I just finished watching Madoka Magica and I couldn't help but be struck by the number of similarities I saw to Fate/Zero, an anime that I consider to be among my favorites, if not my favorite in totality. However, while I do believe parallels exist, they seem to be very different in terms of their tones and executions. Which one is better, you may ask? Well, first, let's discuss why these two series are worth comparing.
So first and foremost, both series have not only high production values but also similar staff behind them. The animation studio at UFOtable brought Fate/Zero to life with some of the highest quality animation you're ever going to see, and while Studio SHAFT didn't quite reach that height with Madoka Magica I will say that its style is very striking and memorable, something I'm not going to forget for a long time. In addition, both series were written by Gen Urobuchi and had musical compositions largely directed by Yuki Kajura, with Kalafina showing up for some of the music as well, particularly OP and ED. In addition, both settings are very similar in ways, combining both the majesty of modern fantasy with the horrors that come with the use of magic. Magic in both settings is a very painful and corrupting aspect of the settings and both settings even revolve around the corruption of a person's wish, not only the lengths to which someone will go to get it granted but also the corruption behind the wish itself even when the desire behind it is inherently noble. Finally, a greater seemingly omnipotent force is behind the events of the story, albeit in different ways, and it's their influence that ultimately results in the narrative's beginning and end.
So now that I've brought up points of comparison, let's talk about character and thematic relevance since those are going to be key to understanding my takeaways.
Now, after watching both these series, I was struck by how much these settings had in common in terms of what happened and how everything's portrayed. To start, however, I want to clarify that not all of these similarities are necessarily the result of the writer Gen Urobuchi. While he did write out the narrative for both, the thing to remember is that Fate/Zero was written as the prequel to an existing work, while Madoka Magica was written as an original story. Because of this Urobuchi had limitations to work around when writing Fate/Zero specifically due to the pre-established setting of Fuyuki established in Fate/Stay Night by Kinoko Nasu. As a result, various themes and events occur due to Fate/Stay Night locking these things in stone. Sure there was a lot that Urobuchi had to work with in terms of his own creative vision but there were still things to keep in mind.
Certain figures such as Kiritsugu Emiya, Kirei Kotomine, Artoria Pendragon, and King of Heroes Gilgamesh had to remain constant since they're consistently referenced in Fate/Stay Night as being major players in Fate/Zero's Grail War. In addition, the Fuyuki Fire that occurs in the aftermath of the Grail War had to remain constant, as did the nature of the Holy Grail. Other things could be altered or fine-tuned for the sake of the narrative but these things had to remain unchanged.
Madoka Magica, however, was written as an original work that had a lot more to do with the Magical Girl formula, which is why it strikes me as odd that so many elements remain consistent between the two settings. Obviously, I'm not going to focus too much on specific stuff, like a black-themed main character being both a gun wielder and time manipulator, or a spear-wielder finding some sort of kinship with a sword wielder. These things are interesting coincidences but to focus on such surface-level details is to really miss the big picture. At their core, both of these series have characters that are motivated by a wish they want granted and make sacrifices to achieve such wishes. So let's tackle that first.
Fate/Zero takes place in the greater Fate series and Nasu timeline as an entry that covers a Holy Grail War. The Holy Grail War is a battle fought between seven masters who summon a servant of a given class to do battle, and it is initially believed that the last remaining master with a servant will have their wish granted by the Holy Grail. Along the way, great evils are committed in order to obtain the grail on multiple parts but it is ultimately revealed that the Holy Grail is not all that everyone thought it was. I'll talk more about that later.
Meanwhile, Madoka Magica follows a group of girls who live in an idealic world with no real notable problems initially but who come to meet this mysterious cat-like creature that offers them a deal: in exchange for having one wish granted, you shall become a magical girl and fight against witches to protect the world from suffering.
