To actually contribute, I get where you're coming from. I
relate to the
Madoka girls more than any grown man ever
should....well, not really, I just like drawing them. But the anime is really special to me too, and I'll tell you why. See, I remember well the winter Madoka came on. It was the coldest and snowiest winter in a long time (forcing Harvard to declare its first snow day in 25 years), I was halfway done with law school, and I was just starting to make my first Space Jam mashups. I remember that from the very start, Shinbo's direction, Kajiura's score, and Gekidan Inu Curry's freaky Witch/labyrinth designs grabbed my interest--and Urobuchi's writing held it firmly. Without any one of those elements, Madoka would've been lost in the tide of disposable moe shows. But together, combined, they made up a world that drew me in like no other anime I can remember. You wouldn't want to live in the Madoka world, but you do want to see the bizarre horrors and the human stories going on under the near-future, crystalline-perfect cityscapes. Same goes for the characters. I wrote upthread about how all the characters but Madoka maintain certain artifices that divide them against each other and ultimately bring them down. This is realistic human behavior, and it invites the viewer to follow along with the girls, try to learn what makes them tick. Madoka wastes zero screen time; every time a character is on screen, you're learning something important about them, whether through what they say, what they don't say, or their body language.
What's really great though is how even after all the suffering, good--or at least less-bad--wins out in the end. Sayaka, Kyouko, and Madoka/Homura (in the lyrics of Magia) aren't wrong when they liken their experiences to the fairy tales they loved so much as children. Madoka is a fairy tale for adults; it's a Hans Christian Andersen original, bittersweet and possessed of a moral clarity. And like any good fairy tale, it captures the imagination and never quite lets it go.
