"If someone says it's wrong to have hope, then I'll tell them they're wrong, every single time."

-Madoka Kaname, Episode 12, My Very Best Friend

Seems to me that its only suiting to start with the titular star of the show, so let's begin by taking a look at Madoka Kaname. While the show is obviously not her story alone, and it's even arguable whether she's a co-star rather than the star of the show (will delve more into that when I cover Homura), Madoka is undeniably the main character of the story told in this show. The thing that I find to be most impressive about this is that it is not something that just becomes apparent in the final episode, when Madoka makes the single most important decision of the show. Rather, the show does a very, very good job of selling Madoka as the main character throughout the entirety of its run, even though she's not actually DOING all that much. Until the series finale, Madoka only (1) rescues Kyubey from Homura, (2) saves Hitomi and a group of suicidal victims entranced by a witch, (3) almost kills Sayaka by throwing her Soul Gem away (which has ALL KINDS of bad consequences for Sayaka, though in the long run it did prove beneficial to Madoka), and (4) regularly accompanies Mami, Sayaka, or Kyoko on witch hunts. On paper, that doesn't sound like something that makes for a compelling protagonist, and one might think just from reading that alone that Madoka suffers from what I like to call "Harry Potter Syndrome", when a main character is often overshadowed by supporting characters to the point that significant numbers of readers or viewers even question the main character's very status as the main character. But thankfully, that's not the case. In fact, it couldn't be further from the reality of things.

Madoka remains an engaging, compelling character whom the audience can easily invest themselves in throughout the entirety of the show. In every episode, the execution of the story, the way everything is set up, always leads every important story element or event to point back to Madoka as THE center of everything, the point around which every character and story element revolves. For the viewer, watching Madoka Kaname is participating in a twofold learning experience: (1) the viewer accompanies Madoka on her own personal journey of discovering just the right wish to make, a wish worth sacrificing everything for without bringing as much despair into the world as it does hope, and (2) the viewer embarks on their own journey of trying to dissect just what makes Madoka so special in the first place. Both journeys are a delight, like great puzzles or mysteries that feel so very rewarding to solve, and are very much interconnected as well. But most importantly of all, they stay at the forefront of the story largely because so little is said about them. Just enough is said to establish throughout most of the episodes that these questions about Madoka are truly the most important questions of the show, the questions that every viewer must think about while watching everything else going on, no matter how unrelated it may seem.

On top of that, Madoka engages in some very interesting conversations with pretty much every major character of the show, which only reinforce the idea of the show as being Madoka's learning experience. She listens to advice from her mother, from Homura, from Kyubey, from Sayaka, from Mami, from Kyoko, she watches the consequences of Mami, Homura, Sayaka, and Kyoko's decisions, and she usually doesn't input that much. But the entire show you can't help but get this sense that she is deeply, deeply pondering all of these things, these conversations and events, learning from them, trying to take away as much as she can from them, as she struggles to determine just what is the best wish to make. I kept wondering to myself as I watched the show when THE episode when Madoka ceased to be the main character would be, but it never came; I never once felt that she wasn't the main character in any sense of the word. This was undoubtedly her story most of all, and the way it was told and delivered was simply extraordinary. The way they did it, it would have been so easy for her to just fade into the background, but as it is Madoka ended up being a truly great character in her own right, and undeniably the main character of the show.

Besides her status as the for-sure main character of the show, there are plenty of other things I love about Madoka. Her optimism for one is a big selling point; it's not a naive optimism, not at all. Madoka doesn't make brash decisions, she's really quite passive and takes her time to listen to and learn from others, so her idealism doesn't really get her into any permanent trouble. I think it's interesting too that Madoka is the only main character whose family is ever shown (besides Kyoko's when she gives Sayaka her backstory and Sayaka's parents for about 2 seconds when she recounts watching Kyosuke when she was younger in a concert). This is very important I think, because I just strongly feel like this is a very important element of the story for the writers. While besides Kyoko and Mami we don't know if any of the other magical girls had bad or traumatizing experiences with their families, we do know this; none of their families are shown influencing them. Madoka's, however, is shown to be one of the most important rocks in her life, a foundation from which she derives all her virtues, love, and hope she has to offer from, especially her mother. I just can't help but feel this is the writers of this show saying that this type of family situation, having loved ones at home all your life to love and support you, is a truly wonderful thing to strive for, and while that might not seem all that surprising to Western viewers, I can see why they'd really want to make this point in Japan, because, although I make no claims to be a Japanese expert, from what I do know it seems like in recent years or decades even the youth of Japan have been increasingly less and less investing efforts into starting and raising families.

But perhaps the biggest reason that I actually fell in love with Madoka's optimism was because of what I realized after Episode 10 (at which point the wish Madoka would make was considerably easier to deduce), that being that Madoka is the single greatest embodiment of hope on Earth, maybe even in the universe in this show, and THAT is why she has so much magical potential. As a number of characters mentioned throughout the show, when a magical girl makes a wish, a certain level of hope is released into the world which must be balanced out by an equal amount of despair. In this universe, one cannot supersede the other. A magical girl's potential largely depends on the level of hope released when she makes her wish and signs her contract. Ergo, it only makes logical sense that the girl who could be the most powerful magical girl ever would have more hope than anyone else. In fact, she has so much hope to spare that she ends up rewriting the laws of the universe with her wish and becoming the law itself which stemmed from her very wish, becoming, more or less, a god. Besides the fact that that right there is just plain outstanding writing in general as far as stories go, this fact makes every bubbly, girly, naive, or passive moment Madoka has have far more weight than they'd normally have any right to have in any other story. But as it is, these traits she displays throughout the whole show, her optimism, her black-and-white view of the nature of good-and-evil, her willingness and eagerness to learn whatever she must in order to make the right wish and break the endless cycle of despair balancing out hope and vice versa just because she's that good of a person and thinks that every person, especially magical girls willing to sacrifice so much for the sake of others, deserve to always know and have hope, these things make Madoka an extremely likable main character from beginning to end, well written in every sense of the word. She is hope itself, and she more than lives up to that title throughout the show, oftentimes providing the only light left in an episode when the darkness has consumed everything else. Madoka Kaname, you truly are the embodiment of hope.