In other words both series revolve thematically around the idea of a single wish and what that means for the world at large. However, while this element is a driving force in both, they manifest in different ways. For example, in Madoka Magica, to become a magical girl, you have to make your wish first and your wish is then granted. Several of the girls have various wishes but it's clear that not all is as it seems. For example, Mami was placed in a situation where her only wish was to continue living. After being caught in a car accident and nearly dying, she took Kyubei's deal not for some greater aspiration but because she was in dire straights and needed assistance. The other girls didn't have the same thought process, though.
Sayaka for example chooses to restore the motor function in the hands of a boy she likes so that he can play the violin once more. Her goal is inherently selfless yet one particular problem that arises with it is how a selfless wish like this ends up harming her mentality. Meanwhile, Kyoko had a similar style of wish, wanting people to listen to her father and take his teachings to heart. The thing is though that while both wishes sound selfless in theory, they're not necessarily what the other person wanted in practice. This is much more the case with Kyoko, who's father murdered his family and committed suicide once he realized that it was Kyoko's magic that caused people to listen to him rather than any form of miracle, her selfless act ended up devaluing what he was doing.
In fact, side-note about Kyoko, I notice that she tends to eat a lot. There's almost no circumstance in which she's not eating a large amount of food whenever she's on-screen. My personal theory is that while she says she's okay and is fine living for herself, I speculate that she eats as much as she does in order to cope with what's happened. I don't have a huge amount of evidence to back that up, it's just a thought that came to mind as I was watching.
Finally, Homura's wish is simply to save Madoka's life because Madoka was the singular greatest source of happiness for Homura. This results in Homura going through a time loop where she attempts to simultaneously defeat Walpurgisnacht without letting Madoka become a magical girl. However, by doing so, she creates a timeloop that restarts every time Madoka dies, which in turn causes a large number of potential timelines to converge, making Madoka's magical potential stronger with each loop as well as making Madoka herself more appealing to become a magical girl to Kyubei. In other words, by choosing to attempt to save Madoka she ends up making that job substantially harder on herself with each passing loop.
In other words, much of the drama stems from what the characters are willing to do to have their wishes granted, as well as how much being a good person ends up sacrificing in order to achieve it.
Fate/Zero has a substantially larger roster of characters but it does have a similar style of dynamic in which everybody has a goal to achieve that the Holy Grail makes possible in some way and future drama is stirred up by everybody's desire for it. Although not everyone involved has a clear goal in mind and not everyone's goal pertains specifically to the Holy Grail. For some examples:
- Tokiomi Tohsaka wants to obtain the Grail to reach the Root of Akasha in the hopes of obtaining true magic and any knowledge he desires. However, apart from that, he doesn't seem to have anything in particular in mind.
- Kirei Kotomine has a wish to be granted but his wish is to understand his own true nature as he doesn't know why the things that bring others joy and satisfaction only bring pain to himself and vice versa. Kirei could've potentially achieved this wish without the Holy Grail under the right circumstances but he happened to be chosen before that could happen so he figured he'd may as well compete.
- Lancer doesn't have any specific wishes, only to be given a chance to fight with honor one last time, something that was deprived of him while he was alive.
- Kariya Matou doesn't give a crap about the Holy Grail either way but he sees what Zouken is doing to Sakura and wants to rescue her from that Fate. His deal with Zouken is that Zouken will let her go if Kariya can get him the Holy Grail. In other words the Grail is a McGuffin that he can trade for what he wants as opposed to the Grail itself simply giving it to him.
- Waiver wanted recognition and proof that he's a valuable mage and he believed participating in the Holy Grail war would do that for him. What he actually planned to wish for was irrelevant because he quickly found himself out of his depth in this particular contest. In other words, he joined in order to prove himself, and survived simply because he didn't want to die. We'll come back to Waiver though.
In other words, everyone has a goal to achieve and the Grail has something to do with it but even with this accounted for, the major difference between the Grail War of Fate/Zero and the Magical Girl process of Madoka Magica is that the Masters battle in the hopes of achieving a wish, whereas the Magical Girls fight to pay off their wishes.
