The intrinsic concept of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica is the duality of the universe. The unmerciful equality of it. If you look hard enough through your daily life, you can see it underpinning everything. Every concept has it's twin. Light has dark; love has hate; hope has despair. For every good thing that is done in this world, an equally bad thing happens. Every pleasurable activity carries pain hand in hand. Think about love. When you fall in love, that person becomes your everything. You hold them deep inside you and they resonate joy through every nerve ending and fiber of your being. However, when that relationship ends, that part of them in you ends with it. It leaves a void exactly proportionate to the space the person occupied.
Think about good deeds. When you impart good upon this world, somewhere else in the world, evil also occurs. So the two concepts balance each other out, and the fundamental equality of the universe is preserved.
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." This law is true in more ways that just in physics.
So does that mean that we should never do good? That we should never care? That all is pointless and every happy feeling and hope and dream is just an embryo for sadness, despair, and nightmare?
Of course not. And this is where the beauty of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica truly shines. There is one action that cannot cause an equal and negative reaction, because it contains both positive and negative within itself. That is the power of sacrifice.
This is one of those anime that makes you sad, because you wonder if you will ever experience something so good again.
Watch it and, in the words of Samuel L Jackson, hold on to your butts.
