Popular Dynamics of Madoka Magica
These days there seems to be a Wiki for just about everything. So it should come as little surprise that there’s one for this season’s hit series, Puella Magi Madoca Magica. Naturally its personal wiki is run by devoted fans of the series. Naturally that just makes perfect sense. But at least one contributor on the site seems to be going too far. I don’t mean in the “they’re way too obsessed with this show” kind of way that you might be thinking. No, I mean they’re probably WAY overthinking things.
One particular entry is titled “Population Dynamics,” & explains the food chain established in the series. In the most simplistic terms, the Puella Magi (magical girls) are on top, witches below them, & humans on the bottom. But as the piece points out, it’s actually more complicated than that. There’s an interdependence between the Puella Magi & the witches that doesn’t exist in more conventional food chains, something which needs to be taken into account. So yes, that does make things more complicated. But I don’t think it needs to be as complicated as this entry makes it out to be. Check this out; this is an actual part of the entry:
And that’s not even the half it. The entry is filled with charts, graphs, & complicated formulas. All leading to one probable hypothesis- they’re really overthinking things here. Take a look at the following quote for another example:
If both populations are in equilibrium, then there are no changes to either the witch and magical girl population [ΔM(t) = 0 & ΔW(t) = 0]. It follows that the number of magical girls contracted will balance out those that died or become witch in the same period [C = (D + B) M(t)]; and the number of witches matured from minions balances out numbers contributed by magical girls [F * W(t) = (K - B) M(t)].
That’s EXACTLY what I was thinking as I was watching the series! If you’re not afraid of your brain exploding, you can view the whole entry here:
http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Population_dynamics