This is an interesting inversion in ways but one question this raises for me is what sort of impact does it have on character motivations and the theme? Well, in the case of Fate/Zero, one particular question that all the characters have to answer is how far are you willing to go to have your wish granted? In other words, the characters aren't even guaranteed their wish and therefore they need to fight, deceive, play dirty, and sometimes ruin any form of good they may have envisioned for themselves.
On the other hand, the girls that choose to become Magical Girls have their wish granted right away so in other words, the question is less about what you'll do to achieve the wish and more about how much you're able to endure for what you received?
This is actually one notable way in which I believe Kiritsugu and Homura are similar to each other. While yes both are black in color scheme and have some degree of time powers, what's more notable is that the two have a notably noble ambition but have given up on any ethical means of achieving it. Kiritsugu believed at first he wanted to stop all suffering only to find he couldn't do it with the power of a single person, so he chooses to fight in the Grail War, and do whatever it takes to win and in exchange he will use that wish to remove any and all suffering from the world, even if that means he has to be the last remaining evil to do it. Meanwhile, Homura decides all she wants is to save one person that mattered to her and was willing to endure any amount of pain on her own shoulders in order to achieve it. Her actions allowed her to do noble things at times but only for the sake of her own larger goal of keeping Madoka from becoming a magical girl. Their motives and ambitions may differ but at the end of the day the two have a goal to achieve and are choosing to shoulder the entire burden on their own in the hopes that they're the only ones who'll suffer at the end of it.
Likewise, I see some parallels between Sayaka and Artoria as well. Artoria is fighting for the Holy Grail to undo the damage to her kingdom that she brought on during her rulership. The Fate Route of Fate/Stay Night goes into much more detail on this than Fate/Zero ever did but essentially, Artoria is choosing to pick up her sword here in the hopes of redoing her time in Camelot so that she can prevent its ruin. There just happens to be a slight snag in this though: the Berserker Class Servant.
You see, this Grail War's Berserker isn't just any old servant, he's Sir Lancelot, the Knight of the Round Table that served most closely with Artoria. Before engaging him in battle Artoria wanted to redo the selection process so that she could get a second chance and not lead her kingdom to ruin. She thought she could take the mistakes that she made, learn from them, and be a better king in a redo. However, it's only after she runs into Lancelot, defeats him, and has the Grail taken from her at the last second that she reflects on what happens and amends her wish: rather than redo her life to alter the fate of her kingdom, she decides that she's entirely unfit for the job and decides that she wants someone else to be king so that hopefully her subjects, Lancelot in particular does not come to the same fate that they did under her. Of course, that amendment is more relevant to Fate/Stay Night than Fate/Zero but it's worth pointing out because Artoria takes on the battle for an initially noble cause yet the longer the battle goes on the more of a toll it takes on her until eventually she just wants to opt out completely.
In this way, Sayaka is similar. Sayaka's wish is initially noble, to restore the motor function of her friend's hand so that he can play the violin and be happy again. Essentially, she wants him to be happy not just for himself but also for her. On the one hand, her goal is selfless in that she's helping someone else to achieve a state of happiness that they wouldn't have without her. But there's also a selfish element to it, she doesn't just want him to heal, she also wants him to love her.
This all comes to a head after two particular events take place, the first is that her soul gem is taken away from her body and her body becomes inanimate. It's revealed during this phase that when you're a magical girl, your soul is no longer in your body, it's in your soul gem, and your body just happens to be an avatar through which the magical girls fight. Kyubei later goes on to clarify that in this state they can suppress physical pain and continue fighting and heal later if their body gets damaged. He also makes note that some magical girls can go their whole lives without ever realizing this fact.
The other thing that happens, is Sayaka's friend Hitomi chooses to confess her feelings to that same boy but gives Sayaka a chance to do so first. This seems fair on a surface level but Sayaka is dealing with something that makes her own confession difficult: now that her soul is no longer in her body her body is basically just an animated corpse, she's a zombie in her own words, she's not alive the way others are. Therefore, she believes that it wouldn't be right for her to get together with Kyosuke. Nor that he would be able to love her if he found out what she was.
