mom magic girl fights the witches (the cotton balls in mustaches) with guns.
• Kyubey is nice. (Creepy Cat)

 

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Interesting information we found about this episode:

 

1. A parallel plot proposed by the fans of Puella Magi Madoka at Wiki.Puella-Magi.net.

The wiki details several interpretations of what could be an embedded adaptation of Goethe’s Faust.

• In the first shot, there is a title card that reads “Prolog Il Himmel” which translates to “Prologue in Heaven” and is the name of the prologue in Faust.
• Underneath are runes that could be construed to mean 2011, which as the wiki argues, “may imply that the series does not just reference Faust, but is a fully animated adaptation of the story.”

Based on what we could find in interviews, it’s more likely that the Faust references were added later (See this panel transcript with the writer, Gen Urobuchi.)

Still, we’d like to explore our own theories as to how the narrative matches up, since there are some definite parallels. The artists no doubt realized this when they chose to include the references in the artwork.

 

Here are Studio Lovecraft’s Faust notes for Episode 1.

Goethe’s Faust is a tragedy written primarily in verse and is considered the most important literary work ever to come out of Germany. The story of Faust was made famous by Johann Goethe but has seen many iterations.

In the story, Faust feels disillusioned with his life and within modern human society and attracts the attention of the demon Mephistopheles. They make a pact in which Mephistopheles offers to serve Faust for a period of time by giving him magical powers at the cost of his eternal soul.

Read more at Faust.com

The parallel here would be Madoka as Faust, who is living an uneventful life in a misogynist environment (as exemplified in the scene where Madoka’s friend tells her that her mother insists she takes Tea Ceremony lessons despite exams coming up, or Madoka’s own mother teaching her the secrets to “pretty girl success.”)

If you don’t agree there is a little feminism in play, let’s agree that Madoka is leading an unexceptional life. She may even feel as if she is underperforming in her role.

Her real journey begins when she is offered a contract to become a magical girl, by a cute cat thing (in Faust it was a dog that followed him who turns out to be Mephistopheles.)

In the psychedelic scene near the end, four Anthonies spell out a basic magic spell in runes. This is very spell is demonstrated verbatim in Goethe’s story in when Faust visits a witch.

The spell translates as follows:

 

The Witch

 

This you must ken (understand)
From one make ten,
And two let be,
make even three,
Then rich you’ll be.
Skip o’er the four!
From five and six,
The Witch’s tricks,
Make seven and eight,
‘Tis finished straight;
And nine is one,
And ten is none,
That is the witch’s one-time-one!

You can read more about it here.