Puella Magi Madoka Magica

With kindness comes naivete. Courage becomes foolhardiness. And dedication has no reward. If you can't accept any of that, you are not fit to be a magical girl. - Homura Akemi

Status

Anime: complete. (11 episodes subbed.)

Thoughts

I should get one thing out of the way immediately: I have a permanent thing against this anime, largely due to hype backlash. One of my friends in particular constantly harped about how amazing this show is and how I should watch it immediately...and I have never completely let go of that. So let me reiterate: I'm biased against this anime, and that probably won't change for a long time.

Now then.

Madoka has an interesting enough setup; a typical magical girl anime that quickly takes multiple turns for the worse each step of the way. Contrary to popular claims, it is not a deconstruction; a more appropriate term would be "dark subversion". But that has little significance, so moving on.

Enjoyment of the series largely hinges on two subjective factors:

As a plot-driven anime, character development inherently suffers a bit. Many people enjoy the main characters, many more enjoy some of them, and many don't like them at all. I myself am relatively ambivalent to them, except the titular character (whom I dislike, if not overly so). If you ever discuss this anime, which characters you sympathize with (and don't sympathize with) is inevitably going to be a touchy subject with those involved.
The series seems to follow the general thought that "true art is angsty". Plot twists occur nearly every episode, which may eventually render you apathetic to what's happening, and some of them may even get predictable (for instance, I saw the "witches are formed from magical girls" twist well in advance).

If you get past those two factors, you're set (at least for personal enjoyment). Otherwise, hype backlash ahoy.

I also had a few more problems...

Scientific, the story isn't (which matters to me because the second law of thermodynamics was explicitly brought up). As far as we know, the second law of thermodynamics is a fundamental truth of the universe, and Kyubey wants to stave off the heat death of the universe for as long as possible. Ok, fine. Grab more energy from humans? How much energy can a human body realistically produce - more specifically, how would you gather any amount of energy that is meaningful to staving off heat death? And why do you even want to stave it off? It is in the very distant future, which, combined with the previous fact, basically makes the difference between 1000000 years (say) and 1000000.0000001 years until heat death. Assuming Kyubey's kind lives long lives, the difference in time to them should seem negligible. In addition, Kyubey is essentially Maxwell's demon, which is pretty neat, but we have to remember that the second law of thermodynamics still holds; in order to fulfill the functionality of the demon, he needs information, which in itself causes more entropy. But then, to be fair, he might just be using humans as a very efficient energy source, which legitimately delays heat death (even if not by very much, for reasons I've mentioned). Still doesn't explain the small energy output...
The concept of souls, a fairly non-scientific one, is a weird one to use in conjunction with the second law of thermodynamics, an extremely (for an anime) scientific concept.
Kyubey's wish-granting is kinda weird. To grant a wish, he might need to expend a huge amount of useful energy, more than might be recovered when the magical girl in question eventually becomes a witch. This holds doubly true in Madoka's case, where Kyubey grants her a wish which breaks my willing suspension of disbelief. And honestly, if he can grant that kind of wish, why the fuck is heat death any concern to him? The series makes one weird distinction between "Kyubey's energy" and "the universe's energy", completely ignoring the fact that if the former exists, the second law of thermodynamics (and thus Kyubey's motivation) is bullshit.
Teenage girls are the best source for energy because they angst the most. Hmm. I definitely do not see any unfortunate implications here. And even if this is true, not all teenage girls are like this, and there are plenty of other people who angst a ton, so why isn't Kyubey targeting others as well...?

Anyways, Madoka is at least not cringe-worthy; it does take the care to flesh things out without using cliche storms, so, it's something.