On the other hand though, his happiness was what brought her happiness and forcing herself to separate from him is what leads to her mental breakdown: deciding to revel in brutality, shut down physical pain in the hopes that it shuts down her emotions as well, choosing to be reckless with her life because she sees no value in it anymore, even rejecting help from others because she doesn't want to be saved.
Artoria and Sayaka have massive differences of course but the major takeaway with them is that a single act of selflessness or a desire to save another lead to their eventual downfall. Helping someone else does not necessarily lead to one's own salvation. If this were a Fate/Stay Night comparison, this would be the point where I bring up Shirou Emiya but since he isn't featured anywhere in Fate/Zero outside the epilogue, I'll just move on.
However, while two of our major players end up with an outcome of misery and pain, it's not all doom and gloom for everyone in either series. Kiritsugu Emiya sacrificed everything, even his own happiness to try to save the world but when it was brought to light that the Holy Grail was going to destroy everything instead, Kiritsugu rejected it, with his answers "1 life versus 3 billion. It's an easy choice." Meanwhile, Rider in particular was able to find some semblance of peace at the end because for him the journey was always more important than the destination. When he was alive, his goal to reach the ends of the earth and find Okeanos. When he was summoned long after his death, he saw what Okeanos really was and found that everything he did was pointless. Rather than despair at that though, he laughs, now seeing something even greater to achieve. He now wants to win the Holy Grail not to grant any particular wish but to grant himself a mortal body so that he can go on and Conquer the world that formed after his death. He could've easily wished for it with the Grail himself but he decides that there's no point in a lofty goal if the process is just to press an instant win button. So instead, his actual wish is a lot smaller and in exchange he'll use that small wish to achieve his goal himself. In other words, his wish was not the end of his journey, it would've been the beginning of a new one.
Likewise, in Madoka Magica, when Madoka sees all the suffering everyone goes through, from Sayaka over every revelation she had gone through, to Kyoko choosing to abandon everyone and fight for herself, to Mami's unfortunate death, even down to Homura living through the same time loop over and over again to achieve some form of alternate outcome, Madoka realizes that she can save every magical girl by removing the witches they become before they hatch, becoming a higher concept herself to allow Magical Girls to obtain their wishes without having their lives end in suffering and pain. In other words, once a magical girl becomes a witch, Madoka removes the suffering from them so they can have some semblance of peace.
Now, at the time I write this, I have not watched Madoka Magica Rebellion, which is the direct continuation of the 12 episode series that I just finished, so I can't speak on it directly. But looking at the 12 episode series by itself, Madoka's sacrifice to save everyone else is very similar to what Kiritsugu wanted to achieve, take all suffering onto yourself to save everyone else. But where Kiritsugu had to sacrifice the opportunity at the last second because the Grail could only grant the wish in a way he could comprehend, Madoka successfully becomes a god and takes every magical girl's suffering away. What ramifications this has in Madoka Magica Rebellion, I'll find out when I watch it. But for now, this is at least a somewhat definitive ending.
It's hard to talk too indepth about comparisons beyond this because there's so much less material to work with in Madoka Magica than in Fate/Zero. Fate/Zero was over double the length so it already had a longer run-time to begin with but it also has a much larger roster of characters, with around 14 as opposed to Madoka Magica's 5. As a result, I can't really talk endlessly on this particular comparison. But regardless, I do see all these similarities and while the modern fantasy settings may partly be responsible for that, it may also partly be that Madoka Magica was inspired by some of Fate/Zero. While the Fate/Zero anime came out some time after the Madoka Magica anime, the Fate/Zero light novel was written by Gen Urobuchi well before Madoka Magica began production so it's possible that the takeaways Urobuchi had during the writing of Fate/Zero still persisted somewhat into Madoka Magica. What I will say is that both series are deeply meaningful and have a lot of lessons to teach, even outside of such a basic comparison as this one.
That's all for today. Have a good day.
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